Tech is an artifact of power. The Internet is a device that creates anonymity and distance and leverages the power of technocrats. It takes and takes and promises to give back. But for all of its wonders, it has failed to live up to its promise.
This is doubly true in politics. Some of my readers are old enough to recall the Nineties, and the wild surmise that greeted the prospect of Internet politics. E-Democracy would be the order of the day, they said. Once wired up, the whole digital Republic would glitter in electronic maturity, a hundred million silver strands tattooed across the broad back of America, highways crossing the skin.
The Net was more than a collection of fiber-optic tubes. It promised a refined United States. The Shining City on the Hill and all that, but illuminated by light-emitting diodes. The Internet Political Future of America!
An endless feed of data, facts, issues and appeals. No more peddling from media cloisters. No more fortresses of corporate sanction and processed, agreed-upon punditry. Everyone would have their own web page, their own blog, and it went without saying their own course of self-education about the candidates and issues. In this beautiful future, Americans would be lifted by the sleek silicon soul of our nation. The digital age would ascend us to the fuller meaning of our creed. The online world promised our More Perfect Union.
We opened up our eager eyes. Why should we accept this the way it has to be? Why does there have to be a digital cocoon around all of us, all of the time? For instance, we could keep the Internet, and just design it differently. Not as much as you might think Thinkstock. Perhaps cutting the links between such places, then, would be an easier way to break the internet?
There are uncountable miles of cables wrapped around the globe, and many of the biggest are just lying there unprotected — albeit often underwater.
Baran is one of a few people who, way back in the early s, believed a communications network could be designed with significant physical survivability, to withstand even a nuclear attack. He wrote many fascinating papers about it , but at first no-one took him seriously.
It might have stayed like that except for Donald Davies, a Welsh computer scientist, who came up with the same fundamental idea as Baran, completely independently and at almost exactly the same time. These are fired across a network via the fastest route available — whatever that route is — until they all arrive at their destination, where they are then reassembled.
Take out one link in the network, even an important one, and messages can still arrive where they are expected by taking one of the many alternative routes. To disrupt things, you don't need to cut the cable - just reroute the traffic Thinkstock. DDoS attacks are becoming more and more common, and they are one of the threats which CloudFlare and other networks are designed to protect their clients against, says Prince.
But dealing with the problem is getting more difficult all the time. We saw two feuding day spas the other day that were launching denial of service attacks against each other. Another major concern is BGP hijacking. But hey—what if you snipped them all? The Internet is a network of networks. The laptops in your house, the desktops in your office, a server farm in Moscow—they're all wrangled together by these byzantine cable connections. Kill the connections, and the networks can't speak across oceans.
The Internet is instantly fractured. Cables 2. Don't take TeleGeography's word for it—they're aggregating data given out freely. Feel free to ask the FCC , which mandates a publicly available license for every single cable that touches our shores. These servers, like much of the internet's vulnerable innards, are an "open secret," explains Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Here's the latest list from their end:.
The cables, as with anything underwater, come straight out of the water, often just lying atop a beach like this one. They're sometimes disguised or partially buried. But sometimes they're just lying out on the sand like an abandoned boogie board.
We asked the burly crew at Best Made, crafter of damn-fine axes, what they'd recommend for cutting through the Internet's backbone, and how much elbow grease it'd take. Naturally, they recommend using an axe :. Looking at the make up of the cable and it's diameter, I'd say a half dozen swings maybe less, provided they're accurately placed and the cable is held securely on a sturdy surface. The toughest part of the cable would most likely be the polycarbonate sleeve, everything else I think would succumb to the axe fairly readily.
Although the exact location of many of the cables and their onshore landing stations are kept a secret by private corporate owners, many aren't—in fact, they're found on popular beaches and bustling towns. Here are two cable spots that, according to TeleGeography, would be the most devastating if destroyed. Striking a node like this would only result in slowdowns and setbacks, not total annihilation. Sites from across the ocean would be immediately inaccessible—many others would be so slow as to be unusable.
The internet still runs—confusedly and very slowly—but this is a good start. Its cable coordinates are online for the world to see. Sites like these link America's eastern seaboard with western Europe, and serve as some of the most dense, crucial infrastructure points in the world. Get these out of the way, and you've made a good dent into the Internet's guts. Global finance is now over, leading to an instant worldwide financial collapse—sorry.
Skype is broken, as is every other means of talking between continents over the Internet. You can't email your friends abroad. You can't order Barbour coat from the UK. Tweets from the Middle East are stuck there. The other most crippling attacks would be executed as follows, using the list of towns and beaches above:.
The Internet is now no longer global—every continent and island is, well, an island. The best most basic part of the Internet is scooting data anywhere around the globe in an instant. That's over now. Typing in a domain name actually translates an obscure numerical identifier, the IP address: The other problem with data centers and internet exchanges is getting access to them. They have security. In fact, data center marketing campaigns regularly boast about how tough they are to get into.
We regularly test our readiness for plausible scenarios as well as more imaginative crises, like alien and zombie invasions. I reached out to the usual large tech and hosting companies to get their viewpoints on data centre security and physical threats to the internet, but perhaps unsurprisingly they were a little reluctant to talk.
Most of them, like Google, just pointed me towards their brochures, marketing materials, and corporate videos. I also tried to contact the FCC, but didn't hear back. Going in as a potential client means they're going to want to please you. If you're like, 'Excuse me.
I'm going to go to the restroom,' they probably won't follow you in and will still be waiting as you [sneak] down another corridor. What about cutting undersea fibre optic cables, thousands of miles of which link the world together?
That said, she does point to how Houthi rebels in Yemen allegedly managed to do enough damage to internet cables in that 80 percent of the country lost internet access.
0コメント