How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#2Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#3That's a bit of a fallacy. They compare the US to single European countries. I'm guessing it would be as easy to turn off the internet in California as it would be to turn it off in Greece.
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#4Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
I doubt it. All it'd take to shut down a satellite is to take over the control room on the ground and transmit a "power down" command or something.
Perhaps a better approach is to work to decentralize as much of our existing infrastructure as possible. Eliminate DNS. Fundamentally change how routing occurs to become more organic. Etc. Non-trivial, to be sure, but possible, IMO, and I think it needs to happen.
The goal should be that any internet-enabled device can mesh with the internet from any other internet-enabled device. Example (contrived) would be my cell phone talking to your cell phone with bluetooth, your phone talking to your laptop with a wifi connection, and your laptop talking to another device via ethernet, etc... and that ultimately, packets flow and end points can find each other all without central routing tables or artificial hierarchies, etc.
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#5Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
I doubt it. All it'd take to shut down a satellite is to take over the control room on the ground and transmit a "power down" command or something. Perhaps a better approach is to work to decentralize as much of our existing infrastructure as possible. Eliminate DNS. Fundamentally change how routing occurs to become more organic. Etc. Non-trivial, to be sure, but possible, IMO, and I think it needs to happen. The goa…
So who has the incentive to do this?
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#6Just switch off electricity for ISP buildings.
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#7That's a bit of a fallacy. They compare the US to single European countries. I'm guessing it would be as easy to turn off the internet in California as it would be to turn it off in Greece.
It would be very easy to turn it off to somewhere like Greece. There are probably only a few companies connecting to the outside world. And these are either government owned, or were until recently but are still so civil service minded and government linked that they will do as they're told.
Any commercial outfits want to keep operating in that country, so unless they think they will get a better deal from the next ruler - are also going to obey order.
California is trickier, there will be lots of links to towns in other states just because the cable run was shorter or a telco in Oregon wanted more of the market. There will also be a more complex backbone links so someone in Seattle may connect through california to Texas, so blocking out those individual routes without killing the whole network is a lot more difficult.
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#8Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
"... Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution? ..."
Old school HAM, AX.25 and Linux ~ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/AX25-HOWTO/
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#9Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
I doubt it. All it'd take to shut down a satellite is to take over the control room on the ground and transmit a "power down" command or something. Perhaps a better approach is to work to decentralize as much of our existing infrastructure as possible. Eliminate DNS. Fundamentally change how routing occurs to become more organic. Etc. Non-trivial, to be sure, but possible, IMO, and I think it needs to happen. The goa…
Maybe we should create a site/wiki/working group/mailing list to discuss these issues. Otherwise it won't get talked about and never done because the corps definitely don't have incentive to do this.
Re: How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet
#10Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?
I doubt it. All it'd take to shut down a satellite is to take over the control room on the ground and transmit a "power down" command or something. Perhaps a better approach is to work to decentralize as much of our existing infrastructure as possible. Eliminate DNS. Fundamentally change how routing occurs to become more organic. Etc. Non-trivial, to be sure, but possible, IMO, and I think it needs to happen. The goa…
The control room doesn't have to be in your country.
It's tricky for anyone who isn't a superpower to remove a satelite owned and operated by another country.
Distributed DNS etc doesn't really help if all the cables in and out of your country run through one building and the government owns it.