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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

schneier.com

21–30 of 189 posts

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#21

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't re…

It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist. And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not su…

This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#22

Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated. Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offlin…

> Surprise internet shutdowns are good

I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good

For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#24

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't re…

[flagged]

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#25
post #7

I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#26

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't re…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#28

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't re…

[flagged]

One of these things is not like the others..

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#29
post #25
post #7

I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something. Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.

would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
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