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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

schneier.com

51–60 of 189 posts

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#51
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.

It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.

Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#52
post #43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

== Call To Action

Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.

Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#53
post #5

One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.

Living without the Internet is still doable. Just a little bit harder.

You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)

Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like going back to 1999.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#54
post #2

Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable

It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#55
post #12

If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.

Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.

We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#56
post #17

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…

Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.

Unions tend to work for people.

If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations.

I like people!

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?

How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me.

Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#58

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…

> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.

Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.

In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".

The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#59
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timi…

> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten? Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to…

I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
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