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There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

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Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#321

Post by stackghost »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #201
stackghost wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts. If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-f…

> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall. But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for…

Strategic bombers are just as important because MAD itself is fundamentally a political and diplomatic tool. The reason you have strategic bombers is, as you correctly said, so that you can signal your posture and intent by stationing them, dispersing them, launching them, and (most critically) recalling them.

But again, because MAD first and foremost is a deterrent, you want to provide diplomatic offramps for both you and your adversary. This is crucial. Putting the B-52s on airborne alert sends a very strong message, but so does recalling them from airborne alert.

By their very natures, SSBNs and ICBMs are not capable of playing this role.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#322

Post by stackghost »

mandevil wrote: post #188
stackghost wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts. If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-f…

Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does. The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck mounted ICBM's that form a significant part of their deterrent, offering some of the guaranteed second-strike advantages that the US gets from SSBN's- and which their SSBN program does not…

I don't agree regarding a quad vs a triad.

At risk of sounding like gpt, the triad is not silo/boomer/bomber, it's land-based/airborne/seaborne.

Whether or not the survivability of your land-based ICBMs are due to mobility or hardened bunkers doesn't change much at the strategic level.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#323

Post by andyferris »

kijin wrote: post #318
SchemaLoad wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypted DNS has existed for quite a while now through DNS over HTTPS, the missing link was that to connect to a website, you first had to send the server the hostname in plaintext to get the right public key for the site. So someone listening on the wire could not see your DNS requests but would effectively still get the site you connected to anyway. The new development (encrypted client hello) is you no longer hav…

> This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting. Until some clueless judge orders all of cloudflare to be blocked.

True!

Though I worry that instead western governments will beat the judges to the punch and start asking things like DNS providers or even HTTPS servers to keep logs that can be subpoenaed much like a telecom company keeps a log of each phone call ("metadata"), or else be blocked...

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#324

Post by bawolff »

monocasa wrote: post #160
bawolff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help.

There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say. And frankly, the Venezuelan military is absolutely tiny and has been facing the same economic issues as the rest of the country. They have 24 F-16s, but rumor is none of them work anymore, maybe some SU-30s, but those would be shot down pretty much as soon as they were scrambled. There was pretty heavy bombing before hand t…

> And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there

Is that confirmed? because i think that would be a textbook example of a war crime.

I think people are suspicious because Maduro allegedly didnt seem to make it to a bunker in time, which if things are being bombed and helicopters are showing up on radar, one would think he would have sufficient time to get to some secure room, which in turn would delay things enough for reenforcements to arrive.

I think some of the suspicion is that we are talking about helicopters not fighter jets, which seem like they would be easy to take out even with how degraded their military is. But idk

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#326

Post by CamperBob2 »

yakbarber wrote: post #198
themafia wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching a civilized nation drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy really got into peoples heads. What's worse is.. it worked.

there's a fair argument to make that a nation that drops a nuclear bomb on a city isn't "civilized"

Bomb somebody else's harbor next time, kthxbai

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#327

Post by CamperBob2 »

somenameforme wrote: post #295
delichon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high end of the range of death estimates by the two atomic bombs is around 246,000. The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim. Japan attacked the US first, and by Hiroshima the US had 110,000 dead in…

The US had already secretly intercepted cables from Japan with it looking to "terminate the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan" as far back as July 12th 1945 in which they also expressed a willingness to relinquish all claimed territories. [1] The only condition they were seeking is that the Emperor be able to remain as a figurehead. That urgency and willingness to surrender was before Japan…

Pro tip: if your enemy is really about to surrender, nuking them once will suffice. Even after the second bomb was dropped, the Emperor faced assassination threats from the military high command for running up the white flag.

More to the point, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, they were cheap lessons compared to what it would have cost humanity to establish the taboo of nuclear warfare later, in Korea or elsewhere, with bombs 10x to 1000x their size.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#329

Post by 1zael »

codefeenix wrote: post #301
1zael wrote: post #266

Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else? A few thoughts: - The affected prefixes (200.74.224.0/20 block → Dayco Telecom) hosting banks and ISPs feels significant. If you're doing pre-kinet…

really?

?

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#330

Post by potsandpans »

nonethewiser wrote: post #308
JasonADrury wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable. It's really hard to guess how retaliation would happen in practice, a large-scale nuclear war certainly isn't inevitable . The most likely targets for nuclear strikes right now are also non-nuclear states.

People massively simplify the dynamics of launching a nuke. If Russia launched a nuke on a Ukrainian military target away from civilians there is virtually 0 chance of nuclear retaliation. Ukraine doesn't have them. Does anyone think the US, France, etc. would nuke Russia? Of course not. It's scary, but in some scenarios one nation can absolutely nuke another nation without threat of getting nuked themselves. In real…

Yeah yeah yeah, this is the new narrative that I keep seeing. "A small nuke, as a treat."

It's scary, but it's fine!

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