ELI5 for people not familiar in this domain?
There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
351–360 of 476 posts
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#352ELI5 for people not familiar in this domain?
From the article:
When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities.Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
Western governments just send a court order to the hosting provider to shut the site down / revoke their domain name. Site blocking is more of a problem for small counties trying to block sites the rest of the world allows to be hosted.
In terms of privacy, your DNS history probably isn't very interesting. It's almost all going to be requests for the top social media sites. Which governments have full access to the stuff you post there.
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#354[flagged]
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads. Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea? > All NATO needs is enough time to respond Th…
> What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads. > Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea? Because while you can't tell how far a missile is going to go, you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable…
> you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable of tracking that a missile has gone past what would make sense for a Russian strike on Ukraine
Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)
> you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not
At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.
> Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left
I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.
> "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized
Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.
Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for China so-called "overblocking" where to censor a small thing you have to block a much larger thing, is a real concern with these technologies. There's a real trade here, you have to expend effort and destroy potential and in some cases the reward isn't worth it. You can interpret ECH as an effort to move the ratio, maybe China was willing to spend $5000 and annoy a thousand people to block a cartoon site cri…
That requires the client to only emit ECH, even if the ISP-provided (and therefore government controlled) DNS blocks HTTPS/SVCB records. China can easily make the default for a browser in China be to never even try to use ECH as well. Then they'll only annoy people trying to actively circumvent their system. They already do TCP sessionization to extract the SNI domain. Detecting ECH and then just dropping the connect…
> That requires the client to only emit ECH
So for example, Firefox since version 119. Or Chrome since 117
Now, for most services ECH doesn't have an encrypted target server. But the important choice in ECH was in this case it just fills that space with noise. An encrypted message also looks like noise. So you can block all the noise, in case it's secrets, or you can let through all the noise (some of which might be secrets) or I suppose you can choose randomly, but you can't do what such regimes want, which is to only forbid secrets, that's not a thing.
We've been here before. When sites starting going to TLS 1.3 lots of HN people said oh, China will just block that, easy. But the choice wasn't "Use TLS 1.3 or keep doing whatever China is happy with instead" the choice was "Use TLS 1.3 or don't connect" and turns out for a lot of the Web China wasn't OK with "don't connect" as their choice, so TLS 1.3 is deployed anyway.
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power wins in anarchy. International relations are anarchy. There is no actual international law.
> There is no actual international law. There is, of course, both private and public international law. You don't know what you're talking about.
There is something by that name, but it doesn't mean much. On the international level, it's all voluntary. States can choose to be part of the international courts. The US (and many other high profile countries) famously are not participating, which is why they can effectively just commit war crimes left and right.
In contrast, if you go rob a grocery store, you can't just opt out of punishment. "I'm not a member of this court system" does not work as a viable defense strategy, even if some souvreign citizen types sometimes try (and always fail).
International treaties are really just statements of intent and can be withdrawn at any point. Worst that happens is that next time you try to make a treaty, your counterpart may not trust that you uphold your side of the deal. There is no higher authority to effecticely appeal to, in contrast to the grocery store case.
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything.
If you mean during the israel-iran war, israel was allegedly using non-stealth planes once the airspace was secure. Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
I think the non-stealth planes used by Israel were unmanned drones
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect. For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another ro…
I think what the other commenter is saying is that the BGP changes happened 12 hours before any of the power loss/bomb drop, so that eliminates your primary cause.
At that earlier time, some preparatory action was likely already on its way.
Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is insane that some people need more signals. It was clearly stated by US in February 2025 and several times after that.
After eighty years of collaboration, I’m not surprised people don’t take lightly when the USA do a 180 on their entire history of diplomacy and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies. But by now, the big wheels sure are turning for good in the EU. I’m (we’re, probably) just bitter for everything that was destroyed so need- and carelessly.
> and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies
They're applying secondary sanctions on Russian oil so China and India stop buying it despite there being a war on. Hardly "turning to Russia".