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There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

loworbitsecurity.com

361–370 of 476 posts

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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.)

I already said they'd be at DEFCON 1.

> 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.

Waiting might also keep you out of a nuclear war. They know exactly how long they can wait.

> I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.

Convential forces are inconsequential wrt a full nuclear strike.

> Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.

I already quoted you the exact policy from one of your examples.

> 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.

If you were retaliating because NK had already set off a tactical nuke in your territory? Once again, the orbital mechanics don't work like that. Looking at it, the only thing you could hit from US silos launched so that they look like they're hitting North Korea would maybe be Hong Kong. Which once those missiles go past North Korea, China is already considering it a first strike and retaliating, so you didn't really gain anything.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say Trump decides it's fuck-around-with-Islamabad-o'clock. He fucks around. Pakistan nukes at India. How many of those Senate seats flip as a result? I'm going to guess none. If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America In your scenario India did literally nothing. I know the rivalry but even then India has its own nukes and if India wasn't part of the plan then…

> then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America This isn't an option. Not within a nuclear window. The only bases within range are Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan. Hence its inclusion in the above scenario. > then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise This is tantamount to saying Pakistan can't actually retaliate. Which is my point. Pakistan's nuclear deterrent doesn't actually deter America.…

> Pakistan's nuclear deterrent doesn't actually deter America

It does, US cannot disregard the consequences of a strike on India regardless of their relationship with India.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#363
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Are they doing also something that is not aligned with business interests?

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#364
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Are they doing also something that is not aligned with business interests?

Sorry, I can't tell how you're refuting the idea that applying very painful sanctions to Russia is the opposite of "turning to Russia".

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#365
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear capability by itself isn't a complete deterrent. It has been widely reported that the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.

For nuclear deterrence to work in situations like this, it'd also be preferable to have sufficient conventional capabilities that your leadership isn't decapitated before you even notice it's happening. If the attacker is also nuclear-capable, there's little incentive for second person in the chain of command to kill themselves. Similarly, if a head of state is killed by poison or other similar means, you could hardl…

I think nuclear deterrence works even in such situations. The retaliatory system is structured in such a way that after decapitation, the decision to use or not use a nuclear weapon is made not by the "number two" or the "successor" but by a person specifically authorized to do so, about whom the successors and number two may know nothing.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an unpopular Head of State Heads of state are generally pretty good at delegating the C&C of their nukes to people they are pretty popular with. That's orthogonal to popularity polls of the populace.

Yeah but those people read the popularity polls as well. If you kill or capture the leader, there isn’t much upside in retaliation against a massively more powerful enemy. The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.

> The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.

Why care whomever is in power next? You could just do your job.

So, the solution is to press the nuclear button, get a couple hundred million dollars from an offshore account in Cyprus, and live in any country of your choice. Why care about polls in this hole, and what the US will do with this hole in response to the use of nuclear weapons?

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/devil/putin/

Sure, but I think these discussions are more enlightening when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system rather than just whatever propaganda is locally convenient.

> when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system

But they are not. We can thus look at the people who make decisions, but not at the countries themselves. So, it’s most likely not about joining NATO, but about European integration and economic growth.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think calling shutting down the internet horrific is appropriate at all in the context of bombings.

Ridiculous post. Power outages would kill a lot of people if sustained. A Carrington event would devastate modern society.

You mean in hospital contexts?

I'm having trouble thinking how power outages can be deadly.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what this is about. HTTPS is the name of a protocol, which is mostly used to make the World Wide Web work, but we do lots of other things with it, such as DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH. However HTTPS is also the name of a type of DNS record, this record contains everything you need to best reach the named HTTPS (protocol) server, and this is the type of record your parent didn't previously know about In the borin…

> so if many people share the same endpoints then eavesdropper can't tell which site you were visiting. Which is why it is so important/useful to Cloudflare but of much lower utility to most nginx users.

Cloudflare provides a very large haystack for this, but even for an nginx server with no CDN, it's still useful to prevent the hostname from being sent in the clear before the TLS connection is negotiated. This still hides the hostname from casual eavesdroppers, who now only know what IP you're connecting to, and would need need out-of-band information to map the IP back to a hostname. And they couldn't ever be 100% sure of that, because they wouldn't know for certain whether there are additional vhosts running on a given server.
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