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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded if they hadn’t given up their nuclear weapons.

Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an ord…

> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.

Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#372
post #197

I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation, and that this event will add pressure to proliferate.

the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia. We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn'…

> the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money

It sounds stupid. Maduro has no way to enforce the deal, and the US has no incentive to fulfill this deal.

> We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes.

To use it, no resistance is matter. One person must do their job to launch a nuclear weapon. That's all.

> it involves a lot of people and processes

It doesn't matter. Nuclear deterrence exercises are conducted regularly. And their peculiarity is that no one except the person with the red button knows whether it's an exercise or whether the missiles will actually be launched this time.

So when the order to launch comes, many people will be performing a large number of complex processes which will result in the use of nuclear weapons. Because they regularly receive such orders and carry out these processes.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right? The previous owner was the USSR, who ceased to exist, and who Ukraine was a part of. > Maybe you should see how good the Ukraine was at keeping their naval assets after they used the totally legal methods to obtain them. Maybe then you would have a clue on how good they could had maintained them. Are you talkin…

> The previous owner was the USSR Not quite. > and who Ukraine was a part of Oh, so there were some wedding contract what stated what in case the parties.. part - there would be the transfer and division of assets? When why Belorussia didn't received their part of the navy? Kazakhstan? Georgia? Baltics, because they surely "were parts of USSR"? > Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally That weren't or…

> I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge

This is uncalled for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why not take the thread somewhere constructive by writing out a more complete, stronger argument?

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#374
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might, it might not. Of course, you could for example also implant a trigger with a dead man's switch inside your head of state which they could use to launch a strike at any point.

An important part of deterrence is broadcasting that you've done this though. It all works much better if your enemies approximately understand your processes

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#375
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those interstate highways are starting to look pretty good as the fuel guage drops

I'd always been told this was planned into the implementation of the US Interstate Highway System. There are dead straight and level sections ever so many linear miles or per some gridsquare measure to serve as ad hoc landing strips in a national crisis. That's been 35+ years ago that I heard it and I haven't sought any supporting documentation since the dawn of the Internet. Any insight would be appreciated.

even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.

[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

BBC says the Chavez tomb thing was AI slop.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly1x12v33jt

> One image claiming to show the tomb actually shows the aftermath of a real US strike on the nearby Cagigal Observatory. The observatory is reportedly used by the General Command of the Bolivarian Militia branch of the Venezuelan military.

> We’ve also seen a viral image claiming to show extensive damage to the mausoleum but this appears to be an an AI-manipulated version of a real picture of the building published in 2013.

> Plus, the Hugo Chavez Foundation posted its own videos on Monday to show people the tomb was intact and called on people in Venezuela not to spread speculation.The videos displayed Monday’s date on a phone before zooming in on the Cuartel de la Montaña 4F to show there was no visible damage to the building.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#377
post #316

I guess one of the interesting things I learnt off this article(1) was that 7% of DNS query types served by 1.1.1.1 are HTTPS and started wondering what HTTPS query type was as I had only heard of A, MX, AAAA, SPF etc... Apparently that is part of implementing ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) in TLS 1.3 where the DNS hosts the public key of the server to fully encrypt the server name in a HTTPS request. Since Nginx and o…

There’s an odd skew in that data which is saying the *third* most popular TLD is ‘.st’ which is… unexpected. The biggest service I can find using that TLD is `play.st` so maybe PlayStation clients are early adopters of DNS-over-HTTPS via 1.1.1.1.

Weird. Or maybe someone looking up `te.st` a lot?

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#378

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.

I think you might be surprised at how heavily SNI is leveraged at places like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and other similar providers to host sites from hundreds of completely unrelated businesses on the same IP address.

Re: There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout

#380
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more. It seems rather immoral to a high degree to send some Americans to their deaths unnecessarily because we didn’t want to use a weapon we had in our possession to end a war that we did not start.

> On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more. "Our" people? That kind of moral calculus simply doesn't track with me: I'm neither from the US nor Japan, plus I think considerations of "civilization" fly out the window once you start thinking like this. But also, it's a kind of goalpost shifting. Either the calculations were the justification,…

I am not following this rationale at all. Because you're not Japanese or American, Americans are uncivilized for using a weapon that caused lots of Japanese people to die after Japanese people attacked the United States (and Australia, China, the Philippines, and more) and wouldn't stop?

> Either the calculations were the justification

The person I responded to was trying to suggest the number of American lives saved was a lot fewer than estimates. Instead of saving 1,000,000 Americans it "only" saved 50,000 or something and because of that, the calculus to use the bomb wasn't as "good" as it otherwise would be if it had saved more lives.

I say if it saved a single American life it was worth it, and was righteous, thus the shifting around of how many American lives saved is pointless because we know the lower bound is 1, and 1 was all you needed.

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