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Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#81

Post by acidburnNSA »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #70
harshreality wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't SDRs be a lot more useful for creating higher-bandwidth wireless networks in the sort of disaster where the FCC opens up other frequency ranges? The amateur radio regulation regime and common ham radios work well for small numbers of small messages sent around in a well-regulated way, without the government initiating a frequency band jubilee. But beyond that, HAM radios are limited, even if they're modded,…

Sure, but everything has to be ready, prepared and exercised before anything happens. Whatever plan you may conceive, you have to do plenty of test runs in advance. After it happens, it's chaos, it's too late to start new initiatives. And there are caveats anyway. For local connections, some kind of WiFi mesh might still be the best option. For long distance, I don't think you can currently use anything but proper HA…

As a fellow ham, I have to say: guys, guys... it's ham, not HAM. Other than that I totally agree with you.

The (VHF and UHF) ham bands will send data a few tens of kilometers with good messaging bandwidth. Here in Seattle there's a Monday-night digital net through a repeater on the Columbia tower where folks send text messages and some (slow) photos on 444.55 MHz. Typical speeds are like 9600 baud.

As you mention, when you go down to the HF bands like 20m you can transmit and receive around the world, but there's far less bandwidth. The tragedy of the commons is right on.

I've operated PSK31 (which runs at 31 baud) worldwide on 20m and it's pretty much a chatroom. You can get a lot said with that, but you certainly won't be browsing the web.

It would be cool to play around with connecting 2.4 GHz local wifi meshnets with ham repeaters at ranges of say 50 km. Then you'd have nice fast local communication with reasonable long distance. .

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#82

Post by eternalban »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #44
kej wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.

KG6YHQ here. It's doable, but if the wired net becomes unusable and you have to rely wholly on the RF spectrum, bandwidth would be stupendously tiny. Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages. Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum, but even then there are only so many of us, only so many transceivers out there. I feel the HAM net would…

"Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum"

Or, depending on who shut it down, you may have to deal with jamming.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#83

Post by jcl »

goda90 wrote: post #15

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a…

There are educational projects that focus on providing the benefits of the internet to communities that have poor or no connectivity, like: http://internet-in-a-box.org/

While internet failure mitigation isn't an explicit goal of such projects, their resources might make a good starting point.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#84

Post by duaneb »

reitoei wrote: post #42
falcolas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Verisign is running the nameservers for .com and .net, it will cause DNS problems across the board. We'd have to rely on DNS caches until new .net and .com nameservers come up. This would impact not only new domain registrations, but DR grade migrations, and DNSSEC. If coordinated with an attack against the root nameservers so we couldn't change the .com and .net nameservers, DNS would become a real disaster. If c…

Would there a use case for decentralizing DNS into blockchain, or for creating an alternative?

For some reasons to use DNS (e.g. service discovery) the latency associated with a blockchain would be prohibitive. Generally, I think it's an excellent application.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#85

Post by SilasX »

linkregister wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His writing about cryptography certainly should include citations.

It might sound blasphemous but I (as a non-expert in crypto) would be satisfied if either you or Bruce didn't cite their writing about crypto. Yes, appeal to authority and all that, but I don't have time to fully learn a field to find out if a cryptographer is mistaken. Also, the point I was making is that if he wants to leave work uncited, it should at least be the work he has actual credibility in.

Citations aren't simply about "is this valid?", but about enabling others to audit the basis of the clais -- was the author they saying it based on their more nebulous "general expertise" (speaking ex cathedra), or were they relying on the credibility of other source? If the later, that makes it easier to fix when the same error was propagating through several sources to the point that became common knowledge.

(Interestingly enough, that sounds like a point Schneier would make :-p )

In fact, there's a general problem in belief updating (Bayesian or otherwise) where you may over-credit others' opinions by treating them as independent when they were both actually relaying the same data point. You can only detect this error if you can inspect the source of those opinions.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#86

Post by vacri »

linkregister wrote: post #40

Although Schneier is probably correct in this instance, one of the most exasperating features of his computer security writing is an utter lack of citations or evidence to back up his claims. (His writing about cryptography should require no citations because he is an actual crypto expert.) After the significant inaccuracies and frequent unsubstantiated speculation in Schneier on Security , I don't think credible sec…

My $0.02, as a latecomer to this tech industry (really only been in it for 6-8 years)

I don't understand the reverance around Schneier. I first saw him give a talk in 2009, and it was an 'insert town name here' speech about stuff that was blazingly obvious to people who should already know (topic: social engineering and passwords). Yet people were fawning over the talk. It really struck me as a guy who was once great, but is now resting on his laurels - that halo effect you mention.

I get exactly the same feeling from this article. There is nothing in it that we don't already know. What, there are state actors in Russia and China that are effectively at cyberwar with us? Quelle surprise! DDoS attacks are getting more sophisticated? Quelle surprise again! He takes one issue in tech that actually has filtered through to the general public, and makes it sound like he has the inside story. DDoS attacks pick up where they left off last time? Must be the work of an evil genius - no mere mortal could think of that!

I also get that the article is for a general audience, but in that case, the "oo, I can't share details!" bit is just populism. In short, I find his writing on tech to be lots of fluff and little meat.

Perhaps I'd have a different opinion if I grew up with him in his glory days, or if I was more interested in crypto and read his more technical papers, but while I've been on HN, I've never been enlightened by a linked article of his. This is all, of course, personal perception, and he may be a downright top bloke to someone more in the know.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#87

Post by gipp »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #75
linkregister wrote: post #40

Although Schneier is probably correct in this instance, one of the most exasperating features of his computer security writing is an utter lack of citations or evidence to back up his claims. (His writing about cryptography should require no citations because he is an actual crypto expert.) After the significant inaccuracies and frequent unsubstantiated speculation in Schneier on Security , I don't think credible sec…

Sometimes it feels as if computer engineers have a unique inability to deal with ambiguous information. Yes, I agree the article is vague, and I'd like to learn more. But this is typical for this kind of backchannel intel. From some sources, through some channels, for some kinds of info - this is all you get. This is business as usual. Take it in for what it's worth. It's a signal from a sea of noise, nothing more. M…

> Take it in for what it's worth. It's a signal from a sea of noise, nothing more.

His post is the very definition of "taking it for what it's worth".

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#88

Post by superuser2 »

kej wrote: post #28
goda90 wrote: post #15

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a…

The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.

The amateur radio community can't use encryption and, for the most part, is happy about this restriction.

A zero-privacy internet might be better than nothing, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#89

Post by rabidrat »

matt4077 wrote: post #34
goda90 wrote: post #15

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a…

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

You mean, like this guy?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#90

Post by M_Grey »

rabidrat wrote: post #89
matt4077 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

You mean, like this guy? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...

The man lived through a tsunami in the area, that was hardly a matter of exciting thoughts, but a desperate desire to prevent a predictable tragedy. By contrast people prepping for the end of days in whatever form, often nuclear, strike me as mad.

If there's a nuclear war, I want to be in the hypocenter of the first detonation, because we're not climbing out of that hole as a species in any meaningful way. I suppose that reality is why so many have turned to fantasies of a worldwide EMP of some exotic type which is at least survivable in their imagination.

Me? I've read my history, if civilization comes tumbling down, my plan is to eat a gun. Meanwhile I'll live my life without terror, and plan only for disasters that can reasonably be managed without dedicating my limited lifespan to it.

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