Do you think eplaya would be cut off?

[turtlebird]

Internet Kill Switch. Been hearing more and more about it. Sounds kind of scary. What are your thoughts...

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... ostpopular

[geekster]

Well, since there really is no such thing as "THE" internet, it would be pretty hard to kill. What we call the internet are thousands of individual connections between private networks. There is not a central piece of infrastructure called "the internet" that traffic flows through.

It is sort of like saying the government was going to put a stop to people driving cars but in this case, imagine all of the roads are privately owned. Exactly how is the government going to hit a "kill" switch?

Lets say for the sake of illustration that you have AT&T data service. AT&T connects directly to Yahoo, Google, MSN, Facebook, and lots of other places.

People on Comcast will find that Comcast also connects directly to Yahoo, MSN, Google, Facebook, etc.

Now, they won't connect directly to everyone but the generally will connect directly to a network that is connected to the network of the destination. But again, these are all interconnections between networks.

Now, how exactly would the government go about "killing" the Internet without knocking out people's VOIP phones, preventing government employees' Blackberries from working, preventing anyone from sending email, and preventing people from getting news and information from the news sites?

Would they just send out a blanket order to everyone to turn their routers off? How are they going to enforce that?

And nothing prevents people from making their own "internet" by stringing cable between themselves. How are you going to prevent people from communicating? I could possibly see them shutting down cable landing stations where trans-oceanic cables arrive but shutting down the domestic Internet would be rather difficult. It is like telling people that they can not talk on the phone or write letters or converse in person.

The funny thing is how dependent the non-classified government has become on the Internet and if they tried to kill it, would shoot themselves in the foot. This looks like some idea cooked up by someone who hasn't the foggiest notion of how the internet works.

Once upon a time a guy got laughed at when he said the internet is nothing more than a series of tubes because people were thinking he meant those old obsolete electron tubes. He meant tubes as in "pipes". Lots of private pipes between various networks. It really is like a giant, privately owned spider web that is designed to route around failures and by nature be hard to "kill". If one pipe breaks, the data flows through a different one over a less direct route but eventually getting to where it needs to go.

I don't see how they could do it in practice.

[velocirafter]

it was ted stevens who said that, absolutely hilarious.

[youtube][/youtube]

[gyre]

Most internet traffic is the same lolcats zipping back and forth anyway.

[ygmir]

electrical interruptions.

[Token]

Gotta disagree with you Geekster.

What you describe is fairly accurate, though somewhat simplified for metro area networks (MAN).

Those MAN networks, as complex and layered as they are, do eventually connect to the Internet Backbone (or Backhaul as some call it) Network that links all the MAN regions.

There is a finite number of very large powerful routers that runs this whole show on the IBN. They use MPLS switching and are quite capable of classifying, shaping, filtering and billing down to the smallest packet or switched cell level.

The IBN also is often implemented with DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) optical redundant rings, which use different wavelengths of light in their lasers to segregate data streams based on both technical and business needs.

A DWDM optical backhaul can carry asynchronous Internet packets on one wavelength, isochronous cell switch data for phone companies on a second wavelength, government data on a third, millitary data on a fourth, etc.

Shutting down any portion of this system is not only possible, it is already instrumented in the Network Management Systems currently deployed.

China already does all this stuff and they have more internet user than we do.

[Elderberry]

This is all very complicated and confusing. (And I'm in the business. )

JK

[Token]

This is all very complicated and confusing. (And I'm in the business. )

JK

I'm looking for a job and I have forgotten more about the business than most mortals will ever know.

I'm available mid September.

[geekster]

And I am telling you there is no such thing as "The Internet Backbone". It doesn't exist. I know what I am talking about, this is what I do for a living.

I have a network at 11 Great Oaks in San Jose. I connect directly to Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MSN. If I want to get to another destination, I hand my traffic to InterNAP. InterNAP will hand their traffic directly to AT&T, Comcast, Savvis, Time Warner, etc. It will never touch a thing called "The Internet Backbone" because there is no such thing. Also, not of my connections to those people touch any carrier infrastructure. They are physical fiber optic cables that run within the building from my network to theirs. No MAN no wavelength mux, nothing ... straight 10 Gigabit ethernet.

When I want to send traffic to my data center in London, I hand the traffic to Savvis directly. They haul it across their own network to their data center in London and then present it to my router there. Again, the traffic never touched anything called "The Internet Backbone". And in London, I also peer directly with various carriers and content providers on an exchange called LINX. In France there is PARIX, in Germany there is DE-IX, etc. None of these are owned by a telco, they are owned by the actual people who use it.

Also, The Internet is not under the jurisdiction of the United States Congress. All 'The Internet' is, is a series of agreements about how domains will be named and what protocols people will use to communicate. There is no formal public infrastructure called "The Internet".

[geekster]

Now some of these networks will use carrier services between facilities but that is what they are, telco services. For example, between two data centers in the Bay Area I lease "dark fiber" from AboveNet (the old MFS fiber ring) and light it myself. That isn't an "internet" circuit, it is just a strand of fiber. What "switch" is the government going to throw that will disconnect that fiber and all the other direct cross-connects and private peering? There isn't one. Government would have to issue an order compelling companies to shut off peering.

It is just very difficult to do in practice. You basically have to compel everyone to power off their routers. If government tries to put too fine a point on it and say "only communications between people on this list is allowed", you then have everyone configuring a bazillion access lists and that won't work either.

It just sounds good in theory, but I don't see how they would actually do it in practice. How would AboveNet know what is going over that dark fiber? Is it voice traffic? Is it data? Is it long haul fiberchannel to a disk array? They have no way of knowing what is going over it.

[Fire_Moose]

Do _I_ think eplaya would be cut off?


God, I hope so.

[Token]

Well Geekster, since we are both experts in the field, we just have to disagree on this and live happily ever after.

After the non-existing backbone of NSFNet was dissolved in 1995 and the fictional backbone privatized, ten carriers emerged as Tier-1 providers, six of which are US based.

Sprint
Quest
Verizon
L3
Savvis
AT&T

These six carriers all have transit free settlement agreements and are peered together to form the non existing Internet backbone.

All uncle Sam would need is 6 court orders or a declaration of a national state if emergency and a few phone calls.

[Elderberry]

This is all very complicated and confusing. (And I'm in the business. )

JK

I'm looking for a job and I have forgotten more about the business than most mortals will ever know.

I'm available mid September.

I'll keep that in mind.

JK

[Rice]

I do not think it would take much to disconnect North America from the rest of the world. I believe there are only ten or twelve fiber junctions connecting our continent to the rest of the world. If those were to be taken out, would we not be disconnected??

The way that the internet is interconnected it would be quite a challenge to have some sort of kill switch. Sure, the Telco's and cable companies would probably be compelled... Looking at several ISP's commercial fiber maps it seems that they all pretty much funnel their traffic through the same major cities. If these connection points were shut down, that would reduce the connections to local areas.

http://www.dante.net/server/show/


http://www.telegeography.com/product-in ... /index.php


I don't profess to be the 'expert' in this, but I do know how what is called the Internet works...

Shutting the junction points down would by far be the best way of doing this. I'd like to get some opinions on this.


Rice

[rodiponer]

I agree with Bruce Schneier-- an Internet kill switch is a security risk by itself, and flipping it would do more damage than anything it could possible protect against.

Lieberman is an idiot. I think he should propose a national electricity and running water kill switch.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2 ... ill_s.html

[theCryptofishist]

I'm tired of all these amputation threads!

[geekster]

Shutting the junction points down would by far be the best way of doing this. I'd like to get some opinions on this.

What you are calling the "junction points" on that map are the cable landing stations I mentioned in my first post. Yes, the USG could shut those down. But that won't shut down "the internet" because there is still satellite connectivity that would also have to be shut down. Once that is done, you might have the US somewhat isolated from the rest of the world (actually, you don't need to shut them all down, shutting down enough of them will congest the rest to the point where they become unusable).

I suppose then they could shut down the domestic root name (DNS) servers. Once access to foreign root name servers is cut you won't be able to get to anything by name (but can still get there by IP address) until someone creates their own root zone and works around that problem.

The other problem is that if you cut the cable landings, you cut connectivity between the US and a lot of Asia. A lot of traffic between Asia and Europe transits the US. It would disrupt connectivity globally and piss off a lot of people in a lot of countries.

The US government doesn't have jurisdiction over "the internet". And at this point disrupting data communications would be a freedom of speech issue. How are you going to tell people that they can no longer send email or use telephones that go by IP or publish their thoughts on a blog?

It is possible that they could *try* to do it but I doubt if it would actually happen in practice. Besides, it wouldn't accomplish anything. You can't find out where an attack is coming from if you disconnect and disconnecting might be the goal of the attack ... simply force the government to use the "kill switch" ... mission accomplished.

[geekster]

Well Geekster, since we are both experts in the field, we just have to disagree on this and live happily ever after.

After the non-existing backbone of NSFNet was dissolved in 1995 and the fictional backbone privatized, ten carriers emerged as Tier-1 providers, six of which are US based.

Sprint
Quest
Verizon
L3
Savvis
AT&T

These six carriers all have transit free settlement agreements and are peered together to form the non existing Internet backbone.

All uncle Sam would need is 6 court orders or a declaration of a national state if emergency and a few phone calls.

Things have changed now. You can obtain settlement free peering today by simply appearing on one if the various exchanges. 5 years ago nearly 80% of my traffic was transit, 20% direct peering. Today it is the opposite. For $1000 a month, I can toss a GigE (10GigE is more) to a peering switch and pass traffic with other participants for free. Once I reach about 300 meg or so with any participant on that switch, I cross-connect directly to them in the facility for under $300 a month and take the traffic off the exchange connection. So the actual cost starts at under $1 a meg at 300 megs and drops from there as traffic increases on the cross-connect.

I have had two networks approach me for peering just in the past month. I pay no "per meg" charge, only a flat rate to the exchange.

peeringdb.com now lists 17 pages of public peering locations. A lot has changed over the past 5 years.

[Trishntek]

Of course, there's always smoke signals and drums if all else fails,,,,,

[geekster]

It will be easier than that. For several years the South Bay Network existed that moved email between people by UUCP over dialup telephone. It is actually very efficient. All you need is a phone line to stay in contact with others in the network. You can still send email, participate in mailing lists, and move files back and forth. So you can sort of even view http stuff by moving the files onto your computer and opening them in a web browser.

They can not shut off data communications unless they also shut down the phone system.

sbay.org provided the San Jose Tech Museum with email long before they had internet connectivity. As long as you can reach a dialup modem (foreign or domestic), you can exchange email and data IF you have the tools.

[Lassen Forge]

They can not shut off data communications unless they also shut down the phone system.

That, my dear, hits the nail on the head.

Unless you have the access code *and* a pre-set-up line, or access to the, oh what the hell is it called, the successor to Autovon, (can't remember the name) you would be without phone.

That would shut the internet - at least domestecally - down.

And (paranoia time) it can be done. You should see some of the Continuation of Government plans...

Thank you Ronald Reagan for being so fracking paranoid... altho I'm sure our former administration would have done such a thing as well had it not been in place.

[mdmf007]

Of course the internet can be shut down.

fiber optics are the main route and certainly susceptible to damage, or can literally have their power shut off.

A server for a particular website may be on another continent as well. Just because Crackerjacks.com is located in the Midwest, their actual server storing their website could be in Palo Alto, Seattle, or Bangalore with a backup copy in Amsterdam. Just like GPS in N.A. you can bet some agency has the power to pull the plug on any or all of the net domestically.

How do you think China is able to restrict the net so much if it was not routed through central hubs somewhere?

[ygmir]

yeah, I think it's built in.......and still, refer to my premise about power.....
and, as the U.S. becomes one single "grid" for power distribution.......it'd be easy as flicking a wall switch.

[geekster]

fiber optics are the main route and certainly susceptible to damage, or can literally have their power shut off.

Sure you can cut fiberoptics off. But you will cut off telephone and even video feeds between television networks. How can you tell by looking at a fiberoptic strand what kind of traffic it is passing? You can't.

When a couple of apparently disgruntled telephone employees cut two fiberoptic cables in San Jose, they took out telephone service from Morgan Hill to Gilroy including 911 service in some areas in addition to data communications.

BUT the network is so wired six ways to Sunday that you would have to cut so many cables that you would take out more than just internet. I might lease several strands. I might run voice over some, data over others, a mix of the two over some more, and maybe video over another one. And I might change which strands are used for which. The government doesn't even know which wires carry Internet traffic.

Sure, it is POSSIBLE but I can think of no practical way in which it can be done short of subordinating network administrators to some government agency and issuing an order to shut the routers off.

Even then you would have to rely on voluntary compliance.

[turtlebird]

I hate to bring up an old thread, but is anyone concerned about what's happening with Wikileaks and Amazon and all the other companies involved? I feel like it's kind of to why I started this thread in the first place...

[Aiee! It burns!]

[quote="geekster"]What you are calling the "junction points" on that map are the cable landing stations I mentioned in my first post. Yes, the USG could shut those down. [/quote]

USG = US Gypsom? do thay have that power ?

[knowmad]

never has so much been said by so many with so little knowledge. Without a fair grasp on the terms such as backhaul, heterodyning and demuxing; the debate is moot, your senators the majority of whom can't text or read an access log, are even less comprehending than those dumb enough to follow them.

Is there a "kill switch"?
It is a distracting argument, placed there to cause us to not ask the real question.

Was it a good idea to let the military/industrial complex to design and deliver a mass marketable communications network apparatus to; politicians who's mainstay of staying power derives from media influence, and a general public addicted to consumption and diversion?