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How Dependent Is The Internet On The U.S.?
interstar asks: "It's been noted before, but Cringely has an interesting article on Carnivore. The final, big thought is that it might give the U.S. security services the possibility to shut down the Internet. Now, as a UK resident, I'm concerned, but it raised another question in my mind. As of today - July 2000 - how dependent are we in the rest of the world on the U.S. Internet? If all nodes under U.S. jurisdiction shutdown tomorrow, could I still route mail to my girlfriend in Brazil, around the smoking crater? Could a company in Paris hire programmers in India and Russia? Do we still need the U.S. or is the global Internet now independent?"
What if instead of just passively dropping off the network, the US nodes started broadcasting null routes? or somesuch other evil thing?
EOF
As far as I can tell the internet is something that the US started and then other countries joined in. However, since the internet is based on nodes of computers, then shutting down those in the US doesn't kill the UK ones. As long as there is a protocol and adress(es), then the internet will live.
Just kidding.
it would be a lot more boring. For a start, most of the fastest connections in the world are to/from the US, and the backbone infrastructure there is pretty blindingly speedy. I suspect that, with the US taken out of the internet equation, the firm in Paris would have to wait a bit longer for the replies from programmers in India or Russia.
:) Seriously, the US generates most of the traffic too, so maybe it would balance out.
A lot of the content is also based over there, so the WWW would instantly (if we are talking a big Carnivore-style switch-off) lose a heck of a lot of information. Perhaps enough to severely cripple its use as a tool.
On the other hand, it would lose a sizeable percentage of AOL users as well, so the bandwidth for the rest of the world might increase dramatically
In all, I think the worst problem would be the sudden lack of information.
I want all these countries to start building their infrastructure to be not "dependent" on the United States in any way for the Internet. There should be a T1 line to every house. It is an injustice if done any other way. The more bandwidth the better.
A friend and I were discussing this the other day. Although there's still a lot to discuss about whether or not the actual traffic *would* get routed, another topic that usually comes up is that would the reduced capacity be able to handle all the traffic that the web generates? It's important to remember here that if you lose the nodes in the US, you'd lose all the American users as well, reducing the traffic overall.
Hey - is /. down for you too?
uhh... well. if the US did kill a main portion of the net, a few things will happen.
the net will become very slow for the remaining nodes as a large portion of the backbones will go out.
also, the name servers will probably take a beating causing domain names to be useless.
the 'net will probably still move on, though. that is unless useless packets are spewn over the lines causing almost a global denial of service from packet-collisions, line saturation, etc.
kick some CAD
On the other hand, this sort of makes sense. This is, after all, where the Internet was born. And it has only been ten years since it became popular.
--
I've heard gripes from various european friends that when they traceroute to neighboring countries they tend to go through the US to get there. Direct routing would be better. Is this still the case? Maybe the patchwork of various telcos should put aside the differences for the good of the net...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anyone with enough time can probably figure out the answers to you questions by consulting one of the maps at:
http://www.cybergeography.com/atlas/ atlas.html
This map seems to suggest that most data does pass through the US.
Is the Internet largely composed of US nodes? I don't know the real numbers.. but I'd bet it is.
Does the US monopolize the technology? No. Could the internet change shape many different ways? Yes.
The Internet is a phenomenon, not a thing.
We must remember the roots.
1) Everyone makes their own private networks, not necessarily hooked up to anything else all the time.
2) People got the address space for their networks assigned by a big plan, so they could hook them together without conflict later. This was not competitive in the beginning. there was more than enough address space to go around, it was only centralized to keep it all unique. (Sort of like radio, eh?)
3) People hook stuff together however they manage.
This will continue, no matter what. THe world is now connected, and will only continue to be more connected.
I've just forwarded this question to the internet architect, Al Gore, and he has promised to get a response back to me by tomorrow. Seems he's busy wokring on the intergalaticnet at the moment and can't drop what he's doing. Nice guy, that Al.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Of course the Internet would die. If the United States of America were to disappear tomorrow, the entire world would then cease to exist along with it.
For example: If the US was gone, then what would be holding Canada to the planet? Nothing! Canada would float off into space and crash into the sun. Also, since 89.58% of the worlds heavy metals is has been shipped to the United States, then what would be balancing Europe, Africa and Asia where they are today? Nothing! They would sink to the South Pole, and everybody would freeze to death.
Yup. The Eeee-yooo-nited States of America is the glue that keeps this world spinnin'! Now all youse other nations remember that, y'all hear?!
Certainly, this wouldn't stop you from setting up your own root server, but I'd venture to guess that most ISP's in other countries use the US ones that come with BIND. It might take a few days before they all got switched over.
Kinda OT: You should be using 199.166.24.1 (ns1.vrx.net) as your main DNS server (or setup your named.ca to be a root server). Try it, then visit the.earth or free.tibet.
Well, the ability to "shut down" the entire US internet requires that laws are passed forcing EVERY ISP to have the so called "Carnivore" box. Say what you will, but I hardly think thats likely. Perhaps some gov't types out there might want to have this ability but big business which has embraced the internet in recent years is hardly likely to let something like come about without making a lot more then just noise. And we all know who really runs the US government now don't we?
Spyky
Now granted, there are some major corps in the states, who handle a lot of the internet traffic. Shutting down these guys would probably put some of your ISP's out of business, as they may actually have purchased time on say an MCI leased line over to a bigger ISP within the US, but that is something again, quickly routed around.
Another thing to take into consideration is the magnitude of what you're talking about. In order for the US to pull the plug on their internet, they'd basically have to, with certainty, shut down every fiber optic, copper, radio, microwave, and sattelite shot going out of the US. Such a thing has never been done before. The TransAtlantic cable, which was used to carry telephone conversations across the pond, was never taken off line during world war II. In fact, a german sub attempted to cut it on numerous occasions, and failed.
What the US could do is begin to monitor data packets. packet sniffing would slow the internet down a little bit, sure, but it "IS" feasible. The task would be daunting at best, though, since in essence, every single data packet makes it's own way, and quite possibly gets a different route. I don't see it happening any time soon.
And if it does come to that, ARPANET's little baby program will, hopefully prove itself worthy of the money and research put into it, and simply route everyone around that humongous "Dead Spot" that would be the US.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
As far as I can tell, a good deal of the world's traffic is routed in one way or another through the US. Probably most traffic destined for Australia or Latin America passes through the US, either just by the route of the fiber or actually having routers on-shore. If we (the US) wanted to screw the Internet as a whole, I'm sure we could do away with greater than half of the non-US destinations.
You also have to keep in mind that ARIN, based in the US, allocates IPs, both for US-based entities and to overseas folks. Likewise, I'm pretty sure most of the root nameservers are in the US, or at least on this side of the pond. Also, of course, the infrastructure for registering new com/net/org domains would be down until such time as an overseas entity or group took over and started updating the remaining root nameservers, if any, or began to run their own. The real bitch of this, of course, is that just about every resolver in the world is programmed with the current roots in its hints file.
On the other hand, as time goes on there are more and more links being run the other way around the globe. Ones that go through the middle east or Russia, and then on to far Eastern destinations. If this trend continues, of course, the rest of the world will be in a much better situation in case of the US being blackholed for whatever reason. I believe the same sort of trend is beginning for getting links directly to South America, and if that is the case, that would also help immensely. As far as Canada is concerned, there are probably quite a number of trans-Atlantic cables either terminating there already or which run across Newfoundland, and so could, in relatively short order, be used to get Canadian connectivity back to Europe. The big question of course, would be whether the US being gone was because of an internal will, in which case Canada would be unable or more likely unwilling to tap into the US trans-oceanic cables that run across their land, or if the problem was that the US for some reason had a major political breakdown and lost their superpower status, in which case I doubt that they would have much of a problem appropriating needed cables for their own use.
In short, for now, the Internet as a whole would be a less useful place to inhabit if the US was to go away for some reason, but as time goes on, the trend appears to be a less US-centric one. That's not to say that there's not a lot of traffic running through it, but more that later on, more traffic could be routed around it.
-Nathan
Care about freedom?
Become a card carrying member of the GOA.
Knowing the specific purpose behind the protocol design of the Internet (back when it was ARPANET) -- to withstand bombing of nodes on the network without losing networking ability between the remaining nodes of the network/internet -- you should still be able to send your email with the U.S. ISP's being "off" (after the FBI's 'carnivore' switched us off).
Still, U.S. ISP's may own Internet infrastructure outside of the U.S. which could interfere with outside U.S. communications.
My suggestion: end Carnivore now -- it means the end to ANY private communications inside the U.S. -- about the worse thing to derive from the FBI since McCarthy (sp?).
I am very disturbed by this article at The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/12117.html , since it seems that the FBI has succeeded in removing the website as of today.
--
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I would imagine that the internet would survive more or less intact. However, I would think that many inter-country internet links would become saturated to the point of unuseiblity for some time. I belive this for two reasons:
1) Most of the most popular internet sites are located in the US. This content would have to be substituted with content from other countries. Thus much more intra-nonus traffic.
2) Much of the internet conections between two given foriegn countries will be routed though the US. This can largely be attributed to the fact that, one, the US was first, and two, the US is largely in the middle of the highly industrialized nations where internet use prodomites. ie the best route from england to japan may often be through the US.
No .coms. That would be great. Finally my slashdot.cc and msn.cc would get the recognition they deserve.
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
I ran an ISP in Panama for a couple of years a couple of years ago, and at the same time got to know a lot of the infrastructure in most central and south american countries, which represent a good sample of the world when it comes to Internet connectivity. My view on things is that, were the US to suddenly go down in a ball of fire, or if bill gates gets ellected president and gets legistlation passed that would force windows on all ISP servers in the US, most countries would be disconnected from other countries, but local (domestic) traffic would still route. most countries by now have the equivalent of a MAE and route local traffic among themselves (this is not as obvious as it sounds, since there's a TON of pollitical and economical issues to be resovled before you can get this going in most countries) and use US connectivity through satellite and/or fiber for their international traffic. I know there's a lot of intra europe connectivity going on, but would think that most of europe-to-assia traffic would go through the US (please correct me if i'm wrong). The bottom line is that you would still be able to route traffic locally until you can get connectivity to somewhere else that would make a good hubbing place like the UK (specially that island owned by that guy a few miles off their coast). So the bottom line is that we would be partially cut off for like a month, and then back online.
now if you asked me about content, well, that's a different matter. most internet content is hosted in US servers due to the fact that most ISPs can get to the US pretty fast and interconnection among US ISPs is excellent compared to the rest of the world. In the case of the ball of fire, we would have to hire that guy that's trying to save the history of the internet. If it's the case of bill gates getting elected, then nothing could ever be done, and all connectivity, caching systems and redundant links would be saturated forever due to direct email marketing campagins from microsoft using the database they've collected for years in secret using the task scheduler and registration forms.
the internet is here to stay.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Can the internet be shut down?
Lets first learn how the internet works here
Now that we know a bit more we can say that they can surely cut off some major roads and create major disruptions by shuting down key relay points.
But you answer is NO, they can't shut it down.
You also have to keep in mind that ARIN, based in the US, allocates IPs, both for US-based entities and to overseas folks.
Thinking of which, there is (or was) a class A subnet (that's 4294967296 addresses) on a piece of CoAx in Imperial College, London. I think it's only a few tens of feet long, as well!
Firstly, there's a big difference between what Cringeley suggests (the ability to shut down ISPs) and shutting down all the backbones. Taking down all the ISPs in the USA, but leaving the backbones running would make the net several orders of magnitude faster for the rest of us. (and several orders of magnitude more boring) However, if the backbones were taken down...
.za.
Living in Sydney Australia, pretty much all of my routes go through the USA, except those to very close neighbours such as Malaysia and Indonesia. My routes to Japan and Taiwan go via the USA. South Africa is closer to Perth, Australia than I am. My packets to South Africa go to Perth, THEN to the US, THEN to
Sometimes it's even worse than that. Back when I was at University, it was so bad that when I did a traceroute between two servers 15 minutes drive apart but on different backbones, the packets were going via California.
There are links between countries that could be used if the USA were to vanish, but these links are usually significantly underpowered. Most of the major content providers are in the USA, most of the packets go to and from the USA, so other countries tend to invest most of their money in fat pipes to North America. And since those fat pipes are already there, they may as well take care of some of the local traffic as well.
Between countries on the same continent, you're probably looking at a continuing stable network. But inter-continental links would most likely fall over and die.
Even if the underpowered inter-continental links could take it, you'd see a routing nightmare. BGP packets would be flying around in circles panicking, and any sane network administrator would lock him or herself in a small room and whimper until it was all over.
There's also other things to think of. How many of the root nameservers are outside the USA? How much traffic can they take? How would they cope with the prolonged absence of a.root-servers?
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
Carnivore is just another reason to justify my paranoia. Everyone should have email encryption at their fingertips. I really don't care if carnivore intercepts some twofish/serpent/rijndael encrypted traffic, because it would take the FBI three years to decrypt it. How relevant or incriminating could it be then? I pose a different question: How can we force ISP's to participate in augmenting the current net to include Public Key Infrastructure? Why doesn't every email/file transfer program have a PGP-like plugin? Shut down the US Internet, my left butt cheek!
"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
I'd already mentioned this in Kuro5hin, but it's worth repeating. Given that Carnivore is set up between the ISP's main routers and the rest of the Internet (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's pretend it is...) they can do all sorts of creative things if they weren't restrained by ethics and the Bill of Rights including:
A little bit of law enforcement arm twisting would help make sure the sysadmins didn't try to interfere with these activities. Sleep tight everyone...
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I can only think of two unique things requited to make the 'net work. First there is the NIC, or more specifically the Top Level Domain and the name authority that goes with it. Then there are the 4 NAP's (network access points) that are supposed to be so crucial. 3 of them are on the US East Coast, and 1 is in California. Supposedly all internet traffic eventually goes through one of them. Not sure if that's true anymore. At any rate, I would think making another TLD wouldn't be too hard. I wonder why it hasn't been tried already. It seems silly that there could only be one of something on the internet. Why couldn't there be a competing domain structure? It could use differently numbered TCP ports to communicate so as not to conflict with the existing one, and be somewhat gnutella-like to avoid centralization.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
As for Carnivore, the idea of a co-located snoop box seems reasonable enough technically. (Legally and politically is another matter entirely.) As a means of shutting down the Internet, it doesn't make sense.
We need much tighter legal controls on such snooping. The FBI has been fighting this in the telephony area, where the phone industry has insisted that CALEA only authorizes the FBI to wiretap with telco assistance after the telco receives a court order. Law enforcement doesn't get to select what they want to listen to by themselves; the telco has to physically set that up. The FCC has gone along with the telco industry's position that the telco must check the validity of the court order and keep records on the taps; some vague piece of paper from the FBI isn't enough.
Carnivore needs at least that level of protection. Preferably more.
At least for a while. Just by hacking and crashing backbone servers, or using Carnivore to shut them down. They would probably need to do both to shut down the gobal internet, but it would certainly be possible.
IIRC, in the flurry of concern after the DDoS attacks last year, Congress held some hearings where, among other famous folks, Mudge (from l0pht) testified that they (l0pht) could probably bring down the US internet in about 30 minutes.
If seven (admittedly smart and resourceful) folks can do this much damage, then the US government can probably do at least as well. Particularly since the government has a lot more muscle to flex on companies exporting technology (just look at crypto up until very recently).On a brighter note, this sort of DoS wouldn't last forever - systems and networks would get cleaned, and lines to the US would get shut down. The US would be an international villan, and would probably by completely cut off from the rest of the world. I don't think the US politicians would profit from this scenario, and I hope that anyone else trying this stunt would promptly get punted into prison.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Well... .com .net and .edu domains would die... NetworkSolutions is in the US. And how much of the trans-oceanic cable is owned by US companies... No maintainance... It would suck.
If the US portion of the internet was shut off the internet would most likly become so unstable that it would just break. I would think that way peering is set up they internet isn't truely that fault tolerant. I mean With a NSP or AS there is a lot of built in tolarence but between the networks I just don't think there is enough redundacy. Portions of the Internet would still work fine but interconnectivity would just be horrible. Because is the US NSPs are shut down a lot of international network will just die out too. Most of the internet in other places is owned by US companys. UUnet, Sprint, PSI, ect...
-ZiN-
could I still route mail to my girlfriend in Brazil, around the smoking crator?
Probably not, mostly due to topology. Brazil is closer to US than to Europe. Therefore it's easier to lay a fiber optical cable to there, and take advantage of the already existing cables between US and EU. Not only that, but Brazil communicates more to US than to EU. Therefore it seems to be a logical step.
Brazil has 2 major backbones: Global One and Embratel . Both route traffic to Europe through the US east coast. For those interested, here are some traceroutes:
From Brazil to sunic.sunet.se via Global One:
1 router.indeca.com.br (200.197.162.2) 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms
2 gip-spo-3-rt02-ser1-1-1-4.br.global-one.net (200.224.226.233) 12 ms 11 ms 12 ms
3 gip-spo-3-rt02-fast0-0-0.br.global-one.net (200.224.224.30) 12 ms 15 ms 12 ms
4 gip-spo-3-rt01-fddi10-0.br.global-one.net (200.30.0.37) 13 ms 33 ms 12 ms
5 gip-spo-3-rt06-fast0-0-0.br.global-one.net (200.30.0.62) 16 ms 21 ms 13 ms
6 gip-stoc-us-bar-2-s6-1-2.gip.net (204.59.129.9) 604 ms 604 ms 603 ms
7 gip-penn-us-bar-1-h0-1-1.gip.net (204.59.136.17) 657 ms 657 ms 657 ms
8 gip-penn-us-bar-3-p1-1.gip.net (204.59.138.9) 657 ms 658 ms 664 ms
9 gip-arch-gb-bar-2-p9-0-0.gip.net (204.59.138.22) 726 ms 727 ms 726 ms
10 gip-stkh-se-bar-2-a0-0-0-744-aal5.gip.net (204.59.5.102) 780 ms 781 ms 781 ms
11 gip-segix-se-ix-1-fe3-0.gip.net (204.59.26.193) 795 ms 787 ms 856 ms
12 Stockholm-DGIX.sunet.se (194.68.128.19) 788 ms 781 ms 781 ms
13 STK-BB-2-POS4-2.sunet.se (130.242.204.65) 784 ms * 783 ms
14 KTHNOC-1-SRP-5-0.sunet.se (130.242.211.4) 786 ms 781 ms 782 ms
15 sunic.sunet.se (192.36.125.2) 785 ms 790 ms 785 ms
-------
From Brazil to sunic.sunet.se via Embratel:
1 gw-ether1-cisco1.node1.com.br (200.246.122.1) 18.129 ms 18.817 ms 26.504 ms
2 200.182.13.225 (200.182.13.225) 89.953 ms 56.801 ms 38.883 ms
3 ebt-A1-2-1-dist05.spo.embratel.net.br (200.246.244.230) 76.897 ms 48.078 ms 36.505 ms
4 ebt-P10-0-core03.spo.embratel.net.br (200.230.0.138) 30.443 ms 65.064 ms 36.109 ms
5 ebt-P11-1-0-intl01.tang.embratel.net.br (200.230.0.117) 74 ms 83.839 ms 89.661 ms
6 Pos12-0-0.SR2.BLM1.ALTER.NET (157.130.218.133) 604.84 ms 606.939 ms 593.931 ms
7 503.ATM3-0.XR2.EWR1.ALTER.NET (152.63.22.38) 577.339 ms 589.149 ms 561.397 ms
8 192.ATM9-0-0.GW2.NYC2.ALTER.NET (146.188.178.157) 567.07 ms 626.497 ms 558.11 ms
9 teleglobe.ny2-gw.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.4.166) 583.406 ms 157.130.5.218 (157.130.5.218) 598.425 ms 615.608 ms
10 if-0-0.core1.NewYork.Teleglobe.net (207.45.221.97) 1047.11 ms 751.36 ms 717.436 ms
11 NORDUnet-gw.Teleglobe.net (207.45.202.26) 675.847 ms 786.77 ms 809.703 ms
12 sw-gw.nordu.net (193.10.252.185) 925.529 ms 1059.38 ms 1115.3 ms
13 STK-BB-1.sunet.se (193.10.252.178) 847.593 ms 829.137 ms 785.761 ms
14 KTHNOC-1-SRP-5-0.sunet.se (130.242.211.4) 706.207 ms 701.081 ms 786.604 ms
15 sunic.sunet.se (192.36.125.2) 714.076 ms 699.167 ms 729.571 ms
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So if the US suddenly got disconnected, most international traffic from South America would be out, indeed. But due to topological reasons, this should not affect traffic from Paris to India or Russia.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
My via-Palo-Alto experience was when I was living in Perth. AARNET had just switched from Telstra to Optus, but my home box was hooked up to Telstra. The telcos hadn't even bothered to set up peering, they were just throwing everything at the international link. To some extent this still happens. The telcos have POPs in all major cities, but they only bother to peer with each other in Melbourne and Sydney, AFAIK, so the same packets would even today travel an 8000km round-trip in order to cover 15km of real-world distance.
ISPs complicate the issue even more, because routing in commercial ISPs is usually set up based on which link costs the most per megabyte, rather than which actually gives you the fastest route to your destination. If Telstra charges you 19c/meg incoming, but your satellite is feeding you at 7c/meg, you'll end up broadcasting your routes only via the satellite, then using the Telstra link for back-channeling. (Except now Telstra has a back-channeling charge, so unless you have an exemption you have to calculate your routes carefully to stay under the threshhold...)
This tends to disadvantage users, since satellites have a bit of a latency problem, but what they don't know doesn't hurt them.
The short summary is that routing is, and will continue to be totally insane until bandwidth gets cheap, and telcos get a clue. Oh, and then we could use the flying pigs to carry some of the packets!
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
And, DEAR GOD, NO MORE SLASHDOT?!?!?!?!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
It could be a GOOD THING if the US tried to shutdown the Internet as it would encourage the rest of the world to reduce the dependance on the US. The non-US backbone providers would quickly update their routing tables and IANA would be forced to allow more root servers to be established in Europe etc.
It would hurt in the short term but we would end up with a more resilient and secure Internet.
IP does no such thing. There is no guaranteed packet delivery mechanism with IP. That is the responsibility of upper layer protocols. Routing protocols (BGP-4 for instance) only work as well as the person who set them up. The Internet no longer has the fully meshed topology it was designed to have when it was designed to be nuke proof either.
Ok, so lets say tomarrow the FBI shuts down the internet. How long can it stay down? The entire US wont wink out forever. I am more afraid of the FBI shutting down small portions of the internet for news blackout purposes. I seriously doubt the American people will roll over and take it. Although the American populace are sheep at best, losing the internet will not only anger the hordes of computer geeks, but all internet Users in the US. The gerneral public will get the idea that the government has taken thier internet away, and, like the uninformed mass that americans are (myself included) The public outrage would cause thier elected officials to quickly reverse whatever extreme steps the FBI might have taken.
If the FBI was able to get boxes in every single ISP in the US, then they would be able to shut down the net in the US. I cannot believe that they would try that though, even if they really, really wanted to. Possibly if file-share technology becomes so rampant that it threatens to destroy the media companies something (yeh right)
There won't be any problems if you aren't behind a carnivore box. Only traffic that needs to go through the US would be affected. People in Canada and Mexico might have problems.
Writing this post has made me thing of something else, though. If carnivore sits behind every single ISP system, how hard would it be to reprogram them to look out for, and possibly stop, napster/gnutella type traffic? I can't imagine that would be very difficult to stop. The next wave of Internet evolution, distributed file systems, is scaring the shit out of the traditional media. Once the boxes are in place, what's to stop them from saying, "Well, as long as these things are here..." The greatest threat to freedom of speech on the Internet hasn't been fears of pornography, but fears of copyright infringement. The web isn't threatening anymore, its controlled now. But the distributed systems can't be.
Well, I know if I was a big media crop/whatever, that's probably what I'd do...
We don't know how bad things are in North Korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Personally, I don't think they will use carnivore
in such an overt manner. The public outcry would
be too great.Since it is a sniffer, I think they
would drop "offensive" or "questionable" packets,
either based on userid (drop all traffic from
foo@bar.com), or they would start dropping, say,
all encrypted traffic. Why encrypted traffic?
Because anyone using strong encryption would give
them *major* headaches trying to decrypt it. And
since Louis Freeh has previously said that he
didn't think that the public should have strong
encryption. He also has petitioned for the FBI to
have the hardware in place to tap 1% of all of
the phone lines in the metropolitan areas of the
US simultaneously. Given statements like these, it
wouldn't surprise me if they set something like
this up and target specific types of traffic. The
"we can't decrypt it, so it doesn't belong on the
network" mindset isn't too far of a stretch.
--Storm
For example, in their paper Measurements of Internet topology in the Asia-Pacific Region, they focus part of their study on which countries provide IP transit for other countries. In other words, they want to know how often certain countries carry traffic that is neither sourced nor destined for that country. They conclude, in part (see Sections 4 and 5):
BTW, never pass up an opportunity to hear kc claffy speak, she's great.Is there a safe way of exchanging fingerprints other than a face to face meeting?
Vivek Mittal
Research Technologist
Telstra Research Labs
Because in the UK they put cameras on street corners, and can put you in jail if you don't provide decryption keys for cyphertext you have in your possession (whether or not you actually have them...)
I'm not saying the US is fantastic, but the UK isn't really that great. Places like Norway or Finland might be a good choice, as long as you're going to learn another language...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Like... when I shut off my computer I firmly believe that the internet as a whole just stops... I have a cable connection and the whole internet travels through it so when the power goes out in my area nobody can use the internet... I think... that's what the leprechauns told me anyway...
While the internet is supposed to be a self healing creature, one good look at a map of the net will tell you where to strike the death blow. Few major trunks run across the puddle, few major lines are located in any place other then the US. While the net would survive, it would not be able to support the current user base. If say the US just vanished and took all its people with it, I doubt users would see much change other then the obvious ones such as sites being gone and a few extra hops. While the US may hold most of the net in its arms, we also provide the bulk of the traffic. So I would say that the net would survive as long as the user base dropped in proportion to the lines droped.
www.cyborgworkshop.com
...and the geek shall inherit the earth...
www.linux-skunkworks.com
I'd like to turn the question around.
If the EU (or say.. Asia) suddenly decided to shut down all nodes of the Internet in their area, would the US companies get their emails to the coders in India? Would they get their emails through to Paris? Why is it that so many Americans cannot think of the world in anything but a US centric way?
I live in Finland but am currently in Singapore, coding the back end for the site of a dot-com startup. You would be amazed how little thought the USA gets here in the daily life. I doubt that many people (normal citizens) would even notice / care if the USA dropped off the Internet. Sure some stock brokers would suffer from lack of fast & good information about Wall Street but in the end of the day, there would be no catastrophy.
Doing a traceroute on servers in Finland, I see that the traffic is currently being routed through the USA (up to 30 hops to many sites!) so I'm gussing I would have a hard time reaching some Finnish servers.. However, I dial up to my Finnish ISP using my GSM cellular phone and a Palm IIIx daily anyway, so I could still get my email and access Finnish sites.. No prob..
The USA is not the beginning, center nor end of the world.
Umm, it is a bit outdated :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...is, "Is this something we need to worry about?"
Would, or could, the Feds somehow shutdown the internet backbone? What purpose would it serve? There are many ways to get around it...it would simply cause a hell of a lot of trouble, and not accomplish very much.
Got Rhinos?
Just to start with, Cringeley is nuts. Even if the FBI had some nefarious scheme to shut down the (United States) Internet with Carnivore, it wouldn't work. The second it started to cause problems, the ISP admins would think it had malfunctioned and take it off line. No warrant is going to give the feds the right to shut down all comms at the ISP. From what I've read, Carnivore isn't installed in series anyway; it hangs off the network and just watches stuff go by. That's when it's used at all. I watched an interview with an FBI guy who said that an ISP that has the ability to supply the feds with the information required by the warrant (and many of them can) won't have to have Carnivore attached to their network. So pffft, Bob X.
.to domain.
As to other types of catastrophic failure, the only thing I can conceive of taking the entire U.S. out is nuclear war, or Network Solutions getting really pissed off. If that happens, the root Domain Name Server is in jeopardy. There are some DNS root overseas backups from what I understand, but without the U.S. lawsuit industry (motto: "Somebody's infringing on our motto!") resolving domain ownership disputes through litigation, they will soon be hopelessly out of date. The world's internet users will be reduced to petitioning Tonga to let them register in the
I don't know about the other stuff, but I'm sure EuroSlashdot would appear in no time to take up the slack.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Gore: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
You don't have to listen to Limbaugh to know that Gore is one lying, conniving little toad. For three pages of hilarious Gore lies (with citations) go here.
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
I would like to think that the US government has enough sense to NOT shut down the Internet. That would be veeeeeeery bad. They know better. Whole scores of people would get recalled from office, there would be scandals everywhere, and someone would marry Janet Reno. None of this will happen. The entire internet-using country would go apeshit, to put it in a nice, blunt way. The world is too reliant on the Net now for anyone as large on the power list as the US to pull crap like that. course that's just my opinion, I could be Dennis Miller
Seems someone else noticed the disappearance of Cryptome.org after the FBI ordered them to remove material. Hmm...
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
...with the exceptions of those to my ISP to figure out why my proxy was messed up, have gone through servers in Vienna, Virginia, or somewhere within a 20 mile radius of it. I've tried this with several ISPs, and it happens even when connecting to my friend 3 blocks away. Of course, I live in Virginia. Still, I remember our idiot governor once bragging about how 90% of all the world's internet traffic goes through Virginia. As dumb as he may be on policy, I think he's got that statistic right. It's only a two-hour drive to the grand hub of the internet, and we have some really crazy people around here. Think, foreigners, do you want YOUR connections dependent on systems within a stone's throw of the lunatics inside the D.C. beltway?
The name "world wide web" applies to how the content is linked, not the configuration of the land lines. We have an "all roads lead to Rome" situation, and our cross-paths are few and far between.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
If you stay in .de, .ch or .at, the most likely clearing point is DE-CIX in Frankfurt. The backbones here are quite well connected, so IMHO we wouldn't notice it THAT much as long as we stay European.
Current laws in place in the US - and probably in most countries - serve to place privacy restrictions on older forms of communication, but are sadly in need of an overhaul to deal with internet communication.
We have one of the largest collections of computer geeks on earth right here. I'm sure that if we all put our minds to it we could shut down 99% of the US internet hosts.
I mean, it's in the cause of science, right?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
keep in mind when assessing the "damage" done to global backbone networks that backbone switches and routers cant just reconfigure themselves with simple dynamic routing updates to find alternate routes. Some technologies like ATM or even FDDI are to a point self-healing but the really fat pipes at the center of the internetwork use technologies so new they dont have the capability to reconfigure themselves. Most use tag switching or labeled packet-swithing schemes to reduce network overhead and increase speed. Once a packet comes off of a local line and hits a switch that tags or labels it routes become largely static - meaning that a severed route means death with almost no recourse for that frame. Yikes!
Then again most of the fat stuff is domestic >:^]
*cue "Proud to be an American"#
however, I would think there is some difference between shutting down US internet geographically [US in-out traffic], and shutting down the internet capacity put forward by US based/owned corporations.
IMO the world would be just fine if the shutdown was geographical. But shutdown all corp-owned nets and there would be severe effects, a lot of cabling is owned by US corps.
And a lot of connectivity in Europe for example is effectively based on US owned networks, albeit being put in Euro soil.
Of course the whole thing would be seized by the various local government entities by the second a shutdown takes place, to guarantee national and intra-national communications, trade and security.
as for lack of content and DNS issues, wouldnt it be great to once again file for ownership of every porn domain under .com you can think of? :)
IE: the pipes to the united states tend to have the highest bandwidth. The network you refer to might have 60x the bitrate, but does Canada have as dense a mesh of fiber as the US?
It doesn't matter if your fiber can handle 10x the number of bits, if I have 1000x amount of fiber.
This is why many of the routes go through the US, the individual global networks tend to cross-connect with each other within the US. Within the US, it's at least an approximately tight mesh. Outside of the US, most of the lines look like parallel spider-webs that only interconnect within the US.
Thought I'd mention this, since the story mentions carnivore.
Well, aparently on like 15 hour tape delay, but they just ended on CSPAN. From what I gather, congress isn't going to do a damn thing right now (because the session is over too soon to do it right), but revising all the law on wiretaps will be on the agenda for the next congress. Only one of the committee members seemed in the least sympathetic to the FBI witnesses. Most of the committee members were already on the "they're the FBI, of course we can't trust them" bandwagon.
So congress will probably get around to updating these laws, the updates will be pretty much along the lines we would like them to be, and they will, of course, be buried under riders making it a capital offense to link to a website that makes mention of the existance of drugs or child pornography.
The question we should be asking is how long it would take the rest of the world to route around the US?
At the moment, everything goes through the US, because they have the greatest infrastructure in place and its the path of least resistance for most of the major telcos worldwide.
You remove the US from the Internet - everything that was old becomes new again - and suddenly Intramuros is the centre of the universe online.
M@T
signal to noise might improve a bit too...ok...sounds worthwhile...all in favour say AYE!!
'sapientia potestas est'
Slashdot. ;)
If the US dropped off the internet, it would suffer a staggering loss of information and routes. Many routes exist only through the US and those countries would instantly loose web access.
But on second thought, if the US dropped off the face of the web, then there would be a good reason to re-make the internet and make it better and faster. This time the US government wouldn't have so much say in what happens. This could be a long term blessing with some short term pain. Just my thoughts.
(why can't i log in?) - oh well:
Itzdandy@yahoo.com - Cowards!!
I tend to believe that America would regress into a state of complete anarchy with teenagers whining about the lack of access and business relying on snailmail. Then of course we'd all rediscover the joys of ham radio and meanwhile Europe would twist the web to their own distored media image and assume overlord duties over the Earth. But thats what I tend to believe.
 
Well, close. Your thinking of 32 bits (x.x.x.x) where a class A subnet is 24 bits (c.x.x.x) where c is a constant, and x is a number 0-255. The actual number of addresses is then 24 bits, 2^24 = 16,777,216. So you were only off by 8 bits. (What's another 256x ;-)
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
I would say that 90% of Australia's internationally bound traffic must pass through San Francisco at least. We have a few satellite links pointing elsewhere, but high latency and not good for a countries traffic. One company started laying cable to Indonesia and Malaysia to our north, but with recent problems in that part of the world, I have no idea when they or what traffic they intend to take.
Many people in America have guns. Makes an angry populace a bit more serious doesn't it.
This should be a high-priority issue of the EU, if it is not allready. The EU politicians are pretty interrested of being non-dependent of the US. someone should take a talk with them, and they might put some large amount of money in his pocket to fix non-us-dependent-inter-country/-continent connections.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Well, the US might be able to throw a wrench in the works of the 'Net once, but after the subsequent re-routing and such that would happen in the following days, and the pre-emptive fiber lays that would happen in the following months, the world would basically cut the US out of ever being in that position again.
And you know that the FBI knows that, and therefore wouldn't do that except in extreme cases.
So, yeah, it's a trump card right now, that would play once for maybe a week, and never again.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, since they don't have representation in congress, Canada is classified as a territory.
They also consider the Queen of England to be their queen and put her on the money
The Internet (by that I guess I mean TCP/IP) was designed specifically for the "smoking crater" scenario. Remember that it was a product of a military institution, and came about during the 60s. Pretty much anything that the military developed during the cold war was built with nuclear war in mind, and TCP/IP is no exception. It's funny that you should use "smoking crater" because that's quite literally what they had in mind: the TCP/IP protocol was built so that traffic would be automatically rerouted in case something got nuked. The Internet hasn't changed much in thirty years. If America were to sink tomorrow, hypothetically the impact in terms of connectivity would not be too bad. Instead of passing through an American backbone, traffic would just go somewhere else. Add up all the links in the world, right down to the last analog modem, and there will always be a way to get from point A to point B, America or no America, given the vastness of the Internet.
Now, in the real world, it's not that simple. America definitely has more bandwidth than any other nation in the world as far as I know. Killing all the American connections would cause horrendous slowdowns through the web as all that traffic was suddenly routed through pipes that weren't built to handle it. Not to mention the fact that all American-run websites would be down, of which there are many. So, the bottom line is yes, there would still be a self-sufficient Internet, but whether it actually performed in a timely fashion is a matter open to discussion.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
As an Australian resident, I've notice that most of my traffic is coming from the US. As far as I'm aware, there are two major backbones in Australia and these are owned by rival telcos: Telstra and Optus. Telstra's network likes to pop out of aus into the exodus network in the US while Optus has a habit of going through Alter.net. These are the two major links into Australia through undersea cables with sattelite backup. I haven't noticed any of my traces going anywhere else (most of my net use is only Aussie and US content), but if The US backbones were shut down, We'd basically be screwed as I can't see our bloodthirsty (oops...I mean friendly :) telcos putting in any ultra huge link into Middle Asia or africa (it was already pointed out that east asia goes through the US).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because Cliff apparently left open an italics HTML tag, and it manifested itself all the way down slashdot's main page.Just a little kidding for 4:00 A.M. in the morning.
Having read some of your answers I want to give some myself:
1. US stock market will not crash major, it will vanish.
2. The US of A will be instant rogue nation for everyone. (So NATO has to nuke them?)
3. EU is of course aware of the situation and has plans about it. (That's just the bs what-if Germans would love to prepare for.)
4. China will probably be the big winner. (Taiwan will be down in hours.)
It will only happen if the USA will declare and do war on every major nation in the world. Any other case, they're fucked up.
Censorship on Slashdot
I can understand the point trying to be made and understand the leading role that the US has taken in developing the internet but the internet being what is, will survive without it.
Ok... This entire discussion about cutting out the US might be a bit academic. I'll grant You that the US might hold more nodes than any other COUNTRY in the world, but certainly no more nodes than the rest of the world put together.
As pertaining to Your "maps". Please bear this in mind. I've NEVER seen a US citizen (netizien or "real") who actually believed that the US was not the hub of the world, and as such did not base their concept of ANYHTING on the US. If You REALLY want to know if the world can survive without the US on the internet, don't look at the traffic generated BY the US. Look at the traffic routed THROUGH the US. Take a small country like... Say Portugal, and look at how much traffic they send THROUGH the US, not counting traffic that ends there (that would be senseless if the node was cut away). Also ask Yourself this: Would Portugal have alternate routes in place ?
I'm sure that some minor countries might largely depend on bigger countries to sustain their internet access and routing information. And certainly if this pathway was lost, a lot of "damage" (logically, not phisically) would be done. Sure the routerinfo might even take a long while to recover. BUT I seriously doubt that most of us (even those of us working in the ISP business) ofhand can think of a single coutry or larger area that is wholly dependend on another (single point of failure). This is actually the POINT of the internet. Even though You might cut away pieces, the ramins should still work. I'm not saying that there are not stupid poeple out there who just say to themselves: "We'll just depend on someone else to make sure this works". But they are also the ones who get the virus in the office, they are also the ones stuck in traffic and generally the ones who are dumb enough not to think for themselves. To plan for the future.
Up untill a few years ago it was actually fairly common for us in Denmark to "loose" the connection to the US, and what came of that You might ask ? Absolutely nothing. The internet worked just fine. Only the US sites were responding DAMNED slow as we had to route the other way around the world to get to them. So in essence: These maps are bogus, and provides no real insight into the US's "central role" in the internet.
cut away the spider, and the web will still be there....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
when will Texas finally start its own Internet? And I dont indend to talk you into another new currency and passport to attract FBI shotgun dummies, but rather.. a marketing strategy to launch the free_american_dream again! Isn`t US today downministered from Washington, taking all your decision about every single washmachine coin, and where Your percentage gains of it went into is obscured by federal politics? Than Subscribe to Texas internet to build up your oin coin!! Maybe There we can make a difference again an.. ()
What would probably happen is, that
a) big parts of the net would be missing
b) maybe some countries/continents become either isolated or are badly (small bandwith) connected to the rest of the world
but this is very shortterm, after a few days/weeks alternative lines would be found, (phonelines etc.) and bandwith previously routed via USA would be routed elsewhere, and future projects for transatlantic lines are more likely to avoid USA.
The reason is, that the internet is a driving factor for too many countries economies by now, it's no longer the toy of some university geeks. If the net fails bigscale because the FBI wants to flex it's muscles this will be taken into account in the future, measures will be taken to reduce the dependency of the internet on the USA backbones.
The FBI knows this too, and even if their Carnivore toys have some builtin facility to shut down the whole trafic this will be used very carefully, and probably not nationwide. But theres a different aspect: Carnivore could be used to work selectively this makes a lot of sense: shut down that annoying website at ISP level with a commandline, put pressure on an ISP by just threatening to shut down it's services, put diplomatic pressure on other countries (one at a time) threatening to isolate their part of the internet (at least what is routed through US), simply drop any packets encrypted in a way the FBI doesn't like. The thing is, that Carnivore works as the big Hammer (shut down the net) only once, but much better and more effectively as a scalpel, to push some policies and generally make the internet behave the way the FBI wants it to.
The best thing that could happen to the internet is that some cracker found out now, how to shut down these boxes and do it to the 20 or so that are already in place, then the project would die pretty fast after some very bad publicity for the FBI.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
The point isn't that shutting down anything in the U.S. won't shut down computers in the UK (or anywhere), of course it won't. The Internet isn't anything without its cables (and satellite links etc), so the point is really: Are there links around the U.S. lines in case the U.S. shuts down? I notice that sometimes even my intra-European connections go through U.S. lines (crossing the Atlantic twice!).
TA
...we blackholed Sweden instead?
That would really make an impact on the Internet society.
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
I think we can rule out natural disaster or nuclear strike. Anything big enough to wipe the entire US off the map is big enough to make an unholy mess of the entire world: the fact that we're suddenly unable to get through to eBay will be the least of our problems.
As to political action, we're talking about something very, very extreme indeed. It so happens that submarine cables are very, very vulnerable indeed. One depth-charge in the right spot and the thing is done. The reason submarine cables get left alone these days is that no-one wants to start that kind of fight - a couple of thousand kilometres of cable is an impossible proposition to defend and about a week of tit-for-tat would put most of the world's comms out of action.
A carrier battle group has a power projection radius of somewhere over a thousand kilometres, which means you'd need two to defend a transatlantic link very, very badly indeed - that thousand kilometre radius is covered by a couple of hundred aircraft trying to detect an attacker that tactically need not come anywhere near the surface.The dependence of the entire world on those links means that no-one has an interest in knocking them out, simply for fear of retaliation.
About the only thing that would take the US out without taking the rest of the world with it would be the Nehemiah Scudder situation - a mad theocratic coup that insisted on isolationism and total suppression of external communication. And at that, satellite links would allow some communication in and out for the brave.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Enemies of the USA will support the FBI action as their digging their own grave.
Bizar technology?
The point is very valid. And knowing these percantages would be nice if there was a proposition to tax countries on the amount of traffic they send though the US. However, the hypo is: "What if the US was cut away", not "how is the traffic being routed now".
So even though the information is very interesting, it does not provide the discussion with say an idea of what would happen to this traffic if the cut was made.
Based on the report, One can speculate that Mexico would wither and die, seing as they aparantly have NO alterntes routing, but seeing as no other coutry is 100% dependant on the US for routing, things might slow down a bit, but nothing else.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Go on, America, pull the plug for a week...
Even if the Internet stops (and I don't believe it will), after a few days the rest of the world will get it up and running again.
And it'll be a lot faster than before.
this is just bad in so many ways.... it is bad enough that the carnivore project seems to be going thru without too many hooks..... This story raises a possibility most people prolly havent thought of tho.. like it says, what are you gonna do if you get cut off? what can you do? unfortunately it isnt up to us. once again, we get to play the pawn.... hopefullly we wil be able to move into checkmate after this, and get it over with. all of us here are pretty much slaves to our isp.... the one thing we need to remember, is that the internet is an open place... and just because a certain host doesnt agree with you, doesnt mean you need to give up what you are doing.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
September, 2000 (AP) - A newly discovered buffer overflow in the FBI packet-snooping program known as Carnivore has been exploited, with drastic effects spreading across the entire Internet.
"Shut the Internet down? Of course that's not our intent! That would be an incredibly dumb and damaging thing to do," cries a high-ranking FBI agent who asked to remain anonymous. "This is not a switch to 'turn off' the Internet. We are merely watching everything. And it doesn't mean a thing that we hired some fired Outlook programmers - they needed a job!"
With any luck, Internet users will still be able to read thi...
I too live in the UK and met my Brazilian girlfriend off the plane from Sao Paulo this morning. 1) Is there a high incidence of UK techie guys with Brazilian girlfriends. 2) Are we all sharing the same one? ... more on topic. I have experienced severe problems with routing in Europe when major US routers go down, let alone trans -continent routing.
*duck*
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Just my thoughts to answer your flame about Americans that don't need to know about other countries...
I used to live there, for about a year, in a family. I was an exchange student. So don't get me wrong : I hate the rest of the world's stereotypes about the US, it people, it culture and its history. I get really nervous when I meet friends that tell me all "Americans" hate burgers and their country has no history.
But you guys in the US should realize that there's more to the world than your country, and that no empire lasts forever (witness all the ancient civilizations that once had an all-mighty power over the known world).
I remember a big fuss in my high school because some organization studied high-schoolers and came up with this figure : 60% of US kids (that was in '95) cannot find Florida on a map of their country. Now that's an easy one... I guess most Europeans know that Florida is that small penis-like peninsula (forgive my spell. on this) in the South-east. Now I'd like to see the figures for Nebraska !!!
Another true story... When we started the Civil war unit in the American history, the teacher asked "I'd like to know if there's anyone in here who knows when the American Civil War took place ?". I was the only one able to give a answer (correct one, btw). And I was a 17 year-old kid from Belgium.
I think the US' problem is not about not knowing the others... It's a wider problem, a matter of education (Note that I believe most western nations face the same problem, only at lower intensity at this time).
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I thought the original intention of the embryionic Internet was as a means to defend US military computer networks against the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Has any one company's QA department ever tested their Internet servers against a direct nuclear strike?
I mean, hardening against crackers/hackers/buttspelunkers is one thing, but providing firewall protection against 32 MEGADETH's of atomic destruction is something else.
Can you get telephone helpdesk support for this kind of attack?
Heh!
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
...and where your traffic is going. For example, most of Europe is pretty self-sufficient now, as far as Internet connections are concerned. So as long as you limit your traffic to Europe (not very unlikely, because of time differences), you should have no problem.
.sig
I'm told Southeast Asia is pretty self-sufficient as well, they'd only have a problem if someone nuked Singapore.
Africa and Latin America I'm not too sure of, however. From what I know about Africa, they don't even have normal cross-continent telephone lines, let alone optical fiber. I'm guessing Latin America is only slightly better: have you ever tried to wire up a rainforest?
The point is that the world is divided up into relatively independent subnetworks, which are connected to each other with only a limited number of intercontinental cables. So if the US breaks down, it's too bad the rest of the world can't connect to slashdot anymore, but e-mails to your auntie next door are no problem whatsoever.
This is not a
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I would say they there is a high incidence of geeks who claim to have a girlfriend in another country.
there are only 4294967296 total possible IP (v4) addresses, so I find your claim that all of them reside on a piece of "CoAx" [sic] in Imperial College, London a bit ridiculous.
How many of the problems with going to IPv6 disappear with the US though?
If you were to "shutdown the internet" do you realize just what kind of disaster that would be for the US?! Our government would face open revolt in the US and a bunch of very angry neighbors as well
Perhaps I'm dating myself here, but how many others remember the dark day AT&T shut down their internal networks to Usenet? In a single swell foop nearly 90% of usenet was cut off from each other. However, the up side to this was usenet re-organized and the new incarnation wasn't dependant on any single entity. The same thing would most likely happen to the internet if those remaining cooperate and work toward a solution. The net would come back stronger and more independant that it is today. Sometimes evolution requires a good kick in the pants to get started.
Lawrence Freil.
As being a geek girl, I would lean towards you geeks just pretend to have a girlfriend in another country...
Get used to it. I've seen my rejected posts show up a day or two after they were rejected. I want to know who rejects my stuff so that when this happens I can yell at the appropriate person. This is the main reason why I do not submit stories anymore. If I have something important to say, I'll just make an offtopic post somewhere. There seems to be a lot less censorship in that area.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
CPUs designed in the US (Intel, AMD, &c) have, by agreement with the NSA, undocumented operation sequences (long ones, which would be very hard to stumble across without knowing what one is looking for), which allow unprivileged code to do privileged things (such as read protected memory, perform I/O operations, &c.) This is to allow the NSA/CIA to root machines without relying on security holes in software, and is also why they suddenly did an about-face on crypto restrictions.
The FBI are about to nail a kingpin from some large, well-organised operation. He could be coordinating a drug smuggling operation or terrorist cell or child porn ring or something, or he could be running a religious sect or militia that TPTB don't like. Though if the quarry notices something amiss (i.e., contacts in the field reporting trouble), he could go into hiding. So, as soon as they start to move, they reprogram the Carnivore box at his ISP to filter messages to him, blacking him out. If it's only for a few hours, he won't notice that something's amiss and flee.
Of course you cannot do without the U.S. in all things. So, you would not be able to operate very long, if at all without the U.S. The world depends on the U.S. for everything from food to new technology to money. WE are the cornucopia of the world.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
It could be argued that the British won the war of 1812, but of course it was born Canadians who did a lot of the dying. But yes, the American invasion attempt was repulsed. Of course, Fenian (anti-British Irish expats) militias kept coming across the border and bugging us for a while after that...
Freedom: "I won't!"
I wonder how Evolution will do. Might be worth downloading one of the pre-alphas to have a look. I'll have to add that to my to-do list.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just post a story about a web page residing on each one of them in a short time frame and let the /. effect do the rest...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think it's going a little too far to ask what
would happen if the US tried to "turn-off" the
internet, how about if it simply started massive
censoring operations?
Difficult yes, but as such systems as Carnivore
suggest there are steps being made...
If the US simply "turned it off" cutting the
internet out of the country entirely of course
the rest of the world would eventually
route around it, but in the case of censorship
I think there would be less demand and "pressing
need" There would be outcry but if such
systems were put in place slowly enough
I believe most people would accept them...
Maybe the US couldn't "kill" the internet,
but given some more time and tech, could it
control it???
-Ikol
All the research done by the posters on this story seem to indicate that there is no way between the eastern and western hemispheres without going through the USA. The US isn't the center of the universe, but if you're trying to exchange data with someone in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, etc, the US is pretty damn necessary, and a serious disruption of routers there would cut you off from all those countries.
Stating hard facts about network topology != cultural imperialism.
grep -ri 'should work'
If you check out the the map at CAIDA you will notice that the USA appears to be very dense with backbones and this make for a lot redundency. The world could survive without the USA, but it would effect the flow of the traffic as there aren't enough large bandwidth pipes connecting Europe-Asia, Asia-South America directly, most traversing the USA.
I reckon in this century the creation of large traffic pipes to route around the USA would actually help relieve some of the burden currrently carried by the USA internet infrastructure and probably help traffic generally for non-USA data on the internet.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What does Al Gore have to say about all this? After all he "invented" the internet!
I am an American who used to work doing network support in Amsterdam. I believe that the reason why "all routers go to America" is the financial cost. Many times it is cheaper for the Europeans to run a leased line to NY and back than it is to stay in the country. For example; a friend of a friend ran an ISP in Bordeaux. It was cheaper to get connected to Paris through NY than to go straight through to Paris. Why? It is those huge Euro-telecoms. They can charge whatever they want. That is why I laugh whenever I hear about the Europeans trying to "catch up" with the Americans when it comes to the internet. They first have to cure their own telecom ills. And I bet that that applies to the rest of the world too. Also that is why I shudder whenever I hear DT or KPN or Telefonica is going to gobble up an American telephone company. sheesh
The Internet is built on commercial arrangemements between ISP's and other Internet Networks, which have nothing to do with whether one country wants to transit another's data. There is no political decision made to route data to the US or not, it's about companies remaining competitive and building better networks than the other guys.
Over here in .au, the government is more determined to destroy the Internet than have anything to do with running it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from claiming credit for anything on the Internet that might get them votes. I imagine that other countries aren't much different.
Geez, you people have to be the most paranoid individuals outside of an insane asylum! Stop and think for a few minutes before whining about "Big, Evil Government gonna crush MY internet!"
First off, why would the US Govt. want to attempt to shut down the Internet? Yeah, there are a few ultra-conservative morons in Congress who get their panties in a wad about pr0n, but ol' Jesse "I hate everything" Helms and Dan "Let's launch another investigation" Burton don't have enough sway to shut down the entire US part of the Internet.
Second, what would be gained by shutting down the Internet? Hmmm... let's see... well, we'd piss off virtually every other nation on Earth, along with lots and lots of the US voting public (who still, believe it or not, wield an incredible amount of power.) Many of the US's most successful companies depend on the Internet, so we'd be cutting off a lucrative source of cashflow. But, by God, we'd stop that pr0n! Beyond that, there's no advantageous gain for shutting down the Internet. You may not believe this, but the US Govt. isn't that stupid.
Third, how would the US Govt. shut down the Internet? The very foundation of the Internet (as defined by the US Military when the Internet was first being built) was for extreme redundancy in the event of massive loss of nodes. This redundancy has extended out beyond the US borders to most of the world. Also, not every ISP has the Carnivore systems installed, and the reaction if the Carnivore'd systems were shutdown would be to rapidly deploy new systems that weren't Carnivore'd.
Furthermore, there are probably many, many people in US Govt. service that have thought of these and other reasons for why shutting down the Internet would be a bad idea. The US Govt. is the largest employer in the nation, so they've got a lot of smart people working for them.
Time to stop reading George Orwell, kids! Time to stop believing the X-Files! Just because it's a government doesn't automatically mean that it's going to take away each and every right and privledge you have. It's one thing to be an idealist, wanting to better the government for future generations, but this incessant "the Govt. is always evil, it's always Big Brother, and it can never be trusted" is really becoming ridiculous.
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
I guess so, actually I would like to see the US continue to dominate the internet, but thats mostly just because I'm a typical American imperialist. I try to convince all of my friends who dont have jobs yet to go out and get a job and then go out and get a computer so they can get online.
I read thru a good number of these posts, and I noticed something. They seem to be in 2 basic categories.
1) This would be crazy, it would only work once, and we'd build/install needed infrastructure within a week to fix it. (Note I'm in the US, so I'm probably excluded from that "we".)
2) Lots of traffic goes thru the US now because it has the infrastructure to support it.
I'm going to ignore 2, and ask a question concerning 1 here... This is highly dependent on *why* the US disappears from the internet, but...
How much non-internet communications goes through the US? If the US disappears from the internet, what would happen with worldwide long-distance telephone networks? Anyone working in telecomm willing to say what percentage of international calls that don't start or end in the US still go thru US links?
Basically, what I'm asking here is, assuming the US disappeared from the internet, would the infrastructure exist to coordinate bulding/installing the necessary links to get back up and running again in this assumed less-than-2-week period?
I don't know, but I'm curious. And that category 2 I mentioned above makes me wonder about this...
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
'Cause the US is the only rock star left in this shabby little dive we call a planet.
You know a lot about all kinds of celebrities, but they don't know a thing about you.
So deal with it, you silly little people.
American's don't give a damn about your country because countries don't mean shit.
Ideas are where it's at, and the U.S. just happens to be a helluva producer and consumer of 'em.
I WISH I lived in the U.S., just so I could be insulated from all this bitching and moaning.
It cracks me up. Really. The whole idea of Linux as being "independent" of Big Corporations. You do remember who owns Sladshdot, don't you? And Freshmeat? That's right: a Big Corporation.
:-). Parasites eventually lose because the community is too eager to help out their competition."
And who owns Linux? Everybody. Slashdot and Freshmeat can be killed today; within a week or two, you'll see replacements.
Between the huge number of Linux web sites owned by VA Linux, Internet.com, IDG, and others, it's laughable that anyone could consider these sites to be less biased than say, CNet or ZDNet.
"Understanding is a three-edged sword; your side, their side, and the truth" -- John Sheridan
There is no such thing as "unbiased coverage" anymore, not since mass media became more about delivering readers to advertisers than news to readers. But at least the "Linux biased" sites are more willing to look at IT issues from a non-Microsoft-centric view -- even if it is only to grab the eyeballs of the "Microsoft-bashing open source zealots".
I think it should be well known to Slashdot that they idea of a "socially responsible" corporation is laregly a myth.
I remember seeing a quote the other day to the effect of "a corporation is an amoral construct; however, if the corporation is formed from moral people, then it is a moral corporation". Slashdot as an entity is no more or less moral than ZDNet or MSNBC, but I believe that the people who select the stories and write the features believe in what they're doing.
VA Linux wants to sell you Linux machines, and if that means promoting it in an unethical way,
then what? (You forgot to finish your sentence.)
But is it more than just the media? Think of how many Linux "celebreities" work for Big Companies: Torvalds at Transmeta,
Who IIRC got a clause in his contract stating that Transmeta doesn't own any of his Linux work (that might be blurred somewhat when it comes to the Crusoe-specific work, but if it's going into a kernel it has to be GPLed, right?)
the huge number of people at Red Hat (Alan Cox, etc),
A company that has yet to not release any of its work under an open source license (I'm qualifying here because I don't know offhand how much of Red Hat's work is done on BSD-licensed code or the like).
Larry Wall working at O'Reilly ("the biggest parasite on Open Source", according to Bruce Perens).
Actually, he was referring to Tim O'Reilly himself, not necessarily the publisher -- a dust-up over O'Reilly being given some recognition by OSI.
As for "parasites" on the Open Source Community, Bruce said in a Slashdot interview:
"Every for-profit company that participates in free software development will have to find a balance between its own needs and those of the community if it is to participate at all. I have a scale that I use to describe free software participants that runs from benefactor to symbiotic to parasite. I'd put Red Hat in the symbiotic position right now, NASA is a benefactor, and the parasites know who they are
O'Reilly beleives it serves the community best by selling books about Free Software; if you disagree, don't buy the books.
Better yet, write some comparable-quality documentation and give it away yourself. The only "parasites" I see in this are the ones demanding that the property of other people be given away for free. Me, I'm happy with what is freely available (I'm waiting for the day that someone ports the GPL StarOffice to the MacOS -- yay, a replacement for MS Word!) and if I need to pay for *gasp* proprietary software or a *shudder* non-free book to get what I need in the meantime, I will.
Jay (=
I'm one of those rare americans that does know a good bit of US history/geography (I actually was in a geography contest once) as well as that of most nations of the world (minus parts of Africa which change every decade and some of the newer countries to have split from the USSR when it 'went away').
Most (99%) of my class though didn't care about the histroy of their town, their family, their country, or anything else not within 20 miles away and where happy to just be 'in the now'. They were incredibly dumb and they used to put me down for actually wanting to be more than they did out of life. I tend to think this is because of current 'popular' US culture, but It's just my guess.
Btw if I had to pick a conutry to call my own I'd disown them all and live independant of any particular country as all have their problems and issues and it would simply be best to visit rahter than to live in them...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Wasn't the original internet created by the US military designed to be able to route communications around a real "smoking crater"
What the hell is a sig?
As to invasion, well if you have a better mouse trap and people have mice, they buy it. That's part of that free will and self determination thing that we all here treasure. So all these people clamoring onto the Internet all over the world, by choice, are doing it for their own reasons, hardly an invasion. A revolution of information and communications maybe, but one being driven for the most part by those voluntary participants at their keyboards, like yours I might add.
Pornography, Gambling, I see as personal choices and something that adults, yes those people of responsible age, should not be restricted from. Gamboling is a problem when it opens someone up to control by someone else. Here in the US, people in banks are restricted from holding large debts, or margin accounts. As a saftey against desperate people dipping into the central monetary system of the country. A restriction sure, but you can think of it as risk management, not unlike a boot scan program. You have one of those dont you?
Hacking, well if you mean that people should not be allowed to break into other peoples computers and destroy corporate records or steal credit card numbers or delete a students hard work, well yes I think there should be concequences for that sort of juvenile or felonious behaviour. Dont you?
Net Monitoring, look at the ACLU who is asking for the FBI's Carnivoir system code. We too do not support that type of activity and are vocal and pro-active in our country to make sure those in power know we disaprove and will take them to court if necesarry. If that doesnt work we vote them out of office and change the laws.
The US is not monolithic, far from it, we are such a mixture of the world and changing daily. We feel the heat of invasion from the Orient, Middle East, Europe, South America, Africa. New people coming in daily, voting patterns changing, many parts of our cities principly speak other languages than English. Here we have a large Spanish speaking contigent, Polish, Chinese, Korean, Chek, Vietnamese, Russian, to name a few. If there is a Jack Boot, it is a very colorful one and full of ethnic dancing.
Copyright, well have you written anything? did someone take what you wrote and turn around and sell it an become wealth from that sale? How would feel. What if wanted to make computers and computer software your living, and you spent years designing a killer graphical utility. You started selling it to find out that it was being sold dirt cheap throughout Asia in pirated form. All your years of work and sweat for naught. And you see the fellow that pirated it driving a BMW and smiling. Well you might feel that you had been robbed of your property. Do you feel that you should just say, well thats alright, all that work was just for fun. I'll get a job packing boxes to pay the rent and feed my kids. When I was in China in the computer stores, virtually all the major software was there, and all of it was pirated. Admittedly they cant afford the price we pay but someone there is getting very rich on theft.That is the core of the issue and gets back to part of this countries valuing the individual. This gets confused when corporations own rights but it is still a matter of, if you did the work, you should get the benefit (within reason and for a certain period of time), how can this be a bad thing? Benefit fosters innovation. The open source movement is the same, it is collective benefit, that is good, but somewhere, the bill have to be paid. So we work at using that open source software to make it do things, but that intellectual property is yours and if someone else uses it and calls it there own or makes money off your work your going to protest.
I think the invasion you talk about is really the world seeing the value in a good idea. One that we have fought hard to keep free and open such that the whole world can be connected. The whole world has embraced it, hardly an invasion.
Welcome to the revolution.
Just done a tracerout from Italy to Canada:
:)
6 it-uk.uk.ten-155.net (212.1.192.98) 43.027 ms 40.527 ms 40.807 ms
7 canet.ca.ten-155.net (212.1.196.174) 156.944 ms 192.211 ms 183.248 ms
So, who would care if the US were to disappear now? Sure, I wouldn't, since I'd still be able to mail-order some maple sugar
If most of the worlds internet traffic gets routed through the US, doesn't that mean that the NSA then is able to read most of the worlds traffic? They could target certain domains, ie Germany for instance. Brrr what was that shiver running down my spine...
Typical. Anonymous Cowards that make assumptions end up looking foolish.
I've read thru many technical replies on this subject, and I was very happy to read some really informative stuff. This discussion should encourage other countries to build stronger routes to other parts of the world, *not* because they are affraid the U.S. backbones will be shut down by the F.B.I., but because they owe it to themselves and the rest of the world to increase the performance and reliability of the internet. After all the whole point of the Internet was to have many different ways to route packets around the world, and although we already can, from what I've seen on the various posts, we sure could do it better. The original question of what would become of the internet without the United States backbones came from the recent litigations between the FBI and major ISP's (one of which I work for) about running Carnivore. So now here's my question: Why would any U.S. governmental agency do *anything* to significantly harm the internet in the U.S.? How dependent on the internet do you think the U.S. economy is? How do you think the U.S. population would react if they suddenly couldn't get their e-mail anymore? Do you think our economy and government would survive that? The Feds may threaten, prosecute, fine and make ISP's lives a hell, but in the end, a compromise *will* be found, and the show *will* go on, there is way too much at stake. And yes chances are those who don't know about encryption (PGP) will end up losing some level of privacy. But hey, while they're at it, the Feds should sift thru my snail mail, and to make the pill easier to swallow they should start a program called "wepayyourbills.fbi.gov", "'cuz we care about your business!"
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
D'oh! Of course. Sorry - it's still a lot of addresses on one bit of coax.
I don't pretend she lives in a different country, I know she lives about 40 miles away, hehe.
"Florida? That's America's WANG!" -- Homer Simpson
K.
--
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Initial versions of the bill would have allowed the authorities to "to scrutinise all "traffic data" - internet sites a person or business contacts. It can then build "friendship trees", check for patterns, and log contact with black-list sites."
Seems as though it would be fare easier to 'control' what is sent, seen and viewed in the U.K. than in the U.S.
A while back (~4-5 yrs ago), there was a fairly large movement among local ISP's in the US to set up local (intra-city) peering points, so as to avoid having geographically close destinations reached through geographically wide routes. I don't know what ever happened to it, beyond the initial setup (I remember such peering happening in the Seatle, WA and Austin, TX areas, at the time). Perhaps it died out when so many of the smaller ISP's got eaten by the big boys.
Perhaps something similar would be beneficial in Europe and elsewhere.
Ok - so if some govermental authority tries to block all my traffic with a box - what is to prevent me from just cutting their box out of the circuit? Sure - the rest of the world might be able to get along without us, but i sure as heck want my e-mail delivered to me. And i don't think international service providers are going to look too kindly at the US government blocking their business.
;-}. I would hope they would say "You're not interfering with our right to try and earn a living by blocking our traffic" - and throw the government's box out on the street.
For instance most companies overseas cables provide more than just internet, ie telephone and telegraph service
Simple as that - what is the man going to do if all of their "control" boxen get yanked, and dropped off a big building? "Sorry mr suit, your equipment was malfuntioning and interfering with my business"
Not that i'm anti-government, but hey - the people still have a voice here in america
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
In the intel chips from 286 days on, the opcode is known as LoadAll. Do a web search, and look for a few well written papers on how it works. There is still a protected 0x180 bytes at the bottom of the memory stack for accidental tripping of LoadAll in all versions of micr~1.oft operating systems including win2k. Grep the linux kernel for references to LoadAll, even linux deals with it.
What you put there is up to you, but you better know exactly what the CPU will do with it, and how the machine will respond. Not impossible, but difficult.
The even greater difficulty is getting around the millions of combinations of OS, hardware, and chip revisions to do anything useful. So even though a single opcode exists in all intel CPUs, nobody has ever been able to make a general purpose exploit.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
> Err ... last time I checked Canada was part of North America.
.ca, but instead moved to .ca.et . . .
Not any more; see above. Once the US was magically removed, Canada flew off into space . . . hopefully their air survives long enough to land on mars, but for the moment all of candada is no longer the tld
:)
Cut away the web, and I'll build another one. I am the root name server, pay me now!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think a more interesting question is:
How dependent on the internet is the U.S.?
The question is not, "Would the Internet still function without the U.S.?" but instead "Would the Internet still function without U.S. companies?" Shutting down U.S. ISPs would slow the routing of traffic, and would take some time for equipment to re-route, but it wouldn't stop the eventual delivery to most destinations. However, forcing backbone carriers such as IBM, UUNet, and PSINet *could* possibly bring the Internet to its knees since access over their network extends into all parts of the world.
In essence, all of the services that the Internet provides would be kaput. All of the Information that seems so ubiquitous would be gone. And the world would, indeed, stand still for the day.
The Internet would probably still work, but the utility would be marginal.
I'm sure that you can name many other services, which would be inaccessible should the US be removed from the map. The following day, the stock market would crash and the tech world would probably launch an all-out attack on whoever made the decision. Not a pretty situation.
Invidia fortunum ovit.
1 Euro is in fact worth only slightly less than a dollar ;-)
1.00 European euros = 0.94 US dollars
1.00 US dollars = 1.07 European euros
1.00 European euros = 0.63 British pounds sterling
1.00 British pounds sterling = 1.60 European euros
(Info from http://www.expedia.co.uk)
So why don't we nuke the United States.
"Would you really miss it?"
Just to see what would happen, you know.. if many of the DNS servers were gone.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The point isn't that shutting down anything in the U.S. won't shut down computers in the UK (or anywhere), of course it won't. []the point is really: Are there links around the U.S. lines in case the U.S. shuts down?
The question is more than that.
You need to ask whether there are any network services in the US that are necessary to the operation of the net. For instance: Root servers for the domain naming system that aren't adequately mirrored - or adequately maintainable in the absense of live US-hosted services - outside the country.
You also need to ask whether the routing can automatically recover from the loss of the connections in the US (or can be manually tweaked back into operation in a reasonable time).
The original routing protocols were designed to withstand atomic attack and "find a way" if one existed. But with the expansion of the net the routing tables became too big to store in all the routers, issues of router spoofing attacks came up, and the rise of the ISPs created sections of the net with more tree-like and fixed connectivity. So the Internet is now routed very differently from the original ARPANet, and the original "work during and after a nuclear war" scenarios no longer apply.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in Hawaii are accustomed to most of our traffic going via "the mainland," with the exception of things that peer through HIX (our own lil' exchange!). I don't know whether there are any undersea links direct from us to Asia or not, but there might be.
--
Hey, if you're going to pretend, might as well make it a good fantasy. My girlfriend is an intergalactic spy.
--
Knowing the specific purpose behind the protocol design of the Internet (back when it was ARPANET) -- to withstand bombing of nodes on the network without losing networking ability between the remaining nodes of the network/internet -- you should still be able to send your email with the U.S. ISP's being "off" (after the FBI's 'carnivore' switched us off).
The "work during and after nuclear attack" network functionality no longer exists.
Among the things that took it down:
- The router tables became too large, and other solutions had to be found. They're more tree-like.
- Router table update methods were modified to be more robust against deliberate attack - at a cost in automatic flexibility.
- The rise of ISPs changed the network topology from a net of co-operating sites with total routing flexibility to a set of leaf sites with single feeds, attached to ISP networks that tend toward inflexible tree structures with limited (if any) routing flexibility, attached to a backbone network.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The FBI knows [shutdowns would get the world to route around the US in the future] too, and even if their Carnivore toys have some builtin facility to shut down the whole trafic this will be used very carefully, and probably not nationwide.
But given that over 70% of the rest of the world's inter-country traffic goes through the US, why should the FBI ever turn the faucet off, and start people re-routing around the US?
Given their intelligence-collection function, it makes more sense for them to tap the communication as it comes through the US.
And that gives them a big incentive to avoid using a shutdown feature even if they have one.
They're also noted for "dirty tricks" tactics, forging communications to disrupt people and groups they don't like. Carnivore would be a great platform for that feature, since it could inject forged traffic in reasonable-looking places, defeating some attempts to detect such forgeries from delivery-path analysis.
And imagine trying to track down a DDS hosted by Carnivore boxes!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well it's not that bad, it just turns out Florida is now wholly owned by the Cuban-American community and is no longer relevant to most Americans.
:-)
Something tells me if you asked them where DisneyWorld is you might have a better response.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
The reason is that is a national effort to achieve a locally interconnected Internet. And it has a GREAT disadvantage: it hurts local telephone monopolies.
In Argentina it took years just to have a local NAP (CABASE). But when ISP start pricing different from national and international connection (for bussiness, of course) that flourish. For example, here, the price of an international E1 (that's a 2Mbps for Americans) is 30 times a national E1.
If the goverment was to pull thst kinda crap wouldent most isp;s simply go over to the box and un plug it? remember if this was to happen it would be big news and the media would have a feild day so there would be no question about what was going on. if i had a isp and this happened i would simply go to the box unplug rhe conection and re link the network minus the fed box simple fix end of story and i think most isps would too
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
That's why I'm going to hold off a few weeks on the "How to boobytrap your PC" article at iamnotageek.com or (Mr. Spinrite) Steve Gibson (grc.com) blowing the whistle on RealNetworks, AOL, and some other outfit using their download programs to send private machine-specific information back to their servers.
Seems they found another use for the MS GUID.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Didn't u guys (both GB&US) fail to knock out Iraq's tcp/ip network in 1990 with a load of explosives. If a tcp/ip is that robust I can't see how it can go down if the US went down. OTOH the main lookup servers are in the US aren't they. Is ther a mirror in Europe? or Asia?
You don't have to worry about me, Andrew. At least not for a while yet... A man must be quite bored to institute a full scale militant isolationist theocracy in a constitutional republic, and slashdot keeps me busy enough that I don't have time to bother.
Ralph Nader, however, should have you terrified. He's a bored man with a cause.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I would have thought this community would understand, more than any other why most of the traffic get routed through the U.S.
The U.S. is well known for for insisting on backdoors for access by the US security services. Why not then insist the the routers take the default line through the US unless unavailable.
This would then make the Echelon system more than a fanciful pipe dream and limit the amount of information not seen by the biggest eavesdroppers and privacy invaders on earth.
And for those U.S. citizens who believe that the world does revolve around their anus, sorry but we REALLY ARE having a great time despite you guys!!
when you're up to your arse in alligators, it is difficult to remember your original job was to drain the swamp!!!!!
Whenever there is talk about the education of citizens of a certain country, someone comes with the example of showing country on the map. I don't think that such knowledge is really important. In these times it is really easy to look up such things if you have to know about them.
6 it-uk.uk.ten-155.net (212.1.192.98) 43.027 ms 40.527 ms 40.807 ms
7 canet.ca.ten-155.net (212.1.196.174) 156.944 ms 192.211 ms 183.248 ms
You're connected via TEN-155 - this is transit for EU R&D networks - (actually EU + Cyprus & Israel)
The catch for you is that the only Canadian network to peer wth TEN-155 is CANARIE (the canadian R&D network)So unlness you can get a CANARIE member to sell you maple sugar you will still have a problem
X-BTW: Another problem is that the current ATM VC between TEN-155 & Canarie is approaching saturation - so any added traffic will not fit through easily ;-(
--compare:
UK.ten-155>trace www.utoronto.ca
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to info.utcc.utoronto.ca (128.100.132.30)
1 canet.ca.ten-155.net (212.1.196.174) 108 msec 112 msec 108 msec
2 c3-torcor01.canet3.net (205.189.32.149) [AS 6509] 108 msec 108 msec 116 msec
3 onet-tor-on.canet2.net (205.189.32.9) [AS 6509] 116 msec 120 msec 132 msec
4 utoronto-tor-gigapop-if.onet.on.ca (205.211.94.166) [AS 549] 120 msec 116 ms ec 116 msec
5 mcl2-bbup.gw.utoronto.ca (128.100.200.11) [AS 239] 124 msec 112 msec 116 msec
6 info.utcc.utoronto.ca (128.100.132.30) [AS 239] 112 msec * 116 msec
UK.ten-155>
with:
UK.ten-155>trace www.sprint.ca
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to www.sprint.ca (207.107.250.55)
1 mngmt-uk.ny.dante.net (212.1.200.81) [AS 9010] 80 msec 84 msec 80 msec
2 500.POS2-2.GW9.NYC4.ALTER.NET (157.130.19.21) 80 msec 84 msec 80 msec
3 110.ATM2-0.XR1.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.21.202) 84 msec 80 msec 80 msec
4 189.ATM6-0.GW8.NYC4.ALTER.NET (146.188.180.57) [AS 702] 84 msec 80 msec 80 m sec
5 * * *
P.S. it-uk.uk.ten-155.net is an ATM sub-if on uk.ten-155.net ( which I used for the traceroutes - and no the router isn't publically accesible )
Rafi
(to Email replace "NOSPAM" with "meron")