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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
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.
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
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?!
Sounds good :)
There is already a seriously big communications hub in London's docklands area. Plus the UK academic community has its own network (the original Joint Academic Network). They started out on X.25 links and are currently moving to a UK-wide gigabit ethernet. Bristol University (where I work on the network team) is getting one of the SuperJANet 4 links to provide services to the West of England. The point in bringing this up is that all US links from JANet are carried via 3 trans-atlantic TeleGlobe fibres. When they go down, UK universities have major problems accessing the US, and access to the rest of the world (e.g. Japan) is slowed. It doesn't stop working. People still publish papers and Altavista Europe and other repositories still work. The problem, as I've said above is that sudddenly the information at the end of a hyperlink is not there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
-----
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
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
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.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?
...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
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
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'
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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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.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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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 ?
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
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?
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.
...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/
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?
As being a geek girl, I would lean towards you geeks just pretend to have a girlfriend in another country...
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.
Speaking English lesson 1: :)
If you spill your drink down you while you are in a pub do not proclaim that you have 'wet your pants'
On the topic in hand, wasn't the internet designed by DARPA to provide a network of computers that would .com, .org, etc. - loads of non-US websites use
survive through a nuclear war? If you thoroughly nuke the US, the majority of the Internet will probably work
fine. The only thing I can think of is the TLD nameservers for
those.
Also - isn't there also a domain '.' (to get you to the TLDs) - if so, where are the nameservers for that
physically located?
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?
From the little information I have, CERN was started about 1976. Work On ARPANET began in the 60's, and in 1970, the first publication of the Host to Host protocol was published. Later, that year, there was the "[f]irst cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. This line is later replaced by another between BBN and RAND. A second line is added between MIT and Utah" (Hobbes' Internet Timeline). According to this, CERNET was around in 1976ish. In 1971, ARPANET had 15 node and 23 hosts. The WWW is only a subset of the internet. While I can't disprove the CERN claim of WWW, I do know WWW did not take off until you had browsers. That is all I know, and I admit it isn't much.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
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
> In fact, I seem to recall that the White House was originally white
:) We got what the war was :) about--an end to the boarding of US ships by
> because they had to whitewash it to hide the burn marks. No lie.
Nope, it started white, just like all of the other similar buildings
of its era. But wasn't it Aaron Burr who wanted to paint it black?
>It could be argued that the British won the war of 1812,
For a very strange version of "win"
(at least nominally
the Royal Navy to impress sailors into naval service. Seems they
weren't recognizing US citizenship . . .
The war ended with a treaty in Paris just in time to save the British--before word of the treaty got back, the only remaining significant british force in North America was obliterated at New Orleans, with its remnants scattered across three or four states. General (previously Colonel, later President) Jackson sent the commanding british general home in a rum barrel. . .
oh, and as for the stuff several pages up--as a matter of economic reality, the US *is* the center of the world. That's likely to change over the next fifty years, just as it has become less so in the past fifty, and just as the US was of minor importance prior to WWI.
hawk
- A.P.
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"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
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