Slashdot Mirror
Syrian Malware Servers Survive, Then Die
Nerval's Lobster writes "A massive outage knocked Syria's Internet offline Nov. 29 — with the exception of five servers implicated in serving malware earlier this year. But the next day, those five servers went dark as well. Internet analytics firm Renesys suggested late Nov. 29 that those five servers were likely offshore. 'Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content,' the company wrote in a blog post. 'These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria.' By the morning of Nov. 30, those five servers went offline. 'The last 5 networks belonging to Syria, a set of smaller netblocks previously advertised by Tata Communications, have been torn down and are no longer routed,' Renesys wrote."
CloudFlare has a blog post confirming that the Syrian government was responsible for flipping the switch, contrary to their claims. Meanwhile, Anonymous has started targeting the Syrian government's remaining websites and helping to get communications channels flowing out of Syria. Google is reminding people of its Speak2Tweet service, which lets people post to Twitter through voicemail over still-functioning phone lines.
I've heard of ideas and even projects for ad hoc internetworking and/or phone networking. In these, there is no authoritative routing, but rather meshes of individual nodes (perhaps with uplinks to the "regular" internet/network).
Obviously there are enormous obstacles to developing such a thing. It's hard; it's fragile; it's messy; it's confusing to the user; and it's not profitable.
But when we read stories like this... shouldn't we give it some more thought?
Ya know what I think? I think we just freed up 84 unused netblocks for the rest of the Internet to use.
Is this really a thing? A service where your voice gets turned into an anonymized URL and posted to a generic twitter handle? Sounds productive... I wish Google would remind people that when phone lines work, maybe call a PERSON and make REAL contact, don't just shout into the void. This twitter obsession is nuts.
Nobody cares what is happening in Syria. Think of all the headlines of the last few years about Libya, Egypt, Iraq etc etc. It's in the news for a few days/weeks then the focus of attention moves elsewhere. X killed, Y removed from power, Rebels are fighting government forces in Z. The internet is up, the internet is down, bloggers tweet about blah blah. So it goes on. Not saying it's not important to people in that area, or who know people who are affected. But people watch the news, generally, for entertainment, not facts. This story is only on Slashdot because of the internet angle. Currently it has 10 comments or so. I don't see it picking too many more up.
Thats a reason, why all people should prefer small autonomous over global decentralised over centralised networks for communication.
Killing off one centralised service is easy.
If you have enought control, you can even cut a global decentralised network into 2 or more.
But try killing off 100000 of small autonomous networks - if they are not even known - and noone knows them all - , how should they be killed?