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The Countries Most Vulnerable To an Internet Shutdown
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "In the wake of Syria's 52-hour digital blackout last week, the networking firm Renesys performed an analysis of which countries are most susceptible to an Internet shutdown, based simply on how many distinct entities control the connections between the country's networks and those of the outside world. It found that for 61 countries and territories, just one or two Internet service providers maintain all external connections–a situation that could make possible a quick cutoff from the world with a well-placed government order or physical attack."
My connexion is RFC 6214 you insensitive clod!
The day the earth did not see pictures of cute cats. The thought alone is terrifying.
and anyone still in Second Life.
U.S.A is certainly the most vulnerable. Can you imagine what a catastrophe it would be for the general population if they were all suddenly unable to Tweet about what they read on Facebook?
The horror!
Maybe I don't get the way this is measured well, but why isn't China one of the riskiest country ? Are we regularly overestimating the power of the Chinese government on its Internet or his the measure showing something else than "ability to control and shutdown Internet" ?
Didn't realize Greenland was so repressive.
Oh wait...
New Economic Perspectives
What if the government that places the order is the oppresive one of the US? Had done commercial embargos for just not liking a foreing country government, escalating to internet embargo is not something that will happen, unless is more effective to keep the connection up and promote/coordinate/finance local rebel groups using it.
And is not just for cutting off access. Spying, intercepting or censoring in a way or another traffic is a risk on a country with few internet connections, unless we are talking about US, as they can spy the traffic of most countries.
So, the "resistant" color of the chart effectively means "resistant except to US government actions". And by the way actions are escalating lately, that map should be pitch black.
So if a country has its Internet shut off, what are the reprecussions to the Bitcoin network? Does one side of the partition lose the abilty to make transfers, or can you spend the same Bitcoin twice; once in that country, and again on the rest of the network?
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
At least i can still play my diablo III in single player mode...
Be seeing you...
The most telling comment from the actual orginal post reads:
"Ten providers also seems to be the threshold below which one finds significant additional risks from infrastructure sharing — there may be a single cable, or a single physical-layer provider who actually owns most of the infrastructure on which the various providers offer their services."
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
Oh - it's nice to see that New Zealand has cemented its place in the list of nice countries who are "extremely resistant" by having more than 40 ISPs - unfortunately there's only one organisation that controls the two connections out of NZ on the Southern Cross Cable So the home of that fiendish master-criminal Mr K. Dot Com should rightly be lumped in with Syria, Libya & that famous hot bed of international crime, The Cook Islands.
I expected the article to be about the expected damage a country would incur IF it was disconnected from the internet. Now that I think about it the damage would be difficult to quantify - but I recon even conservative estimates would be high.
One of the great lessons I got from Nassim Talebs writing is that we should pay attention to seemingly improbable events if their impact is huge. Having no internet would be one hell of a Black Swan event. Another is that the likelihood of improbable events are often difficult to measure. Maybe in addition to the (presumably futile) attempts at predicting which is the next country to get disconnected, we should also make sure that we can survive without it as well.
Just basing this on how many connections there are is pretty irrelevant. Are we really expecting there to be many unofficial major backbones crossing national borders? Could you really enumerate them if there were? Even assuming some random people have a line (wired or otherwise) across a border for network access, this is probably not going to route the majority of the country's traffic anyway, and is equally unlikely to be counted in this survey.
A real measure would be more like "how likely will an entity have to shut down their connection due to government pressure," but for that you need to analyze the legal system, political situation, history, etc. Of course, that's much more work than simple counting, but I suppose "simple counting" is the most we can expect from a pop media source.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
XKCD
Wasn't someone asking for an "OFF" switch for the internets just the other day?
You know, for the sake of the children and national defence and other such fairy tales...
Why does Slashdot keep linking to secondary sources, like Forbes.com, when the primary source is so easily available? Laziness would be my first guess.
Here is the much-better Renesys blog post: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/could-it-happen-in-your-countr.shtml
Questions about their methods of reasoning are the most interesting.
There may be 5 ISPs, each operating their own logical notwork, with their own IP space, servers, and everything--but they may all share the same physical fibre optic cable out of the country--especially if the country is an Island. New Zealand would be a good example of this: it is about 1500 km from Australia, and 1000 km from Fiji. There are only a few submarine fibre optic cables connecting to the rest of the world. Perhaps Southern Cross Cable and SPIN only?
The authors acknowledge they were mostly unable to analyse this, and had to guess about the number of physical conduits. They say they will have more to say about the limited physical connections in the future.
Remember that the internet was invented for the specific military purpose of withstanding a nuclear war. Granted a politically motivated attack on the internet would probably be easier since you're actually forcing engineers to go out and pull the kill switch.
Still the best way to keep the internet running is to build out an extreme number of connections to other parts of the internet. Another thing that would force politics to stay out of the internet is to make business extremely reliant on it. One of the biggest reasons the internet in developed nations won't be turned off is because of how much of an extreme problem it would create for all of the industries that are actually in power economically. It would literally be shooting yourself in the foot.
I spelling "reckon" incorrectly as recon, you accidentally implied that you had been there and actually reconnoitered (recon for short) what would actually happen should a country loses connectivity.
Needless to say, this probably amused both grammar and spelling Nazis alike. I am neither, and yet I am amused, so I thought you might like this pointed out politely before the flamers arrive...
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the entire intertubes in the US is controlled by one entity... the MPAA
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
And most of the rest in the poorer countries of Africa, where the answer to the question "Why do you have one ISP?" would be "Because it's one more than zero". Even with monopoly rent it's pretty hard making business on people that are that poor and probably for the most part don't have computers at all. Anyway, I find the numbers quite meaningless since they don't measure physical redundancy, resistance to government interference or consumer choice. Average number of providers available per person would be interesting though, I bet the US would end up in the "extremely high risk" monopoly/duopoly category. Though I guess after that the researchers can forget asking any ISPs for work...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I spelling "reckon" incorrectly as recon, you accidentally implied that you had been there and actually reconnoitered (recon for short) what would actually happen should a country loses connectivity. by webmistressrachel (903577) on Monday December 03, @03:44PM (#42172747)
What kind of sentence is that? What is "I spelling", good grammar in the context of the sentence in which it was used? You spoke too soon, pot calling a kettle black.
We've already seen quite a few countries are more than happy to pass legislation controlling ISPs. And ISPs tend to be large - and more to the point law abiding companies.
What exactly is the difference between, say, Uzbekistan cutting off each of their few ISPs with international links and the UK passing laws which give the government the power to demand ISPs shut down all international links on short notice? The only real difference is one of them requires some preparation.
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Some places in this list are not countries per se: Guadeloupe, French Polynesia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Réunion, for example.
I really think that despite the quoted 40 ISP(s) serving the US's borders, the fact that our new "Emperor Obama" publicly announced that he wanted an Internet kill switch should be enough to put us all on notice!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Some places in this list are not countries per se: Guadeloupe, French Polynesia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Réunion, for example.
As long as they can keep a tight control on their people, they'll be profiting very nicely in the next few years. The globalists love control-ridden countries..maybe they'll try and move it there.
Dubiously, Malaysia is in the "Resistant" category. We're such a small county, and I believe we have less than 10 internet service providers. We should be in either significant or severe risk category. Something doesn't smell right.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
They indicated that the "10 and under" was where cable sharing increased risk, when the NZ Internet essentailly all runs out of Takapuna. There might be some theoretical capacity out of Whenuapai, but none (possible exaggeration) of the ISPs have any gear there and everything is funneled through Takapuna to leave the country. Oh, and the two "diverse" cables run through the same waterway, far apart enough that an accident shouldn't be able to cut both, but a deliberate act could kill both within a few minutes of each other, from a single vessel.
Learn to love Alaska
They didn't measure the "better" metrics because that information isn't public. You use what you can get. And the US is bad because I've seen more than one that was nothing other than an AT&T retailer (renting copper pairs from AT&T, aggregating Internet over them, then buying upstream from someone, sometimes even AT&T again). The US was good back when UUNET was spending $1,000,000+ per day on network upgrades, and turning a profit on it. Until evil evil MCI swooped in and Worldcom'd the Internet, milking the best and brightest ISP on the planet so shamelessly they went bankrupt.
Learn to love Alaska
Without zooming in to the pixel level, I can sort of determine that Israel and Lebanon are the same color, I think. After zooming in I can tell they are both "resistant", simply because they are lighter than the Palestinian Authority, which is, in turn, slightly lighter than Jordan, which is big enough to tell what color it is.
I get this very same problem whenever some !@$#@! thinks it is a good idea to let me choose time zone only by clicking a map. Clicking my location will result, depending on the precise pixel, in either "Jerusalem", "Gaza", "Beirut" or "Amman".
Shachar
Australia would be trivial to excise from the internet. The government would need to make precisely two phone calls. I'm sure they've already prepared the road in terms of that contingency.