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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."
The day the earth did not see pictures of cute cats. The thought alone is terrifying.
and anyone still in Second Life.
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
Most people in the US probably wouldn't notice if we were cut off from the outside world for quite a while. Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc is all hosted within the US I believe. I can't think of any sites that are primarily hosted outside of the US that a *majority* of US citizens use on a daily basis.
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
*cough* ... pirate bay ... *cough*
mmmh, I'm thinking maybe it doesn't pass the *majority* test.
And I'm thinking it maybe would pass the majority test.
However most people would assume it either was down or got raided again.
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
Last time some politic decided to cut off internet, masses went to streets and smashed authoritarian government to smithereens. We can only hope that it will happen to US too some day.
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
Most people in the US would not notice if 90% of these countries simply disappeared either. Seriously, next Slashdot poll could be how many of these countries could you identify on a map that does not show the country names. My guess is that 10% would be about typical, maybe even optimistic.
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
really iran hasn't seen any rioting in after having done so? they were the last ones weren't they? or are they still in the process of building their firewall?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
Right because we're so much dumber than the rest of the world. Typical superiority-complex having nerd.
If you expanded that poll to Americans in general, definitely optimistic. Heck, I don't know that I could do more than 10% these days (of course, much has changed since I last took Geography). As a child I could also name all the (US) states and their capitals, but like everything else I learned in school that I don't need to know in day-to-day life, I have forgotten many. The stuff that sticks is the conceptual stuff & the stuff you actually use. The rest was just mental exercise.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Be glad we can't find your country on a map. Bad things can happen to countries that draw American attention. I know where Iraq, Korea, and Germany is. Americans should not need to know where your country is or who your president is. You shouldn't need to know who the American president is either.
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.
Ask anyone outside of the US to identify 5 unlabeled states. You'll get California, Florida, Nevada and Texas - plus whatever states they've been to.
Ask a Chinese person to identify the eastern European countries - he won't do to well.
Ask the average Dutchman to identify countries in Africa - you won't have too much success.
You are arrogant.
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.
I do fine when all the countries are listed, other than the one they are asking about. "I goes in the blank spot." But then, I'm American and I never remember which in NH and which is VT.
Learn to love Alaska
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
This lol farken!
Does anyone have a link to a chart of average IQs in Western countries...? :).
I'm tippin not all of them are 100
And so with every iphoney sold we subtract just a little more from the sum total of human knowledge & wisdom, as well as rejig where an average IQ of 100 actually sits. Oh brave new world...
-- ;-p
Sent from my S2 muthafucka!
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.
Does anyone have a link to a chart of average IQs in Western countries...? :).
I'm tippin not all of them are 100
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fA2RjSyq8L4/TMxnvR5JQLI/AAAAAAAAGyg/blddZkpRT-M/s1600/AverageIQ-Map-World.png
We've had a large influx of Sudanese, Lebanese & several peasant Asian country migrants over the past 20 years or so...? I don't think they even know what maths or formal logic is, much less be able to take an impartial test for their education levels lol. Unless you just made that map/chart up yourself...? ;-p
Hey also, I'm from central Europe & took my IQ tests there :)
We've had a large influx of Sudanese, Lebanese & several peasant Asian country...
Well, per the chart, the Asians should be driving up the curve...
...Unless you just made that map/chart up yourself...?
No, I didn't make it myself, but hey; it's on the interweb, so it must be true!! :)
I find it amusing that we're holding up the ladder with Botswana, of all countries ffs!
As much as we may have as many dumb-as-dogshit 'bogans' & 'ockers' & AFL yobos & 'fully sick mate!' petrol heads & Apple users, I just can't accept that we're dumber as a nation than the US, sorry. Plus, all of north AND south America have exactly the same average IQs...? Please.
I just can't accept that we're dumber as a nation than the US, sorry. Plus, all of north AND south America have exactly the same average IQs...? Please.
Averaged across they probably do. Remember, you're not talking about income or GDP, just IQ. And not the best and the brightest, everyone.
You've got to remember you've got all the scientists and doctors and mathematicians in South America, as well as all the carney folk and phone sterilizers in North America in the mix.
Per-capita averages are a funny thing.
If you stop and think about it, the continent with the highest per-capita IQ is Antarctica.
I know, I know - a type leading to a grammar problem, the same thing. That should have said "In spelling"...
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