Paranoia *MI*GHT* destroy ya.. or, it might get you looking in the right direction for a change.

[arthurthedented]

Today .. Facebook had a serious interruption for a a couple of hours. the news feeds.. werent.
Today .. Youtube had some kind of a problem.. the playlists and favorites were down.
Today yahoo IM had some kind of a problem.. an hour or two (that I tested) that I couldnt log on.

Yesterday... Google quit china.... because theyre sophisticated well funded

Comments

clear on all that. but...

[arthurthedented]

the substance of my little rant there is that the net is .. as much infrastructure in a military sense as dams or bridges, railway marshelling yards or tunnels, fuel or arms depots.

If there were a bunch of chinese soldiers standing around with cameras , taking measurements, checking blueprints and noticeably doing tests and making plans for attacks on any of those OTHER things... it would be treated as a completely different order of threat.. but its not.

As to the famous resilience of the internet.. what you say is true. It seems that well funded sophisticated organizations may be working on that problem even as we speak.. so complacency that a system designed to survive nuclear war is also suitably protected from nuclear war scale hack attacks and sophisticated stratagies and software tools... is something I dont think we can afford to gamble on.

as to 'just going back to doing things the old way'.. in the long run, for the survivors, that might be true. but to think that could meaningfully happen in a scale of weeks or months is not. And if you factor in the chaos caused by say.. one month of the North american internet infrastructure being so badly comprimised as to count as being 'down'.. getting running on 'paper and phone calls like the old days' would take much much longer.

and when I speak of 'the survivors' I'm being neither facetious nor alarmist. if the food distribution net stops working.. if the stuff piles up in warehouses while folks starve... if the parts of our infrastructure that our monitored or run via internet applications stop... I will wager that will include gas, electricity , fuel distribution.. and essentially all commerce a one month outage will kill a substantial chunk of the populations and drive us back as badly as if fleets of conventional bombers had swarmed over both costs and bombed all major cities.

or do you think when the ATMs and cards stop workign the grocery stores and gas stations are just going to GIVE away what they have in stock? and even if they do, if its not replenished say.. more than once (stuff that was already enroute) how will that effect things?

maybe the Chinese Internet Army (ooh nice acronym.. too bad its taken) cant do a month, or even a day yet. ... maybe theyre working on it..

and remember they dont have to 'take it down' they just have to make it ineffective... if they cripple critical systems with a bogus stream of authentic *looking* information (let alone a nation sized DOS attach or some kind of 'all widows machines will die on command' virus) it functions just as well for offensive purposes as if the network was down.

and maybe we should take defense of our internet infrastructure more seriously- in an organized well funded and smart way than we are currently taking our (expensive but laughable) efforts to secure our airports and ports... (please oh pleas NOT with the same idiots in charge!)

Just saying.