What if the internet goes down?

[wtmusic]

Don your tinfoil and indulge me...

This morning, as I was reading even more biased CNN tripe and the uncovering of more evil GOP tricks,

my ISP went down.

Just for about 10 minutes. But it made me acutely aware that in a worst-case scenario, where Reichsfuhrer Bush decided he didn't even want to try to maintain the illusion of playing fair anymore, what might happen.

The internet could be brought to a halt by massive government-sponsored DOS (denial of service) attacks on critical web nodes in the name of "national security". Where would that leave those who depend on the net as the last remaining source of free and unbiased information?

I have heard some discussion of shortwave-based internet. Although this could be jammed as well it would be more difficult. Anyone have knowledge of this?

[Momgonepostal]

1. luckily, according to GWB, we have more than one

<snicker>

I knew all those internets would come in handy.

[Vickers]

18. Hahahaha!

:toast:

I was gonna say, "ALL of them?!?!?!?!"

[Liberal Veteran]

2. No sex threads!

:)

[porphyrian]

3. It won't stay down...

...any more than herion will ever go away.

[Goldmund]

4. One or two can go down,

but they can't shut them all down, can they?

[Endangered Specie]

5. Well, there are other internets we can use.

[Bridget Burke]

6. We aren't the only users of the Internet

Businesses depend on the Internet, as well.

[wtmusic]

10. true...but it seems "national security" would trump profits

in the short run, until "stability" was restored. :(

[ClassWarrior]

7. Which one?

24.

[gumby]

8. October Surprise?

Or maybe November 2 Surprise?

[salvorhardin]

9. Rest assured

IF the internet is ever entirely knocked out (and I doubt they would ever try that -- too much of their money laundering depends on it), us geeks will break out the old BBS code from the 80s and we will form our own network. AFAIK parts of the FIDONet still exist and I know parts of the old Citanet still exist though both have moved predominantly over to networking through TCP/IP. All the old code is still pretty much available and it doesn't take much to code up these things anyway. If we have to rely upon telephone relay networking and 56Kbps or lower dial-up speeds we will. It won't be as anywhere as fancy as the web, but it will work.

[wtmusic]

12. interesting

it seems that some thought should be given ahead of time to having a backup plan.

Even if it wasn't entirely knocked out the dissemination of info could be severely restricted. That's a dangerous thing.

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

11. Wouldn't work.

The Internet was built around the military ARPANet, which was itself built to withstand multiple precision missile strikes. It's got redundant backups six ways from Sunday.

An individual node (say, a government database, or the gateway router for an ISP) can be brought down easily enough, or simply turned off by someone with the proper authority, but the Internet at large isn't going anywhere.

[wtmusic]

13. Correct me

but would it be extremely difficult for the DHS to target nodes in urban (liberal) areas and hit several thousand at once? The internet may still be "up", but the purpose would be served...

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

15. Possible, but unlikely.

If I understand you correctly, your concern is that the DHS could cut off access to the Internet for individual users (what telecom companies refer to as the "last mile"), rather than striking at the backbone of the Internet itself.

To do this effectively, they would have to shut down several ISPs simultaneously. That would mean taking out dozens, if not hundreds, of servers all over the country.

That's practically impossible to accomplish with a DDoS attack. As another poster mentioned, a similar stunt was tried a few years ago, and everything affected was back to normal in less than a day. On 9/11, CNN.com and several other news sites collapsed under the strain of a few hundred million simultaneous requests (basically an unintentional DDoS), and they were up again by mid-afternoon.

Nor could Tom Ridge brandish a fistful of warrants and order the servers shut down. Almost all of them are either on universities or privately owned. And while many ISPs will turn into jellyfish when the RIAA asks them to turn over a suspected music fan, they're not as likely to cooperate with a full-scale shutdown of their bread and butter. Besides, there's no way to do that without everyone knowing about it.

[cheezus]

16. i wish you were right

all it would take would be shutdown of major traffic routing points from the major carries (sprint, worldcom) and the internet would slow to a crawl

that said, they can't get rid of the net forever ,but they could make it close to unusuable for a few days

[Chico Man]

14. It has been tried before

http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/1486981

A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack (define) of unknown origin briefly interrupted Web traffic on nine of the 13 DNS "root" servers that control the Internet but experts on Wednesday dismissed the overall threat as "minimal."

Sources say the one-hour attack, which was hardly noticeable to the average end-user, was done via ICMP requests (ping-flooding) to the root servers. In a typical DDoS attack, hundreds of "drone" machines are used to remotely pound IP addresses. While the common ping program sends on 64-byte datagram per second, "ping flooding" attacks can emit ICMP echo requests at the highest possible frequency, experts explained.

Internet Software Consortium (ISC) chairman Paul Vixie confirmed the ICMP request source of the attack on the NANOG mailing list but maintained the DDos attack "was only visible to people who monitor root servers or whose backbones feed root servers."

[ghostsofgiants]

17. If the internet wen down

I would go through withdrawal that not even the most hardcore of heroin addicts could imagine.

[kayell]

19. It seems more likely that they would employ filtering as China and other

repressive regimes have done. In that sort of situation we would become more dependent on foreign sites and work arounds such as misspellings and understood language.

I also think it more likely that this "kinder and gentler" totalitarian regime would be satisfied with taking out a limited number of high profile sites that they would claim were terrorist affiliated. A little intimidation, maybe a limited number of Wellstonings. They could then point to remaining but defanged opposition as proof that we are still a "free country".

[TrogL]

20. We'll do what we did before the Internet

get on the phone, set up BBS's, fax storms....

[DoYouEverWonder]

21. A lot more would grind to a sudden halt than just some noisy chat rooms

Banking would be shut down. The movements of goods and services. The government would lose billions in revenue because even collecting taxes is done over the Internet now. As a matter of fact, the State of Florida forces me to do my taxes on the Internet. So I really doubt that Bu$h Co would try something so stupid. There are other ways to try to get us to shut up if it comes to it.