Can a society survive now without the Internet?

2 Responses to Can a society survive now without the Internet?

1. Art Stone says:

   February 1, 2011 at 4:11 am

   I did a little poking around in what Egypt did to kill the Internet. First, some technical mumbo jumbo:

   When you visit a web site, say example.gov.eg

   a system called “DNS” looks that up – similar to directory assistance / 411 in voice phones for those old enough to remember….. the internet has a series of “phone books” to look up things – the .eg at the end says “Look this up in the Egypt Phone book”…. but even that is only a shell of a phone book – it knows where to find the phone book called “gov.eg”, which actually knows the computer example.gov.eg and how to connect to it. The 411 query returns saying ” connect to 123.111.57.42 (the IP number) if you want to talk with example.gov.eg. So far, so good

   But with just an IP number, and a global system not run by any one entity, how does your computer know how to connect to 123.111.57.42? The answer is “it’s magic”. All of the big internet providers “advertise” the preferred path to reach them. AT&T has a big device called a Border Router that has a great big list of numbers and the best way to reach them. So let’s say 123.111.*.* is controlled by myisp.eg, an ISP in Egypt. It sends out a message saying “if you want to reach me, try going through the phone company in France”. That just begs the question “So how do I get to the phone company in France? Well, they advertise too. AT&T may know how to get to France, but not to Egypt. So your message for the computer gets shipped off to the phone company in France, and they relay it to Egypt over a fiber optic cable to the ISP, which connects to the right computer.

   So how do you break something that was built to be unbreakable? The first thing you could try to do would be to hide the .eg phone book, which is probably directly under the control of the Egypt government. That doesn’t work for a few reasons – twitter.com doesn’t end in .eg, so Egypt can’t hide the .com phone book. The .com phonebook is under international control (it used to be just the US controlled it). They could try to “hide” the .com phonebook, but that would not work for long and would block access to every .com web site. Hiding the .eg phone book would be only slightly effective, because each ISP keeps old copies around of the phone book. You wouldn’t get updates, but the old phone book would do in a pinch.

   In the begnning, that’s what Egypt did – they tried to block the entries to selected web sites, but word spread quickly that if you know the IP address of http://www.facebook.com, you don’t need the phone books.

   Phase two is you force the ISPs to stop advertising the routes to get to Egyptian web sites (and Egyptians to get reach computers out of the country). That would allow computers within Egypt (like government agencies) to continue to talk to each other, but not outside the country. But that also is only going to work partially – there are way too many paths into and out of the country, and people on both ends of the cables can “hard code” the path information rather than relying on announcements. As links were cut, that would mean someone would have to manually update the routes, but still doable.

   So ultimately, to get things completely shut down, you have to go to the ISPs with a gun and say “Turn off your equipment”. By watching the paths that don’t go down, you find the remaining paths to shut down.

   You might be thinking – but there are people with satellite internet dishes that don’t go through any land based circuits, and will continue to work so long as they have electricity. It isn’t the Internet for a country, but a way that some people could get information out of the country (YouTube videos, for instance). Well, the flaw to that is in much of the world, it is not legal to own a satellite dish that can transmit to a satellite without government permission. In a society like Egypt, you aren’t going to get permission to do that.

   Or you work with CISCO to build a “kill switch” into every ISP’s routers to allow the government to turn them off by remote control. China was the prototype.
2. ICCDude says:

   February 1, 2011 at 5:58 pm

   Two questions are either posed here or implied:
   1. “So how do we feel about the President of the United States having an “Internet Kill switch”?”
   The Repubs don’t want the DemsLibs to have it, and the DemLibs don’t want the Repubs to have it.
   SO WHY BOTHER?
   2. “Or you work with CISCO to build a “kill switch” into every ISP’s routers to allow the government to turn them off by remote control. China was the prototype.”
   If we HAVE to build any “kill switch” (Can’t we use more civil discourse here?) on the Internet, can’t we build one where when the ChiComms do ANOTHER cyberattack we can shut them out immediately?

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