I woke up this morning to four seemingly unrelated news stories<\/p>\n
– North Korea has turned off their phone to South Korea to prevent war
\n– China has launched a “flotilla” of ships to occupy the South China Sea
\n– Verizon has announced it is pulling the plug on new ISDN service. Unless you’re in radio, you probably don’t know what that is. In the early 1990s, an attempt was made to convert the US phone system to be digital on the last mile – apartments and new houses were wired with 8 phone wires going to every room. With ISDN, you have very good audio, including high frequency response. Dialing is immediate. The people doing their shows from a home studio are using ISDN – that’s how they can do fillins on a moment’s notice. Other than radio, ISDN never caught on, and DSL largely did away with the need for it. ISDN is the phone standard in Europe and most if the world. Now cell phones are largely replacing wired phones.<\/p>\n
I guess the thinking is that with the Internet becoming so reliable, there is no need for a dedicated phone network any more.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the 4th story. I first heard about cyberbunker a few years ago
\nhttp:\/\/cyberbunker.com\/<\/p>\n
It may be hard to reach and you may not want to visit that web site. CyberBunker is located in an old Cold War era NATO command center. It’s impenetrable, has its own power generation capability. They will allow anything to be run from their computer center (except kiddy porn or terrorism). <\/p>\n
Needless to say, they are a favorite with organized crime gangs in Eastern Europe. They also are popular with folks sending you unsolicited email (aka spam)<\/p>\n
Government authorities have tried in the past to breach the defenses to do things like try to seize servers involved in violating copyrights.<\/p>\n
At the moment, Cyberbunker is involved in the largest attempt ever to take down the Internet. They are in a war with Spamhaus, a group that works with ISPs to identify and block the sources of all those wonderful offers in your inbox for $5 rolexes and magical blue pills.<\/p>\n
The ferocity of the attacks is spewing 300 Gb of data traffic at its targets (Gb = Billions of bits)<\/p>\n
The Internet was designed with the goal to survive nuclear war. As we become more and more dependent on it, will it survive an all out attack? We’re pretty much putting all of our eggs in one basket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I woke up this morning to four seemingly unrelated news stories – North Korea has turned off their phone to South Korea to prevent war – China has launched a “flotilla” of ships to occupy the South China Sea – … Continue reading