Or am I the only one remembering this opinion? I felt like it was common for people to say that the internet couldn’t be taken down, or censored or whatever. This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet. Where did this idea come from?
The internet was originally designed to withstand nuclear war, so that a functioning military network could coordinate a retaliation quickly.
The network protocols themselves are self-healing, routing around failures, very resilient.
The internet itself, even today, is incredibly difficult to destroy. It is nearly impossible to take it down.
However, the internet that most people think of as the internet, Facebook Google etc. Are centralized services that are trivial to take down.
Peer to peer protocols like email, torrents, are also nearly impossible to take down.
The examples of Russia and China isolating themselves, are different. That’s the network designers isolating the network. It’s not a third party trying to destroy the network.
China’s Internet is basically just a vpn
Well, its not virtual. so its a PN
It’s not private either, so an N
But it’s local to China, so it’s a LAN.
Chins is locally wide, so it’s a LWAN
Wait, email is p2p?
Yes, mostly. It’s distributed and federated. Peer to peer at the email server level
Domain A users can message domain B users directly without going to any other domain.
Fun fact email can also handle variable availability networks and use forwarding agents to get a message through even indirectly (though most people don’t configure this anymore, in the days of dialup this was more common)
I see. Thanks for clarifying!
I’m confused. You’re citing the actions of a country to impact its own Internet as evidence they can take the Internet down?
That’s like saying me disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid.
disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid
DO NOT DISCONNECT YOUR MICROWAVE!
A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]
That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
I think it’s mostly because of how rapid the internet was at becoming more accessible. It was inevitable as to how big it’d become.
And the opinion then changed from that to “The internet never forgets” which was more in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. This is 50/50 because it really depends. Some sites shut down for good, so if there was anything or anyone on it, then we can safely say the internet forgot. But that opinion mostly applies to whenever someone becomes a lolcow or someone who generally does something so stupid online that it’s everywhere. Hence the internet communities not forgetting.
The basic building blocks of the internet were designed by DARPA, and it was designed with that military mentality of “If the ruskies nuke any part of our infrastructure, the rest of it should keep running.” You can chop large parts of the internet off and those parts stop working but the rest of it keeps going. Here’s an extreme example: I can unplug my cable modem and disconnect my house from the internet completely, yet I can still access the web pages hosted by my switch, Wi-Fi router and NAS through my local area network.
Mind you that a lotmof that no longer works
In the past traffic could be routed over whatever. If one node went down, the traffic would go over another
Now we have a few very fast backbones and if even one goes down bye bye internet
What you have cached locally or on your doesn’t count because it’s only that which you’ve seen before.
The internet couldn’t and still can’t be taken down - but countries can certainly restrict it within their locale (though it is insanely difficult).
The opinion is that the internet as a concept and set of protocols was and is too widespread to ever fully dismantle and one dude with a mission can capture and preserve an immense amount of data.
That’s still all true but doesn’t hold for social media walled gardens which have come to control a huge proportion of communication.
Because then it was a robust network with a myriad websites and not just those four websites linking to each other. Also, they weren’t all dependant on adsense or akamai to function.
all tracert point to akamai like internet rome
Because its decentralized. So you can take a part of it out but not the whole thing. Unfortunately in some ways its become centralized.
If Russia disconnects, or get disconnected, then they’re just not part of the internet anymore. The internet itself will continue to exist though - and probably would be quite a bit better.
I honestly hope they do. The amount of disinformation come election time would drastically drop.
They’ll disconnect their citizens, not their cyber warfare assets
There is a lot of confused misinterpretation in this thread. “Can’t be taken down” was a thing, but it was about how you can lose big chunks of the network and have the rest of it still work. That was misinterpreted at the time, in fairness, and it’s even less true now, where centralization in both the infrastructure and the hosting have a lot of things dropping at once and being disrupted, but it’s still technically true. Ukrainian drones are out there beaming up to satellite internet and being used in active warfare in the middle of a battlefield. Which hey, in that context, robust military communication was the original intent of the network to begin with. Given the previous baseline is wired telephone, the characterization isn’t that far off.
Censorship is different, but also true. You can isolate a chunk of the Internet, and once you’ve done that if you have very centralized control you can monitor it, but that’s a high bar. And of course outside of those cases people struggle to limit communications they don’t want, from nazi chatter to piracy.
At the time I used to think that was a good thing, now… yeah, harder to justify. Turns out “free information” didn’t automatically make everyone smarter. I have lots of apologies to give to teachers and professors of theory of communication that were trying to explain this to us in the 90s and we were all “nah, man, their only crime was curiosity, hack the planet, free the information” and all that.
A big change between the internet in the 90’s/00’s and today, is that today we don’t really have this internet with “all computer being equal”, we have a dozen of facebook/google/reddit/tiktok massive websites, and it’s relatively easy to close one of these.
in the 90’s a judge could ask an ISP to close the homepage of someone without impacting the whole internet
It is just the services themselves are centralised now (it wasnt always like this) federation is taking us back closer to the old ideal.
Because back then the Internet wasn’t controlled by just a few big corporations.
Because that was ours purpose in the first place.
Depends on how much can be taken down via software or hardware. Hardware wise undersea data cables carry all the traffic of the internet and when they’re cut the internet will stop working. Software wise, the internet is hard to take down because most means; like the law, malware, and other attacks only affect invidiual websites. Even if AWS were taken down, they would have backups to reduce the outage, and that kind of attack would be as difficult as cutting an undersea data cable. (But the Russians are testing their ability to cut them.)
