Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambataa | Hacker News Reader

> - we get more control over our little part of the internet in case of digital attack

I’d love to hear what people think about this. To me it’s notable that Russia and China have taken steps to separate their internet access from the wider, global network. While the West continues to centralise its network access in the hands of a few companies. Presumably this makes Russia and China more protected from attacks on the global network.

Am I correct in thinking in this way? Could Russia and China continue with internal internets even if the global one went down, or are they actually as at risk as anyone else? I’m guessing that China’s censorship systems and firewalls are fairly centralised and so vulnerable in their own way.

View on HN

> Presumably this makes Russia and China more protected from attacks on the global network.

Of course. And North Korea is probably more protected against terrorist attacks than most of the "free world". That doesn't mean it's a good trade-off in general.

In practical terms, it depends on what you mean "continue with their internal internets". Most of the points of failure for "internet use as understood by the public", are actually just implementation mistakes by private companies - i.e. nobody says you have to host on (and hence go down with) AWS, or rely on (and hence go down with) Facebook/Google Login.

DNS is distributed (it's in the name!); if rootservers went down there would be hiccups for sure, but they could be fixed. Same for the rest of the fundamental network stack; after all, the internet was built to withstand nuclear attack. Whether it would be a good experience (i.e. slow, private services not working, etc), that's something else. If you're based in China and you rely on FB Login, no amount of governmental infrastructure will help you when FB becomes unreachable.

I’m thinking about fairly close to doomsday scenarios.

If/when we reach a point of extreme tension with tit for tat cyber attacks, would Western countries be totally incapacitated for days or weeks while Russia or China were less impacted? Things like food supply, public services etc.

Perhaps such things would escalate so quickly that the internet would be the least of our worries.

There are books on this sort of things, the topic is vast. From energy supply to commercial food operations, there are a lot of very different situations. This said, I reckon that all-out cyberwar on the scale necessary to impact food supply, would see IRL retaliation too quickly for it to matter. The US military has its own network strategy, its own satellites, etc etc, so they will be ready to pounce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com