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Comment by hughesjj | Hacker News Reader

The back of my head is screaming "defense in depth! Redundant systems!"

The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant.

Definitely incorporate the most advanced tech you can for when things are going smoothly to get that efficency gain, but there's a reason all branches of the military (that I'm aware of) still train and test their aptitude using paper maps and trig instead of relying 100% on GPS and electronic devices.

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>The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant.

The reality of course is that the internet has turned into a fragile, centralized system of complication that rests on single failure points like Cloudflare, AWS, and Chrome. The internet as envisioned by DARPA would have survived to be used by cockroaches, the internet today would not survive.

"The Internet" is still there at a lower level than the examples you've given.

It's just how it's been used by the majority for the last couple of decades that's fragile.

Chrome works even if Google is down How is it an SPOF? And links mozilla.org will get you an alternative.

Yeah it’s pretty bad nowadays.

Thinking about this though it’s really the big tech companies manufacturing “the latest thing” to be tossed in the bin after a year. Dollars over longevity. Then they become “no longer maintained.” Could we STILL use a 3g network? Or is there a simpler, slow network that should be good enough barring our pointless desire for cat videos?

And some folks wonder why companies still use floppy disks on air-gapped infrastructure. Because it fucking works don’t litter it with complexity to modernize.

Now… the situation with skills to manage infrastructure? Now that the whole AI thing is happening? The internet is going to be fucked people. It’s time to go analog.

> like Cloudflare, AWS, and Chrome.

That’s essentially www, not Internet. You don’t need any of those to communicate (reliably) between two hosts.

> The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant.

Sure, the routing algorithms can quickly adapt to changes in network topology, but they assume infinite bandwidth, which hasn't been the case since a long time now.

In other words, if a couple of important pipes disappear between tier1 peers, alternate routes will certainly have trouble handling all the new traffic, which would make everything grind to a halt, and will only be solved by pissed network admins null-routing that additional load.

Definitely, we've seen this in fiber cuts before. That said a degraded availability is better than no availability.

I know it's controversial in the context of net neutrality but personally I'd be okay with traffic shaping/prioritization for critical infra in cases such as this. Keep the power plants, emergency services, military, government, transit running over intsagram and netflix when things come down to it.

Does the government not maintain its own dedicated communication infrastructure between important installations? Or has it all been replaced with public connections?

"It depends." Two data points that I know of first hand:

1) There is a dedicated microwave link between Vandenberg Space Force Base and Edwards Air Force Base. Mil. owned and operated solely for their own use.

2) The US Federal government decided to build a standardized communications network for government/first responders/etc. This is FirstNet. They farmed the build-out to AT&T and gave them 20 MHz of bandwidth (Band 14) but it runs over their standard wireless infrastructure and network but FirstNet traffic gets prioritized.

https://www.firstnet.gov/

https://www.firstnet.com/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Responder_Network_Auth...

It’s been a 25 years since I’ve even been remotely exposed to them, but I believe the military currently has a non-classified NIPRnet, a classified secret SIPRnet, and a network called JWICS for top secret.

I think all three are physically seperated from the commercial internet and each other but don’t quote me on it.

Uncle Sam doesn’t mess around…

The US military also has a volunteer fallback HAM radio network:

https://www.usarmymars.org/home

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