Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

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The internet is designed to not go offline. It's true that a lot of it is dependent on big infra providers like Cloudflare but them going down permanently would be a problem for a couple days for anyone with good backup plans or weeks for those without. Painful but not catastrophic.

Your connection is not going down and independent sites will stay up. Taking down everything would mean someone breaking all the local ISPs where you live, because otherwise you could just connect to your neighbors or public wifi. And most governments would do everything they can to fix it ASAP.

The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.

> The internet is designed to not go offline.

Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.

> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.

An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.

I'm not sure how assumed that is. From Wikipeda:

>According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who was deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975):

>The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

I note in practice it mostly still works in war zones unless one of the countries makes a major effort to block its own citizens from access.

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