-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Interesting. My ISP was shut down for a day this week because of a "problem with a router upstream from us". <insert emoticon here> It would be nice to see ISPs maintain multiple paths or at least have a set of backup connections to keep outages like this from happening. Simon Spero wrote:
As a matter of interest, I wonder how much of the internet could be shut down by concerted effort; obviously individual services can be trivially disabled by jamming listen queues (not really stoppable by anything short of IPSEC w/photuris). The BGP backbone could probably be disabled from within by a traitor planted in one of big companies, and a confused backhoe around the MAEs could probably do a lot more damage than people would like to admit. It seems that the internet is getting pretty brittle- I wonder if it would be worthwhile having some sort of infranet with a bunch of backups links using dial-up lines or spare transponders (with a filter to block port 80 :-)
It's probably not possible with todays routing technology (slow, flappy links with nightmarish convergence times), plus it's not sexy like a nice OC-12 SONET. This is the sort of thing the NCSC should be working on- something to keep the essential services flowing in the early stages of an info-war, or an info truck-bomb
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