https://easydns.com/blog/2020/07/20/turns-out-half-the-inter...
The whole idea of the internet was a distributed network impervious to most attacks.
The reality is that a single failure can knock out 90% of the services people use.
The whole idea of the internet was a distributed network impervious to most attacks.
The reality is that a single failure can knock out 90% of the services people use.
For example email - the other big "internet-user" is technically not part of the WWW, but most (? I don't have any stats, just a guess) of our mailclients run on the WWW, nonetheless.
There are roads (or shall I say tubes?). There are cars and busses on the road. Over time, almost everyone has migrated to just a few bus companies. One of them suffers a complete collapse for a few hours. Yes, this means chaos when it comes to transporting people. But the roads are just fine.
This doesn't mean that the situation is fine and that people aren't affected. But it would be entirely different if the roads had been washed away or something.
I'm not sure what the native clients for Netflix and Spotify actually run, but I use their WWW clients mostly. Making most of my internet bits&bytes go over the WWW.
-- https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
:-(
ps. "The Internet was build to survive attacks" is not true. It's a myth made popular by Robert Cringely in the early 1990s. The Arpanet was simply a protocol for mainframes used by computer scientists to connect. The Internet is relatively resilient against attacks, but that was not the "whole idea". It was not in the design at all.
Bob Taylor: “In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project. I was Director of ARPA‘s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late ‚65 to late ‚69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me. The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with common interests to connect with one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography”.
Vint Cerf says the same about invention if TCP/IP transport protocol.
Even email has a method baked into to the protocol for handling failure.
Fallbacks are good, baking in resiliency is better.
The basic design BGP is very vulnerable against malicious attacks. Email security is nonexistent.