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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

Yeah the article makes it pretty far before saying “maritime ports” and even then the article never seemed to acknowledge that there is ambiguity in “shutting down port operations” created when the triggering event is a cyber attack.

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I appreciate you may not be aware of the Independent but it’s a general audience publication. That author isn’t even a tech journalist so I doubt they are even aware of what a TCP/IP port is let alone that it’s related to the subject matter in any way.

They’d probably have more familiarity with “port” used in other contexts like:

- the opposite of starboard

- USB port

- the alcoholic beverage (like Wine)

…amongst any array of other usages.

And out of all of them, the one that makes the most grammatical sense to your average person is maritime ports.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable the way it was written.

So when you read DP World is shutting down four major ports in the first few sentences: You thought that a private company was requiring every other private company & the various govts in Aus to firewall off the http port or something like that?

I'm all for blaming schools and blaming journalists for mistakes stupid people make, but that seems like it's on you being a little too credulous.

I figured it out from context clues, like everyone else. I just found it a little disappointing that in an article about Australia locking down ports after a cyber attack, there wasn’t even a clarifying statement that it wasn’t talking about a network firewall.

Although this is not a tech focused publication, it seemed a bit of an oversight and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

If a country has the capability to "lock down ports", they're probably shipping ports - do you think Australia is just suddenly going to (or has the capability to) block all IP traffic on certain ports? A notable exception is China.

They could do it if they tried. Part of being an island is there's only a few connections to the outside.

Satellite internet would like a word.

Perhaps < 1% traffic is routed by satellites, such congestion means it's almost blocked

They don't operate without licenses.

This seems mostly like willful ignorance. How does the article title make any sense if you know about computer ports, or really any ports?

Maybe the article was talking about literally locking down server room Ethernet ports amirite?

I mean, if you know what a network port is how could the title or content referring to network ports make sense?

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