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Comment by tcoff91 | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't the internet literally created by the military for military comms? The decentralized routing was in part to ensure that comms could survive some areas being taken out by nuclear weapons.

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As the effect of yesterday's AWS event demonstrates, the major Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are surely top tier targets in every adversary's war plans.

The decentralized internet is less of a reality today than it was years ago.

Don't we have more internet submarine cables and less single points of failure in our internet infrastructure today than years ago? If so, shouldn't that make it easier to route around failures?

The web though I agree isn't very decentralized.

Maybe yes in that regard. But in the past, most organizations ran their own mail and web servers. Software supporting the business ran on-prem. Now they use Google or Azure or AWS. So business and civilian usage, at least, seem more vulnerable now.

We sacrificed resillience for effeciency. Now things are much more fragile and liable to exploitation.

Considering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants.

An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage.

I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.

That's fine, when all the nodes run autonomously and the internet is only used for real information sharing. What we now have is that the nodes are display control servers and all the computation and storage happens externally. That is not how it was designed by the military.

The very very earliest form of some of the protocols involved it were, yes. But not really now at all. That "internet" would not be worth using.

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