Comments on: U.S. unprepared for Net meltdown, blue chips warn

Group of powerful companies in various sectors calls on federal government to beef up readiness efforts.

[jmmejzz]

Um,

why can't they do it? They obviously have the resources and the will and the know how, why must those who botched the Katrena (sic) aftermath be allowed to botch something else?

[Razzl]

Talking in feel-good generalities

The vague generalities about internet outages mentioned here make it clear that either CNET or the government don't have a clear idea about what the issues would be, and I'm betting the government is the naive party.

Any net outage is going to be primarily an infrastructure issue, such as widespread line destruction from a storm, or localized removal of heavily-used nodes, possibly from hackers. The first of these is clearly the area the government should worry itself about, but given the non-response to Katrina, won't for at least the remainder of the Bush Dark Ages. The second is not an easy problem to fix given that the internet itself is a patchwork of private servers allowing themselves to be used as switching stations for other private servers, but that characteristic seems to make the net pretty well self-mending. During the 9/11 attacks when the loss of servers in the World Trade Center shut down local web traffic in the Northeast we were able to get our news and information from less local sources with servers elsewhere.

The one type of attack that could be most damaging and also under some form of government control/protection would be against the banks of DNS servers that make the whole system possible. My understanding is that most of these physically exist in just a few locations and physically destroying at least one facility might hurt web access for a few days, though even then I doubt the damage would be so long-lasting as to bankrupt mega-corporations.

Homeland security should in principle examine this type of issue but should do so with enough technical expertise to see that it isn't a huge threat and that the few non-hardware threat scenarios can be handled easily with a little redundancy. The internet is not a centralized network and is therefore difficult to disrupt in any significant or long-term way.

[nzamparello]

Hehehe

See... This shows how dumb companies are.. That is why the internet aka ARPANET!!! Is designed to withstand nuclear attack by not being centralized.. That's why arpa was designed in the first place.. So , in reality, the net might continue chugging along after we're gone like a cockroach... But then again we need to make sure that the net is not centralized for that reason.. As the old saying goes.. "Never put all your eggs in one basket.."

[thedreaming]

ARPANET

The orignal project was called ARPANET, and as more and more corporations connected their networks to it, it grew to the "King of Networks" or Internet. Now, it's a mall.