193
Russia is signaling it could take out the West's internet and GPS. There's no good backup plan.
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
193 points (90.4% liked)
politics
19144 readers
2118 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.
Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.
Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn't be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.
Elon would be very happy.
Im curious… how much undersea cable traffic could Starlink handle? I know the sat-sat laser links are just coming online now, what if every sat had them
Not sure, though most would go other existing high-speed satellite trunks.
And otherwise, you can't eliminate the possibility of local sabotage as well. Most of the important networking information in Sweden was leaked due to our "open information" laws.
It's not like Russia can make it some long-term problem, but being an annoyance and making chaos is their goal.
Maybe the local internet would keep working but the countries wouldnt. Lots of stuff stops working without central web authorities and all international trade and payment systems would collapse. It would be a massive catastrophe. But its probably quite hard to take out everything at once before the militaries of the world would start paying special attention to those cables.
Yeah last time I saw a map of the internet cables it looked like there was quite a lot of redundancy so I'm not convinced they could pull it off fully to be honest.
would Americans even consider that taking down the internet? It wouldn't impact a US client talking to a US server.
Thats not how things on the internet work. It would mostly certainly cause many issues for everyone everywhere. Basic functionality might stay working but not everything has a local copy in the US. We depend on things and people from all over the world to keep things running.