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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
198 points (90.6% liked)
politics
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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.