{"id":315,"date":"2015-05-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2015\/05\/18\/post-308-could-we-destroy-the-internet\/"},"modified":"2015-05-18T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T00:00:00","slug":"post-308-could-we-destroy-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/18\/post-308-could-we-destroy-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-308: Could We Destroy the Internet?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nHow hard would it be for<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>a vast, well-organized Luddite conspiracy<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> to cripple the Internet?\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
As it exists today, “the Internet” seems like a kind of magic (e.g., people now talk about storage of data “in the Cloud”), but the Internet really is and remains just a network of physical boxes (servers) and physical wires.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Say a number of Luddite commando teams are raised. Armed with plain old-fashioned hammers, they are dispatched to smash up the world’s limited number of servers and dynamite major fiber-optic cable chokepoints. Couldn’t doing so “destroy” the Internet?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n.<\/font><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\ufeff<\/span>Read More\ufeff<\/span><\/strong><\/font><\/span><\/strong><\/font><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n<\/div>\n
\nHow many physical computer hard-drives (servers) would the Luddite commandos have to smash?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>In other words, how big is the Internet, physically? A few weeks ago, at a book store, I browsed through a (paper) book published last year that answered this. It is by the writer of the popular<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>xkcd.com<\/a> web comics.<\/p>\n

The answer: The physical Internet in the mid-2010s may still be smaller than a single oil tanker (maybe two, by now. The original answer was written in 2012). An oil tanker is a just few football fields in length, and a whole lot of the world’s servers are together at few central locations, or so is my understanding. This wouldn’t require so much smashing, after all.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n\"Picture\"<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nAfter writing this, I did a search and found a thought exercise by someone a lot more informed than I on how destruction of the Internet<\/a> could be achieved.
<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How hard would it be for a vast, well-organized Luddite conspiracy to cripple the Internet?\u00a0As it exists today, “the Internet” seems like a kind of magic (e.g., people now talk about storage of data “in the Cloud”), but the Internet really is and remains just a network of physical boxes (servers) and physical wires. Say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}