Yeah I've played Uplink and in fact in college one of my friends had this in-joke about how "When I get rich I'll finally be able to hire mercenaries to destroy the Internet" I have in fact looked up some facts and figures and destroying the Internet is surprisingly achievablehttps://twitter.com/segfaultvicta/status/1272065139387305984 …
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It's not *easy*, but it's not this fundamental impossibility the way the tech fanboys talk like it is ("It's a LIVING ORGANISM that can REROUTE AROUND ANY DAMAGE" etc) I mean you can't do it from your chair like in Uplink, as a software solution, you'd have to break some shit
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The number of sites you'd have to attack to wipe out the "Internet" as we know it completely - sever the major cable trunks, wipe the root servers, and trash the bulk of archived data - is around 4,000 Here's an old Gizmodo article about ithttps://gizmodo.com/how-to-destroy-the-internet-5912383 …
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That's still a lot of sites, but it's much easier than the idea people have that destroying the Internet would require killing all humans or destroying so much technological infrastructure no one has electricity or can manufacture computers
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And that's complete destruction, like to make it impossible for your computer to connect to any computer further away than your office LAN You could leave a patchwork of isolated networks where each functional network is too small to be "the Internet" much more cheaply
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In all seriousness this is probably impossible for one actor to accomplish, especially with the assumption that the rest of the world is working against them The cable-cutters would get arrested and the sites repaired long before they hit that threshold
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So I don't think any one entity can "destroy the Internet" But I think it CAN be and in fact likely WOULD be destroyed in the event of any level of major warfare As collateral damage of both trying to wound the enemy's economy and control information for your own populace
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Again, it wouldn't be that hard, and the benefits immediate, if you were in a situation where the free flow of information was to your detriment - which a total war is by definition I will actually be surprised if some level of it doesn't happen in my lifetime
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China already kinda sorta wishes it could just sever its links with the rest of the Internet completely, and relations between the US and China do not look like they are on a long-term upward trajectory
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And, yeah, this would be disastrous for the economy and the world and lots of people would die in the aftermath etc But shit, of course there's some part of me that finds this reassuring
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The digital world isn't some spirit world that exists in another reality It's still within physical reach, it can be broken with sticks and stones A mere handful of missiles flying through the air and it vanishes as though it were never there
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