What A Great Idea
Over at the Agonist Quiet Bill wonders After Egypt, Will U.S. Get ‘Internet Kill Switch’?. This was another brilliant idea by LIEberman, the genius behind the Department of Homeland Security.
I think this is greatest idea since the neo-cons under the Reagan regime decided to train and fund a bunch of religious whackoes to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Much better than the neo-con idea to fund Saddam Hussein and give him weapons of mass destruction to oppose Iran. With genius ideas like those, what could go wrong?
Of course, if you install the “switch”, you will need to test it. April 15th and June 30th would be good test dates, because people really seem to want to use the Internet backbone on those days.
Naturally, as ‘Noz points out, there are always naysayers, like the Technolog at MSNBC: Net-less Egypt may face economic doom Monday
Egypt’s government must return Internet access to the country by Monday or perhaps suffer massive economic damage, as banks and other economic institutions return to work without the ability to conduct commerce.
Hey, if I’m willing to sacrifice I Can Has Cheezburger? for a few days, Wall Street can absorb a little financial pain. Come on, you really didn’t want to use your credit or debit cards.
We have seen how effective Egypt’s “Internet Kill Switch” has been in controlling the protests.
[Yes, this is sarcasm about unintended consequences. Note there is a lot of traffic on the Internet backbone that is not part of the World Wide Web.]
4 comments
Used to be, the POS credit card swipes got sent over a proprietary X.25 network to the credit card vendors. Nowadays, they get sent (encrypted) over the public Internet. So yeah, an Internet “kill switch” would kill a huge amount of the economy that way. Though not my own employer, which doesn’t do credit card transactions (our gear is way too expensive for that, it’s the sort of high-end stuff where a guy comes along with it to do the installation into your data center).
But there’s something else you forgot: Telephones. Most businesses nowadays here in the Silicon Valley have only one POTS on premise — the POTS for the fax machine. Everything else is VoIP over their high-speed DSL line to a VoIP provider. So if the Internet goes down, our *phones* go down. We could maybe make an emergency call via our fax machine, but that’s *it* — we’d be dead in the water, no longer able to take or make phone calls whether for technical support, sales, or to our vendors and distributors.
In short, a “kill switch” for the Internet, if triggered, would entirely shut down the *only* U.S. industry that is actually internationally competitive at the moment (the high-tech industry). The fact that morons like Joe Biden can’t see this doesn’t surprise me. The fact that he didn’t get immediately condemned as a moron for that idea… well.
– Badtux the High Tech Penguin
I didn’t forget about VoIP, it is one of the reasons I’m still on DSL and using POTS besides my cell. The local cable company uses VoIP as the “telephone” portion of its “bundle”, but they string their cable on utility poles which have a dismal survival record in out little weather events. The Phone Company buries everything.
A couple of weeks ago the cable lost a major piece of equipment that degraded the TV portion and eliminated the Internet section of their capacity for a day. They didn’t know about it until an irate customer showed up at their offices because they didn’t realize that their phone system was down so the angry customer service calls weren’t getting through. I don’t guess anyone in customer service wondered why there were no calls.
VPN, VoIP, system control and monitoring, … all kinds of things using that backbone that have nothing to do with Facebook.
It may be time to dust off ALOHAnet and radio packet switching if the clowns in DC are going to screw around.
Yeah, well, POTS is exorbitantly expensive if you want to put a phone with a direct line onto every employee’s desk and you’re bigger than a dozen employees. At that point you’re in PBX land there — or VoIP via a SIP provider, which is far, far cheaper. At one employer we avoided PBX land by issuing NexTel phones to every employee with the PTT function. Then Sprint bought NexTel and started phasing out the PTT function, then the IRS changed the tax code to say that cell phones for employees were a benefit that had to be taxed rather than a business expense that could be written off, and that was that — we replaced it with an Asterisk system to a SIP provider like everybody else is doing here in the valley.
Which is why *anything* that could function as a kill switch for the Internet is dumb, dumb, dumb. If the government can trigger it, so can hackers. Did not the lesson of the Clipper Chip teach Joe Biden anything? Oh wait, I forget, nobody ever learns anything in Washington, they just recycle the same old stupidities over and over again…
BTW, my guess is that the Egyptian government shut off their Internet the old fashioned way — by sending out cops to every Internet provider and ordering them to pull the power plugs on their routers. Ka-BOOM! Not much to be done about that, but it’d be a nightmare to do it in a nation the size of the US where the telecom industry isn’t run by a single state-owned enterprise…
Apparently the Egyptians sent an order to all and sundry, and then did, in fact, disconnect wires for some functions. It is going to be an expensive, time consuming PITA to reboot everything and get it back on line, because as every field tech and customer service rep knows, no one has any idea where their wiring diagrams are and the server patch panels weren’t planned, they just happened.
If power were the only wires pulled things won’t be too bad, unless people were backing up at the time.
I had an office next to the PBX when I was in law enforcement and it was a pain in the neck, literally, because they kept the sucker at 50 degrees year-round. I hated that thing. It was Rolm based on a Data General mini and the software was terrible to deal with.
As I remember it was $30/month for every number when I researched starting a dial-up ISP locally. The cost was absurd.
I have a couple of clients who use the backbone, but not the Web. It was the cheapest way for them to establish the connections they needed for what they do and they have a local ISP who configured the system for them. If the ‘Net went down they would go under in a month. It would take years to come back if it was down for a week. The “officials” don’t understand what is involved.
OTOH, a lot of the illegal wiretapping would disappear and the Postal Service would have a windfall profit.
It’s Monday in Egypt, let’s see how long the government can hold out against the business interests.