Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts
labs.ripe.net64 points by voytec 13 hours ago
64 points by voytec 13 hours ago
By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.
As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.
There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.
I thought Gilmore was referring to the earlier idea that the Internet could survive a nuclear war. https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/
I don't think there would have been a straightforward way to connect that to the effects of censorship.
It turns out that flooding your own lies is far more effective than trying to censor information.
Yep. The internet is an infinite copy machine. All you have to do is copy the lies an order of magnitude more than the truth, and Bob’s your uncle (whether you’re related to Bob or not).
I have started quoting the robustness principle when people ask me what my politics are.
A counter point to this adage in modern times is that censorship seems to spread as a result of users sharing content across platforms with varying levels of moderation. I've seen many examples of "shorts" being shared on FB or Instagram which originated from TikTok and which feature heavy use of either euphemism (eg. "unalived" instead of "murdered") or even explicitly silenced language.
Platforms which do not heavily moderate content will nonetheless still have heavily self-censored content as a result of users being conditioned by other platforms into self-censorship.
I think it was late 2012 or early 2013 when I was in India (Hyderabad) at a time when an earthquake in the Mediterranean Sea cut I think it was SEA-WE-ME 3. The internet was terrible for the next two weeks, until the cable was repaired: almost half the internet flat-out didn’t work, including most USA hosts. I have no idea why communication between India and the USA, which should head east, was affected by a break to the west in the Mediterranean. I do know that local ISPs often have fairly dodgy peering arrangements.
My workaround was to tunnel via my own VPS in Singapore, as I could connect to it and but I was using OpenVPN back then and performance was pretty terrible. (Now if I want such tunnelling I use WireGuard, and it’s much better.)
We'd really need traceroutes (ideally bidirectional) from before, during, and after the break to diagnose your issues :P
But, even if your traffic was going east, with the broken cable to the east, there might be a lot more traffic going east (or coming from the east), and that could cause a lot of breakage.
For better or worse (mostly for worse), BGP doesn't propagate capacity of links, so it doesn't matter if there are alternate routes, if the overloaded route has the most desirable advertisement, it gets the traffic even if most of the packets are dropped into the sea.
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Why are they giving free analysis to the enemy?
That’s just a necessary hazard that comes with providing free analysis to the public.
Also, let's just assume that a bad actor would have access to reasonably sized and geographically distributed botnet... they could easily run their own global connectivity tests to get a good picture of what the actual impact of their actions were.