HN Reader

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 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.)

It routes around damage just fine. It doesn’t magically create extra capacity to handle cuts unless the capacity was built out already. Just in time capacity thinking has its downsides.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42198635

> The scarier part is that, while we don’t see capacity issues, we are blind on what would happen if another link would be severed, or worse, if many are severed

An actual attack would be capacity based, but xx% of the internet is Netflix, Disney etc. you can DNS block these. Then unless it's a war zone like Yemen quickly fix it.

News, Messager, websites, VoIP, Zoom (probably) should all work fine on minimal capacity. Just like we throw out a lot of food because we have redundancy, 4K streaming is our redundancy.

It'd be interesting to see a write up by a non-insane person, so not HN users or cyber security 'experts' or military consultants.

TikTok is a vital part of the Ukraine war for Ukraine for instance, but mostly the video gets out and then is organized for the external audience.

4K internet might not "Route Around Damage", 720p might?

I was on jersey island when they lost 3 out of 4 cables. Didn’t notice a thing.

Then again that place was wired up with all fibre infra like it’s nobody’s business even a decade ago so perhaps not surprising.

Best residential internet I’ve ever personally seen.

I have workloads on hetzner data centers in Finnland and Germany. Hetzner owns part of that cable, to connect those sites.

Tracerout gives me a path like this spine5.cloud2.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core22.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core5.fra.hetzner.com -> core53.sto.hetzner.com -> core31.hel1.hetzner.com

Which is worse than before, but still works for me.