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Bruce Schneier: Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

posted by takyon on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:07PM   
from the points-of-failure dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/someone-learning-how-take-down-internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.

Sounds like as good a reason as any to develop a more distributed internet. Fight fire with fire - When the attacks are distributed denial of service on centralized systems, the solution is decentralization and distributed delivery of service (P2P).

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Original Submission

• Re:Ignore Schneier (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 16 2016, @02:28AM

  by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Friday September 16 2016, @02:28AM (#402592) Homepage Journal

  "The real question is not whether Bruce Schneier is a moron, but whether he's shilling for a specific state actor"

  Aww, don't do that. I need to believe that not everyone out there is an evil corrupt asshole. I'm still mourning the loss of Elizabeth Warren to the Darkness. Linus, ESR, Snowden, and Bruce Schneier are the last members of the set, Good Guys.

  Well, we all know (or at least are pretty sure) that Bruce Schneier isn't a moron.

  But the question was in two parts and you cut off the second part:

  whether he's shilling for a specific state actor (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that's pushing for less anonymity and more surveillance on the Internet, or if he's genuinely concerned that backbone, root DNS (read: ICANN and its contractors), and other large-scale network providers can handle large, sustained attacks. [emphasis added]

  Personally, I'd be much more likely to believe it's the latter, rather than the former. However, these days, the first part has to be considered, even if it's rejected.

  This bit is rather O/T.

  As for Elizabeth Warren, what did you expect her to do? Support Jill Stein? At this point, (and I know you disagree with me on this) any vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.

  As Heinlein thoughtfully pointed out (as he usually did):

  “Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”

  Donald Trump is that disastrous possible, IMHO.

  --
  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr

  Parent

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