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.
https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/09/08...
"When fake news hit Abraham Lincoln"
When Rupert tried to lie about voting machines, he was fined couple of hundred mils. All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever.
What about a courier that knows it is delivering bombs? We should look past that too?
Which principles are you invoking exactly?
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...
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 have noticed that some users on Imgur will make an effort to de-censor content though (e.g. re-adding the censored text in a screenshot)
as it is seen in 2024: "the net interprets economic profit as imperative, and routes toward it." next-hops will frequently be FAANG, some faceless CDN, or the cloudflare protection grotto.
Cost for the route has been supplanted in favour of cost for the shareholder.
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.
Mildly amusing to say this had a direct, measurable impact on me? Absolutely. Something to lose sleep over? Maybe in some extremely niche situations.
Now I don't know what their peering agreements look like, but it seems like they normally route everything through Frankfurt's internet exchange and now have to take some different routes.
I suspect that the costs of moving extra bits through other cables is not large. I would assume that Hetzner (and the other companies that own parts of these cables) have peering agreements with other companies and that most of them will not try and take advantage of the cut cables to renegotiate their peering agreements (2). So whatever rates they paid before will still be paid.
1: Because a war creates a problem for the risk pool, it is one of the things that actually can destroy huge amounts of property simultaneously, so it is a risk explicitly separated out and basically impossible to insure against, at least in the US commercial market.
2: Too risky to start renegotiating when your cable can be cut just as easily the next time.
10:13 presents details involving sabotage throughout Europe as well as states choosing to not disclose to their public about the nature of what is happening to avoid spooking their citizens https://youtu.be/6KVnJqaBsnk?t=613&si=8lgB4A7x2fSmJC4N
NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer discusses what he is at liberty to disclose to Arctic nations https://youtu.be/DjpALbzKdJM?si=b4uU2KZ18JlNW5wf
I’m willing to trust what he’s saying verses online discourse where individuals will never have the level of insight as someone in his position.
Think about the MV Dali that crashed into the bridge in Baltimore. Was that an act of war by Singapore against the United states? Six people actually died in that case.
Who would claim what depends on who benefits from what type of claim, I expect.
UNCLOS Article 113 seems to say (to this non-lawyer) that the merchant ship operating country is responsible for punishment, and the only protection is if the mariners can prove that they "acted merely with the legitimate object of saving their lives or their ships, after having taken all necessary precautions to avoid such break or injury." Article 114 says that the merchant ship owner is responsible for the cost of repairs.
So that means, if it can be proven that Yi Peng 3 was responsible for this, then it's going to be on the Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Company to pay, and the PRC to punish. From what I have been able to find, that is a small shipping company with just two ships, one of which is currently unable to operate due to being stuck in the Kattegat. I suspect that means that not much money would be available from that direction, and so I wonder if the insurance companies would be on the hook for whatever excess costs are born by the various companies.
Russia/China/US would I’m sure like to keep plausible deniability here, as it minimizes outright repercussions (for everyone), while still keeping the option on the table for them to tit-for-tat.
It wouldn’t surprise me if any insurance involved (which surely wouldn’t pay out in event of war) would want to claim it was an act of war.
Anyone trying to claim against such insurance would want to claim it wasn’t an act of war (just a mistake), so they could get the payout.
So maybe, in the end, is a Hetzner competitor who profits from those "cable cuts". /s Just follow the money.
What if these cuts were meant to route traffic through a specific network to intecept data?
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.
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.)
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.
You jest, but RIPE Atlas may have that data.
Even back in 2012, us-east was huge.
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?
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc791 calls it precedence
Precedence
111 - Network Control
110 - Internetwork Control
101 - CRITIC/ECP
100 - Flash Override
011 - Flash
010 - Immediate
001 - Priority
000 - Routine
The bits ended up being reassigned for service codes. mainly because nobody used them. I also suspect there would be problems with a priority system in a peer network like the internet. It works in a more managed network(like the army) where strict priority control can be enforced. but it would probably be an arms race when one peer starts setting their priority a notch higher so their messages start getting through better on a congested link.