[CII] Advocatus Diaboli

[Felix 'FX' Lindner]

Hi,

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009 16:03:19 +0000 bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
> > > 	i challenge your lema that there exists a global Internet
> > > that can
> > > 	-unilaterally- fail, taking out all communications over
> > > IP.
> > 
> > Change the crisis to "major failure of the interconnection
> > dependencies of the Internet." 
> > 
> > It is hard to "take out the Internet." It is feasible to have the
> > interconnection dependencies massively disrupted. This disruption
> > would clear the path to continue with FX's thought experiment. 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 	ok... willing suspension of disbelief.... for now.
> 	I'll note - in passing - that if 99.98%  of the global,
> 	interconnection dependencies of the Internet on a global
> scale, fail - and in the remaining 0.02% of remaining connectivity,
> 	I can reach / communicate with everyone I need to - then the
> 	Internet is not broken - FOR ME.

that's exactly the point: assume it's broken for you and everyone else.

Would you be able, with some considerable efforts of creativity, work,
money and whatnot, to keep functioning as an individual? How about the
place you work at? 

If you can maintain your life (private and work) in the light of such
an event, who can you think of any entity that would absolutely not be
able to? 

What I'm after is a list of such entities, so we can later look at them
and see how "critical" they are. 

An example of the entities that I think would be absolutely unable to
recover by other means of communication is Amazon, both their sales
business and cloud computing business, because they depend on being
reachable.

But do we have any governmental entity that would be equally helpless?

> 	Lets face it - at any given point in time, some parts of the
> Internet are not functionally working/connected  to other parts of
> the Internet. Its -always- partially broken.

That's what we commonly refer to as the Internet being functional.
Just because we assume a full black-out for the experiment doesn't mean
the opposite is a completely connected and working Internet ;)

cheers
FX

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