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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.
Physical destruction
A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. "You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity." On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center "healed" as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.
However, while it's essentially impossible to cripple connectivity internally in a country, Clark said it is conceivable that one country could block another's access to its share of the Internet cloud; this could be done by severing the actual cables that carry Internet data between the two countries. Thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables that convey data from continent to continent rise out of the ocean in only a few dozen locations, branching out from those hubs to connect to millions of computers. But if someone were to blow up one of these hubs — the station in Miami, for example, which handles some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America — the Internet connection between the two would be severely hampered until the infrastructure was repaired.
Such a move would be "an act of cyberwar," Clark told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
Content cache
Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A "hard" copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations.
Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA.
This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar. For example, if power were cut to a server, you may be unable to reach a website on its home server, but you mayfind a cached version of the content stored on another, accessible server. Or, "If you wanted data that was not available from a server in country X, you may be able to get substantively the same data from a server in country Y," Lehr said.
Internet arms race
The redundancy of so much online content and of connectivity routes makes the Internet resilient to physical attacks, but a much more serious threat to its status quo existence is government regulation or censorship. In the early days of Egypt's Arab Spring uprising, the government of Hosni Mubarak attempted to shut down the country's Internet in order to cripple protesters' ability to organize; it did this by ordering the state-controlled Internet Service Provider (ISP), which grants Internet access to customers, to cut service.
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Add CommentI wrote a little about this on my blog: http://temporalrelativity.blogspot.com Day 20 . The problem is that even though it might not be able to be physically destroyed, it can be sectioned and dismantled piece by piece and limit access to the greater group of people. it can also be corrupted and manipulated. The SOPA PIPA shelving is a win, but at what cost will they retaliate??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember Usenet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere you could use rn, nn, or tin, and have a really effective killfile, and simply not see the 90 percent of the content that's crap, and see only what you wanted?
No ads. No trolls. Some effort required maintaining killfiles.
Tried to read a newsgroup lately, say one in the sci. hierarchy?
Ask your Internet service provider if they're planning on maintaining the servers and continuing to keep Usenet available -- or are they quietly degrading service, slowing down, and expecting you to go get that somewhere else.
Why? Because it's not controllable. Yes, it's been infested by file-swappers, in some newsgroups.
But if it's not maintained -- once the Web is locked down by copyright and advertising -- where will you go?
Fidonet?
In theory, the author is correct, governments taxing connectivity too high or simply controlling connectivity and turning it off could happen. But in the end, demand will dictate solutions and someone somewhere will simply build a new way to connect everyone. Especially with taxing or pricing issues, especially in America. The geeks of america would simply build a new internet, probably joined up with the geeks of japan, korea, russia and other places until a new internet bypassing the traditional ISPs and government is in place. So in the end, the internet cant really be destroyed or dismantled. At best it can be blocked for a short period of time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA rose is a rose is a rose. Within weeks parallel networks would pop up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore importantly the USA is not the world. The technology is pan world. Disruption in Manhatten did not have any real impact on more than a 10th of 1% of the world. The tsunami in Japan was largely irrelevent to internet function even in Japan.
If congress lets the "Content Providers" have there way,sooner than later,they will choke out any creativity that might have a chance of developing,i just wish people will accept a reasonable profit and let the Internet continue to grow without restrictions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich is exactly why we should be actively pursuing the creation of an official "bill of rights" for the internet. Since our rights apparently don't extend to us when we're on the internet, we MUST layout our specific rights for when we are. Then we will be able to create laws that do not trample those rights.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome official, and at best international Internet Bill of Rights is indeed necessary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only positive thing about SOPA is that they showed that Internet is not taken for granted, and the world (or any single country) can easily slide backwards into pre-internet age.
East Asia shows that music, entertainment and innovation industries can thrive without US-style copyright protection. But man, what a cry that a handful of U.S. companies must change their business models.
The internet, by changing the way people communicate, has changed the way a generation thinks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat change cannot be undone. Attempts to strike at its root now would be too little, too late for those powers feeling threatened.
No 'international' bill of rights is needed or desired. Political correctness would frenzy. The less the Internet is managed, the better. 'Protecting' the voice of the Internet would soon become 1984 double speak.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbsence of ads, trolls and kerfuffles has its attractive value. I think we might have the internet physically protected and protected in software inside of international trade relations; related, I think humanity might be extremely consciously motivated to stay together while we conversationally clean up some past messes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSOPA was bad, but the new threat of ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement)is an order of magnitude worse: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/23/if-you-thought-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome forget that government paved the way for many creative enterprises in many ways. Police/military/fire protection, schools, roads, public communications, air quality, health matters, etc. etc. etc.. Every citizen benefits from the other citizens taxes to get to the point where they can branch out on their own with innovation and creativity. The rub begins when someone gets greedy in the position that society has allowed them to be in. It gets worse when they use their wealth to create and circumvent fair laws (including tax law) and a fair political system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of these people use their influence to form copyright laws, which protect the wealth that society allowed them to gather. If copyright/patent laws take into consideration a fair profit, they are good laws. If they protect excessive profit and greed by a few...well, they need to be restricted. It is easy to see why a socialist or communist country would not feel protective of patents or copyrights of greedy individuals. A fair profit from hard work is acceptable. Ripping your neighbor off by manipulating laws in order to protect greed and pass it on to your beneficiaries is not.
The hacker who gives back to society what it is rightly owed is looked on as a modern hero by many. Sure the diamond toothed obscenity spraying rap artist needs to be protected to have his say in social matters, and make millions doing it. Even Wikileaks has its place, if the press is so thoroughly manipulated by internal pressures and politics to the point where truth is withheld, god bless the hacker that creates transparency.
The difficulty is in setting a fair profit for the creative/innovative improvements. If the piracy act protects greed, without taking into account society's contributions to the inventor, it is a bad law.
It is a shame that the US courts forbid the uploading of millions of books for our children and grandchildren to learn from, while other countries welcomed the opportunity to share the knowledge. Not uploading school books is costing millions and effectively blocking thousands of motivated students from learning opportunities, much the same as not putting our best, most productive teachers online where thousands can be taught at once.
Thank goodness for books should be free, and the Khan Academy where online education is readily available for the motivated. They along with the big shot camera building site (80 language worldwide interaction), will move the quality of life forward regardless of the greed that accompanies the internet overseers.
I think we need to be broader in our definition of "destroy." As an operational matter, you do not need to destroy the internet per se, you need to sharply diminish peoples' willingness to use it, at least for anything of any importance. This is exactly the result of reaching a stage of cyber-insecurity where public, commercial, and individual users grow to be suffiently unsure of the internet's protections that they cease to use the internet for any meaningful transactions. Seems to me, the significance of the STUXNET and others is the real prospect of infections we can never be confident we've killed. Once the infection load reaches a certain level and we have repeated experiences of extirpated infections coming to life again, I think it is quite plausible that much of what we use the internet to do we would cease.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKen Watman
Electric - If a person writes a song, book, poem, or anything else, that article belongs to the author, exclusively, and should. If the author decides to give it away, sell it for a nominal price, or offer it for an exorbitant fee, it is up to the author. No one HAS to buy it, purchase is optional. When a government body tells the author what he/she must charge for their product, the government will soon be telling the author what they can write, and, since the government does nothing without taking the lions share, prices will quickly rise. Let the free market work! If one market has bread at $2 a loaf and another at $1 a loaf, I will buy the $1 loaf this week and next week get the $2 loaf on sale for $.25.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know about any other country but in the
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUSA pretty much anyone can buy some Cat. 5 cable and run a line to the neighbor. They can form a Co-Op and wire up the whole city or county if they want. All they have to do is pay for materials and maintenance and buy the right of way for the main lines. In a true Co-Op the right of way could be built into the member agreement.
No, it could not be destroyed, at least not in this generation. Even if they some how manage to force censorship onto the Internet, which would completely eliminate free speech, there would be free services that would spring up, counteracting in the censorship acts. Meanwhile, I only care about the fastest <a href="http://www.solarus.net">high speed internet wisconsin rapids, wi</a> I can get.
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