https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-could-take-out-west-internet-gps-back-up-plan-2024-8
The electronic communications and navigation systems the West depends on are vulnerable to Russian attack.
Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it's convinced it can't be harmed.
Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.
Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.
Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.
Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn't be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.
Elon would be very happy.
Im curious… how much undersea cable traffic could Starlink handle? I know the sat-sat laser links are just coming online now, what if every sat had them
And otherwise, you can't eliminate the possibility of local sabotage as well. Most of the important networking information in Sweden was leaked due to our "open information" laws.
It's not like Russia can make it some long-term problem, but being an annoyance and making chaos is their goal.
Maybe the local internet would keep working but the countries wouldnt. Lots of stuff stops working without central web authorities and all international trade and payment systems would collapse. It would be a massive catastrophe. But its probably quite hard to take out everything at once before the militaries of the world would start paying special attention to those cables.
Yeah last time I saw a map of the internet cables it looked like there was quite a lot of redundancy so I'm not convinced they could pull it off fully to be honest.
would Americans even consider that taking down the internet? It wouldn't impact a US client talking to a US server.
Thats not how things on the internet work. It would mostly certainly cause many issues for everyone everywhere. Basic functionality might stay working but not everything has a local copy in the US. We depend on things and people from all over the world to keep things running.
Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?
ohh wait...
I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that's actionable, I have big doubts.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that threat.
They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I'm betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.
I also don't know how well they put up against really large lasers
They've also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.
They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.
Where though? They just gonna fly enough jammers up into orbit to cover the entire path and all the satelites and pretend thats not going to also jam every navagation satelite including their own and China, their biggest allys? I don't see it.
Blowing up the GPS satellites is certainly an option and there's not much we could do to stop them. We know that China has succesfuly tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007. I would not be surprised if Russia was working on the technology at the same time. If they can't or don't want to blow up the satellites, then they could perhaps launch their own jamming satellites to orbit near the existing GPS satellites would work.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you don't need to jam them. Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn't know which signals were legit.
The Soviet Union proved that it was able to shoot down satellites in the 60s. The technical difficulty of hitting a satellite with a missile is not really an obstacle here
Yeah, the Soviet union could also mass produce tanks and planes. Russia today...
Glances at Ukraine
Is using almost exclusively Soviet stock.
It may not be a problem technology wise, but do they really have the equipment today to blow up dozens of satellites?
I seriously doubt it, Russia isn't the Soviet Union, they seem less capable, and corruption would probably have undermined the program even if it still existed.
And even if they can, can they also do it without harming their own and China's geopositioning systems?
And even if they can, can they also do it without harming their own and China's geopositioning systems?
Nope, they can't. And not only that, destroying that many satellites is almost assuredly going to trigger Kessler Syndrome and lock out space for the most part for a good long while.
Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn't know which signals were legit.
Do this, then get absolutely raw dog fucked by the US (and any other competent) military, who has absolutely no issue with ground nav or weapons guidance because they all use encrypted GPS signals.
You don’t need satellites in space to shift GPS, they’ve been messing with it in war zones for years, and AWACS like planes could do it in real time anywhere they won’t get shot down.
China doing it in 2007 was big news because they joined the club. The West and Russia has had the capability for decades.
Jam some strategic locations, like air travel hubs or highly populated areas for the highest impact. No need to jam wide open low population areas without military targets.
Real curious how Russia plans to get jamming equipment the size of a truck into those areas
I also just don't see anyone in Russia deciding that were going to trigger article 5 by using a jammer on US soil. The risk reward is non existent unless they can make the whole country GPS and internet dark at the same time. Imagine that many resources going on the ground in a country as large as America. It's basically asking Ukraine to regain any territory they had a counter invasion plan ready for.
That's easy you just drive the truck into the area. It's when you turn it on that's the issue. You're going to meet a lot of people very fast.
The jamming equipment could be the size of a briefcase; the received signal is below the noise floor.
Or it could be one satellite already in the air beaming to a specific area. Or a constellation of satellites already in the air who handoff coverage of a specific area. Or a hack of an existing satellite constellation command and control channel to reprogram the transmitters to cover up GPS L band.
I was just pointing out that it isn't necessary to jam 100% of GPS to have a massive impact. The odds that Russia could pull anything off is pretty small, and jamming GPS for more than a few hours is evenless likely.
Triggering NATO collective defense so they can deploy a jammer on US soil doesn't seem to be what they're threatening, and they're already been using jammers in Ukraine. So either theyre threatening to do something they can't do or theyre threatening to do something they're already doing, and already being countered, in a new place.
Which they do. Not on a global scale, though.
It is quite annoying to be Russia's neighbours. But you can work around it. In fact, it's not bad to train yourself to operate without GNSS. And it would be even better if the jammers decided to spontaneously combust.
Yeah?
And we'd retaliate. Which is why they haven't done it. They didn't shoot down the satellites in the cold war and they aren't going to do it now unless they've decided the world without satellites is just so much better.
How is this news? China could nuke the West Coast tomorrow and the Canadians might invade Maine to secure a maple syrup monopoly! Actually, that's more likely than anything else in this thread...
Maine should just be part of New Brunswick but your decorators could never match the right shade of pink
I need to give you one more chance to retract, no questions asked. Before this conversation becomes a confrontation.
Edit: Just an American quoting a Canadian show to you. Nothing actually confrontational about it. In fact, everyone who responds with a quote from the same show gets an updoot.
Like bro do you even BGP?
BGP works under assumption that everyone involved acts in good faith and that good faith can be, and in specific cases in history was, severely abused.
So it is likely it will be part of the problem.
So Ivan Sabotageovich calls up someone who works at Level3
Says "Hey broski I want you to start announcing bogus BGP routes"
Guy who answers the phone says "What? Why would I do that?"
Guy on the phone says "I'll give you rubles"
Guy who answers the phone says my brother in Christ I make $175k per year and I will get fired and they'll fix it in about 25 minutes anyway, sorting out and fixing stuff like this is kind of why people like me are employed here and there are a lot of us watching what happens
Guy on the phone says I can also give you TONS of unrefined crude oil and methane, or precision aircraft parts from the 1990s
Guy who answers says I need to go now, good luck though
Guy on the phone says blyat as the line goes dead
No, Ivan will just announce "hey, I have direct link into these ASs" and lot of parties will believe him, consider him shortest route and send him lot of traffic intended for said ASs.
That's what china did in 2010 when they hijacked about 15% of all world's traffic.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=mca
... for 18 minutes
With their existing infrastructure in the US which Russia doesn't have
And it was detected (and was trivial to fix once detected it sounds like) even before people were particularly alerted to this as a possibility
Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted? It's absolute chaos. That's all they want. They aren't trying to absolutely isolate Internet from the US and it's allies, we have all kinds of satellite backups for things like that.
I mean you are correct that things like this are a shit show if you are directly involved, but my point is that the wider world can continue fairly unimpeded. Unless they have some kind of magic backhoe that can cut every backbone cable all at once or something, I think the impact in terms of bringing the West's telecommunications to its knees is going to be more or less nil.
All they need is to send subs around and attach charges ahead of time and blow them all at once. The problem is the time constraints of figuring out exactly where the cables got cut. I believe they have somewhat solved this, but I don't think it's bulletproof. The chaos is really the goal though.
Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted?
I have. Usually.the network tries to route around it, with best effort delivery. This keeps the outage localized and is part of network standards. You can expect delay, though. I guess I don't see what you're getting at.
You're just talking about route healing. They mean to disrupt long standing communications, which doesn't resolve itself in the same way. BGP works fine for peered connections, but not at a global scale like this. It can take many hours and lots of manual intervention to quiet things down. Do that a few times at regular intervals, and it could be days.
I've worked international voice and data networks and I can't imagine the number of points of presence they would have to hit in your dream scenario. They simply couldn't do it without going to war, when this effort would give way to plans of survival.
That's kind of their point. They do dumb shit like to provoke and prod. They've been randomly jamming GOS for years for no reason, and cutting these cables as well. It's just a flexnto let people know if it comes to that, then they might do something. It's the same reason they run their subs just loud enough to be detected around the north seas, and then go silent.
You don't understand. They're just talking shit. They are very aware of what they have to do to start a war with the west. Yet they don't because they know that it'll last 20 minutes.
Yes, you are saying the same thing I am. Not sure why you're even replying. It's a flex.
No one takes them seriously, they just bark. Here's a hilarious wiki article on all the red lines Russia set in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_lines_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
Date notified: February 24, 2022
Red line: “Interference” in Ukraine by outside powers
Date broken: February 24, 2022
This one send me flying.
It's like a mini MAAD...
To Putin, any significant threat to his power in Russia is destruction. Ukraine is making inroads as I type this, if they get too far into Russia, it could dominoe into Putin losing power.
If it ever actually looks close to that, he ain't going to be attacking Internet cables, he'll be launching nukes.
But once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us. So he needs an intermediate step that he could do and would fuck a bunch of shit up by doing, but it's not a nuclear bomb.
once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us
No, it really isn't. Nuclear winter and the idea of thousands of Tsar Bombas belongs to the 70s. Even in an all out nuclear war today using the full (working? - doubtful regarding Russia) arsenals it would be a catastrophe with hundreds of thousands of dead but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.
I grew up during "duck and cover" and iodine in the cupboard. That's not where we are anylonger.
Also rockets are a pain to maintain, theres a reason the US military is trying to move away from the minutemen over towards gravity controlled nukes. Does anyone think Russia can properly maintain theirs.
Its the fact that my name is vault dweller and not thw fact that my picture is of the Mer remover Pelinal Whitestake.
Anyways my name is a reference to Fallout one which is a lot more depressing about the whole apocalypse thing, tonally its probably closer to a boy and his dog. I dont fear the bomb but I aint welcoming it either.
If life taught me anything it is that all you need to do is hide under your desk, duck, and cover. You can survive anything from a tornado to nuclear holocaust with that one.
So you're saying if the Russians struck Manhattan it would be relatively little impact. You think of the ten thousand nukes the US and Russia have on average will kill less than a hundred people. Or if just Russia, less than two hundred people per.
I think each nuke is tens of thousands of immediate deaths followed by hundreds of thousands of mid to long term radiation fatalities. If we pretend that 25% of their 5000 or so nukes works, that's still 1250 nukes. If each nuke of that 1250 works and kills 100,000 each, that's 125 million people. I don't think this is so far fetched given that a little over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.
I just don't know how a society can recover if the majority of it's urban centers gets nuked and there is residual radiation there for the foreseeable future. Japan recovered because the nukes were small and there was only two sites, and that still caused about 110,000 casualties.
How many submarines do you think they have in the Atlantic and Pacific with nuclear strike capabilities? How many nukes do you think are in range of major north american cities?
Uh, my state would like a word about that....
https://www.kuow.org/stories/the-secret-history-of-nukes-in-washington-state
Puget Sound is home to around one-third of the nation’s active nukes.
For those unaware, Puget Sound contains the largest cities in Washington as well as many dense suburbs.
Also, for revenge as part of mutually assured destruction, targetting empty silos doesn't sound very useful.
You have no idea how interconnected the world is, do you? How reliant the US is on its ports. Not just any place on a coastline is big enough to pull a cargo ship up to, as well as having the infrastructure to unload it and coordinate all that. All they have to do is hose every port capable of handling cargo ships and we are entirely fucked. The cherry on top would be nuking the oil refineries, completely wiping out our ability to move goods even if the ports were open. We will not have enough food to feed the country within a few days. Mass starvation starts a week or so afterwards. Two to three weeks later and at least a quarter or more of Americans will be dead from starvation. Then comes the massive waves of diseases due to all the unburied dead. Inside of two months at least half of America will be dead or dying. More likely to be closer to three-quarters.
All out nuclear is not something we survive.
Then comes the massive waves of diseases due to all the unburied dead.
I think the literal flood of shits due to failed sewer system will hit us first in big cities.
but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.
Congratulations, this is officially the most stupid thing I have read on the internet, ever.
What?
You really need to look up the yields of modern ones compared to what's been used...
Have you? Or have you fallen for russian influence operations?
The ~1500 or so nuclear weapons Russia and the USA have in active service each are mostly much smaller tactical nukes compared to the insane my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours stuff that happened in the 60s.
Putin won't do that. It's been made very clear to him he has 2 choices in that scenario, leave power peacefully for the old dictators home, or attempt to launch his nukes and immediately get yeeted by the USAF. Possibly the USN if he's vacationing near a coastal area. It's been made known to him that he does not have the operational security to keep the CIA from tracking him at all times and that his location would be target number 1 in such a situation.
The internet was literally created by the DoD to have a communication system that was resilient to foreign attacks. If one part of it goes down, it can still work with the parts that aren't down. This is built into the design.
Nope. Usually this claim includes some reference to nuclear war, but the Internet was not designed to withstand attack. Arpanet was not designed with military applications primarily in mind.
Russia continuing to signal why it's a good idea to take them out. Thanks, Russia!
They’re afraid to use their glide bombs in Kursk because they’re not accurate enough to avoid hitting their own friendlies and they think they can hit a satellite moving ten of thousand + miles an hour in orbit!? lol
For real. People talking like Russia is going to jam GPS or something, while they can’t even jam GPS or RF well enough to prevent FPV drones from slamming in to their own people. I just saw a video of a Ukrainian FPV drone taking out a Russian EW platform that’s purpose built to counter drones for fucks sake.
Edit - oh. This statement was from Medvedev back in June. lol ok bro. How you gonna run those sub generators you need to fuck with those cables when all your diesel is currently burning off in a fucking epic conflagration? Your country is literally cooked rn.
"We could totally fuck you up if we wanted."
"Go ahead and do it then."
"..."
"I'm waiting."
"...I do not want to."
In the Julia Roberts move "Leave the World Behind", they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.
i feel like taking down the internet is harder than it sounds. you could easily disrupt satellite, but the world will route around this... its actually designed for it.
they would have to poison dns or major routing points somehow.
Cut communication trunks to knock out the internet in wide areas should still be an option since storms cause those outages for non-wireless internet now. DDOS and other atracks can still overwhelm wireless communications.
But honestly it is unlikely that being technically possible would be as successful in practice as a widespread attack as most places have a lot of redundancy built in because these kinds of threats have been around for decades.
Or it begets a second renaissance where everyone get their noses away from screens (me included) and start fixing shit.
Not really. We had a country before the internet, we'd just fall back on that. It would be painful but very doable.
That's hilarious bro this putin guy needs his own stand up special he's probably got a million of these
The Russians talk shit everyday. It ends up that it's either something that they can't technically do, as it is here, or something that would would result in having their ass handed to them.
