[HN Gopher] The Internet during world war
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The Internet during world war
Author : ifelsehow
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-12-09 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oecd-forum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oecd-forum.org)
| tehchromic wrote:
| Fascinating. I think that the capacity of nuclear weapons and MAD
| decreased the likelihood of future world wars to so low as to be
| effectively none.
|
| But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking
| place entirely in the data/communications realm.
| nerdix wrote:
| I think future World Wars are definitely possible with a few
| caveats:
|
| 1. There can be nuclear combatants but the fighting is
| primarily on the soil of non-nuclear countries.
|
| 2. Because of #1, the war more like World War 1 than in World
| War 2: some sort of peace treaty that doesn't stipulate
| unconditional surrender. There is no regime change nor post-war
| occupation of nuclear powers.
|
| 3. There is an unprecedently high level of communication
| between the nuclear combatants as both sides try to reassure
| the other that they aren't going to unilaterally launch nukes
| (there may be nuclear brinksmanship in public though as
| propaganda tool. Backchannels will be all about nuclear
| deescalation)
| kristopolous wrote:
| The policy suggestions are fine but the reasons are kind of
| silly.
|
| I've never been in a conflict zone but I'd assume securing food
| and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a distant
| nice to have and cell phone or wifi signal? I'm guessing that's a
| no.
|
| Decentralize, increase redundancy, eliminate single points of
| failure, sure all good.
|
| But if we're really talking about internet like communication
| during wars then I would assume what we need to talk about is
| off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build
| outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing
| resources, etc. Without those you aren't going to have a phone
| that turns on or connects to a tower.
|
| Maybe this is a marketing play to sell things we should be doing
| (like community networks) to people who otherwise wouldn't
| listen. If that's the approach than best of luck
| walrus01 wrote:
| > I've never been in a conflict zone but I'd assume securing
| food and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a
| distant nice
|
| This is very wrong, everything NATO/ISAF related excepting the
| _absolutely_ smallest temporary COP and FOB in Afghanistan had
| at minimum one basic VSAT terminal with IP link to the outside
| world.
|
| You can't have modern C4I systems without data links. Note that
| a lot of what was implemented was not actually "The internet"
| as we know it, though there was lots of commercial DIA, there's
| plenty of ways to use two-way satellite capacity for entirely
| private networks.
|
| The above was a firm rule and ground truth even 15-17 years
| ago, in the latter stages of the conflict (before the US lost
| political will to continue in 2021, _Thanks, Trump and Pompeo
| and Biden_...) data links for anything military related were
| even more crucial.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You seem to be assuming "there is a world war" means
| "everywhere is a full scale conflict zone", which it doesn't.
| In reality, the severity of fighting will vary significantly.
| Some areas may face challenges with food / water, other areas
| won't. While the power grid may not be reliable in some places,
| generators, solar power and local power generation will mean
| that most people will have some level of access to power.
|
| One of the points the article is making is that stuff like
| "off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build
| outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing
| resources, etc" will be important in areas with active fighing
| / bombardment, many other areas may face entirely different
| types of challenges.
|
| Do we have a process for quickly revoking CA certs owned by
| enemy countries? Do we have locally hosted mirrors for
| important content / services / tools that are hosted across
| undersea cables? The internet has been more and more integrated
| into our work lives and it does bear some thought to make those
| systems more resilient so the economy can maintain some level
| of functionality in a world war.
| retrac wrote:
| It is not feasible to either fight a war or do basic things
| like ship food without communications.
|
| During World War II, to coordinate the UK and United States war
| efforts, at the peak several thousands of teletype channels,
| were in continuous operation across the Atlantic (something
| like ~10 kilobytes of text per second) and priority mail
| shipments by plane (often shrunk to microfiche to reduce
| weight) were measured in the tonnes per week. The Allies even
| spent around a billion dollars (inflation-adjusted) to create
| an implausibly-complicated system [1] to allow encrypted voice
| communication between high officials over shortwave. Allowing
| FDR and Churchill to speak real-time, even just for a few
| minutes a week, was considered just that important. And back
| then, they were used to doing things with much less
| coordination from afar.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't think GP was downplaying the importance of
| communication for waging a war, I think they were saying
| civilian internet access would not be feasible during a war.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| > The SIGSALY terminal was massive, consisting of 40 racks of
| equipment. It weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of
| power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it. Too
| big and cumbersome for general use, it was only used for the
| highest level of voice communications.
|
| And now I can whip something similar in one afternoon, and
| run it on my phone. Nuts.
| taneliv wrote:
| It's an interesting thought experiment! What would happen if
| electricity ceased suddenly.
|
| If there was no electricity where I am at, the apartment would
| soon start to cool down. It is right now something like -6degC
| outside. I think it would take some days to cool down to that
| level.
|
| Electricity keeps my food refrigerated and frozen, both at home
| and in the shop. Well, I should put the frozen food out on the
| balcony (and cover them up so that they don't melt if the sun
| shines during the day).
|
| Kitchen oven and stove, and water kettle run on electricity.
| There would be very little cooking going on! Not to mention
| that electricity is needed to pump water from the ground level
| up to the apartment. So I should to fill all available
| containers with snow and take them inside to melt (before the
| apartment temperature drops below freezing).
|
| Seems like loss of electricity would mean loss of heat, water
| and food in rapid order. It's difficult to imagine this loss to
| be very localized, so my neighbours would likely be suffering
| the same, perhaps the whole suburb. Without apartment or street
| lights less reliable members of the community might try to take
| advantage of the situation. Perhaps not, it's not a
| particularly restless environment. More resourceful members
| might come up with solutions to problems, but I can imagine the
| situation to be quite chaotic.
|
| Without communication channels I can't ask if a friend or
| family member can support me, or if they need support. Or
| indeed if it is safe to move, and if so, how and where. Lack of
| street and even apartment lights might be a challenge to many
| and make traffic overall quite a bit more dangerous.
|
| I don't know how reliable electricity would need to be. But
| some reasonable level of access to electricity is definitely
| more important than nice to have.
| jldugger wrote:
| > If there was no electricity where I am at, the apartment
| would soon start to cool down. It is right now something like
| -6degC outside. I think it would take some days to cool down
| to that level.
|
| I mean, I lived this during finals week in college. During
| the day solar heating helps some. At night, with good
| insulation in the home it'll take some time to match outdoor
| temps, and a winter rated sleeping bag helps at night. One of
| my idiot roommates was using a sleeping bag as a comforter
| and complained at how cold it was on night 1. After I pointed
| out what the zipper was for, he reported it was toasty warm
| on night 2. You can do the same thing without a zipper, its
| just slightly less effective.
|
| Also helps: the water heater runs on gas. So you can take a
| warm shower. In the dark, since most bathrooms have no
| windows, just exhaust fans. But the furnace, while it needs
| gas to heat, required electricity to move air. I'm not sure
| why, but water mains don't usually freeze despite the usually
| cold winters (though indoor plumbing requires certain
| precautions in the cold).
|
| Cellphone towers usually have some batteries and backup plans
| in these situations, which was less useful back then before
| data plans existed, but meant you could still reach friends
| in case their power was on.
|
| Finally: emergency generators are a thing. So as long as it
| isn't so cold that diesel freezes, emergency services will be
| available to the community in a school or something. In cold
| climates there are enough of these that in the lead up to the
| ice storm that caused the mess there were PSA campaigns to
| get them tested and vetted ahead of time -- if you just
| energize the lines without installing a cutoff switch, it can
| kill line workers trying to repair.
| kristopolous wrote:
| power outage is a common condition of modern institutional
| planning exercises.
| lazide wrote:
| What you're talking about is worst case support, which while
| important, is not typically required all the time.
|
| Portable battery packs and generators, or power on sometimes,
| but not all the time would be normal.
|
| Same with internet/ISP connections.
|
| Cellphone towers and WiFi would _usually_ work, unless there is
| a big offensive going on at the time, etc.
|
| That means a lot of the less severe stuff is worth talking
| about too.
| numpad0 wrote:
| What the war in Ukraine and protests in China have showed the
| world is, democracy in desperate times survive on Wi-Fi,
| AirDrop'd screenshots, and dozens of single port phone chargers
| hanging off power strips.
|
| They don't even bother to use multi-port chargers, let alone DC
| to DC converters, or cars rigged for power generation. Not to
| mention open-source encrypted software-defined self healing
| mesh network microwave radio protocols.
|
| Maybe wartime is not the best to introduce alternative
| infrastructure that are inherently new; maybe only what's there
| peacetime works.
|
| And if that is the case, what we would need might be such items
| as, sideloadable resilient mesh apps for teenagers, appliance-
| fied server for game sessions in University dorms, and parallel
| chargers for camping.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Your first assumption is wrong. Food and water are necessities,
| of course, but you can survive without either for days (outside
| of extreme weather environments) and they're also very
| portable. Communications are an urgent and ongoing need, for
| military actors and civilians. Without them you are not only in
| a bad situation, you have little idea of where to go. Military
| communications manuals contemplate up to 5 levels of
| communication for different contexts, from wraparound digital
| services to smoke signals and the use of secret symbols for
| identification/navigation.
|
| You are right about communications infrastructure, which is a
| favored target in any militarized conflict. Mesh networking
| offers a workaround to communications breakdown, albeit at the
| cost of bandwidth and deployment effort. LoraWAN devices are
| quite cheap at the margin (under $10 in bulk) but hardening,
| powering, and installing them is labor-intensive, to put it
| mildly.
| gz5 wrote:
| Needs to be looked at from all angles including:
|
| + Shared physical infra Trans-oceanic cables being the most
| fragile. However, the risk here would not immediately be of the
| power-food-shelter variety. Satellite-based comms will
| potentially add resiliency. Intra-region (depending on the
| region), there is less fragility (more independent fibers), and
| emergency tactics such as P2P mesh networks aided by swarms of
| drones, balloons, satellites becomes interesting.
|
| + Shared software infra Because my network talks to your network,
| and/or leverages common (or at least sometimes cascading)
| structures like DNS, NTP, shared BGP routing tables, what risks
| do I have? How could I mitigate them proactively? What would I do
| in an emergency which wouldn't have worse consequences (trade-
| offs are fine)? This category of risks can be difficult in that
| the events might not be obvious at first (unlike most physical
| infra events), but that could make it worse...
| walrus01 wrote:
| Sort of a related tangent to the "the internet was designed by
| ARPA to survive nuclear war" trope that is trotted out
| occasionally...
|
| It's NOT that the Internet specifically was designed or intended
| for this, it was a research network. The pre-existing AT&T Long
| Lines network which carried telephone traffic around the US48
| states also carried the DoD's AUTOVON network data links for
| their own phone system, and data links between things like SAGE
| direction centers.
|
| Many of the cold war era hardened AT&T Long Lines bunkers,
| underground sites, special buried mountaintop sites and such all
| pre-date the earliest days of the ARPANET.
|
| There's mountain top long lines sites out there now that couldn't
| be duplicated for less than $50 million. Money was thrown at this
| in quite a profligate manner - same as money was spent on various
| early generations of ICBMs, strategic air command 24x7x365
| standby and patrols, the DEW line, and such.
|
| In the era before inter-city singlemode fiber optic cables were a
| real operational reality these places were absolutely crucial.
|
| The data links between sites in many cases rode on top of these
| networks in the earliest days of IP.
| iisan7 wrote:
| Valid points, although risks seem to depend on the scale. A
| worldwide conflict would have different risks than two-state
| conflict. I don't see any reflection in the article or linked
| materials on the lessons from Ukraine, and the potential role of
| satellite internet in bridging localized infrastructure gaps.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I don't think many lessons about a potential world war could be
| gleaned from Ukraine. A world war is going to necessarily pull
| in all of the major powers which means that there won't be a
| single front, navy and air force will be involved and strikes
| deep into territory on all sides will happen via missile,
| bombers, and drones. In short, it would be chaotic and fast
| moving with destruction happening everywhere. The involvement
| of satellites is terrifying since they would be a prime target
| and would likely be one of the first major casualties.
| pjscott wrote:
| There are over 3000 satellites in the Starlink network alone.
| How many anti-satellite missiles are there? Would taking out
| all those satellites be worth the cost?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| how much time have you spent fantasizing about this
| s5300 wrote:
| Eh, somebody has to, or eventually bad things will happen.
| Impossible to know the statistics of how useful it actually
| is, but every governments military has entire divisions
| dedicated to simulating war.
|
| I think one of said divisions are the reason we _didn't_
| end up having a nuclear exchange, as he knew the chips
| running the computer were pretty old & due for
| replacement. One day said computer says "enemy nukes
| incoming" completely out of the blue & with no real ongoing
| geopolitical tensions... I think his higher ups nearly made
| the decision to order him to press the red button, but he
| put his years of knowledge & faith in the fact the computer
| radar whatever was malfunctioning & nukes hadn't actually
| been launched.
|
| He was right. If he hadn't fantasized about this scenario &
| known the ins & outs of the technology involved? Well, the
| world might've been fucked decades ago.
|
| I realize what I've said isn't entirely relevant to your
| reply, but some external perspective never hurts. Make fun
| of all the people who do have to worry about what might
| happen in modern war, & they may just become jaded enough
| to say "fuck it, these people are dicks anyways" & press
| the red button, knowing they'll all be disappearing with
| him.
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