[HN Gopher] Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike...
___________________________________________________________________
Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)
Author : edward
Score : 149 points
Date : 2024-07-30 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (siliconfolklore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (siliconfolklore.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Obviously applies:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
|
| But who cares?
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool
| consumer451 wrote:
| The interesting thing from the first link is the Studies
| section, which indicates that Betteridge's Law is generally not
| accurate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
| bell-cot wrote:
| True. But referencing his "Law" is still a humorous way to
| summarize an article in an HN comment.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Accurate?
| Spare_account wrote:
| Are All Generalisations False?
| fragmede wrote:
| I mean, basically.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| How about banking infrastructure and data?
|
| (I know I know, the answer is banks are the least of your concern
| after a nuclear war)
| ot1138 wrote:
| Banks would actually be of primary concern after a nuclear war.
| Without them, there would be little economy to speak of.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| No.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| As Al Gore.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Probably not. Most government agencies (e.g. FEMA) aren't
| prepared to handle the aftermath of one let alone backbone
| infrastructure.
|
| In the US, only high ranking government officials and STRATCOM
| are operating during a nuclear attack. Everyone else is on their
| own.
| amelius wrote:
| If it is never tested we can safely assume that no, it doesn't
| work.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Judging from some of the outages I've lived through, the
| Internet or at least the web is not even designed to have a
| billion people using it
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| A solution can have more than one benefit or perceived positive
| outcome.
|
| We were able to use system time between universities and (we
| believed) it could also survive a nuke attack.
| mrighele wrote:
| I don't think that the Internet was created to survive a nuclear
| strike, but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive
| a nuclear strike, that was one of the reason that packet
| switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time,
| circuit switching).
|
| The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication
| network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, and
| while it was not the basis of Arpanet, it probably influenced it.
| Wikipedia [1] is not the best of the sources, but it sums it up
| nicely:
|
| "After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the
| task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could
| maintain communication between end points in the face of damage
| from nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Then, most American
| military communications used high-frequency connections, which
| could be put out of action for many hours by a nuclear attack.
|
| [...]
|
| After proving survivability, Baran and his team needed to show
| proof of concept for that design so that it could be built. [...]
| The result was one of the first store-and-forward data layer
| switching protocols, a link-state/distance vector routing
| protocol, and an unproved connection-oriented transport protocol.
| Explicit detail of the designs can be found in the complete
| series of reports On Distributed Communications, published by
| RAND in 1964.
|
| [...]
|
| The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to
| route around damage.
|
| [...]
|
| In 1969, when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
| started developing the idea of an internetworked set of terminals
| to share computing resources, the reference materials that they
| considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's "On
| Distributed Communications" volumes. The resiliency of a packet-
| switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which
| are used on the Internet, stems in some part from the research to
| develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran
| euroderf wrote:
| AUTODIN preceded it, but ARPANET won out over AUTODIN II.
| esafak wrote:
| The first time I heard of it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network
| user3939382 wrote:
| Packet switching was invented by an American and Brit
| independently IIRC.
| mrighele wrote:
| Yes, the linked article talks also about Donald Davies, which
| influenced more directly Arpanet.
|
| But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed
| switching was a way to make communications more resilient in
| face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at
| least some influence on the birth of the Internet, so if you
| ask me "what is the relation between the Internet and a
| nuclear strike" my first answer is "Paul Baran"
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed
| switching was a way to make communications more resilient
| in face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at
| least some influence on the birth of the Internet_ [...]
|
| From chapter two of _Wizards_ :
|
| > _Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first
| time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND
| a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington,
| he found the RAND reports, which had actually been
| collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques
| Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing
| this experimental network not with survivable
| communications as his main--or even secondary--concern.
| Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues,
| weren't high on Roberts's agenda. But Baran's insights into
| data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early
| 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something
| of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to
| design the network._ [...]
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_
| Sta...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_sci
| ent...
|
| Baran's influence was perhaps in theory and algorithms, not
| in intent/use.
| dboreham wrote:
| For a couple of decades there was a totally independent
| network stack in the UK (JANET) with its own equivalent of
| RFCs and so on. History gets written by the victors.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a
| nuclear strike
|
| There is a lot more to the design of 'the internet' than the
| selection of a packet switched protocol. The early boxes were
| not hardened in any way and were intended to support computer
| timesharing amongst academic researchers. The DoD's C2
| providers themselves rejected the concept of a decentralised
| packet-switched network because 'it would never work'. Which is
| why the relevant theoretical papers were sitting on the shelf
| and available when ARPANET was designed
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I don 't think that the Internet was created to survive a
| nuclear strike, but I think we can say that it was _designed_
| to survive a nuclear strike, that was one of the reason that
| packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at
| the time, circuit switching)._
|
| That cannot be said unless you can cite sources saying so. It's
| been a little while since I read _Wizards_ , but I don't
| remember _any_ mention of nuclear war until Baran 's work at
| RAND is mentioned, which is a couple of chapters in (IIRC).
|
| For Licklider _et al_ it was all about research, collaboration,
| and resource sharing.
|
| > _The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication
| network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, and
| while it was not the basis of Arpanet, it probably influenced
| it._
|
| Baran's work was used in things like queuing theory, but work
| was already underway on ARPAnet before Baran (and Davis in the
| UK) was roped in. In fact it was Davis that pointed out Baran's
| work to the ARPAnet folks:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies
|
| This is all covered in _Where Wizards Say Up Late_.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 1) Robustness in the face of nuclear disaster was one of the
| drivers of packet switching.
|
| 2) Not the only one, though.
|
| 3) It was such a good idea that it grew a life of its own,
| and no one talked about nuclear war anymore.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 1) Only perhaps for Baran. Didn't enter into the equation
| for, e.g., Davies in the UK.
|
| From the Prologue of _Wizards_ :
|
| > _Bob Taylor, the director of a corporate research
| facility in Silicon Valley, had come to the party for old
| times sake, but he was also on a personal mission to
| correct an inaccuracy of long standing. Rumors had
| persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to
| protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack.
| It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to
| become widely accepted as fact._
|
| > _Taylor had been the young director of the office within
| the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
| overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had
| started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most
| peaceful intentions--to link computers at scientific
| laboratories across the country so that researchers might
| share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its
| progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or
| surviving war--never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in
| carrying that knowledge._
|
| > _Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth
| of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an
| established truth. When_ Time _magazine committed the
| error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the
| magazine didn't print it. The effort to set the record
| straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to
| feel like a crank._
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_
| Sta...
|
| I would think that Taylor of all people who know:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_sci
| ent...
|
| From chapter two of _Wizards_ :
|
| > _Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first
| time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND
| a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington,
| he found the RAND reports, which had actually been
| collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques
| Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing
| this experimental network not with survivable
| communications as his main--or even secondary--concern.
| Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues,
| weren't high on Roberts's agenda. But Baran's insights into
| data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early
| 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something
| of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to
| design the network._ [...]
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_sci
| ent...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The Wizards book came along 20+ years after everything
| happened, so all Markoff could do was interview a few
| people.
|
| I said it was ONE of the motivations; not the only one.
| And Bob Taylor was only one of the people involved; there
| were lots of others. Why a bureaucracy decides to support
| something is pretty much impenetrable and lost to
| history.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The Wizards book came along 20+ years after everything
| happened, so all Markoff could do was interview a few
| people._
|
| Are there any interviews or documentation from ARPA or
| the early days of ARPAnet that _do_ say it was about
| nuclear war survival?
|
| Licklider, Taylor, Roberts, Davies in the UK: no one else
| thinking about things in that way from all the reports
| and interviews I've seen. The only one that perhaps seems
| to have had an interest in it seems to have been Baran,
| and he came in later when the ball was already rolling.
|
| > _I said it was ONE of the motivations; not the only
| one._
|
| Okay. Where are the documents and/or interviews of those
| involved in the decision-making and/or implementation
| process stating it was one of the motivations?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't know why you're arguing.
|
| Obviously we're talking about a period where
| documentation is sparse or non-existent, and most of the
| players are dead. Why is this important to you?
| allturtles wrote:
| You're making a historical claim and he's disputing it.
| Is your counterargument is that it was a long time ago so
| we can just make up whatever we want?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| No,the "counter argument" as you put it, is that if you
| only "know" things that come with a link, you have no
| value over an LLM
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Obviously we 're talking about a period where
| documentation is sparse or non-existent, and most of the
| players are dead. Why is this important to you?_
|
| Because if you are going to make a claim it'd be useful
| if you had a citation for it. Because we're as close to
| the events that occurred as is possible, and it's only
| going to get 'worse' as time passes, so we should try to
| get right now.
|
| You say that "all Markoff could do was interview a few
| people". The phrase "few people" is doing a lot of heavy
| lifting: two of those "few" were Herzfeld (who ran ARPA
| at the time) and Taylor (who was in charge of getting
| ARPAnet going). If _they_ didn 't know why ARPA why
| created ARPAnet then who else would?
|
| If there were/are supporting documents, interview, _etc_
| , which show that surviving a nuclear attack was a
| motivation, they should be shared.
|
| I don't necessarily care _what_ the motivations were, but
| I 'd rather not folks repeating hand-wavy claims that
| don't seem to have any supporting documentation for. That
| was what the linked to web page is about in the first:
| trying to trace and dispel an apparent myth.
| dboreham wrote:
| I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the
| more wrong reporting of those events tends to be. I have a
| neighbor who worked at RAND in the 60s and will ask him about
| this next time we meet.
|
| Worth noting perhaps that many (all?) technical innovations are
| the result of some underlying technology maturing to the point
| that it can be applied to a problem. In this case, I bet that
| nobody liked the fragility and brittleness of circuit switched
| networking, but in order to make a packet switched network you
| need small fast computers that are cheap enough to deploy as
| network nodes. These appeared : minicomputers. The first
| ARPANet nodes were minicomputers running routing software. In
| fact the Internet used regular computers as routers into near
| modern history (IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3
| upgrade). So PSN is the result of a) people sitting around
| wishing they could have a PSN, and b) the technology to
| actually realize that becoming practical. There's no eureka
| moment.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the
| more wrong reporting of those events tends to be.
|
| That is not just for historical events, but for anything you
| are familiar with.
|
| Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
|
| https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3 upgrade
|
| You recall correctly. Info/pictures here[0].
|
| 0 - https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For those who are interested in that sort of thing, Baran's
| full 11 publications outlining the design goals and principles
| of packet-switched networks in January of 1964 are available
| from RAND as downloadable PDFs:
|
| <https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html>
|
| The first document introduces the basic problem:
|
| _Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network
| which will allow several hundred major communications stations
| to talk with one another after an enemy attack. As a criterion
| of survivability we elect to use the percentage of stations
| both surviving the physical attack and remaining in electrical
| connection with the largest single group of surviving stations.
| This criterion is chosen as a conservative measure of the
| ability of the surviving stations to operate together as a
| coherent entity after the attack. This means that small groups
| of stations isolated from the single largest group are
| considered to be ineffective._
|
| <https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html>
|
| "Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience against
| broad assaults was a key consideration from the very beginning.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _" Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience
| against broad assaults was a key consideration from the very
| beginning._
|
| It was a consideration for Baran's work, but not for ARPAnet:
|
| From chapter two of _Wizards_ :
|
| > _Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time,
| of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few
| years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found
| the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in
| the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and
| studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network
| not with survivable communications as his main--or even
| secondary--concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and
| control issues, weren't high on Roberts's agenda. But Baran's
| insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless,
| and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became
| something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts
| assembled to design the network._ [...]
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_St
| a...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scien
| t...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Influences can be manifold and subtle. What's clear is that
| in 1964, as packet-switched networks were first being
| considered, resilience against "attack", however defined,
| was a key consideration for one significant set of
| innovators. I suspect some of that logic was incorporated
| into ARPANET's eventual design, whether the nominal head
| designer was aware of this or not.
|
| One underappreciated aspect of complex projects is how
| different goals and intentions may exist simultaneously,
| and how much active participants even at a high level may
| not be awarer of this. A friend had a uni professor who'd
| been part of the _Glomar Explorer_ scientific mission which
| served as a cover for Project Azoran, the clandestine
| recovery of a Soviet nuclear submarine. The professor was
| unaware of the _actual_ mission until well after the
| mission had concluded, when he read about it in the
| newspaper.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian>
|
| I tend to strongly discount personal-experience denials of
| covert or secondary mission roles by people otherwise
| connected with an activity (e.g., company employees,
| contractors, government workers, contractors, etc.). It's
| not that these are never, or even _mostly_ incorrect. It 's
| simply that for a large enough project, some secondary goal
| might well exist without the conscious awareness of many of
| those involved.
|
| And again, in the case of Baran, we have the receipts.
| phaedrus wrote:
| In my opinion packet switching is an idea that would have been
| inevitable once the technology to support it is in place. The
| real important idea of the Internet is the insight that the
| envelope should be independent of the data it contains.
|
| I say this because I work with specialized equipment that uses
| RS-232 serial protocols for communication, and despite many
| decades of examples available of "the right" way to do it (e.g.
| OSI model), engineers continue(d) to not understand this lesson
| and design ad hoc protocols that don't respect this division of
| concerns and which suffer for it. _Even in IP protocols
| designed to modernize this_ to wrap the RS-232 serial packets
| in internet packets, they repeat the same mistake(s). That is,
| in the midst of having to deal with a more complicated problem
| for serial protocol to IP protocol conversion because the
| original format didn 't clearly distinguish envelope from data,
| they compound the problem by mixing levels in the new protocol.
|
| For example, writing IPv4 into the standard for a proprietary
| an Application or Session level protocol even at the same time
| as our network is banning IPv4 and requiring IPv6, but the
| protocol is not even defined for IPv6 addresses. When it should
| be agnostic to IP level concerns entirely. (The engineers said,
| while designing the system, "well .1 is going to be this piece
| of equipment, .2 is going to be the other side, if it's blah
| blah blah it's .3, etc.")
| treyd wrote:
| People keep repeating this mistake at all layers of the stack
| because they fail to see different layers as managing
| different sets of concerns and want to treat it as a
| monolith.
|
| A very recent and high level example of this is how the
| Matrix protocol was architected. By defining all the message
| formats in terms of JSON-over-HTTP it makes it difficult to
| only use part of the protocol and not all of it, and makes it
| difficult to use it over alternative transports since the
| assumptions of HTTP idioms are baked all the way down.
| Arathorn wrote:
| This is not true. For instance,
| https://matrix.org/blog/2021/06/10/low-bandwidth-matrix-
| an-i... shows how you can (very easily) swap http+json for
| coap+cbor as an alt transport for Matrix.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Perhaps corroborating your point, excerpted from Waldrop's 'The
| Dream Machine':
|
| "Why did ARPA build the network?" Lukasik asks. "There were
| actually two reasons. One was that the network would be good
| for computer science.""
|
| ...
|
| "But there was also another side to the story, which was that
| ARPA was a Defense Department agency. And after Eb [Rechtin]
| came in, defense relevance became the dominant notion.
| Everybody was writing relevance statements. "
|
| ...
|
| "So in that environment, I would have been hard pressed to plow
| a lot of money into the network just to improve the
| productivity of the researchers. The rationale just wouldn't
| have been strong enough. What was strong enough was this idea
| that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust
| under damage to the network. If a plane got shot down, or an
| artillery barrage hit the command center, the messages would
| still get through. And in a strategic situation--meaning a
| nuclear attack--the president could still communicate to the
| missile fields. So I can assure you, to the extent that I was
| signing the checks, which I was from nineteen sixty-seven on, I
| was signing them because that was the need I was convinced of."
|
| Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine (p. 273). Stripe Press.
| Kindle Edition.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, quite. This is a very silly article which ignores a lot
| of the real history in favour of a cutesy top up of early
| 1990s nostalgia - which was a good 20-30 years after the
| events that really matter.
|
| Saying "The Internet isn't ARPANET" is ridiculous. Of course
| it isn't. ARPANET was an academic research project with a mix
| of defence and open R&D requirements. The Internet is a
| collection of extra layers of commercial development on top
| of some of that R&D.
|
| Academic research projects are rarely hardened because the
| point of the project is to investigate possibilities, not to
| spend hundreds of billions building a physically bomb-proof
| network that's useless because the core tech doesn't work.
|
| When the Berlin Wall came down the goals changed, but the
| core concept of distributed scalable robustness is still very
| much there today. Of course now we have too many choke
| points, so it's not as robust as it could be. But if someone
| cuts a cable packets will still find a longer, slower way
| around as long as the bandwidth is there.
| soheil wrote:
| a nuclear attack could be natural selection for the internets
| evolution honestly.
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| > but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a
| nuclear strike
|
| On what basis? What is the distinction between being "created"
| to survive a nuclear strike, and being "designed" to do so?
|
| > that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented
| (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching).
|
| Yes, but I don't think it's a relevant one. Baran's papers
| kinda-sorta-maybe had some influence on ARPANET, but ARPANET
| mostly got packet-switching (and certainly the term "packet")
| from Donald Davies. If you look at the actual layout of ARPANET
| it wasn't very survivable (not much redundancy in the links)
| [0], compared to Baran's proposal [1]. Internetworking and "the
| Internet" as we know it came much later and was way beyond the
| point where Baran had any influence.
|
| [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps
| [1]:
| https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...
| gargalatas wrote:
| Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach? In Greece there are
| some witnesses saying that the major internet provider backbone
| fiber was found buried 10cm below the road. Just after the
| asphalt inside the pebble.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Google Fiber was infamous for doing it this way, called
| "microtrenching" or "nanotrenching", where they either cut a
| trench into pavement and lay the cable into that and fill over
| with asphalt or other material. When done poorly (read: most of
| the installs that they've done), it erodes the road surface and
| the base and causes all sorts of problems [0] [1] [2] [3]
|
| Also lots of providers just string up cable on poles, which are
| routinely snagged by trucks, shot by ammunition, run into by
| cars, etc etc, so even more vulnerable than shallow burial.
| Some of these cables are major links so damage can cause wide-
| reaching problems. No match for an out of control sedan, let
| along a nuclear strike. [4] [5]
|
| [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-fiber-is-
| using-a...
|
| [1] https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-
| say...
|
| [2] https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/google-
| tre...
|
| [3] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/googl...
|
| [4] https://www.wmur.com/article/crash-manchester-comcast-
| servic...
|
| [5] https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/crash-vandalism-
| comc...
|
| and etc
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach?_
|
| Each hop of the internet uses power. The power infrastructure
| is above ground for long enough to be overpowered by nukes. So
| even if the internet were entirely under ground and even if it
| were entirely only fiber it would need an underground-only
| power feed coming from an underground-only power generation
| source. Most internet service providers are above ground. Some
| telco is underground but only useful for old pots lines and
| some DS lines. Satellite ground station relays are above
| ground. Power plants are above ground. Solar panels are above
| ground.
|
| I could be wrong, so after a nuclear event we should all try
| updating this thread assuming M5 Computer Security is EMP
| hardened and has backup power and a fuel contract with a fuel
| company that still exists. Most data-centers are not EMP
| hardened.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fortunately there are autonomously-powered protcols:
|
| <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549>
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Good point. That means you and I can communicate at least.
| spcebar wrote:
| I strongly recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which this
| article cites a lot. Fascinating history of ARPANET and building
| the infrastructure at BBN (on the team was Will Crowther of
| Colossal Cave Adventure fame!). Inspiring book in the same genre
| as Soul of a New Machine.
| ctstover wrote:
| fyi - that font is almost illegible on chrome on x11 @ 96dpi
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| My understanding was that it was designed so that traffic could
| route around the destroyed segments. So if 9 out of the 10 routes
| between Lawrence Livermore and say MIT was destroyed, it would
| route traffic via the last route. Obviously if Lawrence Livermore
| is destroyed, this is all moot.
|
| Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller.
|
| I always had the impression they actually got smaller, as more
| precise targeting reduces the need for higher yields.
|
| If you know your bomb will detonate inside a building, you
| might as well use a conventional warhead and avoid all the
| diplomatic fallout of nuking someone.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Who needs nukes when you've got the flying ginsu?
|
| <https://apnews.com/article/hellfire-r9x-al-
| zawahri-d0d25b7ed...>
|
| Yes, more precise targeting / flight controls means smaller
| warheads, or simply kinetic-kill munitions.
|
| Shaped charges also pack a punch depending on where your
| delivery is intended.
|
| And of course, there is a nuclear version of same:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge>
| jjk166 wrote:
| Nukes were much bigger then.
| baq wrote:
| Nukes were bigger, we have more smaller warheads now since
| we're interested in glassing surface area instead of setting
| volume on fire.
| ape4 wrote:
| Also designed to survive a rogue backhoe (digging up a cable)
| lasermike026 wrote:
| In theory the internet was designed to be fault tolerant and
| highly available. No bombs required.
| localfirst wrote:
| That's the narrative. Just like Tor's narrative is that it helps
| America's spies communicate from hostile jurisdictions. The
| former never got the attention as back then we had monoculture
| shaped by mainstream media (no other alternatives) and we just
| ate up whatever we were told.
|
| The latter appears to be under more scrutiny lately, leading us
| to believe this is just like the lofty idea that VPN encryption
| is completely anonymous from the big five.
|
| Spies operating out of China or Russia would never use VPN or
| Tor? That would be painting a red target on their backs. So I
| wonder what the true intention is for Tor as is the mysterious
| origin of Bitcoin and so many other things. We won't know.
|
| One thing is for sure, what we believed to be bastions of Western
| democracy and privacy are no more.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| If there is a global passive adversary, I'd still rather use
| Tor so that sites don't see my IP and my ISP doesn't see my
| domain lookups
| localfirst wrote:
| If you use Tor without VPN as most do, it won't be your ISP
| that sees your domain lookups mate
|
| If you do use VPN with Tor as some do, it won't be your ISP
| either.
|
| We have an illusion of privacy because there is no true
| privacy anymore with digital technology and without privacy
| we don't have true freedom and as such we only live in a
| democracy in name only.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Well either way please vote blue. If neither party offers
| privacy, at least one offers me some other rights
| localfirst wrote:
| What do you mean?
| jballanc wrote:
| I'm no expert on Tor, but IIRC the story is precisely that
| spies operating from hostile territory would have a red target
| painted on them from using encrypted communications...unless _a
| whole lot of people_ in that hostile territory were also using
| encrypted communications. This is why Tor was released open
| source and wide adoption was encouraged.
| localfirst wrote:
| It's been known that if you connected to Tor in a hotel
| located in this US allied country (there have been briefings
| published around this so you can take a guess) you would
| immediately become visible and targeted for a drive by.
|
| Tor just isn't as common as you think nor is it widely
| adopted due to unreliable and the problem with that cover
| explanation is that you wouldn't know where Tor is widely
| used in the first place to be able to find "safety in
| numbers".
| ricksunny wrote:
| I mean, no horse in this race or anything but sometimes there are
| informal reasons why a project gets funded. Getting the five-star
| to sign off some of their budget on something new and uncertain
| may require the backroom, unpublished message passed, 'because
| nukes make go boom'.
|
| I'm all for the founding fathers of the internet asserting that
| it wasn't a cold war imperative, on citeable paper, but that
| doesn't out-of-hand invalidate somebody's assertion that the
| culture motivating grant funding in the halls of defense at the
| time was continuity of government or C&C during the armageddon
| that everyone was anticipating.
| Tiberium wrote:
| Kind of offtopic, but the font on the website seems really bad
| for me on both my phone and PC. Thankfully reading mode exists.
| nostrademons wrote:
| There's a bunch of good stuff on YouTube from the folks who
| actually developed the Internet. Here's a couple from Leonard
| Kleinrock, whose MIT thesis laid out much of the math behind
| packet switching and whose lab sent the first Internet message:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHpwcZiEW4
|
| And from Bob Kahn, who designed the router of that early Internet
| (interviewed by Vint Cerf, who invented TCP/IP):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxNMTVnBzM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZ6tJcQpcI
|
| A key innovation of the Internet was packet-switching. Previous
| networks like AT&T's telephone system were circuit-switched: the
| configuration of the network, and route between source and
| destination, is an inherent property of the _network_ , and once
| a connection is established it can't be easily reconfigured.
| Packet-switching makes the source and destination a property of
| the _message_ , and then the network is responsible for figuring
| out a route from source to destination. Notably, because all
| information needed to specify the destination is included in the
| message, it can be retried or take a totally different route.
|
| Most things have multiple causes, and the Internet is definitely
| one of them. The scalability and distribution properties were
| certainly one of them: a centralized system like the telephone
| network cannot scale to new uses and many new endpoints the way a
| distributed system like the Internet can. According to Kleinrock,
| the need for management to keep an eye on all the research they
| were funding was apparently another one of them. But given that
| it was funded by DARPA, the resilience of a packet-switched
| network to scenarios where individual circuits might go down was
| probably a major reason for the interest in this technology. It
| doesn't necessarily have to be a nuclear strike, but there were a
| number of scenarios of interest to RAND and DARPA that could
| involve a portion of the nation's communication network being
| disabled and still needing to get messages through.
|
| This is also a good lesson to designers of future networks and
| computing systems. The end-to-end principle remains as valuable
| to system designers today as it did in the 1960s.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| yes
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some previous discussion in 2022:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256
| ot1138 wrote:
| Interesting story but I have a bit of anecdotal evidence to
| share. Back when I was a Freshman at UIUC in 1989, I was given a
| campus tour and told that one of the buildings there was designed
| to collapse outwardly in order to protect the equipment in the
| basement. That equipment was a national computer network (not yet
| called the internet!)
|
| So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by
| at least two years.
|
| I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google
| maps.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91...
|
| Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for
| collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this
| because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a
| Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone
| on earth would want to nuke Champaign.
|
| Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB),
| later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy
| winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes.
|
| https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...
|
| Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also
| cited some of the crazy rumors about this building.
|
| https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png
| conductr wrote:
| I wonder how long that equipment would survive being exposed to
| the elements after the collapse
| ot1138 wrote:
| My guess is that something that important was protected by
| reinforced ceilings/floors.
| conductr wrote:
| It's not easy to make things stay waterproof after such an
| event. Water will find a way. The simplest thing will
| likely be the Achilles heel of such thoughtful engineering.
| jcrash wrote:
| I was going to share this story but you beat me to it. They're
| still claiming this in tours ~2017.
|
| The building was called the Foreign Languages Building until
| very recently and is now called the Literatures, Cultures &
| Linguistics Building.
|
| Relevant info from the UIHistory site:
|
| "Located on the site of the former Old Entomology Building,
| ground was broken on the Foreign Language Building (FLB) on
| December 18, 1968.
|
| A popular myth is that the building's distinctive architecture
| was a result of its being designed to house a supercomputer on
| campus called Plato. The building was supposedly designed so
| that if it was bombed, the building's shell would fall
| outwards, protecting the supercomputer on the inside. It is
| also rumored that the building's interior layout was a result
| of trying to confuse Soviet spies and prevent them from
| stealing secrets from the supercomputer.
|
| In reality, the building's architecture is not actually all
| that unique and was a popular style of the day. In fact, just a
| few blocks to the west, one may find the Speech and Hearing
| Sciences Building, which a 2-story clone of the building. Plato
| itself was real, but refered not to a secret government
| program, but rather to the first "modern" electronic learning
| system, the forbearer of course software like WebCT and
| Mallard. The mainframe computer that ran the Plato system was
| located in north campus, in a building which used to reside on
| the west side of the Bardeen Quad." [0]
|
| [0]
| https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...
|
| Hilarious that the myth extends to the interior design - the
| basement really is a maze the first few times you visit.
| ot1138 wrote:
| Plato was in fact real... I used it many times! Looking back,
| it was pretty impressive technology for its day but was
| quickly becoming obsolete. I hated having to walk all the way
| to campus to get some physics units in that I missed.
|
| I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war,
| I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I
| stopped getting Plato assignments!
| YaBa wrote:
| In theory yes, however, in pratical terms you just need to "bomb"
| the right places and 90% of the communications would be gone for
| quite a while. Think PIX and DNS root servers, destroy those, and
| only minor services would be available. There are countries with
| a single PIX, sitting in regular rooms without any kind of
| security, unplug those and the whole country would be offline (to
| be fair, intra-ISP traffic would work). And there's no need to go
| that far (bombing places), a bad actor that can cut some
| submarine fiber in the right places would cripple the whole
| world. Or just someone messing up BGP config in a big ISP, no
| need to bomb or destroy anything, a single bad command can cause
| major issues worldwide (had happened before).
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Internet as it is now is structured to maximize the profits
| of the Internet service providers.
|
| This results in a structure very different from what was
| conceived originally for the purpose of being resilient to
| partial destruction.
|
| For the latter purpose, the best structure is a decentralized
| mesh with mostly equivalent links, which is much less
| economical than what the Internet uses now, i.e. a hierarchy of
| links of increasing throughputs that concentrates the traffic
| into few very high-speed links that pass through central high-
| capacity routers, so that the parts of the network where most
| of the traffic is concentrated are very vulnerable and their
| destruction would affect everybody.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| The first digital computer was created to calculate army firing
| tables, but the first program they ended up running was for
| studying, in true WarGames style... global thermonuclear war.
|
| That's right... computers, the internet, GPS, weather satellites,
| it was all for war. Paid for by the US and other world
| governments.
|
| So the next time someone says "but Tor came from the government!"
| you can tell them this.
| einpoklum wrote:
| It does not matter all that whether the Internet, let alone
| ARPAnet, was created for that purpose. And the reason is that
| "The Internet" is not built and implemented by a single authority
| nor a fully-harmonized set of independent entities; and many/most
| of those are not committed to initial Internet design goals.
| They're trying to promote their own interests - commercial,
| governmental etc. - within the framework of the requirements they
| need to meet to operate recognized autonomous systems and
| participate in the higher-level routing using BGP:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
|
| Do ASes get set up while maintaining/buttressing nuclear-strike
| resilience of the inter-AS network overall? I'm rather doubtful.
|
| Do ASes get set up so that there's nuclear-strike resilience
| within the AS? Absolutely not. I mean, some might, but you're
| welcome to ask your typical ISP, or commercial corporation
| whether they plan for that.
|
| ----
|
| ... and that's before we mention the tendency in recent years for
| most (?) of the traffic to focus on a relatively small number of
| large "platform-website" providers, like Google, Facebook, and
| others, and their counterparts in China, Russia and elsewhere.
| While those have their own resilience goals - it is entirely up
| to them whether they want to plan for continued operations past a
| nuclear strike.
| palisade wrote:
| Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo
| that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and
| bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies.
| Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper.
|
| At the beginning he says, "The ARPA Command & Control Research
| office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated
| immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to
| it."
|
| And, then goes on to say.
|
| "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to
| go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA's Command-
| and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in
| time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you
| all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA's basic interest in
| these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the
| meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly
| needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise
| if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming
| into existence."
|
| https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...
|
| It is strange the the article tries to start by saying it had
| nothing to do with Baran's research into bomb resilient
| switching. But, actually they relied heavily on his research and
| actually Davies roped him in when designing the early ARPA and
| Internet. Hence, it is based on his bomb resilient switching, and
| therefore was based on ideas that were meant to survive a nuclear
| strike.
|
| "You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all
| about, since you and I independently came up with the same
| ingredients. ... and [you were] the first to reduce it to
| practice." - Paul Baran to Davies
|
| Davies also got his start at Tube Alloys project in UK and worked
| at NPL, in nuclear weapon related projects.
|
| I guess you could argue that beyond that they didn't really think
| much about it further. But, I somehow doubt that they weren't
| thinking about it as they continued. Kahn was heavily involved in
| the project and he also created the Strategic Computing
| Initiative, which among its many other goals also funded
| supercomputing for large scale simulation of atomic bombs. A
| nuclear war was very much on the mind of everyone involved.
|
| This whole article feels like a misinformation propaganda piece.
| For what purpose I don't know.
|
| The website is registered in Reykjavik, Iceland and hosted in
| Oklahoma. Which doesn't really tell me much.
| camtarn wrote:
| From the article: "Also there's a conspiracy tendency when it
| comes to grim folklore. Perhaps people denying the nuclear war
| connection have a political agenda, they were misinformed or
| they are too scared to admit it. It has its own defense built
| in that permits people trying to correct the narrative to be
| dismissed as trying to push an opinion or occluded political
| agenda."
|
| Not saying that that disproves it, but it's somewhat amusing
| that it's lampshaded directly in the source that you feel might
| be propaganda.
| liotier wrote:
| The Internet ? No. The Arpanet ? Also no. But SAGE was - its
| prototype (the Cape Cod air defense project) was a packet-
| switching network and SAGE itself was as well... And staying up
| on doomsday for a bit of nuclear combat was the essence of SAGE's
| functional specification. SAGE pioneered most of the concepts and
| technologies of the Arpanet, whose purpose was absolutely not
| combat, so it is easy to imagine how the nuclear strike resilient
| Internet urban legend evolved.
| xeromal wrote:
| Is anyone struggling to read the font?
|
| I have a 34 inch 4k ultrawide if that makes a difference.
| swader999 wrote:
| Ok internet, now do boat anchors.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Nearly all the Internet founders who are still alive are on the
| internet-history mailing list, which is still active. Vint is,
| for instance.
|
| The author goes on and on about the 90's, I think because that is
| easier to document than the 60's. Tracing the evolution of the
| "nuclear" narrative back then -- who cares? This article is a
| whole lot of research proving nothing except the vapidity of the
| media.
|
| The ARPANET did get started in the 60's, and packet-switching to
| provide "multiple paths in case one is destroyed" was indeed
| _one_ of the motivations. Then it took on a life of its own and
| no one devoted any more thought to nuclear war.
|
| mrighele's answer is excellent.
| atulatul wrote:
| Does flash photography harm the internet?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns
| palisade wrote:
| Found it!!! The proof that ARPAnet was based on the idea of
| command and control! Command & Control means a network capable of
| surviving a nuclear attack.
|
| Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo
| that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and
| bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies.
| Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper!
|
| "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to
| go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA's Command-
| and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in
| time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you
| all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA's basic interest in
| these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the
| meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly
| needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise
| if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming
| into existence."
|
| https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...
| throw0101a wrote:
| Instead of quoting from the end of that document, perhaps quote
| from the beginning:
|
| > _In the first place, it is evident that we have among us a
| collection of individual (personal and /or organizational)
| aspirations, efforts, activities, and projects. These have in
| common, I think, the characteristics that they are in some way
| connected with advancement of the art or technology of
| information processing, the advancement of intellectual
| capability (man, man-machine, or machine), and the approach to
| a theory of science._
|
| The word "military" only exists in the last few paragraphs of
| the document. Most of it is about workflows and resource
| sharing:
|
| > _When the computer operated the programs for me, I suppose
| that the activity took place in the computer at SDC, which is
| where we have been assuming I was. However, I would just as
| soon leave that on the level of inference. With a sophisticated
| network-control system, I would not decide whether to send the
| data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or
| bring in programs and have them work on my data. I have no
| great objection to making that decision, for a while at any
| rate, but, in principle, it seems better for the computer, or
| the network, somehow, to do that. At the end of my work, I
| filed some things away, and tried to do it in such a way that
| they would be useful to others. That called into play,
| presumably, some kind of a convention-monitoring system that,
| in its early stages, must almost surely involve a human
| criterion as well asmaching [sic.] processing._
| palisade wrote:
| Listen, mr throwaway account, if we're starting at the top of
| the document:
|
| "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been
| assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I
| must devote the whole of the coming week to it."
|
| You know, the line you had to skip a few paragraphs ahead of
| to find your quotes.
| throw0101a wrote:
| From _Wizards_ (chapter one):
|
| > _Licklider was no exception to the rule that people
| didn't spend a long time at ARPA. But by the time he left
| in 1964, he had succeeded in shifting the agency's emphasis
| in computing R &D from a command systems laboratory playing
| out war-game scenarios to advanced research in time-sharing
| systems, computer graphics, and improved computer
| languages. The name of the office, Command and Control
| Research, had changed to reflect that shift, becoming the
| Information Processing Techniques Office._
|
| [...]
|
| > _Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss
| funding for a networking experiment he had in mind.
| Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit
| already, so the idea wasn't new to him. He had also visited
| Taylor's office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise
| of logging on to three different computers. And a few years
| earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider
| himself when he attended Lick's lectures on interactive
| computing._
|
| > _Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors,
| most of whom were at research universities, were beginning
| to request more and more computer resources. Every
| principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer.
| Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across
| the research community, but it was getting damned
| expensive. Computers weren't small and they weren't cheap.
| Why not try tying them all together? By building a system
| of electronic links between machines, researchers doing
| similar work in different parts of the country could share
| resources and results more easily. Instead of spreading a
| half dozen expensive mainframes across the country devoted
| to supporting advanced graphics research, ARPA could
| concentrate resources in one or two places and build a way
| for everyone to get at them. One university might
| concentrate on one thing, another research center could be
| funded to concentrate on something else, but regardless of
| where you were physically located, you would have access to
| it all. He suggested that ARPA fund a small test network,
| starting with, say, four nodes and building up to a dozen
| or so._
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_
| Sta...
|
| Also:
|
| > _Licklider described how he had re-envisioned command and
| control research as research into interactive computing as
| follows:[5]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Tech
| niq...
|
| From chapter two of _Wizards_ :
|
| > _Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first
| time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND
| a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington,
| he found the RAND reports, which had actually been
| collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques
| Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing
| this experimental network not with survivable
| communications as his main--or even secondary--concern.
| Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues,
| weren't high on Roberts's agenda. But Baran's insights into
| data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early
| 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something
| of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to
| design the network._ [...]
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_sci
| ent...
| palisade wrote:
| I think it is a bit convenient to toss out all the clear
| evidence that they were developing survivable networks.
| throw0101a wrote:
| What is clear is that:
|
| * Licklider changes the name from "Command & Control
| Research" to "Information Processing Techniques Office"
| before he left and Robert Taylor takes over.+
|
| * Taylor convinced Charles M. Herzfeld to build a
| resource sharing network.
|
| * Taylor recruited Larry Roberts to design/build ARPAnet.
| Wesley A. Clark was part of the design/build team.
|
| * Roberts didn't have any kind of goal related to nuclear
| survivability (per interviews with him in published
| sources/books).
|
| * Roberts met Donald Davies. Davies had no interest in
| nuclear survivability. Davies introduced Roberts to Paul
| Baran's work.
|
| Is any of the above in dispute?
|
| Did anyone other than Baran ever express interest in
| nuclear survivability?
|
| + Given Licklider efforts in the name change, can
| anything be gleaned by his about intentions++ in the way
| he wants the office/department to go?
|
| ++ Can anything further be gleaned by the fact that one
| of the first papers Licklider published was called "Man-
| Computer Symbiosis"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-
| Computer_Symbiosis See perhaps SS5.1:
|
| > _Any present-day large-scale computer is too fast and
| too costly for real-time cooperative thinking with one
| man. Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the
| computer must divide its time among many users.
| Timesharing systems are currently under active
| development. There are even arrangements to keep users
| from "clobbering" anything but their own personal
| programs._
|
| > _It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15
| years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate
| the functions of present-day libraries together with
| anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval
| and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this
| paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network
| of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band
| communication lines and to individual users by leased-
| wire services. In such a system, the speed of the
| computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic
| memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided
| by the number of users._
|
| * https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.
| html
| Sparkyte wrote:
| No.
|
| There are massive ISP trunks that have accidentally been
| destroyed knocking out internet for hundreds of people.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It was designed to survive a nuclear strike, but since the TCP/IP
| stack offers no protection against a backhoe or a shovel cutting
| the cables, I'm skeptical about such claims.
| rvnx wrote:
| It sounds like a mastermind plan, but in reality it's a
| consequence of a global intelligence working together on the
| same project over xx years.
|
| It was certainly not designed with that much hindsight,
| otherwise we would never have had the infamous BGP-spoofing
| attacks (which were basic and easy at the time), the ARP-
| spoofing, not enough IPv4, etc.
|
| Internet has iteratively evolved to be reliable, as each
| iteration has improved on top of the previous one. And this is
| not due to geniuses, this is due to sys/netadmins who want to
| sleep at night more, so they are forced to choose and operate
| reliable techs.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It's a great way to sell it and it worked. Fortunately, the
| product (the internet) works even better that the slogan used
| to sell it. One derivative claim, "the internet treats
| censorship and routes around it" is not used much these days,
| but I do remember it actually being close to reality, for a
| brief moment in time.
| edm0nd wrote:
| These days its more like an anchor from a ship cutting a sea
| cable.
|
| Interesting to think about in the event of something like WW3,
| would these be some of the first things severed?
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| In terms of what could bring the internet down, unrestrained
| capitalism is far more of a uniform existential danger and will
| destroy the internet long before a nuclear strike does.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I notice the title has changed. HN title is _" Was the internet
| created to survive a nuclear strike?"_, but the web page's
| current title is _" Was the internet designed to survive a
| nuclear attack?"_
|
| Cars were designed to hold drink cups. They weren't created to
| hold drink cups, but at this point in the history of the
| development of cars, they do hold drink cups by design.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Irrespective of nuclear war the design goal was always to create
| a network of redundant nodes across wide geographical dispersion.
| That solves two problems:
|
| 1. Increases network durability.
|
| 2. Allows uninterrupted participation by geographically separated
| parties.
|
| This is a hallmark of military technology still very much in use
| today and it goes as far back as the mid-1860s when the new US
| Army Signal Corps began experimenting with and integrating into
| conflict locations the first electronic communication
| technologies.
|
| Geographically dispersed redundancies are still import to
| military communications. On a tactical level this typically
| involves things like radio relays on hilltops, tropospheric
| shots, and various line of sight technologies. On the strategic
| level it involves having multiple routes through the internet
| over different kinds of physical media moving in different
| geographic directions.
|
| You don't see this as much in the commercial world, because
| sending network traffic through less efficient routes is slow and
| costly, so redundancies are only an emergency fallback. From a
| military perspective the network will go down at any moment, so
| slow and expensive are still favorable to disconnection. As a
| result the military will eagerly employ many layers of many
| redundant options. Cost is a less significant factor for the
| military since they are the only ones to own all layers of their
| own stack and thus able to operate in isolation.
| Merrill wrote:
| The benefits of a research project as described to the funding
| authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done
| are often not the same.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 - Oct 2022 (115
| comments)
|
| _HN: Was the internet designed to resist nuclear attacks?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415376 - July 2019 (3
| comments)
| cadence- wrote:
| The original creators of the early version of the Internet wanted
| it to be open and equal, making sure one entity couldn't control
| it. The fact that this design also would be helpful after a
| nuclear attack was used to get the required funding from the US
| military.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I'm an enthusiast and writer on the history of military
| communications technology, particularly during the Cold War. The
| internet is very much part of this story, and I am asked about
| this controversy from time to time. The problem is, I find that
| people who argue for both positions are becoming much too fixated
| on the idea that there was some single set of influences on a
| complex project. There isn't really any answer to "was the
| internet designed to withstand nuclear war" for the same reason
| that there isn't really any single answer to any question about
| the historical motivations of complex undertakings. That's just
| not how history works.
|
| There are some facts which we know to be true:
|
| 1) Various components of the defense complex were actively
| researching survivable C2 communications, particularly beginning
| in the 1950s although there were earlier precedents. Many of
| these efforts involved ideas that were similar to those used in
| modern computer networking, and they sometimes culminated in
| built systems with meaningful similarities to the internet, like
| AUTODIN.
|
| 2) A diverse cast of academics, contractors, and government
| entities were involved in these projects. Sometimes the same
| people worked on multiple projects. Even when they didn't, there
| were often communications between these entities, but sometimes,
| due to security concerns, there wasn't. Much of this
| communication was informal, so in retrospect it is hard to tell
| who knew what. There can be surprises both directions.
|
| 3) Communications technologies often emerge naturally from
| innovations in other fields, technical advances, etc., so while
| many similar communications technologies have a shared
| intellectual heritage, it is also not that unusual for totally
| independent efforts to arrive at roughly the same point. Radio is
| a classic example.
|
| I think that, in consideration of these facts, we can reach two
| conclusions:
|
| A) It seems likely that some of the people involved in ARPANET
| were familiar with survivable C2 research and applied those ideas
| to their efforts. After all, lots of people and lots of
| organizations worked on these programs, and some of the research
| was widely distributed within the defense-industrial-academic
| complex during the '50s and '60s.
|
| B) It also seems likely that ARPANET independently arrived at
| similar endpoints. After all, it had some similar constraints and
| objectives, and its creators were working with mostly the same
| underlying technology.
|
| These two do not contradict each other. In fact, I think it is by
| far most likely that both are true in the cases of different
| individual people and different individual aspects of the design.
| That's just how these things are.
|
| Before considering The Internet specifically, let's consider a
| couple of similar situations in the development of technology:
|
| 1) People sometimes do a great deal of hand-wringing over the
| assignment of labels like "the first programmable computer." I
| have always been very wary of giving these sorts of titles
| without a fair number of weasel words. Consider, for example, the
| ENIAC, usually called the "first programmable computer." And yet,
| there is a compelling argument that a number of the substantial
| design elements of ENIAC, including its programmability, are
| derived from work done for an earlier codebreaking machine called
| Colossus. This connection remained unknown for many years because
| of the secrecy surrounding Colossus... a level of secrecy that
| means that, while a number of people who worked on Colossus and
| later worked on ENIAC almost certainly carried over ideas, they
| wouldn't have admitted to having done so as Colossus was
| officially unknown to the ENIAC project. The particular climate
| of wartime and military technological development means that
| ideas often move around in subtle ways, and knowledge of where an
| idea came from is intentionally obscured. The history of military
| technology can be a very difficult field for this reason.
|
| 2) Almost at the opposite ends of the spectrum, information often
| flows very freely in academic and industrial laboratory
| environments, and so ideas spread without clear documentation. I
| am reminded of a piece I wrote years ago, on the fact that
| several early internet protocols use a similar set of three-digit
| status codes in similar ways (HTTP, for example). Oddly enough,
| these pseudo-standard status codes appear almost simultaneously
| in RJE and FTP, but neither mentions the other. Over time I have
| been lucky enough to get in touch with several of the authors of
| both RFCs, and while none of them can recall the origin of the
| codes, they agree with my general theory: the two separate
| groups, both at MIT, had just shared notes during the development
| of the protocols and one of them informally adopted the status
| code scheme from the other. People talk to each other, and ideas
| often move between projects without formal documentation.
|
| So, with those two examples of subtle cross-project influence in
| mind, can we say anything suggestive about ARPANET? Well, there
| are certain suggestive details. For example, by the time
| ARPANET's first IMPs were built, at least one researcher (Howard
| Frank) was engaged in ARPANET research who had previously
| consulted on survivable C2 networks. But the ARPANET project had
| already set certain design details like packet-switching by that
| point... which raises the question of if packet-switching is even
| the important part. Howard Frank wasn't working on packet
| switching itself, he was working on performance and reliability
| modeling of topologies for packet switching, an area where
| military C2 research was probably generally ahead of ARPANET
| research at that time. So, if we take the face-value assumption
| that aspects of ARPANET topology research were probably based on
| survivable C2 research, does that mean that ARPANET was "created
| to survive a nuclear strike?" Or did it merely end up that way?
| It ends up coming down to splitting hairs about what "created"
| means, an exercise that sort of ignores the fact that
| technological developments always combine established ideas and
| new ones.
|
| ARPANET was not built for military C2. It was used for military
| C2 later on, but during the early days of ARPANET the military
| had more wide-area networking initiatives than you could shake a
| stick at and ARPANET was not one of the ones contracted for C2
| purposes.
|
| Was ARPANET designed for nuclear survivability? The most obvious
| answer is "no," because the early topology of ARPANET lacked the
| level of redundancy in its topology that actual survivable
| networks of the era had. But, this seems to have been more a
| consequence of funding and resource availability than intentions,
| because ARPANET researchers had done plenty of work on
| performance and reliability, using basically the same methods as
| used for survivable networks.
|
| So maybe, at the end of the day, the "best" answer to this is
| sort of a boring one: meh. Nuclear survivability was obviously
| not a goal of ARPANET because ARPANET did not build out a
| survivable network. That said, ARPANET incorporated most of the
| technical ideas from survivable networks of the era. It is a
| virtual certainty that ARPANET got some of those ideas from
| earlier and simultaneous research into survivable networks, but
| it is also a virtual certainty that ARPANET arrived at some of
| them independently. If you consider "packet switching" to be the
| main technical advancement of ARPANET, it's probably not an idea
| that ARPANET got from survivable C2 research, because the
| historical record looks pretty confident that multiple people
| independently arrived at packet switching. That ought not to be
| surprising to anyone, because packet switching is a fairly direct
| evolution of practices established in radio and telegraph
| networks almost fifty years before. But, I also think it's an
| unnecessarily restrictive view of ARPANET's technical
| contributions, and other aspects of ARPANET like routing policy
| were definitely influenced by survivable communications research
| and, to some extent, directly based on survivability work.
|
| What all this means about why ARPANET was "created" or what it
| was "designed" for is strictly a matter of how you interpret
| those words. Yes, articles and books and etc. should not repeat
| the claim that "the Internet was created to survive a nuclear
| strike," because the truth and falsity of that statement requires
| a lengthy and nuanced explanation. When we express history as
| simple facts we should try to stick to the ones that are, like,
| 90% true, instead of like 50% true. But "facts" about history are
| rarely 100% true, we're just not that lucky. It all happened a
| long time ago, there were a lot of people involved, different
| people were doing different things, it's a tangled mess of
| motivations and influences. That's why we study it.
|
| Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
|
| Postscript: Also, packet-switching is not at all intrinsic to
| survivable networks, although certainly survivability lead to a
| lot of advancements in packet-switching. But there were also a
| lot of circuit-switched survivable networks, and for a good span
| of the Cold War, I would say that circuit-switching outnumbered
| packet-switching for hardened C2. You'll notice that AT&T, the
| military's #1 choice for hardened communications, was firmly not
| on the packet switching side of things. But the military also
| contracted C2 projects to Western Union, who were basically
| arriving at modern packet switching by their own route (automated
| telegraph routing). This schism, between packet-switching and
| circuit-switching, remains a critical part of the data
| communications story today.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| TL; DR: osmosis
|
| Thanks, JB!
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I found this article difficult to read and confusing.
|
| In the title "... a nuclear strike". In the article: "... not
| kept in bunkers.. but on regular computers".
|
| Well is the idea to survive nuclear armageddon, or to survive a
| strike?
|
| A strike can take out a city if that happens the network
| continues to function - whatever nodes were just lost.
|
| Having everything inside a hardened bunker is not required.
|
| In so far as nuclear armageddon, I am not sure that having
| computers inside bunkers would help keep the internet up given it
| requires wiring or wireless infrastructure to communicate.
|
| If Having computer systems still operate, even on their own, then
| a bunker starts naking sense.
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