I'm getting worried. I've been harping on the Maersk downtime lately. The ports of the largest shipping company in the world have been shut down for two days by a cyber attack. Trucks can't unload or load at many of the world's ports, including the main container ports of LA, NYC, and Rotterdam. They're going to be down tomorrow, too. Maybe partial operation by Friday.[1] Maersk even lost phone and email systems. One of the few good sources of info has been somebody at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who sends out alerts to truckers.

It's a distributed outage. The usual forms of disaster preparation involve geographic dispersal. That doesn't work against this threat. Few companies are as physically dispersed as Maersk, which has major facilities in 61 countries. It didn't help.

What happens when someone figures out how to take over Windows Update or the Intel Management Engine or Ubuntu Update?

[1] http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx

> The Internet ... started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks.

Those are all computer networks. It just happens that some of them involve computers running financial software, or computers running electrical control software, or computers running social software. Or computers running phone software, or light-bulb software, or toaster software.

Perhaps we don't need networked toasters, but I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors.

Computers are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is not that they are computers, but that some are locked down for user control of networking, but simultaneously designed insecurely as, say, "smart web cams" without the necessary incentives to keep them secure.

The analogy with electricity is pretty good. When the electricity goes out, most people are pretty screwed: it powers our lighting, air conditioning, household appliances, refrigeration, gasoline pumps, Internet access, point-of-sale systems, and in many places, cooking and running water too.

However, when the electricity goes out, it usually comes back on within a day or so, because a power outage is viewed as a top priority to fix, simply because so many aspects of modern life depend on it. And really critical businesses (supermarkets, hospitals, etc.) invest in generators so that they can run independently of the power grid.

The Internet will likely follow that path. It'll become indispensable to modern life, which means that when there's a threat against it, a lot of experts will be mobilized to put it back in service. And really critical businesses will invest in making sure their systems work even when offline.

> I’ve often wanted to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and argue with him about Facebook. It is premised on the notion that "connecting everyone" is an unmitigated good.

This isn't the author's major point. But worth noting Zuckerberg changed FB's mission recently to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

Said Mark: "Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people -- not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together."

"But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks."

This is, I hope, incorrect.

Power, water, road, etc. should not be Internet connected and in many cases should not be networked at all.

Homeowners doing cute things with arduino and their lawn sprinklers (and learning good lessons about simplicity and fragility) are one thing. It's quite another to bear the responsibility for critical infrastructure.

I hope the adults in the room have the wisdom and experience to eschew these kind of "improvements".

I don't think this is a revelation to anyone in tech circles. For this reason, I usually choose products that aren't internet enabled.

I'm starting to believe we need some kind of Geneva convention among intelligence services.

It's one thing for them all to be spying on dissidents and terrorists or however they want to bother their internal populations, because they'll be limited in how much damage they want to do to their own economies.

Once you have intelligence services engaged in all out warfare with each other, there's really no limit to how much damage they can do. Up to and including deaths.

We need to get to some kind of gentlemans agreement between the CIA and the FSB really quickly before the world economy collapses.

It is kind of ironic, since the internet was designed as exactly the opposite: a damage-tolerant coast-to-coast communications system, i.e. one without a single point of failure.

Site got ycombinator'd, so here's a google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4F...

Tainter postulates that societies collapse when they reach their limit of complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexi...

When Raph speaks my ears always perk up.

Site not loading for me. Internet archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphko... (Also I realize I share a surname with the author but am of no relation that I know of.)

Thanks for reminding me to back up my gmail and gdocs.

I think she makes a good point about not getting one's paycheck - that could definitely have a devastating ripple effect on the economy. But, is it really possible, that the entire internet go down?

If anything, the Internet was created with resilience in mind. In fact there's no "the Internet" but rather a network of networks that is by design very hard to shut down.

You could argue that there's DNS and that's more centralized. Sure, point granted. But in theory you can use any DNS server you want... and there are projects which make it less centralized.

Now, a different topic is how devices can be taken over... and that's something where we are largely to blame. The EFF, and the old-school Open source folks like Stallman have been warning for years that we are giving away our freedoms by trusting in closed source. And they were right. Now we are in the endgame where every single computer has one of these "management engines" that cannot be turned off and have total control over a computer, and where your source of entropy is RDRAND.