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The internet was literally designed to solve the problem of automatically routing around problems to maintain connectivity in the event of a catastrophic outage

The internet was literally designed to solve the problem of automatically routing around problems to maintain connectivity in the event of a catastrophic outage like a nuclear strike, and now nations have decided that it's better to put all the necessary infrastructure in one building instead, probably so they can spy on the citizenry better. That makes me incredibly angry. Risking access to what is probably the single greatest human achievement (the web) for the sake of something as trivial as listening to people's Google searches is so damn stupid.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
Or the single greatest human mistake. At least, ADSL and faster might be our greatest mistake. If we had kept it at no faster than 56Kbauds, I’d be more inclined to agree. EDIT: incorrect pronoun
- piker 5y ago
  Go on...?
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    … and say what?
sokoloff 5y ago
The web is our greatest achievement? Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity? I mean, the web is probably in the top 10, but I’d have to think pretty hard before concluding it was even top 5.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Fire, metal working, domestication of animals, sailing and navigation, democracy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the transistor, computing, radio, flight. Probably not in the top 10 the more you think about it.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Internet, not the web, is for sure the greatest achievement of humankind so far if you consider the human effort and collaboration such a massive network requires and the multiplier effect it has on absolutely everything.
  - manuelabeledo 5y ago
    > …the multiplier effect it has on absolutely everything Isn’t this just a byproduct of the technology it is based on? Commercial routes such as the Silk Road could be considered as the first massive, interconnected information networks.
    - toolz 5y ago
      Being able to communicate in real time anywhere in the world would seem to me, to be a force multiplier far greater than any other previous invention. Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        Lets look at real results So invention of soap and hygene doubled life expectancy. The industrial revolution / steam engine has taken us from 1% gdp frowth per ccenturyt o 3-5% GDP growth, so over 100x improvement. Those are historic changes. What important metric has the internet increased at least by 50%?
        purplevendetta 5y ago
        Conspiracy theories. Just kidding, of course.
        suifbwish 5y ago
        I would classify soap as more of a discovery than an invention. Soap self generates in nature in certain environments.
- randomsilence 5y ago
  In theory, with the internet, civilization could go back to full decentralization. You need writing, printing, sanitation and food production to aggregate humans in cities to create a human network. With the internet, people can be hunter gatherers and spread all over the world and still pool their knowledge to maintain the infrastructure. You still need electricity and machines, but the internet links it all together. *edit: changed web to internet, along dgellow's comment
- tonightstoast 5y ago
  I agree. IMO plumbing and agriculture are way higher than the internet. They’re what gave us more free time to build society.
  - harryvederci 5y ago
    Didn't hunter gatherers have a working week of 10 - 20 hours? If free time is the measurement of success, that would make agriculture a pretty horrible invention.
    - tonightstoast 5y ago
      Hunter gatherers spent 10-20 hours per week getting food - which was their work. I'm not sure where you are located but I spend 1hr/wk getting groceries. There are certainly parts of the world where people still walk miles for clean water but that's not most of the industrialized nations. I'm not arguing that people work less, I'm saying humanity now has more "free" time to produce technology/innovate. In regards to the west, the lower classes do not get the benefits of this - but the upper class or researchers absolutely do get the benefit of not having to hunt and gather for food.
- netcan 5y ago
  That's drab, IMO. Plenty of ways to interpret that sentence more charitably. How about "we" meaning "we the people of our time."
- onion2k 5y ago
  Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity? Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments. The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.
  - rakejake 5y ago
    While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything starts off when a small number of people work on something, and later spreads around through consensus. But crops are a basic necessity for survival so I feel it is unfair to bring it into this debate. If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
- kken 5y ago
  Don't forget the Haber-Bosch process or process engineering in general.
martin_a 5y ago
> something as trivial as listening to people's Google searches It's never about Google searches, it's about The Four Horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
verisimi 5y ago
I actually suspect that the internet was designed to spy on the citizenry better, but was sold as a mega-connectivity technology. Its an indispensable part of the tech required for technocracy, but now it has done its job and there is a tracking device is every hand, its time to rein it back a few notches. (Reining back has been underway for a while to be fair..)
- confiq 5y ago
  The internet was not design to spy on citizens, it was design to connect citizenry!
  - verisimi 5y ago
    We don't know that though, do we? We can say it wasn't sold as a spy system. But we also say that technocracy would require all devices to be connected. Languages such as java were designed with that in mind. So, perhaps playing up the social connectivity is the means to gain ubiquitous adoption. If you think reality is just 'naturally unfolding' you will object to this. But if you think reality is somewhat directed, that our future is sketched out (even if we are unaware of the plans), I think what I say is plausible. Obviously I don't think reality is simply unfolding. I note that many single social events that has occurred in recent years has resulted in incremental steps towards a technocratic surveillance system. Eg, constraints to travel with 911, perpeutual surveillance, advances towards a biomedical-banking-id. We move incrementally towards a dystopia none of us would ever agree to - but it happens so slowly, it seems to be beyond perception. As someone else mentioned - the directions are blamed on the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse - terrorists, pedos, etc but if you look it is the individual's freedoms that are lost.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > We don't know that though, do we? We can reasonably conclude the internet was not created to spy on citizens, it was created for military connectivity. One could suggest the World Wide Web was created for espionage, but that again requires several leaps with respect to its early creators, most of whom have shown a lifelong dedication to a vision of human freedom that far exceeds the population’s central tendency. Was the rollout of the WWW and internet to the masses motivated, in part, by domestic surveillance desires? Sure. Almost no question about it. But was that a guiding aim? No, at least not in America, not until the project was well underway.
user3939382 5y ago
I just assume they have/can afford only one transoceanic fiber link which has to land somewhere.
- Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
  According to https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ they have 4 stations (3 in the west and 1 in the lower populated east) with access to a total of 5 cables, and 1 cable is wired into 2 stations.
gus_massa 5y ago
From the article: > The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. [...] Land cables to Saudi Arabia have been cut since the start of Yemen's civil war, while connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be made amid the conflict, TeleYemen previously said. Internet was designed to survive in case of a few random nukes here and there, but I guess that nuking every single connection will do the trick.
true_religion 5y ago
I don’t know if the internet was designed to route around five years of civil war. Even if you are fully federated, you run into the problem of being unable to protect and therefore repair certain parts of the network til the point where it degrades enough that one air strike takes out the whole thing.

tagoregrtst 5y ago

Or the single greatest human mistake. At least, ADSL and faster might be our greatest mistake. If we had kept it at no faster than 56Kbauds, I’d be more inclined to agree. EDIT: incorrect pronoun

piker 5y ago
Go on...?
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  … and say what?

sokoloff 5y ago

The web is our greatest achievement? Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity? I mean, the web is probably in the top 10, but I’d have to think pretty hard before concluding it was even top 5.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Fire, metal working, domestication of animals, sailing and navigation, democracy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the transistor, computing, radio, flight. Probably not in the top 10 the more you think about it.
dgellow 5y ago
Internet, not the web, is for sure the greatest achievement of humankind so far if you consider the human effort and collaboration such a massive network requires and the multiplier effect it has on absolutely everything.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > …the multiplier effect it has on absolutely everything Isn’t this just a byproduct of the technology it is based on? Commercial routes such as the Silk Road could be considered as the first massive, interconnected information networks.
  - toolz 5y ago
    Being able to communicate in real time anywhere in the world would seem to me, to be a force multiplier far greater than any other previous invention. Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Lets look at real results So invention of soap and hygene doubled life expectancy. The industrial revolution / steam engine has taken us from 1% gdp frowth per ccenturyt o 3-5% GDP growth, so over 100x improvement. Those are historic changes. What important metric has the internet increased at least by 50%?
      - purplevendetta 5y ago
        Conspiracy theories. Just kidding, of course.
      - suifbwish 5y ago
        I would classify soap as more of a discovery than an invention. Soap self generates in nature in certain environments.
randomsilence 5y ago
In theory, with the internet, civilization could go back to full decentralization. You need writing, printing, sanitation and food production to aggregate humans in cities to create a human network. With the internet, people can be hunter gatherers and spread all over the world and still pool their knowledge to maintain the infrastructure. You still need electricity and machines, but the internet links it all together. *edit: changed web to internet, along dgellow's comment
tonightstoast 5y ago
I agree. IMO plumbing and agriculture are way higher than the internet. They’re what gave us more free time to build society.
- harryvederci 5y ago
  Didn't hunter gatherers have a working week of 10 - 20 hours? If free time is the measurement of success, that would make agriculture a pretty horrible invention.
  - tonightstoast 5y ago
    Hunter gatherers spent 10-20 hours per week getting food - which was their work. I'm not sure where you are located but I spend 1hr/wk getting groceries. There are certainly parts of the world where people still walk miles for clean water but that's not most of the industrialized nations. I'm not arguing that people work less, I'm saying humanity now has more "free" time to produce technology/innovate. In regards to the west, the lower classes do not get the benefits of this - but the upper class or researchers absolutely do get the benefit of not having to hunt and gather for food.
netcan 5y ago
That's drab, IMO. Plenty of ways to interpret that sentence more charitably. How about "we" meaning "we the people of our time."
onion2k 5y ago
Not language/writing, printing press, medicine, food production, sanitation, or harnessing electricity? Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments. The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.
- rakejake 5y ago
  While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything starts off when a small number of people work on something, and later spreads around through consensus. But crops are a basic necessity for survival so I feel it is unfair to bring it into this debate. If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
kken 5y ago
Don't forget the Haber-Bosch process or process engineering in general.

martin_a 5y ago

> something as trivial as listening to people's Google searches It's never about Google searches, it's about The Four Horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

verisimi 5y ago

I actually suspect that the internet was designed to spy on the citizenry better, but was sold as a mega-connectivity technology. Its an indispensable part of the tech required for technocracy, but now it has done its job and there is a tracking device is every hand, its time to rein it back a few notches. (Reining back has been underway for a while to be fair..)

confiq 5y ago
The internet was not design to spy on citizens, it was design to connect citizenry!
- verisimi 5y ago
  We don't know that though, do we? We can say it wasn't sold as a spy system. But we also say that technocracy would require all devices to be connected. Languages such as java were designed with that in mind. So, perhaps playing up the social connectivity is the means to gain ubiquitous adoption. If you think reality is just 'naturally unfolding' you will object to this. But if you think reality is somewhat directed, that our future is sketched out (even if we are unaware of the plans), I think what I say is plausible. Obviously I don't think reality is simply unfolding. I note that many single social events that has occurred in recent years has resulted in incremental steps towards a technocratic surveillance system. Eg, constraints to travel with 911, perpeutual surveillance, advances towards a biomedical-banking-id. We move incrementally towards a dystopia none of us would ever agree to - but it happens so slowly, it seems to be beyond perception. As someone else mentioned - the directions are blamed on the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse - terrorists, pedos, etc but if you look it is the individual's freedoms that are lost.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > We don't know that though, do we? We can reasonably conclude the internet was not created to spy on citizens, it was created for military connectivity. One could suggest the World Wide Web was created for espionage, but that again requires several leaps with respect to its early creators, most of whom have shown a lifelong dedication to a vision of human freedom that far exceeds the population’s central tendency. Was the rollout of the WWW and internet to the masses motivated, in part, by domestic surveillance desires? Sure. Almost no question about it. But was that a guiding aim? No, at least not in America, not until the project was well underway.

user3939382 5y ago

I just assume they have/can afford only one transoceanic fiber link which has to land somewhere.

Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
According to https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ they have 4 stations (3 in the west and 1 in the lower populated east) with access to a total of 5 cables, and 1 cable is wired into 2 stations.

gus_massa 5y ago

From the article: > The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. [...] Land cables to Saudi Arabia have been cut since the start of Yemen's civil war, while connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be made amid the conflict, TeleYemen previously said. Internet was designed to survive in case of a few random nukes here and there, but I guess that nuking every single connection will do the trick.

true_religion 5y ago

I don’t know if the internet was designed to route around five years of civil war. Even if you are fully federated, you run into the problem of being unable to protect and therefore repair certain parts of the network til the point where it degrades enough that one air strike takes out the whole thing.