2 ms·
Hindsight isn't a fair judge. Can one person's mistake bring down the internet for a day? It sure can. Can one person's mistake create a nuclear disaster, oil
by _8j50 4y ago
Hindsight isn't a fair judge.
Can one person's mistake bring down the internet for a day? It sure can.
Can one person's mistake create a nuclear disaster, oil spill,war? Yup. And one person can also prevent those things except you rarely hear about averted disasters immediately.
- Tanjreeve 4y agoIm curious what mistake could be made by one person to bring down the internet. You can definitely bring down a lot if you take out an AWS data centre or screw up DNS like incident at Facebook last year. But the internet even in its current chaotic form would seem a good example of having many redundancies to me. Closest thing I could think of is screw up a big DNS provider but even that would be partial.
- _8j50 4y agoBad routing update into the global routing table. Especially by a Tier1 transit isp. If at&t starts flooding with a lot if /32 (or /24 even) or makes itself the shortest AS path hop to a lot of ASes or important ASes it would be bad. Even with rpki and all that, ISPs that don't participate can cause a cascading failure. Just knocking out verisign's root server routes for example.
- bradknowles 4y agoI accidentally took down all Internet e-mail for the entire world back in 1996. It was a basic DNS mis-configuration on my part for AOL, combined with the behaviour of typical e-mail servers at the time. This is a slightly popularized version of the actual events: https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/16/who_me/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/16/who_me/ Today, I think it would be easier to mess up the entire internet via a bad BGP routing advertisement. I think mail servers are now more robust against this kind of misconfiguration.
- Tanjreeve 4y agoDamn, congratulations