4 ms·

>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital

>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.

kemiller 9mo ago
Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.
- ls612 9mo ago
  It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections. Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
    - terminalshort 9mo ago
      Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
      - Nextgrid 9mo ago
        I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
        terminalshort 9mo ago
        It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
        TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
        According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
        bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
        I mean, I guess the press is freer in Norway but it’s a backwater and no one cares what they say
        petre 9mo ago
        The current US president cares enough to have writen a letter to the Norwegian PM whining about the Nobel he didn't get and of course, Greenland. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-norway/685676/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-no...
  - whynotmaybe 9mo ago
    The second isn't publicly promoted.
bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
Why would there be a blackout? Is like hardening against a gas shortage
- zabzonk 9mo ago
  EMP attack
  - bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
    There’s no such thing
    - zabzonk 9mo ago
      Thermonuclear weapon detonated in orbit
    - defrost 9mo ago
      The nuke part is optional, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power_Microwave_Advanced_Missile_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power... that said, there have been multiple past nuclear EMP orientated tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse results vary by location (earth's mag field) and pre hardening of infrastructure.
- jenadine 9mo ago
  If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland". Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
  - KronisLV 9mo ago
    > Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer. I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen. At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle. Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage). I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.
deepbluev7 9mo ago
You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.

kemiller 9mo ago

Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.

ls612 9mo ago
It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections. Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
  - terminalshort 9mo ago
    Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
      - terminalshort 9mo ago
        It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
        TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
        According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
        bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
        I mean, I guess the press is freer in Norway but it’s a backwater and no one cares what they say
        petre 9mo ago
        The current US president cares enough to have writen a letter to the Norwegian PM whining about the Nobel he didn't get and of course, Greenland. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-norway/685676/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-no...
- whynotmaybe 9mo ago
  The second isn't publicly promoted.

bethekidyouwant 9mo ago

Why would there be a blackout? Is like hardening against a gas shortage

zabzonk 9mo ago
EMP attack
- bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
  There’s no such thing
  - zabzonk 9mo ago
    Thermonuclear weapon detonated in orbit
  - defrost 9mo ago
    The nuke part is optional, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power_Microwave_Advanced_Missile_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power... that said, there have been multiple past nuclear EMP orientated tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse results vary by location (earth's mag field) and pre hardening of infrastructure.
jenadine 9mo ago
If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland". Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
- KronisLV 9mo ago
  > Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer. I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen. At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle. Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage). I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.

deepbluev7 9mo ago

You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.