Internet Controls To Be Put In Place During Pandemic (ATS SHUTDOWN?)

reply to post by badmedia

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Bandwidth is NOT unlimited. If it were, the "Denial of Service" barrage that hits the net from spammers occassionaly would not occur. Yes, that originates with overloaded servers but it also affects network traffic in general as the major routers also have excessive traffic as a result.

Writing "tons of bandwidth" indicates that you need college grads just to get the terminology straight.

on the off chance this attempted shut down goes anywhere, and it starts by cutting off DNS server access by individual, or cuts off the dns to name connection for sites the regulators want gone, might I suggest ATS gets a back up server that is run by DNS numbers, not normal web addy names?

First, no where did I say it was unlimited. I said that the amount of bandwidth available has increased by a ton, despite the growing amount of users. 1 user today has the bandwidth that 100+ people used in total only a few years ago. Still, the internet was fine.

Second, a DOS attack is when a server overloads, and more specifically it eats up the amount of connections a server has. Servers have 2 main settings in this area, 1 is "max connections", and 2 is the time out rate.

What happens in a DOS attack usually is that the request is made, but the return request is not accepted and the server is unable to send the response. So it sits there and waits for the full time out rate. While it is sitting there waiting, it is using up 1 of the servers connection.

So a DOS attack uses many requests all at once in order to take up all the available connections. The next user tries to contact the site, and as there is no connection availble, the user also sits there and waits for their own timeout amount trying to get a connection.

The pages then load slowly not because of a lack of bandwidth, but because of a lack of connections. Each image and such on a website requires it's own connection. This includes Javascript, CSS and so forth. Any outside links of information. As such, the page will appear to load slowly, or not load completely due to the lack of connections.

Thus a denial of service.

This further complicates things as regular users are then becoming backed up themselves, further contributing to the problem.

Yes, DOS attacks can eat up a bit of bandwidth. But as the DOS attacks points out - the end result is felt on the server mostly, and the servers give out long before the network and bandwidth does.

[edit on 10/30/2009 by badmedia]

Something occurs.....

If the govt is this mis(mal) informed about how the internet works- or they are THIS stupid- And I wont even go into how much other stuff they probably don't have 2 clues and an idea about... Does this simply not show that a large % of the people in DC, who are being paid a gazillion dollars by us, Are obviously a) ignorant morons who dont give a care what they do to us, as long as their bubble isn't burst, ala the French Royalty or b) nothing but near mindless puppets controlled by someone else- allowed to spout off like complete and utter fools, while the real people in charge point and laugh and STILL run the country in their grip- meanwhile putting 'laugh at the monkey' signs on their idiots... And we just go along with the game, in either scenario.

A lot of people are talking about how it probably wont happen because of big company profit loss... I agree to a point.

I think possibly they just might use this as an excuse to manipulate the media on the net.... anything they deem "popular" or "nonsense" or that "wastes net space" they will delete.

Another good question is: If they DID end up getting rid of a lot of popular websites, and many porn sites (which is like at least 50% or more of the net) What are THEY going to do with the space left behind?

reply to post by AllSeeingI

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Looking at the brighter side of the impending situation, at least we'll still be able to log on to watch the stock market crash from people not being able to log into the online shopping venues and make purchases.

It is weird because my internet has been acting up a lot. I fruquently get an error when acessing certain sites especially ats and the cdc web site. I have noticed anything to do with the H1N1 flu will give me error messages. I have had to log in and out several times.
My internet has worked great for a whole month. Suddenly on October 24 the same day as the national emergency my internet is down for 4 hours. On monday it down for half the day.
I called my internet service provider and my modem was working properly. THERE WAS NO KNOWN cause for the error. It should have worked. Just as msyteriously as it went down it came back up.
I still have trouble acessing certian web sites. Sometimes when I post it does not go through.
Anyone have any ideas if this could be related? What do you think?

[edit on 30-10-2009 by dreamseeker]

This is interesting: US boots up new unified cybersecurity center



DHS: Original Press Release

NSA To Build $1.5 Billion Cybersecurity Data Center


[edit on (10/30/09) by AllSeeingI]

Paranoia Watch: Ultrasecret NSA Has Conspicuous Role in New Federal Cybersecurity Center

I found it worthwhile to make a detailed tutorial for downloading all of Wikipedia for offline use. I hope you don't mind me posting this here since it's very relevant.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by badmedia

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thank god someone gets it! i thought i was going to have to kill myself to leave the land of the dumb for good!

just because johnny is downloading some porn, doesnt mean it will even come close to affecting the whitehouse or any communication site at all.

this is a tool for control plain and simple.

dont be a fool. research how stuff actually works and then you wont be scared anymore.



by swamping a single site, only that site has issues!

please stop claiming to be schooled in something, and then turning around to spout garbage.

obviusly if this happens then we know for sure our government is corrupt but even now it's too late to do anything. arguing for freedom will get you killed. when this day comes there will be millions of people hopping over the mexican border... to get into mexico.

I think this will happen in small selective areas as they are quarantined. It will be done so that they cannot get word out about what is happening locally.

These things are always done in slow, small increments.

I don't forsee the entire internet going down all at once.

There will be no fanfare or great disruption as these things happen. It will be very quiet. Like an invisible...."hand of god".

Lhu, I'm not picking on you in particular; just addressing some of the issues.

A bit of info: I was one of the early users of the Internet and large services (starting in 1980) and before retirement I dealt with large servers, large lines (for a city government), ICANN (in person, yet) and routers and DNS servers and more headache-inducing stuff than you can count.



ATS' host has DNS backup servers and all sorts of fail safe technology. In the event of a pandemic, people will go offline because they'll feel ill (I don't feel like cruising ATS if I'm tossing my cookies every 5 minutes.) Unless the disease targets every computer software and hardware geek in the world (hackers, too) and nobody else, there will always be backups and redundancies and you'll be able to get your favorite YouTube vids like always... maybe a bit faster with fewer people chewing up bandwidth.

At this point the web is so complex that there is not a single act that could take the whole thing out (short of shutting off electricity to the whole planet for a month... and by that time, solar powered units would be up and going.

Think of the highways of the country. If a huge bomb took out Denver or even Washington DC, people could still drive to wherever they wanted (except the place that had been bombed... and even then, emergency personnel and others could get into the area.) If California fell off the edge of the US and sank into the ocean, you'd lose sites with a host that had machines ONLY in California, but those with colocations in other states would be up and running.

As to controls... the government can't "shut down the borders" here in the US for Internet. In a tiny country with one main backbone feeding it, it would be possible to shut down sources (and this is done in many places). But in a country where you have multiple backbones and multiple redundancies, there's no good way to completely shut it off.

Good Morning,

The above statement is not correct. A denial of service is a limitation on the servers ability to respond, and not a limitation on bandwidth.
The way it works is many computers send a small bit of information asking a server for a large bit of information back. While the server being attacked is responding to these large bits of information, that servers primary function is greatly reduced thus causing a denial of service.

The reality is that there is a HUGE amount of bandwidth available. The entire structure of the internet was designed to allow for bandwidth conservation. True sites that stream large files, you tube etc, use a large amount of bandwidth in comparison to what a home user might, but there is still a massive amount readily available. Most likely ATS would remain unaffected, except for periods of slowing. Even at a TB per month in transfers, ATS isn't as large a user as Facebook, Nexopia etc.

If ATS did indeed go down, it would be for a different reason than bandwidth, *cough..govt. censorship....cough*. In truth, getting power to run our modems, switches and computers would be a bigger issue than running out of bandwidth.

Just sayin..
..Ex

I must disagree, but only to clarify one point. A single act can shut down ATS, but very few people would have access to it. If the root servers were to drop the delegation for ATS, it would be down. No amount of redundancy in this namespace would matter, as ATS is in the .com, net namespace.

It is in this fashion that the government maintains control over the respective namespaces. But..you already knew that to further clarify, if ATS also had domains registered and DNS servers registered in the alternative namespace, then no single act would be able to take it completely off line.

Other than that, your explanation was dead on.
..Ex