It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Forget wireless. The Internet exists because of hundreds of thousands of miles of thick, old fashioned cables. Hundreds upon hundreds of undersea, intercontinental cable lines, cross-crossing around the world, are what put your tweets onto a monitor in Pakistan. As mentioned, the cables are wired to back each other up—when one fails, another picks up the slack. But hey—what if you snipped them all?
Get these out of the way, and you've made a good dent into the Internet's guts. Global finance is now over, leading to an instant worldwide financial collapse—sorry. Skype is broken, as is every other means of talking between continents over the Internet. You can't email your friends abroad. You can't order Barbour coat from the UK. Tweets from the Middle East are stuck there.
Like the cables that feed (well, fed) them, the servers are also an open secret. In order for them to be any use at all, they have to be absolutely transparent—the web is worthless unless it's a free orgy of interoperability. And the best way to make sure everyone gets theirs is to just make the details of the root servers—and their locations—public. It just takes the tiniest amount of digging.
Let's say we want to obliterate the "K" servers, operated by a company called RIPE NCC. Go to its website, and from there it's as simple as scrolling across a Google Map. Oh, here's a server located in Miami. Click on it—it's located in the NAP of the Americas data complex, which a simple Google search will point out is located at 50 NE 9th St, Miami, Florida. You can take the 6 bus straight there. But if you're going to wipe the place out, be prepared for security—these places are guarded like Nazi bunkers to make sure nobody enters without a damn good reason.
What have we accomplished so far? With all the cables cut, the Internet is landlocked, broken up into a handful of tiny Internets that can't talk to one another. Messages can't be sent around the world anymore. Hell, Japan is completely isolated. After demolishing the root servers, web addresses are reduced to incomprehensible code numbers. The destruction of the Internet is ready for its coup de grâce: Blow up the boxes that hook what's left together.
Data centers are unassuming buildings filled with servers that host the websites we browse, the emails we read, and the vault of lo-res Facebook photos you racked up all through college. They're enormous, often windowless structures that aren't designed for people. They're houses for computers, not flesh—they're often dark most of the time—to keep them cool, and because computers don't mind working without lights on. But they're vital to the people who want to sprint through the web, allowing your ISP to link up with the rest of the internet. Some of these centers in particular are mega-hubs, "public internet exchanges," open bazaars of ISPs from every corner of the globe converging on one floor of one building.
One of the Most Important Internet Hubs in the World Is in Manhattan
60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan provides colocation services and low-latency interconnectivity to over 100 carriers—companies that own the physical equipment that makes up the Internet—including financial exchange and application providers, content and cloud providers, and multiple private enterprises. Interconnectivity is the act of physically linking network equipment with those owned by another company or a customer—be it AT&T linking to Verizon or a Pac Bell customer attaching an answering machine to his landline.
Back on the 9th floor of 60 Hudson, a 15,000 square foot facility known as the Meet-Me-Room is the convergence point of multiple layers of local, national and global fiber optic cables. This is where each carrier's server, storage, and networking equipment resides as well as arrays of optical, coaxial or copper terminations which allows the carrier's "colocation units" to connect to other networks through a series of connection panels. This physical hub of the Internet, essentially a gigantic Ethernet switch, is powered by a 10,000 Amp DC power plant.
Now data is entirely frozen. Nothing can get anywhere, because all the roads, bridges, and traffic lights are in ruin. All that's left of the Internet is your office intranet, or the file-swapping in your dorm. The tiny shreds. There are nets, but none of them are inter.
Congratulations, you're the world's biggest asshole.
But remember, to do this, you would've just completed the single most complex, sweeping act of destruction in human history. But with anything less, the Internet would still be kicking.
Originally posted by DarkKnight21
It would never work. Maybe in the early 90's it could, but cyberspace is too big an infrastructure to destroy at this point.
Originally posted by Unity_99
Internet can bounce off satellites too. Just saying. Cables are outdated.
Makes you wonder how many aren’t out there plotting it right now, huh?
Originally posted by D.Wolf
reply to post by FortAnthem
Makes you wonder how many aren’t out there plotting it right now, huh?
As a super villain, I first made sure My superduperelectronicplants out price all other suppliers and make them go bust. Soon all new hardware is made with My cheap ass semiconducting components that I have provided with a dark gloomy backdoor ready for my evil entrance, I might just push the button.. now.. no not now.. soon though.. soon sOOOOn!
edit on 4/8/12 by D.Wolf because: typoos
Originally posted by NullVoid
Originally posted by D.Wolf
reply to post by FortAnthem
Makes you wonder how many aren’t out there plotting it right now, huh?
As a super villain, I first made sure My superduperelectronicplants out price all other suppliers and make them go bust. Soon all new hardware is made with My cheap ass semiconducting components that I have provided with a dark gloomy backdoor ready for my evil entrance, I might just push the button.. now.. no not now.. soon though.. soon sOOOOn!
edit on 4/8/12 by D.Wolf because: typoos
Sooo, let me get this straight...
You sort of create a super chipset with backdoor, make it the cheapest, everyone using it, you can access and control everything at will, then for the sake of proving "I'm super villain" blew it all ? Wow