Saturday, May 8, 2010

Could a hacker take down the whole internet?

The problem with the internet is it doesn't have a central structure, and lacks a strong organizing body. Well, maybe it isn't a problem. Those factors are also what makes it such a powerful tool for communication around the world. The trick moving forward, will be to maintain the loose, freely connected nature of the internet and find some way to protect traffic.
clipped from dailycaller.com

In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent access to YouTube from the country and intentionally “black-holed” requests for YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the international carrier upstream from it that “I’m the best route to YouTube, so send all YouTube traffic to me.” The upstream carrier accepted the routing message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours.

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