• Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.

      • @Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        217 months ago

        Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.

        Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn’t be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.

        Elon would be very happy.

        • @Steve@startrek.website
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          67 months ago

          Im curious… how much undersea cable traffic could Starlink handle? I know the sat-sat laser links are just coming online now, what if every sat had them

        • @kungen@feddit.nu
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          67 months ago

          And otherwise, you can’t eliminate the possibility of local sabotage as well. Most of the important networking information in Sweden was leaked due to our “open information” laws.

          It’s not like Russia can make it some long-term problem, but being an annoyance and making chaos is their goal.

        • Maybe the local internet would keep working but the countries wouldnt. Lots of stuff stops working without central web authorities and all international trade and payment systems would collapse. It would be a massive catastrophe. But its probably quite hard to take out everything at once before the militaries of the world would start paying special attention to those cables.

          • @Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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            47 months ago

            Yeah last time I saw a map of the internet cables it looked like there was quite a lot of redundancy so I’m not convinced they could pull it off fully to be honest.

      • @eyeon@lemmy.world
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        57 months ago

        would Americans even consider that taking down the internet? It wouldn’t impact a US client talking to a US server.

        • Thats not how things on the internet work. It would mostly certainly cause many issues for everyone everywhere. Basic functionality might stay working but not everything has a local copy in the US. We depend on things and people from all over the world to keep things running.

  • @vegeta@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?

    ohh wait…

  • @nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that’s actionable, I have big doubts.

    • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      127 months ago

      I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that threat.

      They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I’m betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.

      I also don’t know how well they put up against really large lasers

      They’ve also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.

      • @Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        117 months ago

        They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.

      • @nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        Where though? They just gonna fly enough jammers up into orbit to cover the entire path and all the satelites and pretend thats not going to also jam every navagation satelite including their own and China, their biggest allys? I don’t see it.

        • @Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Blowing up the GPS satellites is certainly an option and there’s not much we could do to stop them. We know that China has succesfuly tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007. I would not be surprised if Russia was working on the technology at the same time. If they can’t or don’t want to blow up the satellites, then they could perhaps launch their own jamming satellites to orbit near the existing GPS satellites would work.

          Edit: It just occurred to me that you don’t need to jam them. Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn’t know which signals were legit.

          • Skua
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            187 months ago

            The Soviet Union proved that it was able to shoot down satellites in the 60s. The technical difficulty of hitting a satellite with a missile is not really an obstacle here

            • @SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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              157 months ago

              Yeah, the Soviet union could also mass produce tanks and planes. Russia today…

              Glances at Ukraine

              Is using almost exclusively Soviet stock.

          • @nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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            37 months ago

            You don’t need satellites in space to shift GPS, they’ve been messing with it in war zones for years, and AWACS like planes could do it in real time anywhere they won’t get shot down.

          • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            China doing it in 2007 was big news because they joined the club. The West and Russia has had the capability for decades.

        • @snooggums@midwest.social
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          27 months ago

          Jam some strategic locations, like air travel hubs or highly populated areas for the highest impact. No need to jam wide open low population areas without military targets.

          • Mayor Poopington
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            217 months ago

            Real curious how Russia plans to get jamming equipment the size of a truck into those areas

            • @nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              I also just don’t see anyone in Russia deciding that were going to trigger article 5 by using a jammer on US soil. The risk reward is non existent unless they can make the whole country GPS and internet dark at the same time. Imagine that many resources going on the ground in a country as large as America. It’s basically asking Ukraine to regain any territory they had a counter invasion plan ready for.

            • @aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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              7 months ago

              The jamming equipment could be the size of a briefcase; the received signal is below the noise floor.

              Or it could be one satellite already in the air beaming to a specific area. Or a constellation of satellites already in the air who handoff coverage of a specific area. Or a hack of an existing satellite constellation command and control channel to reprogram the transmitters to cover up GPS L band.

                • @aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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                  7 months ago

                  I’m familiar with radio systems. You could absolutely put a 1 kW L-band jammer in a briefcase, with an effective radius of probably a couple of miles.

            • @snooggums@midwest.social
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              7 months ago

              I was just pointing out that it isn’t necessary to jam 100% of GPS to have a massive impact. The odds that Russia could pull anything off is pretty small, and jamming GPS for more than a few hours is evenless likely.

            • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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              47 months ago

              That’s easy you just drive the truck into the area. It’s when you turn it on that’s the issue. You’re going to meet a lot of people very fast.

          • Triggering NATO collective defense so they can deploy a jammer on US soil doesn’t seem to be what they’re threatening, and they’re already been using jammers in Ukraine. So either theyre threatening to do something they can’t do or theyre threatening to do something they’re already doing, and already being countered, in a new place.

      • Which they do. Not on a global scale, though.

        It is quite annoying to be Russia’s neighbours. But you can work around it. In fact, it’s not bad to train yourself to operate without GNSS. And it would be even better if the jammers decided to spontaneously combust.

  • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Yeah?

    And we’d retaliate. Which is why they haven’t done it. They didn’t shoot down the satellites in the cold war and they aren’t going to do it now unless they’ve decided the world without satellites is just so much better.

    How is this news? China could nuke the West Coast tomorrow and the Canadians might invade Maine to secure a maple syrup monopoly! Actually, that’s more likely than anything else in this thread…

      • @one_knight_scripting@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I need to give you one more chance to retract, no questions asked. Before this conversation becomes a confrontation.

        Edit: Just an American quoting a Canadian show to you. Nothing actually confrontational about it. In fact, everyone who responds with a quote from the same show gets an updoot.

  • mechoman444
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    447 months ago

    Russia said they’d take over Ukraine in three days.

    Russia says a lot of shit.

  • mozz
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    237 months ago

    What? The whole fuckin internet is the backup plan

    Like bro do you even BGP?

      • mozz
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        So Ivan Sabotageovich calls up someone who works at Level3

        Says “Hey broski I want you to start announcing bogus BGP routes”

        Guy who answers the phone says “What? Why would I do that?”

        Guy on the phone says “I’ll give you rubles”

        Guy who answers the phone says my brother in Christ I make $175k per year and I will get fired and they’ll fix it in about 25 minutes anyway, sorting out and fixing stuff like this is kind of why people like me are employed here and there are a lot of us watching what happens

        Guy on the phone says I can also give you TONS of unrefined crude oil and methane, or precision aircraft parts from the 1990s

        Guy who answers says I need to go now, good luck though

        Guy on the phone says blyat as the line goes dead

          • mozz
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            67 months ago

            … for 18 minutes

            With their existing infrastructure in the US which Russia doesn’t have

            And it was detected (and was trivial to fix once detected it sounds like) even before people were particularly alerted to this as a possibility

    • Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted? It’s absolute chaos. That’s all they want. They aren’t trying to absolutely isolate Internet from the US and it’s allies, we have all kinds of satellite backups for things like that.

      • mozz
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        7 months ago

        I mean you are correct that things like this are a shit show if you are directly involved, but my point is that the wider world can continue fairly unimpeded. Unless they have some kind of magic backhoe that can cut every backbone cable all at once or something, I think the impact in terms of bringing the West’s telecommunications to its knees is going to be more or less nil.

        • All they need is to send subs around and attach charges ahead of time and blow them all at once. The problem is the time constraints of figuring out exactly where the cables got cut. I believe they have somewhat solved this, but I don’t think it’s bulletproof. The chaos is really the goal though.

      • @Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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        47 months ago

        Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted?

        I have. Usually.the network tries to route around it, with best effort delivery. This keeps the outage localized and is part of network standards. You can expect delay, though. I guess I don’t see what you’re getting at.

        • You’re just talking about route healing. They mean to disrupt long standing communications, which doesn’t resolve itself in the same way. BGP works fine for peered connections, but not at a global scale like this. It can take many hours and lots of manual intervention to quiet things down. Do that a few times at regular intervals, and it could be days.

          • @Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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            37 months ago

            I’ve worked international voice and data networks and I can’t imagine the number of points of presence they would have to hit in your dream scenario. They simply couldn’t do it without going to war, when this effort would give way to plans of survival.

            • That’s kind of their point. They do dumb shit like to provoke and prod. They’ve been randomly jamming GOS for years for no reason, and cutting these cables as well. It’s just a flexnto let people know if it comes to that, then they might do something. It’s the same reason they run their subs just loud enough to be detected around the north seas, and then go silent.

              • @Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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                27 months ago

                You don’t understand. They’re just talking shit. They are very aware of what they have to do to start a war with the west. Yet they don’t because they know that it’ll last 20 minutes.

  • jackeryjoo
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    7 months ago

    The internet was literally created by the DoD to have a communication system that was resilient to foreign attacks. If one part of it goes down, it can still work with the parts that aren’t down. This is built into the design.

  • @CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world
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    127 months ago

    They’re afraid to use their glide bombs in Kursk because they’re not accurate enough to avoid hitting their own friendlies and they think they can hit a satellite moving ten of thousand + miles an hour in orbit!? lol