Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it's convinced it can't be harmed.
Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
BGP works under assumption that everyone involved acts in good faith and that good faith can be, and in specific cases in history was, severely abused.
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
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.
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.
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.
To Putin, any significant threat to his power in Russia is destruction. Ukraine is making inroads as I type this, if they get too far into Russia, it could dominoe into Putin losing power.
If it ever actually looks close to that, he ain't going to be attacking Internet cables, he'll be launching nukes.
But once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us. So he needs an intermediate step that he could do and would fuck a bunch of shit up by doing, but it's not a nuclear bomb.
No, it really isn't. Nuclear winter and the idea of thousands of Tsar Bombas belongs to the 70s. Even in an all out nuclear war today using the full (working? - doubtful regarding Russia) arsenals it would be a catastrophe with hundreds of thousands of dead but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.
I grew up during "duck and cover" and iodine in the cupboard. That's not where we are anylonger.
Putin won't do that. It's been made very clear to him he has 2 choices in that scenario, leave power peacefully for the old dictators home, or attempt to launch his nukes and immediately get yeeted by the USAF. Possibly the USN if he's vacationing near a coastal area. It's been made known to him that he does not have the operational security to keep the CIA from tracking him at all times and that his location would be target number 1 in such a situation.
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.
Nope. Usually this claim includes some reference to nuclear war, but the Internet was not designed to withstand attack. Arpanet was not designed with military applications primarily in mind.
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
For real. People talking like Russia is going to jam GPS or something, while they can’t even jam GPS or RF well enough to prevent FPV drones from slamming in to their own people. I just saw a video of a Ukrainian FPV drone taking out a Russian EW platform that’s purpose built to counter drones for fucks sake.
Edit - oh. This statement was from Medvedev back in June. lol ok bro. How you gonna run those sub generators you need to fuck with those cables when all your diesel is currently burning off in a fucking epic conflagration? Your country is literally cooked rn.
In the Julia Roberts move "Leave the World Behind", they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.
i feel like taking down the internet is harder than it sounds. you could easily disrupt satellite, but the world will route around this... its actually designed for it.
they would have to poison dns or major routing points somehow.
Cut communication trunks to knock out the internet in wide areas should still be an option since storms cause those outages for non-wireless internet now. DDOS and other atracks can still overwhelm wireless communications.
But honestly it is unlikely that being technically possible would be as successful in practice as a widespread attack as most places have a lot of redundancy built in because these kinds of threats have been around for decades.
The Russians talk shit everyday. It ends up that it's either something that they can't technically do, as it is here, or something that would would result in having their ass handed to them.
I really don’t think they have the capability, actually. They might be able to degrade the network, but I don’t think they would be able to actually physically destroy enough elements of the constellation to make it generally useless.
Not to mention, I’d be a bit shocked if the DoD doesn’t have some backups sitting quietly (as in: not broadcasting at the moment) in geosync. After all, it’s the first rule of government spending.