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aaron695 6 days ago

> The scarier part is that, while we don’t see capacity issues, we are blind on what would happen if another link would be severed, or worse, if many are severed

An actual attack would be capacity based, but xx% of the internet is Netflix, Disney etc. you can DNS block these. Then unless it's a war zone like Yemen quickly fix it.

News, Messager, websites, VoIP, Zoom (probably) should all work fine on minimal capacity. Just like we throw out a lot of food because we have redundancy, 4K streaming is our redundancy.

It'd be interesting to see a write up by a non-insane person, so not HN users or cyber security 'experts' or military consultants.

TikTok is a vital part of the Ukraine war for Ukraine for instance, but mostly the video gets out and then is organized for the external audience.

4K internet might not "Route Around Damage", 720p might?

amelius 5 days ago | parent [-]

We'd need an Internet Protocol that would support the opposite of net-neutrality. Basically, only allowing important traffic and blocking or downgrading everything else.

somat 5 days ago | parent [-]

That was part of the original ip specification, it was modeled after army telecom patterns. where there are priority levels baked in. when the net starts to overload the lower priority traffic gets discarded first.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc791 calls it precedence

  Precedence

          111 - Network Control
          110 - Internetwork Control
          101 - CRITIC/ECP
          100 - Flash Override
          011 - Flash
          010 - Immediate
          001 - Priority
          000 - Routine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_of_service

The bits ended up being reassigned for service codes. mainly because nobody used them. I also suspect there would be problems with a priority system in a peer network like the internet. It works in a more managed network(like the army) where strict priority control can be enforced. but it would probably be an arms race when one peer starts setting their priority a notch higher so their messages start getting through better on a congested link.