No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

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Aurornis 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume

No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.

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PenguinCoder 9 hours ago | parent [-]

While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.

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reactordev 9 hours ago | parent [-]

They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance.

	▲	ta20240528 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No need for a clearance, merely explain that 1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light 2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism… 3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity 4. this 20% is identical to the 80% 5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used 6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.
	▲	dmoy 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point. Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.
	▲	8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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