The internet became a single point of failure for all of civilization years ago and we're only realizing it now.

Based on Bahrain’s AWS region I would expect the first decapitation strike on a country, after defensive systems, would be cloud data centres. Everything we have from hospitals to logistics to power to SCADA to retail seems to be heavily centralised.

We need more distribution for the sake of redundancy. Less large data centres and hyper scalers, more servers in a back office somewhere.

The internet itself is less of a problem. It’s where most of the traffic goes that is the problem.

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elictronic 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Data centers are a somewhat difficult target. Not alot of explosive content, highly redundant operations, low staff count to impact operations.

It's much easier to destroy the power generation for those data centers than the center itself, and power generation is much less redundant and more easily impacted. It can be highly visible if you are only hitting a few targets, but the actual impact ends up being pretty low.

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robotnikman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm guessing countries are now starting to realize this. I bet new datacenters will start being built underground or reinforced concrete bunkers

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rco8786 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are 12,000+ data centers around the globe including ~1300 "hyper scale" DCs. It seems like at a glance that we are actually fairly distributed physically. Not to say that DCs wouldn't be valuable military targets but I would not call it centralized.

	▲	sdcfgy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And then there’s AWS us-east-1

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quantified 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, Russia has clearly established itself as a source of failures. In the same way that Europe and Canada should be weaning themselves from the USA for lighter-duty yet valid issues, they should really further disentangle themselves from the Russian economy if possible.

	▲	krunck 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's as if this whole cloud thing is BS and we should stop putting our stuff on other people's computers.

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tantalor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, this predates Internet. It happened as soon as we started connecting computer networks together.

See "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll

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ecocentrik 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was plenty of network hacking going on pre-internet and people still figure out ways to hack air gaped computers. Security is always going to be a problem.

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nradov 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Luckily the Internet itself has never failed. The worst that has happened is some large regional outages due to BGP problems.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> we're only realizing it now

Hence we need alternatives. P2P wireless (and wired) networks Freifunk, Guifi and NYCMesh are three that works today, in practice and in the real world. Contribute to them, learn from them, replicate them elsewhere, where you live.

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oldsklgdfth 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For me this is a reminder of how you can't really escape technology.

Imagine being a tech luddite. Flip phone, old PC you boot every time you want to use it, no internet presence.

You got to get produce on your bike and there's none because the fucking internet. This is the type of shit that tips people over the edge and go full Kaczynski.

Or if you're like me, maniacally laugh at the absurdity of over complicating basic infra.