Ignoring The Kill Switch

Much has been said recently of Cyber Warfare and the existential threat it represents.

Hopefully you have been able to ignore this ridiculous meme and the clownish "experts" propagating it.

Unfortunately, providing "solutions" for these problems is far too lucrative a market opportunity to be left unexploited, so you should expect to see this meme grow, and for the proposed policies to become more and more radical.

Enter the kill switch.

Like the more general "cyber warfare" meme, the Internet Kill Switch is demonstrably absurd. Will wireless networking equipment be confiscated ? Will private peering interconnects within datacenters be disconnected ? Will IP traffic over cellular or CATV links be disabled ? The understanding of those that propose such an idea probably begins and ends at the word "switch".

Derision and disgust, however, are not ingredients of a good business continuity plan. Although it appears unlikely to be implemented soon, the (bad) policy has been proposed, and regardless of our technical "understanding", we as service providers must respond and fit our offerings to this possible reality.

And so, in Q1 of 2011, rsync.net will provide a wireless private network at each of its physical locations (San Diego California, Denver Colorado, Zurich Switzerland, and Hong Kong) which will allow customers to physically approach the datacenter and access their stored data without traversing The Internet. This will ensure that bad policy will have to enter the stone age to keep you from accessing your data.

Full technical details will be published on our web site before these wireless links are active. Capabilities will include the ability to tunnel through to other rsync.net locations. So, for instance, if you live in California and store your data in our Zurich location, we may still have routing across the ocean even if you do not - we're right next to our backbone providers, and have several of them, after all. So while we will not transform ourselves into an ISP for you, we will maintain whatever VPNs we can to allow you to reach your data, regardless of which physical location you may be at.

As we've pointed out before, we are not an ISP. We announce today that we are not even an Internet data storage provider ... we are simply a data storage provider and will work with our customers to provide them service regardless of political inefficiencies.

 

Comments

[Steve Cheatham]

John,
The absurd idea that you can turn off all or parts of the internet is a dinosaur. But, alas, somebody might try it.
Thanks for keeping your eye on the ball so I can operate with the security that I am a step ahead of the crazies.

[John Moravec]

Shutting down all parts of the Internet is indeed impossible. It may however be possible to "disconnect" USA from the rest of the world, leaving the rest of the world screwed (no root DNS servers), at least for a while.

People, economy and industries now depend on the Internet, so shutting it down is like protecting yourself by shooting yourself in the stomach. And what about those terrorists we're so much afraid of? Won't they find this kill switch as a wonderful target to hit and cause excessive damage? Let's make it easy for them. Let's construct a kill switch! Let us protect ourselves from terrorists by creating another big target for them!

Human stupidity really amazes me sometimes. I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad. 9/11 made us afraid, reckless and stupid. The terrorists have indeed won.

[Nicolas]

Even though the threat is pretty stupid, I have to say that your idea of providing a local wireless network so your customers still have a way to access their data, is a good idea.

John, when you guys are done setting up these wireless networks around your datacenters, maybe we could join our forces and work together on building a "politics kill switch" ? :)

Nicolas

[Mike]

Thank you for this information and brining it to my attention, I don't have the time to follow all this nonsense about kill switches.

Hmmmm, I wonder if anybody has ever routed IP over short wave radio. LOL.