To those of you who still worship Messiah Obama...

BillieTheBot

Who the fuck does this man think he is?

"President Obama will be given the power to shut down the Internet with a 'kill switch' in a new law being proposed in the US. He would be able to order popular search engines such a Google and Yahoo to suspend access their websites in times of national emergency. Other US based Internet service providers as well as broadband providers would also come under his control in times of a 'cybersecurity emergency.' Any company that failed to comply would be subject to huge fines. Critics of the new law, which has been proposed by former presidential candidate Joe Liebermann, said it would be an abuse of power to let the White House control the internet."

What is it about the White House water that turns every President that gets in there into (and I quote from Dubya's 2000 election campaign) "a major league asshole"? I don't recall people in the USA voting on a party manifesto which included giving Obama the power to switch off the internet. The rest of us didn't get to vote for him in the first place.

The mask is slipping...

Former Member

That is so going to be abused.

Former Member

You think such powers don't already exist, in reality?

Emergency powers are massively wide reaching already.

Former Member

This makes me think of the South Park episode where the internet disappears.

Former Member

LOL @ "shut down the Internet with a 'kill switch'" - 'cause that's how the Internet works. Stop reading The Daily Mail, SG. That shit's bad for you.

Former Member

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/pakistans-accid/

A Pakistan ISP that was ordered to censor YouTube accidentally managed to take down the video site around the world for several hours Sunday.

The Pakistani government ordered ISPs to censor YouTube to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a trailer to an anti-Islamic film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. YouTube has since removed the clip for violating its terms of service, but a screenshot of the film, available via Google, shows a crude drawing of a pig defecating with the word Allah underneath it.

Pakistan Telecom complied by changing the BGP entry for YouTube — essentially updating its local internet address book for where YouTube’s section of the internet is. The idea was to direct its internet users to a page that said YouTube was blocked.

Unfortunately, the ISP announced the new route to upstream providers. The upstream providers didn’t verify the new route but accepted it and then passed it along, cascading the bad address around the net, until most everyone using the net on Sunday would have been directed to the Pakistani’s network block. The blunder not only took down YouTube, but also choked the Pakistani ISP, which was quickly deluged with millions of requests for talking cat videos.

So why did the upstream providers accept the information?


YouTube has a large block of IP addresses it owns — in essence, its BGP entry tells people to go to Madison Square Garden. Once your packets get there, they are then told which entrance to the Garden is least crowded.

But the Pakistani announcement said that YouTube was located at 123 Censorship Row, Suite 305, Lahore, Pakistan — which looks to be far more specific and thus more useful information than “Madison Square Garden.” And since the internet’s architecture still relies on trust, most networks — especially big ones — trust each other’s info without testing it.



Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/pakistans-accid/#ixzz0rOn4NY1l

That was Feb 2008, if an accident can do that to a site worldwide, think of what the US government could do if it was in its own eyes "legally" allowed to toy with the internet in such a way, I'm sure they could disrupt worldwide rather than locally.

Former Member

Namaste wrote: »

This makes me think of the South Park episode where the internet disappears.

Hahaha I love that and they all go to the one place with internet..

Also.. This is why you'd never put a teenager in charge of a country "Okay Niamh, this switch here turns off ALL internet... do not flick it unless it is an EMERGANCY" *ten minutes later* oohhh no, my internet isn't working... I better switch it off and on again hahaha
Xx

Former Member

G wrote: »

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/pakistans-accid/



That was Feb 2008, if an accident can do that to a site worldwide, think of what the US government could do if it was in its own eyes "legally" allowed to toy with the internet in such a way, I'm sure they could disrupt worldwide rather than locally.

That method couldn't be used to turn off the internet - it only worked as the ISP advertised a "more specific route"
In order for anyone to do this to the whole internet it would have to advertise twice as many routes as there currently are in the routing table (Last time I looked we were running at around half a million routes, I think - but I've a terrible memory for irrelevant stuff)
Anyone advertising a million prefixes would get ignored.

Former Member

Can an 'Obama Gives You Cancer' headline by thr Mail be far away?

Alarmist headlines aside, as MoK says there is in fact almost no end of things most governments can do in an State of Emergency. Including in Britain and most Western democracies.

Former Member

In the early days of GPS, the US Military quite regularly shut down or disrupted the satellite signals during the first Gulf War. These sort of powers exist already. Chill peeps.

Former Member

The Obama Deception ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw