
Ask HN: A Fault-Tolerant Internet (Or Untangling the Cybernetic Supply Chain) - EmilioMartinez
In many parts of the world internet access (and indirectly computer&#x2F;phone login) depends on a very long trail that might be severed by power failure or crisis in intermediate countries. Offshore hosting also obscures what files or certificates might become unreachable. What would it take for a country&#x2F;state&#x2F;city to set up their internet infrastructure and computer software to keep working as locally as possible? Take into account that the very process of development and deployment as we know it is reliant on the internet working as intended (for software access, programming, hardware logistics, etc).<p>Bootstrapping of a country&#x27;s communication system sounds nightmarish enough, but it&#x27;s flat out impossible if all the software and hardware has built-in assumptions about what should be able to access on the other side of the world. I reckon it&#x27;s no good to spoof a remote server location without the corresponding information and credentials. What will software updated look like when security certificates are out of reach?<p>Even the development and deployment of such contingencies is at risk. Worldwide, software developers rely on online resources and services in their usual workflow (hosting, version control, plugins, testing, coordination efforts, documentation, good ol&#x27; copy-pasting, Stack Overflow, etc). And even taking software for granted, hardware guys would need to deploy the changes in logistical darkness if done post hoc. Implementing this could be incredibly costly and disruptive for any nation, but if it is imperative the sooner the better. IT staff would get overwhelmed one way or the other, preventing or fixing it. And all of this working against unknown deadlines, utilizing services that might go offline at any time because of obscure chains of dependencies. Y2K sounds like a walk in the park all of a sudden.<p>So when does push come to shove? Should any country worry about the possibility of going offline? Can anything even be done to mitigate it?
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EmilioMartinez
We've told our phones and computers to lock us out if anything feels off. In
doubt, they validate logins against international servers, but in absence of
this we have a validation stalemate. An authentication breakdown would be
specially puzzling for non-technical people. Emergency personnel might find
themselves shouting at very expensive bricks if authentication goes awry, and
not even knowing why. I fear officials and first responders might lose access
even to their institution's intranet resources because their browsers stored
all their passwords. Most people don't remember anyone's cellphone, as they
use messaging apps that leverage account contacts or the like. So even if
local cellular networks still worked untroubled in an internet blackout, I
don't think anyone who is busy in the front-line took the precaution of
printing out their coworkers' phone numbers. Governments instruct their
populace remotely, and even radio and TV broadcasting depends on the people
who operate it having internet access. Big services like GitHub, Gmail, etc,
have regional hubs that serve content locally, but I fear that they rely on
centralized servers for login auth anyways and cannot possibly be functional
in a vacuum.

Let's use WhatsApp as an example. People rely heavily on it, and let's say we
try to make it keep working as smoothly as possible to avoid disruptions in
response work. Firstly, it should keep working as usual, but in lack of a
proper connection it should default to a local server that you somehow set up
almost overnight (let's take that for granted). Your first choice could be to
convince Facebook to implement the changes themselves while everything still
works, and blindly trust your country to manage delicate conversations. If
they don't, you need to tell thousands of non-technical people who already
have enough work on their hands how to manually install non-store apps.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc, might help preemptively rolling out updates
weakening authentication and security, but that's a very dangerous thought if
it's done when not absolutely necessary. Maybe simply send notifications on
how to proceed. Even if a nation instructs their populace to install a
preexisting p2p app, can you guarantee the country's intranet will be still
standing?

