A year without internet

 

Image from Pixabay

It was a pleasant spring day, that April 14, 2022. Sunny, light wind, twenty degrees (68 °F). But the day started foggy. Not only from a meteorological point of view, also digitally. At 7:53 am the internet started to malfunction. An hour later all screens were black. Worldwide. That was a year ago. The internet is still broken, despite all the smart cyberheads who have weighed in on this. We've been thrown back, cyber-wise, to the floppy era.

Could such a horror scenario ever materialize? At the risk of the wish being father to the thought: I don't think so. After all, the internet is designed to survive the failure of part of the network. It has no all-important component that, if it fails, shuts down the entire Internet. The design has a military background, where availability was of the utmost importance, and this mechanism is of course also very useful in civilian society. Despite the improbable nature of this figment of my imagination, I would like to pretend that the first paragraph actually happened for the duration of this blog. In terms of information security, you could say dryly that there is an availability problem. That's nice, but that observation won't help you much if you can't pull out a recovery plan that lives up to its title.

I try to comprehend what the prolonged absence of the internet would mean. Let me take a look at myself first. For starters, I wouldn't be sitting at my desk at home right now, but in the office. Five days a week. Because working from home without internet is not possible. Well, of course I could write a blog or a memo, save it on my laptop and put it on the intranet at the office (sorry external readers, no blog for you). But that online meeting that I had this morning, that really couldn't have been done. I would have cycled to the office through the cold spring sun. Speaking of cold: without the internet I really wouldn't have known what the weather was like a year ago, and I couldn't have started this blog with the weather report from then.

It's fifteen minutes by bike for me and I find my office blindly, but suppose I had to go to an unknown destination. Would my navigation have worked? Yes and no. GPS is separate from the internet; it comprises a bunch of satellites in orbit and an antenna in my navigation device that picks up the signal from those satellites. So I know where I am and which way I'm going. However, without internet I have no current maps. If I'm lucky, the necessary maps will be in the system. If not, I have to provide the coordinates to tell the system where I want to go. But how do I find out? And I miss up-to-date traffic information anyway, so I may end up in a big traffic jam and arrive too late at my destination.

Well, I still have some old paper road maps lying around somewhere and the signposts haven't been abolished yet either; I would find my way completely without electronics. For digital natives – young people who were born with a smartphone in their hands, who don't even realize there was ever an internet-free era – analogue navigation could be a big challenge. They don't even know how to unfold a map, so to speak, and they see right through signposts.

The demand for many types of personnel would explode. Webshops no longer work - you have to go to the store for everything, which means that they need more staff. Fortunately, there are suddenly many redundant people at the distribution centers of large webshops. The tax return has to be on paper like in the old days, and all that paperwork has to be processed manually. Where do you get so many well-trained tax officials? If I want an appointment at the dentist, the barber or a restaurant, I have to call – fortunately we have not yet shut down our telephone networks under the guise of “there’s Skype and WhatsApp, who needs POTS?” (Plain Old Telephone System).

Travel agencies would shoot up like mushrooms. Because we can no longer book a nice holiday from our easy chair. You have to plan your holiday well in advance, because the travel agency has to send a paper application to the tour operator and in the meantime you have to keep your fingers crossed, because the travel agency cannot check availability online either.

And my work? That continues. Because luckily we have our own large data center, in which the systems run that our own army of IT specialists makes and maintains. We have years of work to do on that. Because security is a process, right? We throw all our energy into this job, without distraction from external emails and social media. And we only hear the news of the day in the evening, when we watch the news via the hastily restored analogue cable TV.

Well, I'm going to drop this blog in de pillar-box.

 

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• smaller pieces of internet regularly fail for shorter or longer periods of time. [2 different articles.]
• you can see at a glance what is broken, and for how long, here.
• things are not so good for phishers in the Netherlands. [DUTCH]
• the impact of encryption on policing cannot be determined. [DUTCH]
• DdoS criminals have already had enough of IoT devices, they are moving to cloud servers.
• criminal service providers put your rogue app in Google Play for a few thousand dollars.
• you should hope that you never have to have a computer or smartphone repaired. [Ignore the commercial message at the end of the article; the story itself is relevant.]
• Artificial intelligence poses a threat to digital security.
• long passwords are more important than ever in the AI era. [Please note: I disagree with advice No. 2 in this article, and No. 3 is shaky.]