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by lucb1e 1571 days ago
You'd have to cut literally every cable and satellite connection and radio transmission in and out of the country. With something as geographically distributed as Russia, that sounds very hard to convince every country to convince every operator to... and even then, there's some wireless options.
2 comments
mhh__ 1571 days ago
Presumably there's a Pareto 20% (or smaller I'd imagine) of connections that carry 80% of the traffic? At very least the increased latency of being forced onto suboptimal paths would be a statement
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lucb1e 1571 days ago
Sure, but whose traffic is truly going to be disrupted? There's a reason they had this stuff about being less dependent in the past, I seem to remember they disconnected DNS traffic to the outside for a day as a test a few years ago. This 80% will impact the netflix/youtube streams, video takes a lot of bandwidth (megabits per second) compared to push-to-talk audio (kilobits per second) or plain text (~21 bytes per second is the average american reading speed). Sure there will be overhead and webpages are crazy nowadays so you need more than 21B/s, but e.g. email can work very easily on 20% of the typical bandwidth (probably also 2%, but it depends on the specifics, e.g. QoS would help a lot there).

And even if you reduced it to a few megabits snuck in and out for the whole country, the military would use that and what's impacted is civilians. Bad for the economy? Meh, if all countries were already convinced to be against russia, then trade would be at a standstill and no comms for civilians would not matter that much financially.

That's not to say it's not worth a try, but I expect it won't be effective, or if it is, I'm skeptical that it would hinder them much more than any traditional trade limits already could.

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dschulz 1571 days ago
I don't think it's necessary to physically cut cables. What if critical infrastructure is isolated from savages by just not having routes to/from them? I mean, in a similar way the Team Cymru UTRS[1] works by publishing a list of BGP filters to be imported in routers.

[1] https://team-cymru.com/community-services/utrs/

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lucb1e 1571 days ago
Agreed, it was a metaphor and not really meant as a call for physical damage that would (presumably) later have to be fixed again anyway. I should have written that more clearly.
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