WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated attacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.Why is that a surprise to anyone? The Internet, first known as the ARPAnet, was designed to provide resilient communications between mainframe computers that would survive a nuclear attack. Especially when there are a shitload of mirror sites and there are over 1,200 such sites as of three hours ago.
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Actually, erm, no. There were other projects for that purpose, none of which shared any commonality with the ARPANET's design. The purpose of the ARPANET was to connect the mainframes of DoD research teams so that they could easily share research, period. It was a research network from day one, with no (zero) redundant links between the major universities and government contractors who were on the network, and no attempt at hardening the network.
It was not until the Reagan Administration that serious thought was given to, "what happens to the ARPANET in a nuclear attack?" It turned out that the EGP routing protocol then in use would not automatically route around damage, but that the fundamental architecture of the Internet was, by happy happenstance, otherwise well suited to route around damage due to unintentional consequences of how the network had grown over the years. The end result of that research was BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, which decentralized routing and allowed the Internet to actually dynamically route around damage. This was first proposed in 1989 in IETF RFC 1105, and was widely adopted by 1994.
In short, yes, the Internet is designed to route around damage, but no, that was *not* part of its original design. Us computer geeks had to work long and hard during the 80's and early 90's to make it so. Thankfully the DARPA tap was on full gush during the Reagan years to give us the funds to do that kind of thing.
Disclaimer: I was at one of the universities that was doing that research during the Reagan Administration... which is why I know that the story you just repeated, while a cool story, gives way too much credit to people who had nothing to do with designing the Internet to route around damage, and not enough to the folks at Cisco, IBM, and Cornell who actually did it.
- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
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