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But... but ... I thought the Internet was supposed to route around damage.


Yes, the Internet has continued to work for me even though whole countries have implemented large scale filtering.

I'm not in any of those countries, but no-one ever claimed that the Internet would continue to work in the areas that were damaged.

EDIT: Freedomhouse has an interesting article about the state of Jordanian Internet censorship in 2011 and 2012. (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2012/jordan)

As an aside: was robustness (routing around damage) ever an aim of the DARPA project? I hear conflicting things, and it seems to be part of the folklore now.


That's a really good question. The phrase is sometimes called [John] Gilmore's Law. http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.h... It has certainly been said many times that DARPA was "researching a decentralized system that would be robust enough to survive and function even if most of the network were destroyed".

http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/history.shtml

http://www.ciec.org/trial/complaint/facts1.html

But that was in the event of a nuclear attack - presumably a bit more random than governments with Big Switches. Of course, NO networks, NO re-routing.




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