Is It Possible To Destroy The Internet?

[anwiii 17]

you're full of it. you have abolutely NO knowledge of what is capable....but lets turn it around for a second and not talk about the internet. let's talk about people and technology. you get rid of the people OR the technology, and you get rid of the internet....*POOF* GONE! so my point is....where is the world heading to...in terms of technology. oh...short term proves very beneficial. what about the long term? where do you see it heading? a virus can't destory the internet? well....it still is a possibility in an answer to the original question. what about technology....where in the long run will we stand? you don't have a CLUE what the possibilites are the way we are heading. the internet is ever changing which means it is always being destroyed for something better that it can offer. saying the internet can't be destoryed is like saying you will never die....and your ignorance will never be an excuse for being wrong.

It is not possible for a virus to destroy the Internet. Regardless of what anyone wants to believe (which they can, and they're entitled to), there's no argument, it simply is what it is. You can call it ignorance, but it's ignorant to make an assertion without having a clear idea of the technology behind the Internet backbone. It's not the same as the $40 Linksys router you use at home. Some of the fundamental routing systems are impossible to disrupt through the use of viruses alone. They do not have dynamic or writable storage systems Have you ever noticed that backbone routing functions have -never- gone down as a result of viruses? That's the case for a reason: it's not possible.
Also, viruses don't just continue to feed unchecked; they have limitations. If you can name even one virus that been able to infiltrate every system on the Internet, you'd be lying, because that too has never happened.

If you'd like, you can do a little research on the hardware involved in these processes. A simple Google search for "internet backbone" would probably reveal a plethora of enlightening information.

Best of luck.

[nolan 0]

No, not full of it; I just actually understand the technology that I talk about. And for the record, you shouldn't resort to calling someone ignorant just because your argument can't hold its footing against them. Even if the person were wrong, what would you be showing by sinking to that level? That kind of attitude doesn't take you far in life, and only gives insight into greater insecurities.

The question was, "is it possible to destroy the Internet?" That's not the same as asking, "is it possible for a future technology to take the Internet's place?" or "is it possible for humanity to get destroyed and the Internet to go out with it?" A part of the Internet changing is not the same thing as a part of the Internet being destroyed; it's simply something changing. If you want to use that logic, you'd have to take the stance that you yourself have been destroyed thousands of times throughout your life due to the ever-changing nature of the human body. (And if that's how you look at things. fair enough -- that's what they call "perspective".)

And when it comes to the "long term" that you've mentioned, if the Internet ends up being replaced entirely by another system of mass communication, again, the Internet will not have been destroyed. The creation of a new Web browser does not "destroy" the old web browser. A person taking the place of a retiree at their former job does not "destroy" the retiree. A technological construct can become deprecated or removed from service, but that's not the same as it being destroyed.

A little bit of calm thinking goes a long way with these topics, as opposed to just looking at someone who says something slightly off cue with you and gorging yourself with enough adrenaline to kill a small bull.

Have a good day.

you're full of it. you have abolutely NO knowledge of what is capable....but lets turn it around for a second and not talk about the internet. let's talk about people and technology. you get rid of the people OR the technology, and you get rid of the internet....*POOF* GONE! so my point is....where is the world heading to...in terms of technology. oh...short term proves very beneficial. what about the long term? where do you see it heading? a virus can't destory the internet? well....it still is a possibility in an answer to the original question. what about technology....where in the long run will we stand? you don't have a CLUE what the possibilites are the way we are heading. the internet is ever changing which means it is always being destroyed for something better that it can offer. saying the internet can't be destoryed is like saying you will never die....and your ignorance will never be an excuse for being wrong.

[thejode 0]

I have always wondered if it is impossible to destroy the internet all together... is this even possible?
If it is possible to destroy the internet what would you have to do? Would you have to destroy all the Internet companys like comcast and aol? Or would that not even take care of it?

Just think, if someone took down the entire internet not only would our lives be boring but it would basically destroy the U.S. & other big countries all at once.

Well, you would probably start off by destroying all the ISP's(Internet Service Providers) in the world, because they are the people who provide the internet to you. They send you a bill via the mail about your internet usage and stuff, so if they got taken out, you would never get internet to your house. Hence, no internet.

[nolan 0]

In this (highly unlikely) case, you'd still have satellite direct-link and backbone communications between network service providers (different from ISPs). Although that's irrelevant, because it's not feasible for the ISP's alone to get taken out.

As I've mentioned before, there are a lot of materials out there that are available to be studied which discuss the Internet backbone at great length. Reading these will provide a greater insight into the technologies at work.

Well, you would probably start off by destroying all the ISP's(Internet Service Providers) in the world, because they are the people who provide the internet to you. They send you a bill via the mail about your internet usage and stuff, so if they got taken out, you would never get internet to your house. Hence, no internet.

[armynavy123 0]

You can definetly take out the internet. You just need to destroy all the providers! Which could happen if you cross your fingers and buy 2 billion $$$ worth of hacking tools! Good Luck!

[kleong 0]

The thread and the idea of killing the internet was started in 2006. Now at 2009, the internet is still around and if getting "stronger" through the years. So that should answer the question which is the topic of this thread.

[anwiii 17]

you aren't using your head, nolan and your take on the definaition of "destoryed" is relative and just one sided thinking.sure, it's almost impossble to destroy the whole internet or get rid of it in general...but what are we looking at. communications providors. get rid of them and you destroy the majority of the internet. now since the united states has the most internet users, i will use them as an example as a starting point in the destruction of the internet. all that really has to happen is unrest in the united states to where martial law is declared. if you feel you have a right to use the internet, you are sadly mistaken especially under conditions of marital law. a cival war in the united states could definately destroy a big chunck of the internet. and if that ever happens, then you will see a domino effect where the internet is being destroyed in other parts of the world. i mean...can the internet be used as a weapon against an enemy? sure it can. this has already been proven. do you think if there was a war against a government, that the governemt doesn't have the power to shut down communication access to the masses?without going in to a lot of detail and writing a book on the subect, this is just one example of the possibilites in the internet being destroyed. also, war in general. take away the people is to take away the internet. i don't really care how much knowledge you have on technology. you aren't thinking outside the box. maybe you are thinking realistically....but realistically doesn't cover any of the possibilities now does it.when i was a teenager, i predicted a cival war before i turn 50. it's starting to seem unlikely but ever since i was a kid i have been noticing how our government has slowly been taking away citizens right. they have also been rewarding us with all sorts of government benefits to where we aren't recognizing the gradual changes and the rights being taken away. what does that have to do with the destruction of the internet? well, i used a civil war as an exampleand yes, CHANGE destroys but it also allows for new beginnings. and yes, i do we change every day and parts of us get destoryed. the only thing that i couldn't debate about is if our soul and the energy that surounds us can ever be destroyed. everything else does in fact have the possibility of being destroyed. and just because i said you were full of it, doesn't mean i was calling you ignorant. i am talking about your reasoning in this topic only. but what do i know. maybe you are full of it in other areas too... lighten up sheeeesh

[nolan 0]

Here's my definition of destroy (from Merriam-Webster): 1. to ruin the structure, organic existence, or condition of, and 2. to put out of existence. If you need to look up "ruin", feel free to do so.

And yes, I am using my head. Part of using my head means to actually draw from a thorough understanding of the technologies that make up the Internet, as opposed to having no idea of what those technologies are or how they work and to state something as being a fact regardless of my lack of understanding.

As for your other points:

"communications providors. get rid of them and you destroy the majority of the internet" -- First of all, you're saying the "majority" of the Internet. Destroying the "majority" of the Internet isn't destroying the Internet, since it would still be operational (traffic reroutes itself automatically), still be in existence, and its structure would not be "ruined". Not only this, but taking out all of the communication providers alone won't happen, so it's a moot point.

"a war in xyz country would create a domino effect that would destroy the internet" -- Again, this is incorrect. The Internet was initially designed to be a system of mass communications DURING wartime, hence its origins as DARPAnet at the Department of Defense (and hence the reason the DOD controls a great number of DNS root servers).

If, for some reason, a government decided it was going to restrict all Internet access from its civilians, I can guarantee their military operations would still rely on the network. And, lo and behold, even if they didn't, the Internet still wouldn't be destroyed, due to the fact that if any one country (or several) lost Internet access in its entirety (which also won't happen, but we'll say so anyway), that wouldn't "destroy" the Internet for other countries. People in those countries won't be able to access servers in the country that's no longer connected, but the Internet would still be functional.

"...without going in to a lot of detail and writing a book on the subect..." -- Well, you could start by -reading- books. Perhaps even look over some of the documents put out by the NSF and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

"...i don't really care how much knowledge you have on technology." -- We're discussing technology, so I would think that would be relevant if you wanted to offer any intelligent contribution.

"...and yes, CHANGE destroys... etc." -- Fair enough if that's what you want to believe, but I hope you either wear the same clothes every day or buy clothes in bulk, because you're going to end up with a lot of destroyed undergarments that way.

Best regards,

Nolan

you aren't using your head, nolan and your take on the definaition of "destoryed" is relative and just one sided thinking... Etc.

[anwiii 17]

what does wearing clothes or buying clothes in bulk have to do with this topic? you lost me now.as far as wartime. if a government believes shutting down any part of the internet will give them an advantage through other means of communication, what do you think would happen or the possibility?yes...you destory the internet if the united states, under my example, goes to war with the results that were stated. you shut down a big chunk...and yes...there will be a domino effect in how one nation affects others. since most internet activity comes from the u.s., you literally destroy the internet. it has changed. information isn't going back and forth like it did.lets look at it on a smaller scale. all the internet is is 2 or more computers linked together forming a network. now, you do agree that if the internet was just two computers, it would be easy to shut down the internet. what about if 1,000,000 computers formed the internet through one network. would it be easy to shut it down? yes. very. now....we have millions of computers and thousands of networks. is it still easy? no. because of the different network involved but it doesn't mean it's impossible.let's not talk about war, but programming,hacking, and viruses. since i've been on the net for over 25 years, there have been programmer and hacker groups. hackers usually work on their own but some belong to a group. . there are many of these groups around that have evil intentions. but, they aren't organized. what if one day, their groups get bigger and organized to where eventually this group is world wide and their sole job is to take down the internet...even if it was for only a day. isp's and satalites are not the internet. they just provide the gateway to it. all the internet is, is computers connecting to eachother. if this worldwide group that is now organized places each individual to do a seperate task after much thought and study to the preperation of shutting down the internet, is it possible then?you say never. i appreciate whatever logic is behind your thinking. i guess you are assuming that we are living in a never ending world as the human race will live forever on planet earth and the internet is going to be our gateway to it. 30 years ago, cloning was just science fiction. nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought that in 2009, we'd be cloning. they thought it wouldn't be possible(according to your thinking).i know i may be far fetched in my thinking, but you have to be to even try to answer a question such as "is it POSSIBLE to destroy the internet". and sorry, i don't like your definition to destroy. in fact, i don't like a lot of definitions i have read in the past because they don't account for certain variables. written definitions only make communication more universal. definitions as a whole isn't a law to define something...and plus...definitions can be translated in to meaning more than one thing by whoever is reading it. i didn't really need you to look up the definition. i was just wondering what YOUR definition was....but...i guess whatever you read....that has to be true for ya...so i wont really get YOUR definition....just somebody elses who wrote it.

[nolan 0]

A lot of this is repeating points from other posts, but here goes...

"as far as wartime. if a government believes shutting down any part of the internet will give them an advantage through other means of communication, what do you think would happen or the possibility?" -- I've already explained to you that Internet traffic reroutes. If country A has to communicate with country C and country B's Internet access is taken away, it finds another route.

"...you shut down a big chunk...and yes...there will be a domino effect in how one nation affects others. since most internet activity comes from the u.s., you literally destroy the internet. it has changed. information isn't going back and forth like it did." -- I don't think you grasp what the Internet actually is. It's in no way limited to any one country. If the U.S. didn't have Internet access, the Internet wouldn't "not" be the Internet anymore. That's very ego-centric thinking.

Communication would still continue in the same manner, with the exception that traffic would reroute itself around the disconnected areas. (And that's only if it were going through those areas in the first place -- there are tons of websites outside of the U.S., believe it or not. Many of them are the most visited websites in the world [google.cn, yahoo.cn, etc.] -- see the Alexa rankings if you wish). Equate this concept to a traffic light going out and a detour being created. No, it doesn't mean that all traffic lights are destroyed, it just means that a single traffic light went out. (Again, reading about the technologies would help a lot.)

"let's not talk about war, but programming,hacking, and viruses. since i've been on the net for over 25 years, there have been programmer and hacker groups." -- There's no need to. I've already explained the nature of some of the technologies employed along the Internet backbone and how they can be affected by neither viruses nor hackers. Stateless, dumb systems without dynamic or writable storage systems. Proprietary systems without traditional operating environments. And, yet again, it's not that these details even matter, due to the fact that infiltrating every other system before that point is an impossible task.

"their sole job is to take down the internet...even if it was for only a day." -- No group of intelligent hackers would even bother to try this, because they would understand that it's not possible. (There are plenty of international hacker groups, by the way.)

"all the internet is, is computers connecting to eachother." -- Yes... And hundreds of thousands of other networking devices that work to make that possible. This includes devices that can't interact with users at all (i.e., dumb systems). These devices have no user interface. All of their instructions are encoded on inaccessible, read-only storage.

"...is it possible then?" -- No, for every reason I've mentioned and reiterated through each post I've made to this thread. Throughout the course of those posts I've informed you of various things you could research if you wanted to expand your knowledge on the subject, which I don't believe you've done. The opportunity is still there, and I'm sure you'd be fascinated by what you'd find.

"i guess you are assuming that we are living in a never ending world..." -- I've already mentioned that there's a difference between asking "is it possible to destroy the Internet?" and "is it possible for the Internet to be destroyed?" A meteor can easily destroy the Internet. An international group of blackhat hackers with evil intentions? Not so much.

"i don't like your definition to destroy. in fact, i don't like a lot of definitions i have read in the past because they don't account for certain variables. written definitions only make communication more universal." -- If you don't like the definitions given by dictionaries, then so be it. I can't account for your way of thinking if you're not going off of the standard definitions.

"and plus...definitions can be translated in to meaning more than one thing by whoever is reading it." -- Yes, that's called semantics, which is something I can't possibly account for (any word can mean anything to you -- the Internet could be a large purple bunny in your mind, for all I know). That's the very reason we have things like dictionaries and style guides: in order to provide a common framework for communication and understanding.

...as far as wartime. if a government believes shutting down any part of the internet will give them an advantage through other means of communication, what do you think would happen or the possibility?...

[Strikee 1]

Neah , the internet has been here for a long time now and will keep on going. The reason why i think it's almost invincible is that it's basically made by maybe millions of computers connected to each other and destroying the internet would mean destroying more then it's humanly possible.

Now consider the following hypothetical email virus. The carrier part of the virus exploits a new security hole in a popular email application to email itself to everyone in the victim's address book. But it also installs a trojan horse into the victim's computer, which in it's simplest and most insidious form is what I call an Autonomous Random Denial of Service Robot.
This little chunk of code simply picks urls from major websites at random from a list (or creates them by looking at email addresses from the email application), and makes http requests. It doesn't need to execute any of the fancy denial of service techniques (though it could if it wanted). It just waits until the computer is connected to the internet, and then, as unobtrusively as possible, uses all the extra bandwidth that the user isn't using to pester the target websites.

If 100 slave computers could overwhelm some of the major sites on the internet, think about what 100,000 machines could do, even if their attack technique was not very sophisticated. In fact, if they just acted like regular browsers and requested homepages, the targets would have little clue that they are being attacked apart from the crippling surge of traffic generated. Such an attack would be very difficult to detect let alone defend against.

Scary, isn't it?

This is some guys theory about this subject, interesting if you think about it but not likely. Everyone has the right to dream.. )
The biggest websites of the internet invested hundreds of millions$ (Google , yahoo , aol, Microsoft) and if they can invest this kind of money you can be sure they have taken all the security measures to make sure they're investment will be worth it.

Cheers.

[Xalor 0]

1. Virus: Very Very Very difficult because a virus maybe won´t go to damage all the servers and all the computers to practically "destroy" the internet... The virus maybe can damage a huge percentage of servers in the most destructive situation but the internet will be online if some computers can mantain their online status...
2. International Cooperation: This possibility is futurist...., excuse me I have seen the 2012 movie twenty minutes ago... If someday the human race need to be disconnected for security purposals this way can be done... All the servers in the world will be disconnected and the satellites shut down...

3. Destroying the satellites: Yeah if you some day can destroy all the international comunication you only have to destroy all the satellites that are in the earth orbit and you will go to incomunicate to all the planet... Maybe this can be a technologic terrorist attack...

4. Disconecting the electricity: Without electricity there is no comunication because the differente devices work with electricity... It´s a very difficult way to destroy the internet but is very possible...

None of these ways would provide a way to disable the internet. The real way is to destroy all devices that have the capability to connect to each other. The internet is the network all the connections in the world, it is the sum total of all the connections at one time, as long as two devices are connected via a method that distrubutes data, the internet still exists. It'ts basically impossible unless all but one device is gone, and even then its still impossible, because its pretty simple to build something back from the rubble. In reality the internet is everywhere nowadays.

Notice from rvalkass:

Quote tags added.

[deadmad7 4]

Well , you cann't actually destory the internet, but many have tried. The closed people will get are hackers and there is no hacker that smart = )

Q: I heard recently that some hackers tried to take down the entire Internet. Is that possible?
A: Hack the entire Internet? Hard to say. But yes, it has been tried. You may have experienced a pronounced sluggishness on the Web on Feb. 6 of this year. For several hours that day, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was directed at six of the 13 root servers that form the backbone of the Internet. Two of them were severely affected. What? You didnt notice? Actually, its not surprising few people did. And so, we all got further proof of the robust nature of the Internets distributed networking structure.

According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the company that manages much of the structure of the Internet and runs one of the two compromised servers, the attack likely originated in the Asia-Pacific region. The identity of the hackers is still unknown, but they utilized hundreds of hijacked zombie PCs to flood the root servers with billions of packets of worthless data with the intention of overwhelming the Internet as a whole.

To understand the attack, you need to know what the root servers actually do. Everything sent over the Internet is divided into packets of data. To get where theyre going, those packets carry domain name addresses, which are checked against directories stored on any number of lower-level servers. If those servers dont have the address that a packet is looking for, they refer the packet up to a higher-level server. Root servers are the top level in the domain name system (DNS) architecture, listing where on the Internet all the directories for domains such as .com, .net or .uk can be found. Most packets never reach one of the 13 root servers, but the system wouldnt work without them.

When the February DDoS attack hit six of the servers, the administrators who run the servers blocked packets that were obviously part of the attack. In addition, some of the root servers were protected by a load-balancing technol­ogy called Anycast that distributes packet queries among the servers and across multiple machines. (In reality, each of the 13 servers is made up of a number of machines distributed around the world.) This reduced the stress on any one server. These two strategies kept normal traffic on the Web relatively undisturbed. So why the number 13? Its because the Internet is run by a coven of witches. Just kidding. Early in the history of the Internet, the User Datagram Protocol, the format in which DNS requests are made, was set at 512 bytes just enough space to hold the 13 root server addresses.

[longtimeago 0]

Nope, except for The Lord God Almighty no one on earth can destroy the internet !!

[ahmed_mmahmoud 0]

you can do it to your self , unplug the connection )))but you can't unplug the air which transfer the satellite internet connections to all the continent asia africa europ Latin Amireca