U.S. Government Proposes "Internet Kill Switch"

[FallenJellyDoughnut]

Help! I accidently deleted the internet!

Ha, I hope they make it a giant lever that a clueless guard could accidently lean on, that would be awesome.

 

[chemicalfire]

Gotta love the use of "cyber-911", you can always count on big brother to drum up scare tactics and buzz-words. On a serious note, this could herald a very bad thing. I think the bill is less for preventing a "cyber-911" and more to prevent videos getting posted on youtube during civil unrest and possible riots. Basically, they don't want what happened with Iran last June to happen here when the shit hits the fan and the people have finally had enough of a shitty economy, prolonged war, oil spill, unclean public restrooms, etc...

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

 

[Deadlock Radium]

If the killswitch actually becomes a reality, all I'll say is:
"Quick, hide /b/ before thy find it!"

But is it indeed a stupid mind-blowingly idiotic idea.

 

[cainstwin]

On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW, patterned after HyperCard and built using the X Window System. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic, technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word Internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web.

So the APRAnet, or whatever "prototype" there was, dosen't count. Okay then.

I just think to myself regulary - "what's with British inventing and creating absolutely everything in human history from United States to paperclips?"

If he invented it doesnt he have in a way a claim to ownership? would the US need to approach him for permission to create an off switch?

 

['Stache]

Ladies and gentlemen: the Democratic Party.
Having to pick between these guys and the Republicans is the true cost of freedom.

 

[GonzoQTortilla]

Oh yeah?

Well the US government can suck my cock.

Damn strait.

 

[Wandrecanada]

I'd like to point out that the Internet exists outside of the US. Does he mean they'll somehow detonate every router in the world at once or something? Will they take legal action against Chinese servers? Wouldn't it be stupid to black out a major source of communication in the US while every other country that poses a threat still has that communication source?

There's no chance in hell any arm of the government, especially military and intelligence would support that bill.

 

[Boba Frag]

Oh yeah?

Well the US government can suck my cock.

That's not the US government.
That's Joe Lieberman.
I doubt anyone takes the guy seriously.

Not a clue who he is (I'm British), but if that's the case then I retract my cock-sucking statement and issue it directly to Joe Lieberman.

Since I'm Russian, the only way I know of him is this.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/475/475503p1.html
Yeah.

Oh, he's one of those...

*sigh*

I, too, would like to retract my vitriol from the US government and invite Mr. Lieberman to dine upon the finest bowl of penis that money can buy.

 

[Lord_Sphinx]

What the fuck is this bullshit. Lieberman needs to piss off.

 

[GonzoQTortilla]

Lesser of two evils...

Why can't we get rid of these clowns and elect people who aren't evil...

 

[cainstwin]

On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW, patterned after HyperCard and built using the X Window System. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic, technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word Internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web.

So the APRAnet, or whatever "prototype" there was, dosen't count. Okay then.

I just think to myself regulary - "what's with British inventing and creating absolutely everything in human history from United States to paperclips?"

Just another person who thinks the Internet is all about HTML browsers Kollega. They don't understand ARPANet and what the Internet truly is. Ask most people and they'll say Internet Explorer is the Internet.

The Internet is not just for parsing and rendering HTML (and scripting). It's about making data accessible. The only role of the Internet is strict data transmission. What the entities connected to the Internet does with the data has no bearing on the data itself. The Internet truly is information.

As an aside browsers were built essentially to translate a markup language called HTML. HTML was based on the GML standard created by Goldfarb of IBM back in the early 70s. Standard GML was used in early applications such as Wordperfect and the use of tags would render text in italics and whatnot. The CERN guy referenced above only came up with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and created it in the early 90s. HTML was not publicly used until the HTML 2.0 standard in the mid 90's. The internet was being used well before this to transmit data from machine to machine well before the advent of HTML and HTML broswers. ISPs existed prior to 1990 and ARPA Net (what would become the internet) had 15 connected sites by 1971.

I would argue that the internet is an idea, and whoever thought of making a network accessible by anyone at all is the inventor of it. From what i know, and seeing as he was marked out from a team of people who would have been working on HTML it sounds like it would have been his idea to make a globaly accesible network, or world wide web.

 

[GLo Jones]

I'm really very interested to see what exactly a 'cyber-9/11' would be like. Seriously, what the hell are they imagining?

 

[Ghostkai]

America does NOT own the internet, it has no right to be able to "kill" it.

 

[MurderousToaster]

I have an issue with this.

Turning off the internet?

You'd have to turn off every ISP in the world to "turn off the internet".

Somehow or other I doubt that anyone outside of la la land will appreciate this.

 

[Flionk]

You know, there's a certain merit to the idea of governmental control over mass communications in a time of crisis, in theory at least. Uncontrolled communications means a lot of miscommunication, which can cause panic in an already unsettled population, whereas if the government has control over primary communication channels it's in a better position to keep people calm and make sure they only know what they need to in order to get through the crisis. I recall back when the 'Swine Flu' was a big thing, there was a lot of wild speculation and misinformation flying around Facebook and Twitter and all those social networking things, and by the time I even heard about the damn thing everyone was convinced that a simple flu virus would be the end of us all. And that wasn't even a genuine crisis!

Now this doesn't mean I support the bill. I only think that controlling information is good in theory. In practice, this bill only arranges for the blocking of communications, with no provisions for arranging government-controlled spreading of information. Plus I don't trust the US government to hold that sort of power, even if they did manage to actually make it work on a technical level. Plus there's the little fact that it somewhat works directly against that whole 'freedom' idea that the government was founded on. Let's not forget Ben Franklin's advice: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lost both."

 

[yoyo13rom]

Ofcourse because when people are panicing having no internet will make it better.

You nailed it!
Let's take this fictive(but possible) example:
There's a calamity(a city get's nuked for example).
And you want to be informed, find out what really happened.
But on the Internet, those darn commies will try to feed you false information!
So just let papa US, tell you how everything raps up on the news(if he feels like it), while he's fixing the problem.

I hope you guys get my conspiracy theory point.
I mean the power to turn off the net is awesomely destructive, in the wrong hands. Good news that the US government is 100% good and won't ever do anything wrong. We must trust those nice guys.

Anyway, the only single not so solid argument they could have brought(but they didn't), is still a far fetched one: to stop SKYNET, or aliens that fry us through our communication devices.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I would argue that the internet is an idea, and whoever thought of making a network accessible by anyone at all is the inventor of it.

I could technically patent that. Does that mean I owned the internet?

Besides, I'm sure there were ways for the public to access usenet and telnet before they could access the World Wide Web. I was just reading some Usenet discussions from 1983 yesterday, although those were posted by people at universities with usenet and/or arpanet access. Regardless, ever seen the movie War Games? There were modems available well before we had the web.

 

[cainstwin]

I would argue that the internet is an idea, and whoever thought of making a network accessible by anyone at all is the inventor of it.

I could technically patent that. Does that mean I owned the internet?

well you would have to have sufficient proof. Im guessing as hes listed in news articles and is hailed by many to be the inventor of the internet, he has more proof that it is his idea. However, feel free if u can get away with it and then sue the US for interfering without your permission!

 

[thethingthatlurks]

Aww, old people talking about things they don't understand are just too precious...
Ok, could somebody tell this guy that it's impossible to shut down a portion of the internet (even the Chinese thing isn't all restrictive, or look at the Iranian elections) unless you go directly for their servers? It might be possible to shut down the whole thing (if the ISPs are involved), but that would cripple the economy.
And some more random things:
1) I'm behind 7 proxies, dipshit!
2) What pray tell would a cyber 9/11 be? Some bloke stealing a few thousand people's identities? Yeah, that's not exactly a rare occurrence...
3) Continuing on that note, who the hell still uses "Cyber" to describe anything other than chat sex?
4) Stay the fuck away from my \b\

 

[XJ-0461]

I can see it be used like this:

"Mr. President! Cities on the West Coast have been bombed by terrorists!"
"Kill the Internet!"