Baz,
My criticism was not aimed at you.
Apologies if I gave that impression.
No Tedc, not taken as a personal criticism at all. I just wonder these days about the truth of whatever we see or hear. There is just so much that’s not true out there, whether that is in the newspapers, on the news, on the internet, through our phones when it’s scammers etc., etc. Very difficult sometimes to tell the truth from fiction. It’s almost a ‘fake’ world we live in nowadays. Just who or what should we believe? 
On checking through the news websites I came across the interesting and I thought informative, item about the recent internet outage. Worth a read I reckoned and as usual I did learn about things I previously had no knowledge of:
Telling line for me :-
“Worst case, it’s going to be an attack on Cloudflare,” Merrill said. “The Russian government or the Chinese government is going to take down Cloudflare and it’s going to break the internet.”
As I suggested earlier, I still expect increasing suggestions of possible future “attacks” rather than simple User screw ups.
Wouldn’t want one of our Companies to be seen to have been negligent!
I still think “Ransomware” or similar!
A bit outside my area of expertise…Well alright then, a lot outside my area of expertise, but I still think there will be a major interruption to the World wide web, if not total shutdown.
One area I think we should concentrate on is the censorship on the net. At the moment it allows groups with ‘not our best interests at heart’ to communicate and organise. Take the example of the BLM, Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rights to name just a few. I dare say many terrorist groups have coordinated their attacks using the web.
The governments of the world are not going to allow this to carry on much longer and I believe much more censorship, and even exclusion from using the internet is on the horizon. The shutdown of the internet might come from someone a bit nearer home…
Yes, it does seem that is one very weak point in the whole internet. That’s all it takes, find the weak point and exploit it, then whoever does this has ‘won the war’.
I guess though that now this has happened and has been pinned down to where and how it occurred measures can now be put in place to prevent, or do so as much as it’s possible, any recurrence.
The world has become far too reliant on the internet, that’s the truth of the matter. Everything depends on it, even more so during this pandemic. A query the other day, with a very big organisation, that I thought would take five or perhaps at the outside 10 minutes, even using the ‘modern’ online ‘chat’ that companies have, took over an hour. The ‘chat’ feature was not working so it was then the telephone. Most of the time was simply waiting on hold for someone to speak to in the end!
One thing that worries me, OGF, is “The Cloud”.
That’s the system whereby my data might well be stored, anywhere around the world, in some machine I’ve never seen or heard of.
Sure, it speeds things up, for the big user, as his storage will be chosen to be as close as possible to his systems.
But what happens in the event of political unrest, or whatever, I’m not too sure.
This is how the cloud is defined:-
“The definition for the cloud can seem murky, but essentially, it’s a term used to describe a global network of servers, each with a unique function. The cloud is not a physical entity, but instead is a vast network of remote servers around the globe which are linked together and meant to operate as a single ecosystem. These servers are designed to either store and manage data, run applications or deliver content or a service such as streaming videos, web email, office productivity software or social media. Instead of accessing files and data from a local or personal computer, you are accessing them online from any Internet-capable device – the information will be available wherever you go and whenever you need it.”
Bet that makes you feel secure…?
Thanks Ted, with my photos and files I just bung them on a memory stick and an old desktop computer that still runs Vista, it is incapable of connecting to the internet, but it’s good for storing stuff and doing electronics drawings on…