My concern about RPKI is legal pressure on the registries. By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access by tampering with that database.
So a highly specific problem couched in terms of the legal obligations of the registry. But,you ignore the other dimension of WHY a legal authority might require a registry to act.
Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
The registry system we live in has operated for almost 3 decades now, an inheritance of a prior informal arrangement. It's a mutuality. If you want to change it, get involved in it's policy process.
When ISPs have so much control, I don't see it as decentralized.
It is designed for fallbacks or ability to reroute when connections become congested or get cut.
Real world decentralized communication would not require an ISP and could operate by proxy with multi modes of communication. This way you can circumvent Government restrictions.
Sneaker net is decentralized and how North Koreans circumvent their government.
For any reason or no reason? I mean, that’s kind of the point I’m making. Countries disagree and have conflicts all the time. No country should be enabled to unilaterally cut off another’s internet in such cases
I don’t know if I’d even notice. I think it would impact the rest of the world much more than people in the US. I think I’d only lose access to two platforms I use and they are easily replaced.
Of course you are correct - the US is also ruled by a narcissistic oligarch who inflicts violence on other nations for ego building purposes.
>Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
Yes. It was the vision of the internet to continue on outside of the whatever political whims some tiny slice of western governments.
It’s just too ripe for abuse.
You can make whatever “whatabout” arguments on DNS, etc but none of those are required to get connectivity (DHT, p2p hosts, tor names, etc).
Any centralization around the narrow middle IP layer of the internet should be treated with extreme skepticism and pushback.
I'm sure there's several ways in which ICANN and RIPE could screw Russia over. I'm also sure (or at least hopeful) they understand this would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
> would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
With the growing threat profiles and potential damage, I wonder the cost calculations being made behind closed doors right now of both governments and companies about that very possibility.
A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
I've seen network operators talk about it from all over the world.
If Sarah owns a gardening center and sells stuff locally, why does her business need to accept connections to her website or network from a foreign country? For her given the attack risk, it makes much more sense to block non-local traffic.
Foreign attacks are usually just VPNs. Something like cloudflare is much more effective imo. This is based on racism imo because for example it implies banning foreign search engines or market research. I can't help but think it fits in nicely with what ICE does in the US and the people who voted for it. It's not effective because all you're doing is banning foreign VPNs so it is trivial to just pick a US server.
> It's not effective because all you're doing is banning foreign VPNs so it is trivial to just pick a US server.
It's incredibly effective at keeping the trash script kiddies out, which is why companies and governments and people do it. It's also part of zerotrust networking, limiting access only from places that need it and when.
Dropping packets from far off sources isn't racism. It may be xenophobia. But it's also potentially reasonable when the cost of serving that traffic vastly exceeds expected benefits from paying those costs.
Wholesale blocking foreign country IP's is both an extraordinarily common practice and extremely effective. It has nothing to do with the political topics you chose to voice.
That means you shouldn't even try if you don't have an American VPN. You can't do it as a non-american website because Google will not index you, because their crawler is American. So it's asymmetric and it means you can only get truly free access to the internet with an American VPN server.
If it’s so simple to do I’m not sure why the west hasn’t already done it vis a vis Russia and China. Spam and scams would drop precipitously instantly.
Hey, have you seen the latest in streaming boxes that provide access to 500+ channels of content for free? Pay no attention to the minor detail that it will act as a proxy in your homeland doing the bidding of its foreign masters. Available for delivery tomorrow for the low low price of $35 usd.
Dropping traffic by source country is not that hard, if you assume country of ip registration is country of origin, which mostly works although things like multination networks, ip leasing or other reuse, and proxy/vpn can result in misattribution.
However, if you mandated blocking Russia or China at a national level, you would cause some major issues.
a) it would become very hard to communicate with people in China. That would make commerce with China very difficult. Blocking communication with your number 3 trading partner [1] is going to be a massive disruption.
b) Doing the same for Russia would be less disruptive as there's much less trade between the US and Russia, and significantly fewer immigrants to the US from Russia than from China. However, there's still a lot of connection between the US and Russia and that would be disrupted.
Given the success of the internet and the layering of everything else over it, I suspect cutting off internet would likely cut off phone service as well. Even postal mail might be impacted, as there is likely coordination between national agencies via the internet.
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End, which is set in 2025. It features a cyberattack against a rogue AI, which involves revoking a root CA certificate belonging to Credit Suisse, causing massive collateral damage to the European economy and infrastructure.
Vinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
It's already happening, you cannot access the websites of many sanctioned Russian entities without trusting a Russia-issued root CA. The fragmentation of the Internet is already in motion
RPKI isn't necessary for this hypothetical to happen, and there's a lot easier ways for various governments to put pressure on network providers to do their bidding.
Without RPKI, it would be easy for many governments to cut off Russia's internet access by launching a BGP attack.
Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
There's no reason an independent entity couldn't spin up a new trust anchor, as long as they get RPs to follow it. If a government started meddling with an RIR's RPKI database, that would provide a pretty good set of incentives for an AltDB-but-for-RPKI TA to gain adoption. Even in the absence of meddling, this would be useful for legacy IPv4 holders, who currently don't have a way to participate in RPKI.
If that were to happen, everybody in Russia would just turn RPKI enforcement off, so this would only turn off their internet access for a few hours at most. See the recent .de DNSSEC failures [0] for an example of this.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
And Russia's peers and the rest of the wider internet? It doesn't matter what rostelekom does if Comcast feels that all routes originating from rostelekom are invalid, and doesn't propagate them. And that's not even a tier 1.
If Comcast's customers (big corporate ones, they don't care about regular people) complain, then Comcast would probably override the RPKI validation too. Well, unless they're somehow legally precluded from doing so, but in that case RPKI hardly matters since they couldn't peer with them even if their routes were valid.
They'd be connected to a non-sanctioned network that was connected directly or indirectly to rostelekom. For instance maybe Arelion, which is Swedish. The internet isn't yet in the situation of the financial system where the whole world obeys US rules out of fear.
Well if that happens, operators will be forced to make a choice - comply with it, or stop using rpki.
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
> By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access
And nothing of value would be lost. Quite the opposite in fact.
The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future, but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL, with about a third of the votes going to pro-Russian parties and with the destruction of MH17 basically gone from the public discourse.
There is imho very little to gain from such a move, and potentially a lot to lose. Disconnecting a whole society in such a way would make the total government control even easier.
Well, I didn't mention Gas because US is not selling Gas to EU, but they do in fact sell Oil to EU while buying Oil from Russia. It might not be the exact same oil and cycled through the reserves, but same thing.
> but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
It's a bunch of statements that need good evidence behind them. I'm not sure why you're ignoring what I said before: the Netherlands have great public education system and strong democratic tradition. The effectiveness of any foreign influence on political life should be studied. AFAIK, it's still a matter of debate.
Idk why you think knee-jerking "social media" adds any substance.
> I'm not sure why you're ignoring what I said before: the Netherlands have great public education system and strong democratic tradition.
I am not ignoring it, I am agreeing with it.
> The effectiveness of any foreign influence on political life should be studied. AFAIK, it's still a matter of debate.
Agreed it needs more studying, but social media does does have influence, and its a reasonable assumption that that influence can be manipulated. It does definitely influence people who spend a lot of time on social media - they are very prone to believe conspiracy theories for example.
How effectively such manipulation can be varies and itself becomes a political issue. The PM of the UK recently implied that the Brexit vote was swayed by the Russians but was swiftly shot down (by members his own cabinet and the head of the internal intelligence service among others.).
> It's a bunch of statements that need good evidence behind them.
most definitely the answer to your question. look at the role media played in the cold war and all the efforts both sides took to influence and sway people on the enemy's side of the iron curtain. now multiply that by 10 and you have today's media environment.
> The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
While I agree with your point, I don't agree that the unchecked globalisation is to blame, rather unchecked capitalism. Even without globalisation unchecked capitalism would lead to the same result, only per country.
And the countries that did the work to rein capitalism in, in a proper way, are doing well, also in the circumstances of globalisation.
Unchecked globalism leads to unchecked capitalism as it creates a race to the bottom. Unchecked capitalism leads to unchecked globalism as it continuously seeks to lower wages.
As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.
Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.
> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
You just demonstrated a big problem with our politics. People lining up with their side on every issue. I think most of what you say is reasonable (although you are missing nuance on some things) but then you call Brexit it stupid and "constitution-breaking". Obviously the majority who voted for it disagreed, and being in the EU without having had a referendum (unlike most countries - France, Ireland and others did, Iceland just did too) was itself divisive. There is not rational reason to call it stupid. The predictions of economic disaster (e.g. the pre Brexit treasury forecast) did not materialise and the economy is doing about as well as comparable EU economies.
Cameron's policy of offering a referendum in 2015 as an electoral tactic was a stupid political move in my opinion, he learned the wrong lesson from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and gambled the future of the country not out of any democratic principle, but for short-term domestic expediency. The referendum was a fundamentally ill-conceived thing, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Conservative Party who feared a) that Cameron could not maintain discipline over the right of the party and b) that the Conservatives would bleed voters to Nigel Farage's then-party UKIP to the right.
I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.
In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.
That's kind of my point. Constitutionally speaking, the Brexit referendum was advisory and could have been ignored. That would have been completely unconscionable from a legitimacy point of view though, so whatever the constitution has to say on the subject on paper an iron-clad democratic mandate to carry out Brexit was forced to coexist with Parliament's iron-clad supremacy.
This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.
Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.
I am afraid there is no winning in either direction, you have to accept the plausible trade offs. Though on high level I do agree that it should not be centralized with one country at least. Then again the whole setup is based on mutual trust.
IP address space and the domain name system are centralized with defined roots, and IANA/RIPE could have removed russia from the internet a long time ago. A primary reason why they have not done this is what happen after the war is over, at which point the west would have Internet with root A, and Russia would have Internet with root B, and recombining A and B would be a very difficult and likely to last longer than transitioning completely from IPv4 to IPv6.
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
I ”blame” <https://internet.nl/>. At some point a few years back, they started only giving 100% to an address if it also had RPKI. A shareable link with large clear text, with a numerical score that is lower than your competitors? And your competitors are sharing this link to your customers, trying to win them over? This stuff works wonders for executives; suddenly there is no higher priority than fixing RPKI.
A couple years ago our org made a big push to have our routes and our downstream customer routes RPKI valid. It's good to see the high adoption rate. It looks like ASPA is now available for ASN path validation. Probably should look at adopting ASPA at some point here.
Agreed, the post has a section on it: networks publishing ASPA records went from 131 to 3,272 in a year, mostly as each registry shipped signing tools. Still early, though. So far published records can verify about 3.5% of observed routing.
I'm always fascinated by how the internet keeps getting better, step by step. RPKI is a good example ! I wonder what "RPKI" would be needed for the AI-agent-gone-rogue age
We have the data. How would you like us to present it? (Bonus point if you can tell me why that will be helpful because that will help me to make a better pitch to engineering!)
Why do people feel the need to announce that they stopped reading?
Hey guys! I know there are many comments on this forum. Stopped reading this particular comment four words in. I knew the rest sucked & just wanted you to know that
Yeah effective at creating irrelevant bikeshedding arguments and destroy any good will and good faith in the underlying project.
How do you measure its effectiveness in other areas — presumably you thought it would make the other person write all copy and design by hand or something? Did you follow a number of people around and see that they changed their ways and posted hand-designed websites from then on? Or is the claim about being “surprsingly effective” just rhetoric based on wishful thinking and at most anecdotal evidence?
(And btw how is using a template, stock media, or an open source library not a similar form of copout? I could shame people for using a template that’s been overused).
I for one am totally okay with documentation or even front-facing product sites being obviously done with AI. I would rather it be obvious than shame people into trying to make it look organic and fool us, or enter some uncanny valley. Generating AI content at scale is fine as long as you don’t lie about it and pass it off as being done by hand. If shaming people would be “surprisingly effective” at causing them to try to make their AI-generated stuff look more like it was done by hand, would actually be a huge net negative for me. Consider the effect your shaming is actually likely to have, even if it accomplished something!
> Much of the jump came from one country: China went from 3.7% of its IPv4 addresses in valid routes to 83.0%, almost 60% of the global gain counted by addresses.
Interesting. China may have predicted cyber attacks in the near future. Or perhaps are readying for retaliation. It's possible their military or intelligence branches didn't anticipate this getting published. (Unless somebody knows if this year just happened to be when they decided to implement cyber reforms?)
Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
> Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
Why are you allowing your LLM to consume instructions controlled by a third party? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Does the data show how RPKI adoption varies across countries in the Caucasus and former Soviet Union? I’d be curious to see how Armenia and its neighboring countries compare.
I love wading through LLM prose!
I know its a tired point, but why not publish the bullet points that were the source for this text as well. I'd rather read those.
Getting another LLM to summarise back to something concise just seems wrong.
The bar is in hell.
My concern about RPKI is legal pressure on the registries. By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access by tampering with that database.
So a highly specific problem couched in terms of the legal obligations of the registry. But,you ignore the other dimension of WHY a legal authority might require a registry to act.
Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
The registry system we live in has operated for almost 3 decades now, an inheritance of a prior informal arrangement. It's a mutuality. If you want to change it, get involved in it's policy process.
The internet is supposed to be a decentralized network.
When ISPs have so much control, I don't see it as decentralized.
It is designed for fallbacks or ability to reroute when connections become congested or get cut.
Real world decentralized communication would not require an ISP and could operate by proxy with multi modes of communication. This way you can circumvent Government restrictions.
Sneaker net is decentralized and how North Koreans circumvent their government.
It is already like you say it should be.
An RFC for data transport over balloon attached USB flash would not appear on 1 April, with or without quality of service.
At the tier-1 level it is already decentralized in the way you describe.
I don’t think that one country should get to unilaterally decide whether another country gets internet, no.
Why would a country take these actions?
Why would a country cut off the International Criminal Court? Not a big step to cut off a country.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr...
For any reason or no reason? I mean, that’s kind of the point I’m making. Countries disagree and have conflicts all the time. No country should be enabled to unilaterally cut off another’s internet in such cases
This is what happens when someone wants to regulate the crap outta everything. what a dumb ass take.
Regulate the crap out of invading a peaceful neighboring country ? I’m down for it.
track @jeremyjh
You want the USA to be sanctioned and banned from the internet?
I don’t know if I’d even notice. I think it would impact the rest of the world much more than people in the US. I think I’d only lose access to two platforms I use and they are easily replaced.
Of course you are correct - the US is also ruled by a narcissistic oligarch who inflicts violence on other nations for ego building purposes.
>Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
Yes. It was the vision of the internet to continue on outside of the whatever political whims some tiny slice of western governments.
It’s just too ripe for abuse.
You can make whatever “whatabout” arguments on DNS, etc but none of those are required to get connectivity (DHT, p2p hosts, tor names, etc).
Any centralization around the narrow middle IP layer of the internet should be treated with extreme skepticism and pushback.
You do understand that the hypothetical threat actor here is one who openly disregards international law?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-internati...
I get your broader point, but making it potentially easier to cut Russia specifically off from the Internet might not be the worst thing in the world.
I'm sure there's several ways in which ICANN and RIPE could screw Russia over. I'm also sure (or at least hopeful) they understand this would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
> would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
With the growing threat profiles and potential damage, I wonder the cost calculations being made behind closed doors right now of both governments and companies about that very possibility.
A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
>A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
Is this an American thing? For example the home Depot and velera do it.
I've seen network operators talk about it from all over the world.
If Sarah owns a gardening center and sells stuff locally, why does her business need to accept connections to her website or network from a foreign country? For her given the attack risk, it makes much more sense to block non-local traffic.
Foreign attacks are usually just VPNs. Something like cloudflare is much more effective imo. This is based on racism imo because for example it implies banning foreign search engines or market research. I can't help but think it fits in nicely with what ICE does in the US and the people who voted for it. It's not effective because all you're doing is banning foreign VPNs so it is trivial to just pick a US server.
> It's not effective because all you're doing is banning foreign VPNs so it is trivial to just pick a US server.
It's incredibly effective at keeping the trash script kiddies out, which is why companies and governments and people do it. It's also part of zerotrust networking, limiting access only from places that need it and when.
Dropping packets from far off sources isn't racism. It may be xenophobia. But it's also potentially reasonable when the cost of serving that traffic vastly exceeds expected benefits from paying those costs.
Wholesale blocking foreign country IP's is both an extraordinarily common practice and extremely effective. It has nothing to do with the political topics you chose to voice.
That means you shouldn't even try if you don't have an American VPN. You can't do it as a non-american website because Google will not index you, because their crawler is American. So it's asymmetric and it means you can only get truly free access to the internet with an American VPN server.
> So it's asymmetric and it means you can only get truly free access to the internet with an American VPN server.
How do you get access to China today, or Russia?
If it’s so simple to do I’m not sure why the west hasn’t already done it vis a vis Russia and China. Spam and scams would drop precipitously instantly.
Hey, have you seen the latest in streaming boxes that provide access to 500+ channels of content for free? Pay no attention to the minor detail that it will act as a proxy in your homeland doing the bidding of its foreign masters. Available for delivery tomorrow for the low low price of $35 usd.
Dropping traffic by source country is not that hard, if you assume country of ip registration is country of origin, which mostly works although things like multination networks, ip leasing or other reuse, and proxy/vpn can result in misattribution.
However, if you mandated blocking Russia or China at a national level, you would cause some major issues.
a) it would become very hard to communicate with people in China. That would make commerce with China very difficult. Blocking communication with your number 3 trading partner [1] is going to be a massive disruption.
b) Doing the same for Russia would be less disruptive as there's much less trade between the US and Russia, and significantly fewer immigrants to the US from Russia than from China. However, there's still a lot of connection between the US and Russia and that would be disrupted.
Given the success of the internet and the layering of everything else over it, I suspect cutting off internet would likely cut off phone service as well. Even postal mail might be impacted, as there is likely coordination between national agencies via the internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Certificate revocation as an act of war... the 2030s are gonna be wild.
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End, which is set in 2025. It features a cyberattack against a rogue AI, which involves revoking a root CA certificate belonging to Credit Suisse, causing massive collateral damage to the European economy and infrastructure.
Vinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
It's already happening, you cannot access the websites of many sanctioned Russian entities without trusting a Russia-issued root CA. The fragmentation of the Internet is already in motion
RPKI isn't necessary for this hypothetical to happen, and there's a lot easier ways for various governments to put pressure on network providers to do their bidding.
Without RPKI, it would be easy for many governments to cut off Russia's internet access by launching a BGP attack.
Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
> should they choose to exercise it
Until other networks choose to exorcise them and their control with it. If you play unfairly often enough, you get depeered.
There's no reason an independent entity couldn't spin up a new trust anchor, as long as they get RPs to follow it. If a government started meddling with an RIR's RPKI database, that would provide a pretty good set of incentives for an AltDB-but-for-RPKI TA to gain adoption. Even in the absence of meddling, this would be useful for legacy IPv4 holders, who currently don't have a way to participate in RPKI.
As a legacy IPv4 holder for over 30 years, I realize I'm going to be forced to pay ARIN at some point. It's been a good run though.
Just for RPKI access, or for other reasons too?
Mainly for RPKI.
If that were to happen, everybody in Russia would just turn RPKI enforcement off, so this would only turn off their internet access for a few hours at most. See the recent .de DNSSEC failures [0] for an example of this.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/de-tld-outage-dnssec/
And Russia's peers and the rest of the wider internet? It doesn't matter what rostelekom does if Comcast feels that all routes originating from rostelekom are invalid, and doesn't propagate them. And that's not even a tier 1.
If Comcast's customers (big corporate ones, they don't care about regular people) complain, then Comcast would probably override the RPKI validation too. Well, unless they're somehow legally precluded from doing so, but in that case RPKI hardly matters since they couldn't peer with them even if their routes were valid.
They'd be connected to a non-sanctioned network that was connected directly or indirectly to rostelekom. For instance maybe Arelion, which is Swedish. The internet isn't yet in the situation of the financial system where the whole world obeys US rules out of fear.
Well if that happens, operators will be forced to make a choice - comply with it, or stop using rpki.
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
Why would western operators turn off rpki validation of this happened?
> By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access
And nothing of value would be lost. Quite the opposite in fact.
Swap Russia for any other country and …
But … cutting off Russia wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Russia is one of the only remaining places you can host things banned in the US.
In this admin and it’s banned in the US? So what? Csam? Terrorism? Why would that be a green flag and not a red flag?
The amount of folks that excuse a lot of garbage people in power do these days for the free speech maximalists is insane to me.
The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future, but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL, with about a third of the votes going to pro-Russian parties and with the destruction of MH17 basically gone from the public discourse.
> The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future
Would you stand by this statement if we did s/Netherlands/United States/g ?
It's not about the governments of today, but those of the future.
Yes.
There is imho very little to gain from such a move, and potentially a lot to lose. Disconnecting a whole society in such a way would make the total government control even easier.
Edit: typo
The USA has gone ahead and done it anyway. We shouldn't trust any government with that much power.
Could this be that having to buy Russia oil from US isn't good for the people of Netherlands for example?
The fact that you're mentioning oil and not gas tells me you are not really familiar with the situation.
But no, getting yourself in a situation where you're dependent on cowboy regimes for critical resources is not good for the people.
Well, I didn't mention Gas because US is not selling Gas to EU, but they do in fact sell Oil to EU while buying Oil from Russia. It might not be the exact same oil and cycled through the reserves, but same thing.
> Well, I didn't mention Gas because US is not selling Gas to EU
Liquified Natural Gas aka LNG is a major US export product. The American export a lot of methane ("natural gas") this way to EU countries.
I have no idea which of many factors you didn't understand here but it's a bad sign
[Edited to correct s/expert/export/]
> but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
Social media
Definitely not an answer to my question.
Social media enables greater foreign influence.
It also enables the spreading of fears of greater foreign influence and much else.
It generally gives you a very distorted view of the world.
It's a bunch of statements that need good evidence behind them. I'm not sure why you're ignoring what I said before: the Netherlands have great public education system and strong democratic tradition. The effectiveness of any foreign influence on political life should be studied. AFAIK, it's still a matter of debate.
Idk why you think knee-jerking "social media" adds any substance.
> I'm not sure why you're ignoring what I said before: the Netherlands have great public education system and strong democratic tradition.
I am not ignoring it, I am agreeing with it.
> The effectiveness of any foreign influence on political life should be studied. AFAIK, it's still a matter of debate.
Agreed it needs more studying, but social media does does have influence, and its a reasonable assumption that that influence can be manipulated. It does definitely influence people who spend a lot of time on social media - they are very prone to believe conspiracy theories for example.
How effectively such manipulation can be varies and itself becomes a political issue. The PM of the UK recently implied that the Brexit vote was swayed by the Russians but was swiftly shot down (by members his own cabinet and the head of the internal intelligence service among others.).
> It's a bunch of statements that need good evidence behind them.
Not every opinion needs a set of citations.
most definitely the answer to your question. look at the role media played in the cold war and all the efforts both sides took to influence and sway people on the enemy's side of the iron curtain. now multiply that by 10 and you have today's media environment.
> The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
While I agree with your point, I don't agree that the unchecked globalisation is to blame, rather unchecked capitalism. Even without globalisation unchecked capitalism would lead to the same result, only per country.
And the countries that did the work to rein capitalism in, in a proper way, are doing well, also in the circumstances of globalisation.
Arguably they are inseperable.
Unchecked globalism leads to unchecked capitalism as it creates a race to the bottom. Unchecked capitalism leads to unchecked globalism as it continuously seeks to lower wages.
> Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini)
As Italian, I would say that the most pro Russia party are M5S (Conte even invited Russian soldiers to help us against COVID) and Futuro Nazionale (Vannacci). Even AVS and part of the PD are "pro-peace", AKA pro-Russia.
Salvini said that he is pro Putin, but Legal voted to send weapons to Ukraine.
> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
You just demonstrated a big problem with our politics. People lining up with their side on every issue. I think most of what you say is reasonable (although you are missing nuance on some things) but then you call Brexit it stupid and "constitution-breaking". Obviously the majority who voted for it disagreed, and being in the EU without having had a referendum (unlike most countries - France, Ireland and others did, Iceland just did too) was itself divisive. There is not rational reason to call it stupid. The predictions of economic disaster (e.g. the pre Brexit treasury forecast) did not materialise and the economy is doing about as well as comparable EU economies.
Cameron's policy of offering a referendum in 2015 as an electoral tactic was a stupid political move in my opinion, he learned the wrong lesson from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and gambled the future of the country not out of any democratic principle, but for short-term domestic expediency. The referendum was a fundamentally ill-conceived thing, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Conservative Party who feared a) that Cameron could not maintain discipline over the right of the party and b) that the Conservatives would bleed voters to Nigel Farage's then-party UKIP to the right.
I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.
In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.
> clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it
The keyword is "attempted". Its also clear they did not succeed in doing so
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cky83q49e4w0o
> constitution-breaking and divisive referendum
What part of the constitution does a referrendum break? One of the main principles of British constitutional law is that Parliament is supreme.
That's kind of my point. Constitutionally speaking, the Brexit referendum was advisory and could have been ignored. That would have been completely unconscionable from a legitimacy point of view though, so whatever the constitution has to say on the subject on paper an iron-clad democratic mandate to carry out Brexit was forced to coexist with Parliament's iron-clad supremacy.
This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.
Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.
I am afraid there is no winning in either direction, you have to accept the plausible trade offs. Though on high level I do agree that it should not be centralized with one country at least. Then again the whole setup is based on mutual trust.
Or they could order Western telecoms to depeer with Russian ones. That would be even more effective.
IP address space and the domain name system are centralized with defined roots, and IANA/RIPE could have removed russia from the internet a long time ago. A primary reason why they have not done this is what happen after the war is over, at which point the west would have Internet with root A, and Russia would have Internet with root B, and recombining A and B would be a very difficult and likely to last longer than transitioning completely from IPv4 to IPv6.
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
I ”blame” <https://internet.nl/>. At some point a few years back, they started only giving 100% to an address if it also had RPKI. A shareable link with large clear text, with a numerical score that is lower than your competitors? And your competitors are sharing this link to your customers, trying to win them over? This stuff works wonders for executives; suddenly there is no higher priority than fixing RPKI.
A couple years ago our org made a big push to have our routes and our downstream customer routes RPKI valid. It's good to see the high adoption rate. It looks like ASPA is now available for ASN path validation. Probably should look at adopting ASPA at some point here.
Agreed, the post has a section on it: networks publishing ASPA records went from 131 to 3,272 in a year, mostly as each registry shipped signing tools. Still early, though. So far published records can verify about 3.5% of observed routing.
I'm always fascinated by how the internet keeps getting better, step by step. RPKI is a good example ! I wonder what "RPKI" would be needed for the AI-agent-gone-rogue age
so is there a public service that can verify some IP block belongs to which country/cert?
whois is so deprecated.
We have country level breakdown for ASNs.
We have some IP range breakdown as well:
We have the data. How would you like us to present it? (Bonus point if you can tell me why that will be helpful because that will help me to make a better pitch to engineering!)
https://ipinfo.io/ips/1.1.1.0/24
How do you deal with anycast?
Check out an anycast IP directly: https://ipinfo.io/1.1.1.1
We show locations hints for anycast IPs.
While I suspect it's not quite what you meant, yes, whois is deprecated and is on its way out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Proto...
And obligatory hn link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384069
WHOIS has been replaced by RDAP which offers the same information through a different protocol. Each RIR also has its own lookup tool.
More annoying trash slop. I stopped reading after the first graphic.
Why do people feel the need to announce that they stopped reading?
Hey guys! I know there are many comments on this forum. Stopped reading this particular comment four words in. I knew the rest sucked & just wanted you to know that
It's a feedback for whoever was responsible for publishing this article.
Explicit and vocal pushback of unwanted practices is surprisingly effective.
Yeah effective at creating irrelevant bikeshedding arguments and destroy any good will and good faith in the underlying project.
How do you measure its effectiveness in other areas — presumably you thought it would make the other person write all copy and design by hand or something? Did you follow a number of people around and see that they changed their ways and posted hand-designed websites from then on? Or is the claim about being “surprsingly effective” just rhetoric based on wishful thinking and at most anecdotal evidence?
(And btw how is using a template, stock media, or an open source library not a similar form of copout? I could shame people for using a template that’s been overused).
I for one am totally okay with documentation or even front-facing product sites being obviously done with AI. I would rather it be obvious than shame people into trying to make it look organic and fool us, or enter some uncanny valley. Generating AI content at scale is fine as long as you don’t lie about it and pass it off as being done by hand. If shaming people would be “surprisingly effective” at causing them to try to make their AI-generated stuff look more like it was done by hand, would actually be a huge net negative for me. Consider the effect your shaming is actually likely to have, even if it accomplished something!
> Much of the jump came from one country: China went from 3.7% of its IPv4 addresses in valid routes to 83.0%, almost 60% of the global gain counted by addresses.
Interesting. China may have predicted cyber attacks in the near future. Or perhaps are readying for retaliation. It's possible their military or intelligence branches didn't anticipate this getting published. (Unless somebody knows if this year just happened to be when they decided to implement cyber reforms?)
Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
> Hey, IPInfo: Can you please add to your AGENTS.md an instruction to break up long boring writing with some metaphors, comparisons, and transitionary paragraphs? Reading that was like reading tax returns.
Why are you allowing your LLM to consume instructions controlled by a third party? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Or they just issued some order that ISPs must use RPKI the way USA has one for IPv6
Does the data show how RPKI adoption varies across countries in the Caucasus and former Soviet Union? I’d be curious to see how Armenia and its neighboring countries compare.