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IPFS News Link • Internet

Kill Switch and Reboot: Brit given the key to the Internet

• connectedinternet.co.uk
 
UK businessman Paul Kane has been selected to form part of an elite “chain of trust” charged with rebooting the web in the event of a catastrophe that sees it having to be shut down, according to Metro. A new safety system has been introduced by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to shut the net down in an emergency, such as world catastrophe, war or terrorist incident. Mr Kane, of CommunityDNS based at Bath University, is one of six people to have been given a key required to switch critical servers back on. After a ceremony in a bunker in the US, Mr Kane now says he will keep the key in a safety deposit box. In a story that clearly sounds like science-fiction it’s worth noting that it’s not actually possible to switch the entire Internet off, but ICANN have developed a system that can shut down some critical systems that would them prevent hackers or fast-spreading malware from causing a data catastrophe. Controllers of most of the major Internet servers have joined the scheme.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Justen Robertson
Entered on:

Right, and exactly what circumstances would require the shutdown of the entire internet? Are we expecting a new wave of super-geniuses who can write malware that is magically millions of times more effective than we've seen to date? Is the internet somehow going to make a terrorist attack worse, or make a volcano blow up more, or cause more powerful aftershocks if it's on after an earthquake? Give me a break. This is a solution to a non-problem being used as a cover for something far more obvious and disgusting: some busybody/psychopath/narcissist/scumfuck somewhere has determined that he and he alone needs the sole power to decide whether and when people are entitled to use services he has had absolutely no hand in providing.



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