The Internet

Re: Is it possible to shut down/alter/censor/control the internet?

Of course, to varying degrees and for varying periods of time.

For a (slightly?) humorous answer, consider the Michael Rennie approach.

Now, in a situation where some people are making efforts to shut down/alter/censor/control the internet and others are trying to counteract those efforts, that will affect the "to varying degrees and for varying periods of time".

One thing I've had occasion to read lately is some (I'll call it) "doomsday fiction", where all the power is gone but the Internet is still working. Not totally impossible if all Internet servers, switches, etc. (infrastructure) are powered from renewable sources of energy, but that's not the way it is at this time.

Is it possible to shut down/alter/censor/control the internet?

Yes (to varying degrees). Two brief examples -

AOL (restricted access internet for Americans who didn't know any better)

China (attempted wide scale censorship)

Also, if it isn't possible for us to control it, but it continues to grow and develop and respond to changes then how far off being a living entity is it?

Quite a lot when you consider that most (read MOST) of the traffic is spam and basic handshaking/communication overhead traffic.

As a whole, no, but certain sections of it, yes, most definitely.

For years I operated a regional Internet services company. All traffic into my network from my upstream provider passed through my border router and from there to my NOC network and then to my subscribers. It is very easy to control the traffic on many lines of thought. We could block certain IPs, whole domains, traffic from certain ASNs, whole IP subnets or individual IPs. We could block certain protocols and ports. We could also "sniff" for certain content. The same functionality on outgoing traffic was also possible.

Companies do it all the time with their managed Internet gateway applications. Could I stop someone not on my network from viewing material that was sourced from outside my boundary? No I could not. But someone getting their feed from me and sending out through my system, yes.

So... as a whole no... but providers have lots of ways to do what you have asked.

I shut off the internet every day on my desktop. It's not hard, I just hit the power button!

Unfortunately, it seems to follow me around, deep inside my pockets, calculating, searching, comparing, computing... I think it may have taken over my tellyfone.

It's not hard to censor the net, look at north Korea, or China. Go to China, and try to look up the tiananmen square protests on the net... Google will just stare back at you with a puzzled look on her face.

I shut off the internet every day on my desktop. It's not hard, I just hit the power button!

Ditto. Every night the system is totally turned off from the power strip. Still have power to the modem, but the computer can't receive/send anything.

In addition, when I'm going to be gone for a while (usually hours) I shut off the "standby" switch on top of the modem. This disconnects me from the Internet.

It's called the information highway for good reason. Shutting down the internet would be akin to shutting down all of the highways in the world. You can shut down sections but there are so many "streets" that total shutdown is not possible, somewhere it would be operational.

I have noticed that few websites of some engineering companies cannot be accessed from asia but easily from canada,why?. They are not banned stuff but just engineering information. An asian government even banned news from BBC(TV screen became black) during an internal war situation.Is it not violating the basic human rights of those countrymen?. What was the UN Secretary general doing?. Internet should not be banned or regulated for intelligent human beings even in communist regimes or dictator-ruled countries. That country should be removed from UN and sanctions imposed.

An asian government even banned news from BBC(TV screen became black) during an internal war situation.Is it not violating the basic human rights of those countrymen?.

Well, someone is controlling the content through the ISPs; maybe even before that at a higher level.

What was the UN Secretary general doing?.

Do you really the UN will or even would help? They care nothing for anything but their own agenda.

An EMP burst world wide would do it.

It says "Access to this site is currently blocked. The site falls under the prohibited content categories of the UAE's Internet Management Policy."

such message comes up when trying to access porn sites, some Christian sites and anti-Islamic sites/pages.

In biological terms:

• It doesn't respire
• It doesn't reproduce
• It doesn't move
• It's debatable as to whether it excretes

So it's a long way off being a living being.

· It does consume energy, as all life forms need to survive in some form or other.

· If you think of the internet as a hive of single cell organisms, it reproduces every day and grows every day.

· Mobile internet, laptops, Iphones, tablets…

· Have you seen the sh!t that's on there lately?

I would call that a pretty good start

If you think of the internet as a hive of single cell organisms, it reproduces every day and grows every day

But not by its own means. The same could be said about a pile of newspapers if we stop and think about it.

If we stop the traffic which is generated by humans (ignoring spam bots, etc) then you just have a large network of hard drives. Can a hard drive (or any storage media for that matter) alone ever be classified as a life form or achieve sentence. No.

Something to think about.

First a lot of life forms are made up of lots single cells. Looking at the internet as a whole organism, like all life forms that changes and grow through out side stimilis and its the same for the internet. Cells are destroyed, remade, replicated and new ones added.

Oh, look. An argument. Bye bye. <unsubscribes>

Hi Jack-Of-All-Trades Perhaps you should take some time to think this matter through more carefully. Two main points: 1. We could, of course, describe our brains, or for that matter, those of other creatures, as just a bunch of neurons, which, like hard drives, are essentially information storage devices. Sentience arises not from the basic devices as such but from the extremely high level of interconnectedness of very large numbers of these units and from their interaction. Furthermore, neurons do not exist "in a vacuum" - they are entirely dependent upon the support of the many other cellular structures of an organism. The whole caboodle having been derived from the functional equivalent of "a bunch of hard drives", the units of which are DNA molecules. 2. While it is true that humankind represents the medium through which the Internet evolves, we must not forget that our species, in turn, is, and always has been, utterly dependent upon the network of organisms which comprise our biosphere. Some practical examples are plants, insect pollinators and the multitudinous symbiotic bacteria that inhabit your gut. It is this intricate web of interactive and interdependent species which has fashioned our own evolution. As, in turn the biosphere itself interacts with, and has been fashioned by, the non-biological evolutionary processes which preceded it. These are aspects of the model presented by my latest book "The Goldilocks Effect" which is a free download from the "Unusual Perspectives" website. Enjoy!

One hopes it is not a block of solid copy.