And Porn.
I’m not a network guy (programmer). Our two main campuses are connected by fiber. I think that’s safe (until somebody cuts that line with a backhoe).
I’m sure there are other things this would affect though. Lot’s of them. Nobody could work from home anymore. I would just retire a month early.
I was thinking of something wrong with the software. I bet lines between internet sites go down all the time, that was the justification for developing the whole thing. Most high reliability data storage sites have backups they can switch to. That isn’t going to help if they are all running the same buggy software, though.
Especially if it’s somebody else’s software. If an AWS service goes down due to an internal update, only Amazon can fix that. Everyone else just sits around and twiddles their thumbs…
And even when it is your software, chances are that it still depends on dozens if not hundreds of other open-source programs, each of which in turn depend on dozens of other programs. Your typical website these days probably includes 1000 different programs written by 10,000 different developers over 30 years. Zero chance in hell anybody on the team is familiar with all of those, and automated checks can only catch some % of issues…
Even the SDMB forum requires more than a thousand programs and libraries.
It’s different in aerospace and the military (as far as I know). In consumer businesses, it’s all just a house of cards. “Move fast and break things” is the rule rather than the exception…
I posted this in the original AWS outage thread. It fits here just fine …
Yeah, lol, that xkcd mostly nails it.
Except that single pillar from 2003 probably also relies on 300 other libraries, most of which are unmaintained, some of which contain bugs left over from 1986…
However bad you think the average software is, I guarantee you, in reality it’s much worse than that. The Internet is mostly held together by duct tape and sheer willpower.
Let’s just remember that not only our cell phones, but also our landline phones go through the Internet nowadays. And our phone books are on the Internet too. Supply chains, banking, etc. How does the supermarket transmit its orders to the warehouse? How do I pay at checkout? Even the electrical grid may not be very stable without communications.
So, if the Internet went down for a year, it’s not like we’d revert instantly to 1990, there would be a few weeks of… 1935.
Try 1835. For good.
That Amish Prime membership might finally pay for itself.
Reminds me of a horrible joke from my youth:
Q: What’s this? : Clip clop clip clop clip clop BANG!! Clip clop clip clop clip clop
A: Amish driveby shooting.
This is so true. I was lucky - where I worked, which I mentioned was paranoid - we had to do a 70 page form whenever we wanted to use open source, and what we were doing had nothing to do with the main software product of the company. I had someone to do it for me, mostly, but I knew the various flavors of open source licenses far better than I ever wanted to.
Buying software, even very cheaply, was like 100x easier than using open source.
You’re assuming that the bought software didn’t have a list of dependencies just as long? Only difference is that with the bought software, you don’t know in advance what those dependencies are.
There were working systems of communications, transit, and food distribution in 1935. Or for that matter in 1835. A world where all of this just disappears overnight is headed toward an unimaginable crisis. Even absent civil strife, it would take 50 years to rebuild, but the civil strife would be severe.
[quote=“HMS_Irruncible, post:33, topic:1024325”]
There were working systems of communications, transit, and food distribution in 1935. [/quote]
Oh, absolutely. It’s just that people ate local / regional food, and some of them didn’t have electricity, and not everyone had a working car or even a radio, and many of today’s jobs didn’t exist. The systems that were working well in 1935 can’t be restarted overnight. And it’s not clear how much companies / individuals would want to invest in analog alternatives if the Internet “will be back any day now”.
The analogy is not perfect, I’m just saying that we’d need to suspend our Amazon / Uber Eats / Netflix / online bank lifestyle for a while. Revert back to eating what’s available at the grocery store, hailing a cab, getting news from newspapers (well, some kind of print media) and radio. Maybe big announcements made by a car rolling down the street with loudspeakers on the roof. And many of us wouldn’t have a job to do.
What I’m suggesting is that it won’t just be a disappearance of labor-saving conveniences for consumers. Not just eating what’s at the grocery store… there wouldn’t be a grocery store.
Losing the internet doesn’t just mean we fall back to earlier systems of doing things. The paper-and-telephone order system simply doesn’t exist nowadays, it would need to be reinvented from scratch, and by the way there’s no more telephones because the copper landlines and associated switches no longer exist, and no more paper because (like other industrial goods) they’re embedded in a logistical system that’s internet-dependent.
We’d be reverting to a subsistence-farming economy overnight, except most people wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to subsistence-farm, nor the tooling or land to do so.
Yep. My side career in software dev wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as @Voyager or the others here. And mostly pre-dated the open source movement. Or at least the ready availability of open source stuff for lack of first the www, and later e.g. github to store and distribute it all.
But every time I/we bought a 3rd party component to use in a product, it ended up biting us in the ass. We were always smallish biz dealing with other smallish biz. So we’re spending hundreds of dollars on small components, not tens of thousands on big component suites.
Inevitably the company (or “company” = one man show?) behind the product folded, leaving no avenue for bug fixes or version updates as the rest of the software ecosystem evolved around us. Or it had scaling problems.
Or its own mysterious dependency chain bit us. Especially back in the days of “DLL hell”, you never knew which version of some Windows built-in dll it required and would refuse to work with earlier or later versions. Get two products like that with different needs and figuring out, much less working around, that problem could take a lot of time and dollars.
It’s bad enough building on the ever-changing stack that e.g. MSFT or whoever provide. At least their stuff is tested for self-interoperability before release.
Uggh! Glad I’m done w those headaches
The argument I heard (perhaps at work) in favor of buying software was that there was a publisher that was standing behind the software and could offer support when needed.
I don’t think it would be as doom and gloom as some of you are predicting. There’s enough in the pipeline to buy some time. After that we would have a supply chain disruption like we did for Covid, but people would figure out how to do business other ways. If there’s one thing humankind has optimized is figuring out how to make money.
We would still have circuit switched mobile phones with phone numbers. We still have mobile-mobile networks that we deploy in natural disasters. Text messaging still falls back to SMS. The grocery store could call their suppliers.
One thing we learned from the Pandemic and 9/11 is that people will pull together for 2 weeks. As long as there isn’t a collective freakout that causes a bank run, that’s enough time to get the message out and avoid a panic.
It wasn’t called open source and there was no movement, but open source existed. My PhD work involved rewriting the Jensen/Wirth Pascal compiler into one for my new language. It was basically open source, but no licenses back then. This was 1978-1980.
Why do you think that? Who is this “we” that would magically pull things together? We had frequent and recurring supply chain issues even during the limited outages of covid. The aftermath of Katrina was a clusterfuck even when we had a government and FEMA. Those were tiny compared to a global overnight internet outage.
You may have pockets of resilience (preppers finally getting their day), but most of the global population would be pretty fucked within a couple weeks. The US population, probably a couple days… those with guns will have food, everyone else will be food…