The prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan echoes some of the most disastrous 20th century instances of great power expansion—reminiscent, perhaps, of Nazi Germany’s Anschluss or even its subsequent invasion of Poland. Given that the latter ignited World War II, America’s strategic community has been rightly fixated on the vast military and political contingencies of a Chinese invasion that would remake Asia.
On a possibly related note, I have been suspecting that the Facebook outage last October may have been related to the Chinese incursion into Taiwan airspace. FB said that a command was issued that brought down their routes, and that it was related to BGP. I understand how that works, but it brought down 4 names servers, simultaneously, that were on different networks, and each were likely advertised to quite a number of different locations. Facebook claims that their DNS servers will disable BGP advertisements if they can't access their data centers. But there's multiple paths to these DNS servers even with the same IP address. So all of these routers would have had to go down at once.
That it also took like 5 hours for the right engineers instead of a brief moment to even gain access to fix this suggests to me that it wasn't an incorrect command issued. Not all my colleagues are convinced, but I was initially considering BGP hacking, and that it coincided with Chinese jets flying into Taiwan airspace suggests China doing a test run for blocking social media during such an operation. But then why would FB cover up for this? At the same time, there was the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's testimony really seeking to invite the government to silence those she disagrees with. So it could have been high level sabotage to draw attention to this that didn't work the way they planned.
Not sure which, or both, of these were behind that outage, and there's also the possibility that Facebook is telling the truth, but their explanation seems less plausible to me.
This video has a good technical overview of what happened. If you want to skip the whole BGP intro, you can see what arouses my suspicion in the last segment following the 26 minute mark till the end.
I lived in Taiwan for 2 and half years, and I fear the future for my friends there. I got to visit many colleges there, and they are absolutely beautiful! When giving a research presentation at an East Asian Security Conference at Sun Yat-sen University, I would walk through a tunnel going through a mountain at the south of Kaohsiung at the south of the island; afterwards, there were palm trees on both sides of the wide walkway in the middle of the campus. And then on the other side of the campus was the ocean with large ships passing by. Makes me wonder why I went to school here in flat North Texas.
On a possibly related note, I have been suspecting that the Facebook outage last October may have been related to the Chinese incursion into Taiwan airspace. FB said that a command was issued that brought down their routes, and that it was related to BGP. I understand how that works, but it brought down 4 names servers, simultaneously, that were on different networks, and each were likely advertised to quite a number of different locations. Facebook claims that their DNS servers will disable BGP advertisements if they can't access their data centers. But there's multiple paths to these DNS servers even with the same IP address. So all of these routers would have had to go down at once.
That it also took like 5 hours for the right engineers instead of a brief moment to even gain access to fix this suggests to me that it wasn't an incorrect command issued. Not all my colleagues are convinced, but I was initially considering BGP hacking, and that it coincided with Chinese jets flying into Taiwan airspace suggests China doing a test run for blocking social media during such an operation. But then why would FB cover up for this? At the same time, there was the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's testimony really seeking to invite the government to silence those she disagrees with. So it could have been high level sabotage to draw attention to this that didn't work the way they planned.
Not sure which, or both, of these were behind that outage, and there's also the possibility that Facebook is telling the truth, but their explanation seems less plausible to me.
This video has a good technical overview of what happened. If you want to skip the whole BGP intro, you can see what arouses my suspicion in the last segment following the 26 minute mark till the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wMU8vmfaYo&list=LL&index=68
I lived in Taiwan for 2 and half years, and I fear the future for my friends there. I got to visit many colleges there, and they are absolutely beautiful! When giving a research presentation at an East Asian Security Conference at Sun Yat-sen University, I would walk through a tunnel going through a mountain at the south of Kaohsiung at the south of the island; afterwards, there were palm trees on both sides of the wide walkway in the middle of the campus. And then on the other side of the campus was the ocean with large ships passing by. Makes me wonder why I went to school here in flat North Texas.