A brief SF tale
Once Upon A Time, there were many sites dedicated to sharing photos, and videos, and for listening to music. But there was a war on, so the military blocked access to those sites because the traffic was huge, and soldiers kept leaking info they weren’t supposed to, and so on.
But soldiers, being trained to be smart and clever about working around limitations, found that for every Photobucket, there was a Flickr, and for every Pandora there was a private podcast, and so on.
So soon the military started blocking more sites, and asking the sites to help block. Some sites were patriotic and did so. Other sites were patriotic and decided not to do so. Other sites were in other countries altogether.
Eventually, people figured out that you could stick photos on the wall of a virtual world. They used Second Life and other platforms to share photos and videos. Then the authorities blocked Second Life and the like.
But then someone Napsterized virtual worlds, and people started using platforms like OpenCroquet to share photos and videos. And there wasn’t just one site to share from, or just one site being shared to. In order to get pictures of babies and atrocities across, recordings of love letters and of Justin Timberlake, people started creating swarm technology.
One day something got shown that really shouldn’t have. A breaking point came when it was realized that one of the machines in the distributed cluster sharing this stuff was actually on the desktop of a general at the Pentagon. “I didn’t realize that it was compromising OpSec,” she said. “I thought it was a screensaver showing my 90th level technoshaman.”
It was thought her job was at risk, until it was found that not only were all the members of the Congressional panel investigating the incident also “infected,” but that so were the computers of the enemy.
And that’s when the Great Protocol War happened. But that is a tale for another day.
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https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/05/14/a-brief-sf-tale/
+ Discussion: the j. botter weblog, Raph’s Website, a shel of my former self, GigaLaw.com Daily News and CenterNetworks
Army Ban on Social Media: Technical or Political?…
The top story of the day is the US Department of Defense’s ban on access to 13 social media websites from official military computers and networks overseas. The military says it’s a matter of bandwidth and security. Critics say itR…
This is the Pentagon catching up to the same firewall – proxy rules the regular bases have had in place for years. Just like any large buisness, most time waster sites are blocked by big proxy black-hole lists. And just like those corporations, headquarters is the last to get clamped down on untill the CEO gets Powned. More News that got 10 percent of the story right
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My understanding is that the reason given is actually bandwidth. I must say that it startles me that the same network handles both the mission-critical traffic and the everyday stuff (an example they gave was losing control over drones because of streaming video!)…
[…] THE BLOGOSPHERE But soldiers…, found that for every Photobucket, there was a Flickr, and for every Pandora ther… Raph Koster on a US military blockade of some social […]
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[…] Raph Koster has a brief story on his blog which points out that in the new media age, whenever you plug up one information hole, another one opens. (Also of note to me as he mentions a personal interest: OpenCroquet) Perhaps the best course of action would be to tighten the regulations of what soldiers are allowed to talk about and then reprimand those who do not obey the rules but then, you know what those wiley Americans can be like with their rights to free speech. […]
Perhaps Cisco could sell them a QoS routing solution? 😉
[…] A brief SF tale […]
I can only talk about the UK military setup, but…
From experience, it doesn’t share the same bandwidth at all. But civvie apps, such as Exchange, do sit on that bandwidth and that means that most of the emailed failsafes (everything or loaded on the high-priority network logged gets emailed to at minimum five people as well) and sooner or later, some (usually civilian) bod is going to notice that mail has slowed down to a pathetic crawl.
Often, mail itself is the reason why things die – last Christmas a video of some squaddies in Iraq doing a spoof music video crashed the Aldershot cluster completely. While mail is, to everyone actually doing any work, merely a redundant failsafe and not all that important, to the beancounters it’s the #1 priority app.
Start hurting their abilitiy to send lolcats around and things start getting locked up very quickly.
Raph – Its not on the same net 🙂 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet SIPR vs NIPR – But its not the drones they are really worried about its those Statusberries 🙂
This story reminds me of something that happened in the Falkland Islands after the war in 1982. The British military built a new camp and set up a garrison. With typical military humour it wasn’t long before they came up with a nickname for the inhabitants of the islands, “Bennys”. Benny was a character in a British TV sopa opera, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. For any Americans reading this think of the film ‘Deliverance’ withouth the malevolence and you’ll understand what was meant by the term “Benny”.
The brass on the island realised what has happening and banned the use of the term “Benny”.
The squaddies (soldeiers) stopped using “Bennies” but came up with a new term “Stills”, as in they’re “Still Bennies”, get it?
The brass got to hear of this, “Stills” was also banned.
The squaddies stopped using “Stills” and started using “Andys”, as in “And they’re Still Bennies”.
The brass gave up.
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