Hello Friends,
Seeing all that is happening today, in the internet world of censorship, got me thinking. What's next? Being an IT guy I can tell you this, as the song says, "Baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!"
The next thing up is DNS, TCP/IP blocking, hijacking, redirection, along with Infrastructure hijacking and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attacks. Let me set the stage. (getting a bit nerdy)
The internet world is made up of what is called the 7 layers of the OSI model; sometimes referred to as the "7-Layer Salad". If you can control, manipulate, corrupt, block, or disrupt any of those layers, you can control what really happens in any network, i.e., the Internet.
DNS operates at layer 7, the Application Layer. While TCP/IP operates at layers 3 and 4 respectively; the Network and Transport layer.
What happened with Parler and other platforms was most notably at Layers 6 and 7; the Presentation and Application layers respectively. For my true nerdy folk out there, okay yes. You can make a reasonable case that the other layers were involved too.
This is all the nerdy I am going to get in this post. I am going to show a fictitious, yet real life correlation that might help you understand the next big thing.
Let's start with a shopping mall. And let's say that they sell everything you are against; whatever your definition of that is. And you have some pull, influence, interest with the management of that mall. The first thing you can ask the management to do is to kick everyone out. This is what happened with Parler, and might happen with many other companies that have "stores" on Amazon AWS, Google, Azure, Apple, etc. But not only did they kick them out, they cut off all necessary products and supply lines to the store. This is where Google Apps, Apple Store, Stripe come in. To add to the mayhem, they cut off all the ancillary ties to the store, such as Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, advertisers, etc.
Let me turn the table on you. Let's say you were one of the store owners that was thrown out of the mall, got their necessary and ancillary products sources cut off. What would you do? It is the hope that those that kicked you out of the mall would see you give up, go home, and get on board with what they want you to do and how they want you to behave. But you are strong, resilient, and believe in your product so much that you are going to build your own infrastructure, and team up with other stores that were kicked out and build your own mall. That way you can run your business the way you want. This is where it gets interesting.
So you build your own mall, and nobody comes. The mall is completely empty even though you had such a great business. You even received money to build the mall. You think, WHAT HAPPENED? Let me tell you. 😡😢
The same folks that kicked you out of the mall may have put up barricades and road closed signs. They may have even turned off GPS navigation (DNS) to your mall. Or even better yet, they re-routed (hijacked) the traffic that was going to your mall to their mall. And your customers think that they are actually supporting you, when they have no idea they aren't. What they really have done was create a somewhat sophisticated live version of the gameshow called "To Tell The Truth". (look it up if you don't get the reference) They have manipulated the internet paths so much that you think you are going to where you want to be, when in reality, they have taken you to where they want you to be. At the end of every show, the host would say, "Would the real (person), please stand up?" And inevitably only one person would stand, the studio would be surprised, and a lot of yuks would happen. The only difference is in our example, you would have many, hundreds or thousands of this person, place, thing stand up to be acknowledged as the "real" one. And here is the kick to the head with a boot, the "real" one may not even be in the group!
And why can they get away with this? Because once someone(s) is able to manipulate one layer of the OSI Model, they are now empowered to manipulate/change the entire OSI model as they see fit.
The even more scary part of this is that there are certain people that think that as long as I agree with what is being censored it is okay. What I think they fail to realize is that it can, and will, easily happen to them too.
Now you might say, "Tom, you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist" and I would agree with you. But I have seen this in action on a smaller scale. I have also seen technology that is very very good for mankind be equally horrific to mankind. The scalpel the cures is also the scalpel that kills.
As I said, "Baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!" There is more, much more beyond this.
