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Are We Doomed?

We Try and Kill the Internet

6/2/202633 min

The internet is how you get your news, your paycheck, your groceries, your banking, and    sometimes your drinking water. Humanity has quietly handed over the keys to civilization to a network most of us don't understand and couldn't rebuild. So what happens if it goes down — and not for a day or two? 

Ben Bradford tries to kill the internet, hunting for weak points in undersea cables, cyberattacks, cloud computing, overlooked open-source plumbing, and fragile politics. It’s harder than it looks, but maybe not impossible. Should we be worried?

Guests:

Bruce Schneier, cryptographer, cybersecurity lecturer, and author of Click Here to Kill Everybody.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik.

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Clips

Who Runs All .coms?
Governments’ Simple Kill Switch
No Power, No Water
No Going Back Anymore
Basement Code Holds Internet

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Speaker 10:00

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  2. Ben Bradford· Host0:17

    [upbeat music] True story, 2015, Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out, ATMs broke down, credit card readers gone, cell phone service gone, 911 jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray. [sirens blaring] The internet had gone out for half a day in one small corner of the United States. So here's a question: What if it was longer? What if the outage went further? What if we couldn't get our World Wide Web back ever, and could this happen?

  3. Bruce Schneier· Guest1:01

    We don't know how to exist in a pre-internet world anymore.

  4. Ben Bradford· Host1:05

    [upbeat music] This is Are We Doomed?, from Nuance Tales, distributed by the NPR Network. I'm Ben Bradford. If you think about it, humanity has put pretty quickly a lotta eggs in one network-connected basket, an amazing one, but

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