Earth Bond Chapter 14 Discussion (spoilers!)

[ANTIcarrot]

I'm going to catgirl hell for this...

They would still retain satellite capability. And while that would add a latency of about 300-500ms to their operations, it is not really a big deal.

While Fel ultimately decides what technology the humans do and do not have access to, we can do that today. In fact there are four ways we can do this. And these humans are supposed to have a 6 year headstart on us. Unless you can mention those three ways that I can think of, or come up with clever ways of your own, then you have no business telling me that it can't be done. And just to be clear, only one of those ways involves turning them off.

I think you know about as much about naval architecture as the Dragons do. Which is kinda my point.The dragons seeem to only think they understand what they are planning. I really don't think they've put any thought into how you 'catch' a 20 ton spinning blade, or how the prop shaft inside the ship will react if you do.

I am taking this from recent reports by the navy to congress about those new ship types which they themselves admit that LCS ships have a very low tolerance for damage.

Low tollerance for damage when hit by a missile above the waterline. Modern ASM hits will tear a ship in half twice the size of an LCS, so no big surprise. Aluminium is not magically weaker than steel. Of course 18" battleship plate armour probably would be magically weaker than Earth Dragon claws <sigh> but that's a different issue. I may be remembering wrong, but I don't think the Water Dragons have magically enhanced strength, so it's moot.

Hoppy:
LCS weaponry is modular. One definately and the other probably has volume set aside for VLS launchers. A navalised MLRS pod has been loudly talked about. So they can and probably will be upgunned at some point. I know of at least one Navy exercise used to 'prove' how useless they are, was obviously and heavily rigged. OVeral the LCS are more experimental than is usual in a naval class. But that doesn't make them flawed.

As for propellers, you're assuming the water dragons are going to rip them off using their paws or something and forgetting their ability to do water magic. To use the water itself to rip off rudders or propellers by means of magic.

And what exactly do you think will happen to the prop shafts inside some of these ships, when one end is suddenly being held stationary and the other has a hundred thousand foot-pounds of torque attached to it? Do the words 'sudden mechanical failure' mean anything to you? How about shrapnal? Or explosion?

'But they can do magic' is not an instant I WIN button, though Fel can make it one if he wishes. Magic is just applied knowledge, which makes it a form of technology. It can do fantastic things, but it is not invaulnerable to counter measures, and does not exist in a vacuum. The humans have plenty of those and are far more experienced in using them against intelligent enemies in intelligent ways. The sea dragons think they can stop the ships without killing anyone. I find that to be a laughable expression of both overconfidence and arrogence.

[afrigeek]

My understanding of Fel's statements about earth dragon invulnerability has them invulnerable to ANY weapon made of something that comes from the earth both in raw and processed form. That would mean any bullet formed of any kind of metal, it would even include the anti tank rounds that have depleted uranium since even that comes from the earth. I find it hard to imagine what kind of special bullet you can think of that they will make that is not ultimately made of something that came out of the earth unless they use moon rocks

As for the internet, for every way you can think of to turn it off, I am sure there is a counter measure to restore connectivity.

As for littoral combat ships or for that matter ships of any sort, we know that for all our advancements to-date, we're still far from being able to shrug off nature and its effects. I believe you're under estimating the power a dragon that can control the waters magically and other dragons that can affect weather have at their disposal for making ships ineffective. If storms have caused super tankers which are bigger and have even greater displacement than carriers to sink, then one can deduce from that that an enemy capable of manipulating mother nature is one not to underestimate.

[Greymist]

While Fel ultimately decides what technology the humans do and do not have access to, we can do that today. In fact there are four ways we can do this. And these humans are supposed to have a 6 year headstart on us. Unless you can mention those three ways that I can think of, or come up with clever ways of your own, then you have no business telling me that it can't be done. And just to be clear, only one of those ways involves turning them off.

Hrm, just taking a stab in the dark about the three ways you can think of, did you mean satellite or terrestrial internet?:

* I don't know how directionally sensitive the satellite receivers are, but I'm assuming fairly as they'd use a phased array to send the return signal back to the correct location(at a guess). In which case just lock out that area of the sea.
* In Hawaii they could chuck some high throughput DPI/MITMing gear on the incoming links, as soon as they find the suspicious transmission they heavily filter/cut that individual link.
* As an extra to the above, Jenny has their IP, and I know the ED say they've owned the the Hawaii system, but a route is a route, traceroute Earth.Dragons.IP.Address
* I suppose they could say that they'd pwned the routers to reply with a different icmp message when people were tracing to them, and I guess a dump of the router OS would take a bit of searching through to find the change.

[SYED]

Direct or indirect exposure to ED, awaken a persons link to gaia creating more wizards. Before ED stayed in their vilages kept seperate form humans by other dragons, so exposure is low, but the hunters have hunted the operatives, exposed by the magic they release. Waking up their gifts. Does that extend to dragons, would more dragon wizards be made if they had more contact with ED.

so the more ED deal with humans, the more wizards are made or awakened?

They could partially sink ships, just enough water to turn them back. How hard would it be to cause the entire ship to fall asleep? They could then rob it and set the surviors in life crafts.

I wonder if there is a sort of runic magic. Simply be making something, it is magical. Anything made by ED is suitable for being enchanted, so it is potentially possible that ED could create magical items.

[dellstart]

just send in the Seals , they will get it done

[ANTIcarrot]

Hrm, just taking a stab in the dark about the three ways you can think of, did you mean satellite or terrestrial internet?:

Three ways of turning off the satellites, plus the obvious one.
0)Turn the bloody things off!
1) Rotate them to point at the north/south pole, or above it, instead of the equator. That way they will be unable to recieve signals from Dragon Island (do we have a name for that yet??) and/or Hawaii. Or just rotate the uplink dishes. I did think about electronic area lockout, but I'm not sure it's something satellites are fitted with, or will be for a long time. Either case theyre just firewalls, which are vaulnerable to hollywood hacking in this ATL.
2) Jamming. The 150 mile limit is close enough for ships to interfere with dragon island (do we have a name for it yet?) signals without interfering with Hawaii.
3) Selective filtering, as you say. Most obviously the single uplink the EDs currently have was supplied by the US military, and presumably looks quite distinctive.
For the undersea cables and fiber optics, I meant physically disconnecting them, preferably at the non Hawaii end.

Unfortunately, something as simple as clicking a link, or sending an email, can trigger programmes already installed on remote systems. So the safest way would be to cut the dragons off completely. (Along with Hawaii until every system on the island can be purged, and/or they are sure they get all the links between Dragon Island and Hawaii.) Unless they have a doomsday setup where the world dies if they are disconnected... But if they do, well, then they've just killed millions of people, and they deserve to be nuked.

[Phantom]

just send in the Seals , they will get it done

well you know the old tag line....


Seals are Crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!



Phantom

[dellstart]

Or perhaps the famous Hobbit quotes

"'Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!' he said to himself, and it became a favorite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb."

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. [...] His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted. His fire belched forth, the hall smoked, he shook the mountain-roots. [...] He issued from the Gate, the waters rose in fierce whistling steam, and up he soared blazing into the air and settled on the mountain-top in a spout of green and scarlet flame."

[afrigeek]

Hrm, just taking a stab in the dark about the three ways you can think of, did you mean satellite or terrestrial internet?:

* I don't know how directionally sensitive the satellite receivers are, but I'm assuming fairly as they'd use a phased array to send the return signal back to the correct location(at a guess). In which case just lock out that area of the sea.

There are many satellites in the sky these days. They don't necessarily have to rely on one belonging to the US. They can piggy back off satellites from other countries and commercial ones that are used for TV and entertainment. Getting all countries to cooperate and turn off their satellites or something similar would be very difficult especially for nations like China which may rediscover their worship of dragons.

* In Hawaii they could chuck some high throughput DPI/MITMing gear on the incoming links, as soon as they find the suspicious transmission they heavily filter/cut that individual link.
* As an extra to the above, Jenny has their IP, and I know the ED say they've owned the the Hawaii system, but a route is a route, traceroute Earth.Dragons.IP.Address
* I suppose they could say that they'd pwned the routers to reply with a different icmp message when people were tracing to them, and I guess a dump of the router OS would take a bit of searching through to find the change.

Spoofing an ip address is actually trivial especially if you have control of the devices on the network like switches and routers but even without that, it is not that difficult. Traceroute does not really tell you where someone is. Also inspecting packets as they pass the wire is not that trivial and thus can be fooled. If one does not do high usage, you can actually just hide your traffic within legitimate traffic and make it very difficult to tell which is legit and which is not.

They could even use a DVB system. Use the dish for only downlink and use a mobile phone or satellite phone for uplink. It would be slow but still useable.

[afrigeek]

Three ways of turning off the satellites, plus the obvious one.
0)Turn the bloody things off!
1) Rotate them to point at the north/south pole, or above it, instead of the equator. That way they will be unable to recieve signals from Dragon Island (do we have a name for that yet??) and/or Hawaii. Or just rotate the uplink dishes. I did think about electronic area lockout, but I'm not sure it's something satellites are fitted with, or will be for a long time. Either case theyre just firewalls, which are vaulnerable to hollywood hacking in this ATL.
2) Jamming. The 150 mile limit is close enough for ships to interfere with dragon island (do we have a name for it yet?) signals without interfering with Hawaii.
3) Selective filtering, as you say. Most obviously the single uplink the EDs currently have was supplied by the US military, and presumably looks quite distinctive.
For the undersea cables and fiber optics, I meant physically disconnecting them, preferably at the non Hawaii end.

Unfortunately, something as simple as clicking a link, or sending an email, can trigger programmes already installed on remote systems. So the safest way would be to cut the dragons off completely. (Along with Hawaii until every system on the island can be purged, and/or they are sure they get all the links between Dragon Island and Hawaii.) Unless they have a doomsday setup where the world dies if they are disconnected... But if they do, well, then they've just killed millions of people, and they deserve to be nuked.

There are 994 satellites in orbit of which only 441 are US owned and even of those 441, 202 are civil/commercial satellites. Unless the US government forced the commercial satellite owners to cooperate at possible great loss to their customers all over the world who are not US citizens and then also managed to get the rest of the world to cooperate in locking out the dragons, the dragons would probably still be able to piggy back a signal off the satellite of another nation. That kind of cooperation would be very difficult in the wary untrusting environment we know. Most likely some other nation like China or Russia would offer the ED access just to try and establish a counter relationship with the dragons.

I have even run a project for doing connectivity to rural areas deep in Africa where we used UHF radios to provide connectivity. We were even able to browse the net albeit at very slow speeds.

As for nuking, I imagine that even the current bunker busters possessed by the US would probably not penetrate to the kind of depth the ED have dug into the ground. I am also unsure about whether the ED are susceptible to radiation or not.

[Weresmilodon]

I am also unsure about whether the ED are susceptible to radiation or not.

They are not. This is mentioned when they talk about the sunken submarine. Earth Dragons can not be hurt by anything that comes from the earth, and that includes the radiation it gives off.

[Phantom]

Hrm, just taking a stab in the dark about the three ways you can think of, did you mean satellite or terrestrial internet?:

* I don't know how directionally sensitive the satellite receivers are, but I'm assuming fairly as they'd use a phased array to send the return signal back to the correct location(at a guess). In which case just lock out that area of the sea.

There are many satellites in the sky these days. They don't necessarily have to rely on one belonging to the US. They can piggy back off satellites from other countries and commercial ones that are used for TV and entertainment. Getting all countries to cooperate and turn off their satellites or something similar would be very difficult especially for nations like China which may rediscover their worship of dragons.

* In Hawaii they could chuck some high throughput DPI/MITMing gear on the incoming links, as soon as they find the suspicious transmission they heavily filter/cut that individual link.
* As an extra to the above, Jenny has their IP, and I know the ED say they've owned the the Hawaii system, but a route is a route, traceroute Earth.Dragons.IP.Address
* I suppose they could say that they'd pwned the routers to reply with a different icmp message when people were tracing to them, and I guess a dump of the router OS would take a bit of searching through to find the change.

Spoofing an ip address is actually trivial especially if you have control of the devices on the network like switches and routers but even without that, it is not that difficult. Traceroute does not really tell you where someone is. Also inspecting packets as they pass the wire is not that trivial and thus can be fooled. If one does not do high usage, you can actually just hide your traffic within legitimate traffic and make it very difficult to tell which is legit and which is not.

They could even use a DVB system. Use the dish for only downlink and use a mobile phone or satellite phone for uplink. It would be slow but still useable.

Hummm hey Guys ?
that might need at least a bit of re-thinking.

Aren't the Dragons are tied into the Fider-optics cable ......Underwater!
Aren't they are patched in to the Main trunk line somewhere.
they are just spoofing being apart of that ISP's network
Changing to a diffrent IP on the fly won't upset them any ....
it's not like they are running a major web site or anything.

They simply exist and borrow bandwidth.

The only way to really shut them down or even come close to hurting their access is to physicaly remove their link.

That means either Pulling up the cable and removing the splice. or cutting off all trafic using the cable (turning it off)
But then i would assume this is a Major telecomunications Cable were talking about (there are not that many underwater fiberoptics cables)
You'd be talking about turning off all communications to the island and i'd assume also one of the main communications
links running from North & south america to Eastern Europe, China, Japan, The Phillipines, and a few others.
(there goes a certian ex-web Admin's Internet access as well...Poke, poke, Spec8472, )

So as i see it ....it's do able....but are the humans willing to do it?
Thats the Big question.
Now if i remember correctly and If we put it to a vote.
Fiferguy might say Screw Spec he doesn't need access anyways and vote to just pull the Plug on it


Phantom

[Belgarion213]

My view is human's could do it...but they would need a very good reason. Just going in case the dragons use it, or even the dragons doing some minor stuff wouldn't really warrant the pain in the ass that its going to promise to be. As for the dragon's taking the web down with them, I would like to point towards the fact that that's their(earth dragons) only really 'major' bargaining shot, that they can do a shitton of damage before they go down if somebody decides to be a dick. Its basically MAD, but on a different scale. It is Hollywood hacking, and as mentioned by Jenny they have no idea how deep into places the ED's are, but its really all the Earth Dragon's can do. While its totally not cool that they could potentially kill tens of millions its basically the only thing they have to argue with. IF they used that to do a preemptive strike I would agree 'totally not cool' but holding it in reserve is probably all they can do.

[Greymist]

Aren't the Dragons are tied into the Fider-optics cable ......Underwater!
Aren't they are patched in to the Main trunk line somewhere.
they are just spoofing being apart of that ISP's network
Changing to a diffrent IP on the fly won't upset them any ....
it's not like they are running a major web site or anything.

What I was thinking/talking about, was finding the specific cable they're spliced into, and cutting that off at both ends. According to Wikipedia there are at least 7 underwater cables to Hawaii, I'm sure one could be cut off, and then route around the break.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in ... ons_cables

[Belgarion213]

"Hey they cut us of...." "Hey we have a water dragon on staff right? Could we get to her go down and route her into ANOTHER cable...like we did in the first place?" "I don't see why not...."