Techno Failings

March 10th, 2010

Having trouble with my internet connection and it’s making me even more anti-technology, my brain is tuned to problem solve, specifically in engineering although the older I get the more I can use the same thought strategies in a more lateral way and I see more and more flaws other things such as peoples’ live’s, society in general, politics, religions, capitalism, communism, even science. The problem relating to my internet is I have little control over it, I’m relying on a third party, I used to use packet radio many years ago before the internet which was a basic internet system used amongst Amateur Radio enthusiasts, the great thing about it was there was no necessity for a third party, you could connect directly with whoever you wanted to file share with or chat to (providing you had a suitable set up), there ‘were’ bulletin board systems (BBS) and nodes where you could share information with other parts of the world but generally they were local and operated by other Radio Amateurs that you were either friendly with or knew somebody who was. My beef with modern day communications is that it is getting far too complicated and with that comes fragility, the system is becoming vulnerable to a myriad of potentially disabling influences.

Solar Activity/Magneto Fluctuations:
Solar flares create huge electro-magnetic pulses that penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere, these propagations can induce power surges into electrical transmission systems such as our national grid large enough to severely damage sub station transformers (such conditions caused a massive black-out in the US some years ago). The same thing applies to any large cable network, telecoms for instance, although fibre optic cables will be immune in such a case any sensitive electronics could be susceptible and many telecoms system are still largely copper cable.

Satellites:
Our reliance on satellites adds to the situation, not only is there an ever increasing amount of space junk floating around that could easily destroy a satellite in a collision (nothing really floats in space, it’s all moving at several thousands of miles an hour!) but radiation from solar flares could also easily annihilate it’s electronics.

Weather:
Kind of obvious, flooding, high winds, extreme high/low temperatures; not only directly but anything that might paralyse essential maintenance services.

Cyber Attack:
Cyber Warfare is already happening, China especially are targeting Western infrastructures and may possibly already have a method of disabling key areas of our communications system.

Terrorism:
Terrorist organisations could target communications networks in order to gain notoriety or interfere with emergency operations.

Pandemic:
The whole of civilisation could crumble on this one, but nationally it becomes even more acute. Consider 10% of the workforce across the board are off sick, that includes managers, supervisors, delivery drivers (in particular tankers to deliver fuel) farmers, police, doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, air traffic control and the administration staff that do the shed load of paperwork involved with all of it, and also engineers servicing & maintaining all this technological marvelry including the communications network. At first 10% doesn’t sound a lot and we could easily cope for a week or two, but how about a month, or even six? And what if the working populous off sick was fifteen percent, or twenty?

Political Red Tape:
Health and Safety, Political Correctness, ethnic integration over skills based employment all pose a threat for reasons that defy logic.

Economic Decline:
All this stuff costs a fortune to keep running let alone improve, so with dwindling resources companies will inevitably struggle to provide an effective service

In time I believe we will be protecting ourselves from the expense and the possibility of being cut off by abandoning third party utility providers for a simpler solution. What that will be who knows, maybe there’s a niche there?

So I can’t solve my internet problem, because it’s not my problem.

Ironically as I’ve been typing this, Orange, who provide my mobile phone service, have barred my phone!

Entry Filed under: General