Accessing the Internet without the Web

RiderOnTheStorm

Not sure if it was coverted before (and wouldnt know what to search for) so I hope I am not covering old ground.

Is it possible (say, in the event of a world wide disaster), to access the internet without the www?

For example, if there was a meteor that took out a large portion of the planet, there is a good chance that the Web will go down. But if I know the IP addy of my fav sites , would it be possible to access them directly? Maybe an emulator pre-loaded with the address of my fav sites
.... any ideas?

For the sake of argument, I am assuming the www is down, and my mates server in Canada, or the BBC servers, etc are still up. I dont want to start a debate that a meteor could/couldnt do this....lets just assume that it has happened. Unless of course, its 110% impossible for the Web to go down, and for my mates server (containing all his data) stay up. Then I withdraw my Q ....

Ta :-)

28064212

Nothing like a meteor required. Something as simple as your DNS servers goes down, you can access sites using their IP instead.

But your question doesn't make a lot of sense. The "www" sits on top of the internet. It can't go down in isolation. An individual server can go down, or DNS servers could be inaccessible, or any of a myriad of other dependencies could be missing, but you can't say that the "www is down"

Capt'n Midnight

https://archive.org/ has a backup of the internet.

you send them a request using something like this http://i.imgur.com/eB1k7td.png

you can download wikipedia here https://dumps.wikimedia.org/


or send a carrier pigeon to GCHQ and ask for a copy of your records

TheChizler

What do you think the World Wide Web is?

Capt'n Midnight

The original network was designed by the US military to keep working during a nuclear war. Today's version has a lot more redundancy so the conditions that would take it down would most likely take out power stations too so you'd have to browse by candlelight.

There are lots of web farms out there holding caches of updates and web sites to reduce long distance traffic too.

Thanks to "accidents" with anchor cables whole countries have gone off line when undersea fibre optic cables get cut, or when the regime turns off encrypted traffic like during the Arab Spring, that's harder to work around.

ED E

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Thanks to "accidents" with anchor cables whole countries have gone off line when undersea fibre optic cables get cut, or when the regime turns off encrypted traffic like during the Arab Spring, that's harder to work around.

And sharks, sharks a serious threat.


Realistically you only have to hit a few submarine routes and you'd take down a massive portion of the intercontinental traffic. Whats worse is if the polar routes get damaged they cannot be fixed during winter due to the ice pack.

Capt'n Midnight

ED E wrote: »

And sharks, sharks a serious threat.

Not anymore. No attacks in the last ten years since they shielded the stray electricity leaking from the cables.

So we're good, unless someone sticks fricken laser beams on them.

scamalert

heres a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db0VfCnULxM&index=85&list=WL ,not that it will make any sense to op but just look towards end where ping process starts and interface goes down-now unless moon hits us and given video example on simulation youd probably wont notice it