Esther Paniagua, author of the book “Error 404”, believes that the world internet is hanging by a thread and that governments will be able to do nothing to avoid the wave of planetary panic that will follow the end of the www.
The journalist decided to title her book with the annoying and frequent 404 error message, which appears when a link does not work. The book is based on the prediction that the internet will stop working sooner or later, spreading chaos and concern in a world that depends so much on it that it is not at all prepared to be without the internet.
“The internet will go down and we will experience waves of worldwide panic; it is very likely that there will be an internet blackout ”, she says, in an interview with with the BBC, although it does not come up with a predictable date for the impending chaos.
Esther Paniagua says that everything can happen very quickly, giving as an example what happened in 1998 when a group of computer hackers showed in the United States Senate that they managed to bring down the entire network in 30 minutes, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in a basic internet protocol that, in words, makes information flow as efficiently as possible.
If network security differs today, piracy methods are also more refined, so much so that a year ago all Meta platforms went offline.
As everything is connected to the internet, “everything would stop working and a cascading effect would be produced, a domino effect, because it would even affect services that are not connected to the network”, he anticipates.
“Intelligence service specialists guarantee that, 48 hours after the blackout, panic would start to emerge and people would fear for their survival”, adds the science and technology journalist.
Esther Paniagua also addressed the DNS, the domain name registration system, which is “in the hands” of just 14 people, 14 guardians of the network. It is these people – and only these people – who meet twice a year and hold the digital and physical keys to the global DNS.
Finally, the author of the book also shows her concern for submarine cables, so “vulnerable” that two years ago they left Yemen without internet and the same has happened this year in Tonga, Polynesia, after the volcanic eruption.
