The U.S. Internet Preservation Society writes about chokepoints in the financial processing system (inspired by recent events with games stores) and the several layers present that are not obvious to people outside the system.
UPIPS covers why payment networks are effectively immune from competition, and why creating a new competing payment network without restrictions will not provide benefits due to contract lock-in and other problems.
They also cover proposed legislation's benefits and weaknesses for addressing the problem.
I wonder what the resistance of underground wiring is to rocket attacks. If the space in between is repeatedly getting hit by explosions, it seems likely the blasts would cut wiring at some point.
On the one hand, underground comms conduits are difficult to target with rockets or even laser guided bombs. This is one reason why special forces on the ground were tasked with popping access hatches along iraqi highways during Desert Storm.
On the other, Israel is an acknowledged world leader in electronic warfare and jamming etc, so they have a very deep understanding of the technical vulnerabilities of wireless comms.
The border fence project did a lot of digging up of the ground so it surprises me if everything wasn't wired together with a mesh and lots of redundancy. And also that cutting the wire would itself trigger alerts and things.
So the part of the story where Hamas blinded everything by targeting cell towers doesn't seem likely. I wouldn't imagine Israel to be vulnerable like that. The bigger picture where Israel was caught off guard resource-wise and response-wise is very plausible though.
You can use either a forwarding service where you order yourself to an address with a personal code, or a proxy buying service which does the ordering for you.
CUDA only had its initial release in 2007 (compared to the mentioned crack in 2009), and I remember it being a fairly limited product at that point. GPUS were also much slower back then.
I am reminded of the tweet from long-banned Twitter poster Hakan Rotmwrt:
"One of the strangest fixations of AFWL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'"
UPIPS covers why payment networks are effectively immune from competition, and why creating a new competing payment network without restrictions will not provide benefits due to contract lock-in and other problems.
They also cover proposed legislation's benefits and weaknesses for addressing the problem.