did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have happened this year across the world? https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
11–20 of 189 posts
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#12If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power.
Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#13One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#14Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#15If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
> Starlink-style connectivity
Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist. And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not su…
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timi…
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#17The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't re…
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#18One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
Ted has some interesting ideas but I personally would not accept any life advice from him
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#19If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
> Starlink-style connectivity Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live —
in a state actor, or in a private operator.
Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.
As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#20[dead]