Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

schneier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 189 posts

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#101

Post by immibis »

nradov wrote: post #9
CodingJeebus wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#102

Post by immibis »

crazybonkersai wrote: post #57
kreetx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?

How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me. Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so…

How convenient it is to label troll-farm propaganda as "opinions you do not agree with"

Is it really your opinion if you're paid to pretend to hold it?

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#103

Post by immibis »

bdcravens wrote: post #30

While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting. https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...

They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#104

Post by vcliberal »

stego-tech wrote: post #6

The 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…

> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.

> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.

There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?

I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#105

Post by crazybonkersai »

crazybonkersai wrote: post #57
kreetx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?

How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me. Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so…

Yes, this is really my opinion. And unlike yourself, I am well familiar with Russian media first hand and not the distilled version presented by Western propaganda.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#106

Post by runlaszlorun »

stego-tech wrote: post #6

The 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…

I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll admit had me scratching my head...

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#107

Post by amelius »

ezoe wrote: post #68

> In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs. It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.

Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever used for something like this.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#108

Post by blueflow »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #32
dijit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer. Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in…

> this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating

You equate comms with internet. Maybe you should talk to people IRL more often.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#110

Post by stogot »

hulitu wrote: post #54
stogot wrote: post #2

Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable

It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.

What name server / level3 event was this?
Post reply on HN