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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

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111–120 of 189 posts

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#111
post #75
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")

> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation. So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter…

[deleted]

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#112
post #12

If 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.

In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They think it makes them sound knowledgable.

[flagged]

It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTA

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#114

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 bet…

Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.

You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#115
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#116
post #17

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…

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.

Depends on the union and the laws under which they operate.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#118
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bet…

Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity. You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they…

Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global corporations.

Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.

A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#119
post #7

I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.

we do annual unannounced firedrills and now one dies as a consequence.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#120
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.

There is absolutely no issue with using obscure abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the first use.

IA (I agree).
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