Live data from Hacker News

Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests

businessweek.com

1–10 of 40 posts

Re: Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests

#3
They also forced the cable operators to take the only TV channel actually informing about the protests off the air (NTN24).

Right now twitter is working normally, but the govt keeps running these small tests, taking websites offline, in preparation for a complete blackout since the only way to find out right now what is going on is through the internet.

Re: Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests

#6

I am surprised about reading this at HN before than Venezuelan press. I hope there is not censorship at the level too.

If they're censoring Twitter, don't you think they'd try to censor domestic media as well?

They would have to shutdown the whole press (not that they haven't done that before), but the website is still there and still publishing opposition friendly news

Re: Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests

#9

I am surprised about reading this at HN before than Venezuelan press. I hope there is not censorship at the level too.

The press is being censored in a different way. The government is not giving them the dollars they need to buy paper for printing (there is a currency exchange control and no one can buy dollars without govt approval). There is no truly "free press" since they all depend on the government to give them the money for buying paper. Several regional newspapers have had to shut down already.

You either tone down the stuff critical to the government or you will shut down sooner or later because of the lack of printing material.

Right now the biggest newspapers in the country have reduced their issues to around 12 pages every day. They've had to print only the essential stuff (these twitter news will probably be printed tomorrow since this took place last night at around 1am).

Re: Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests

#10
Maybe this would be a good opportunity for university students over there to test out a network like Freenet for communicating? FMS, Frost, or Freemail could be used for messaging back and forth in place of e-mails and social networks. A couple people could build a jSite for news stories/pictures/videos. I don't think groups of students would have that hard of a time adding each other as peers under darknet mode. The docs make it pretty easy to switch over [1].

If they can't talk freely to one-another over emails or popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter... maybe they shouldn't use them.

[1] https://freenetproject.org/documentation.html

Post reply on HN