101–110 of 271 posts
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I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
You're replying to a thread where people lose internet connectivity when a bunch of men are kicking a ball around a field.
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The irony here is the government has little grip in much of central Africa. Militias roam the bush with little fear of law. Places like CAR are nations only because europeans drew it like that on a map. Killing the internet may be the only lever of control for the central government, they cannot control people's lives to nearly the extent is done in most the west. In places like the US they can just use one of the ga…
We just had that whole Cliven Bundy thing happen a few years ago, no? Also, large swathes of the western US, Alaska, Appalachia, etc., are often difficult for authorities to access (at least quickly). It's important to be clear that the lack of government control in Central Africa has a lot to do with that same sort of geographic inaccessibility. There are whole countries in Asia that exist largely because of the dif…
That's interesting because of how unusual it is. If there were hundreds of him, the US would be like central Africa.
> governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
I'm sure that governments feel better that you understand their problems. You're replying to somebody who is enumerating those problems, not reviewing individual governments and giving them a star rating.
What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
They'll get 99.99% of people, but not me. I only need it for an hour or so to communicate meeting points. After that it's an added luxury for whatever comes after. It's my contribution to the prepping of my family.
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VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you. Apart from something like starlink and even then they're not playing nice with geographical access most of the time based on politics, whims of a narcissist, or just business.
Starlink is the only massively global ISP and (as far as I’m aware) has not cut off access for anyone based on their politics or location.
In Southern Africa, they were bringing in grey imports of Starlink from the UAE and these units have been blocked.
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Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa. Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable. This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries w…
"Internet is a little flaky today. Probably a bird perching on the fiber."
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How many pirate ISPs exist in EU? How many of them have satellites in orbit?
How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation. Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
In a lot of Europe, you can only buy a handful at a time (like 16), at a relatively hefty per-tablet price and only from a pharmacy (good luck on sunday in a lot of places).
In France, you can’t just grab it off the shelf yourself anymore: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200115-pharmacies-ordered-sel...
Sometimes I leave part of my 500 ct bottle from Amerika because I don’t know why I bought so many in the first place.
Apps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether. The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
But if the app doesn't have internet access, how would it discover the others on that same partition? (Assuming it's a wholesale internet/specific domains being fully blocked). If your phone/computer can't contact Telegram's servers, it doesn't matter.
The gossiped data would be:
> My public key is ABCD1234... and the most recent CID of my data is DCBA9876...
These devices need be on no other network at the time, just in range of each other.
At other times when they're near a node on the larger network they offload their discovered peers and the consult their trust graph to see which peers (new or already known) are both trusted in some capacity (maybe transitively) and interested in the same topics/apps. In those cases, that data syncs to their mobile device, and apps which reference it update.
This would work better if you dedicate some device somewhere to be permanently attached to a network node, but unlike what we're doing today there's no need for it to be maintained by the author of your apps. We can decouple those personas. If the device hosting your data ends up on another partition, you can dedicate a new device to the task without updating anyone, since nobody is hanging onto device identifiers anyway. Probably this just means leaving yesteryear's busted phone plugged in at home so it can be a cache for your data while the device in your pocket is offline. Your mobile device an update when it gets on the wifi.
So now you've got users carrying around data which other users might be interested in (beyond the peer-finding data), and it's organized by topic/app, so when two peers are nearby which share an interest (perhaps on the behalf of their peers, transitively), they can directly sync heavier data as well. I think that attaching a wifi router to every delivery truck would get you most of the way there, since it could move the data between houses it's delivering to.
This might mean network latencies measured in hours or days, which would be awkward, but at least it's never hard down because it never depends on the state of a unique server. Besides, if the partition-tolerant fallback works beyond a certain usability threshold then you've removed the incentive to disable the internet in the first place.
Maybe I don't have the details perfect, but something like this is possible and I don't think the difficult part is getting the underlying protocol right. Rather it's getting the apps we rely on to also work under the fallback paradigm. The necessary shift is to get away from request/response architectures and towards pub/sub ones. Fewer unique server identifiers and more trusted user keys and predicates about the degree to which those users trust different content hashes.
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People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans. When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
Surely you're talking about a District Attorney deciding that an individual needs to be charged prima facie and saying he "will find a crime" right?
Internet shutdown typically happens during riots/ violent protests. Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent. Though Starlink has to follow country's laws and actually shutdown the internet. Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country and they will find ways to enable the internet for protesters with starlink or some other ways.
Starlink puts "internet shutdown" in the hands of just one asshole oligarch.
Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that. Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two. Like, we're impacting communications now.