The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
141–150 of 189 posts
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 participati…
> 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
No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web.
But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#143The 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…
How passionately do you feel about that position every time AWS us-east-1 goes down?
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Starlink-style connectivity Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Notably absent from TFA... Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
Are you trying to argue that Starlink isn't cut off Ukrainian access? Because they did and it was well documented.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#145The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#146While 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...
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#147> 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.
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow! PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that…
I was confused for a minute after reading this, until I remembered that I'm on HN.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it. As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire intern…
You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#150> 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.
Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have enough tactical EMP devices to do the job.
PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.