Deliberate Internet Shutdowns • Hacker News Board

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#151

Post by goku12 » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

krior wrote: post #69

iberator wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living without the Internet is still doable. Just a little bit harder. You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :) Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like going back to 1999.

You are aware of the fact that a lot of the payment infrastructure relies on the internet today?

We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were pretty effective for payments without much of an infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and books.

I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can be done and were done without the internet. But more importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our over reliance on the internet for our financial activities. The first is that the government or a non-state actor can easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful players.

The second major problem is if we ever face a post-apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We already have only a few fabs that can meet the global demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC, shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc. The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are extremely vulnerable to it.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#152

Post by jhbadger » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

SapporoChris wrote: post #71

tchalla wrote: 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.

In scientific papers (where acronyms are common) this is definitely the rule.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#153

Post by rconti » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

crossroadsguy wrote: post #66

matsz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.

CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.

Wait, the acronym for "Tap To Action" is "TPA"?

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#154

Post by Izkata » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 6:26 PM UTC

codeflo wrote: post #75

andruby wrote: 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…

And "ATM machine" tells me most people think the acronym is the name instead of an acronym.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#155

Post by Izkata » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #127

xp84 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM…

What the hell does GTM even mean? How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response? Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”. Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.

If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#156

Post by stockresearcher » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

nmz wrote: post #113

venturecruelty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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

The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.

Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#157

Post by goku12 » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #149

goku12 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sy…

> 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?

Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?

> 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. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.

That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#158

Post by blueflow » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #125

blueflow wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.

> No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.

Nobody claimed that. I'm not sure whether this sort of comms is meaningful at all or whether "staying informed" is just the dopamine thing in effect.

> Going back to the stone age

Its actually 20 years ago. That's less than the median age.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#159

Post by soerxpso » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 8:07 PM UTC

hnben wrote: post #119

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because the unannounced firedrills don't involve setting the building on fire. A "drill" equivalent would be if we all pretended the internet is down sometimes, and in some cases that still might be impossible to do without negative consequences.

Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

#160

Post by zzo38computer » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

ffuxlpff wrote: post #5

One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.

I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.