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Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

theguardian.com

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Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#191

Post by mywittyname »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #20
junaru wrote: post #19

Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.

What? They don't block Internet because they want their people united. They do it because they are authoritarians who want to control every aspect of people's lives. India doesn't top the list of countries that cut Internet access because it's a haven of national unity, lol. It's probably a country more divided than any Western ones.

"Keep the bad parts, eliminate the good parts."

- The Authoritarian Cookbook

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#193

Post by globular-toast »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #100
globular-toast wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.

The internet attack resilience isn't meant to keep a single node online. It is to keep a communication network active even if parts are destroyed. That part works.

Who cares about a single node? You shouldn't need a node in the middle for two parties to communicate. That's the point.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#194

Post by callc »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #43

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.

I agree, but also am weary trying to solve societal issues with technical solutions. We naturally try to do this, using the tools we know. It’s a losing battle to fight technologically against a motivated state actor, like CCP. When your door gets knocked down and you get arrested for using e2e encrypted communications, technology will not save you.

Certainly things like SSL and encryption have helped fight back against the spying eyes of governments and bad actors.

This is not a dig against making apps robust to network partitions

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#195

Post by timewizard »

4b11b4 wrote: post #72

This should be an extremely high profile piece of news... Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"? Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..

This is Africa. So the first question you should ask yourself is "do they even have electricity 24 hours of the day?" The answer is generally "they're lucky to get 8 hours in a day."

I mean, it's a disappointing that Facebook isn't available in Uganda, but I think there are some bigger ticket items on the continent to be concerned with first.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#196

Post by mystraline »

imachine1980_ wrote: post #70
ryandrake wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.

this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est

Its one of the reasons why I am a market based socialist.

The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation.

The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to allow suitable profit and growth.

The final tier is the new and not-required level. This is the new stuff, the crazy tech. Low/no laws, let everyone in this realm go crazy and experiment. The skies the limit.

But water? This is beyond the pale. And revolutions have gone on for this before.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#197

Post by lelandfe »

FredPret wrote: post #187
imachine1980_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est

Are you in an alternate dimension where Snow Crash literally happened?! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Burbclaves coming next: https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-leg...

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#198

Post by MichaelZuo »

amarant wrote: post #178
MichaelZuo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a viable competitor, then it wouldn’t matter so much if it was blocked or not…

What makes you think the competitor wouldn't simply be blocked as well?

Because their policies, behavior, etc., likely wouldn’t be 100% identical.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#199

Post by daveguy »

leereeves wrote: post #113
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Fact check: Mostly true That's not what that link says. "... the claim that Musk had ordered Starlink coverage in Crimea 'turned off' wasn't entirely accurate. (Both CNN and The Washington Post subsequently corrected their reports.)"

Okay, but why pretend starlink coverage isn't solely in the hands of elon?

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#200

Post by Retric »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #188
Retric wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One drop in an empty bucket is infinitely more water. No multiply 0 by infinity and you don’t get one drop, ie 1/0 is undefined. Further it wasn’t an empty bucket.

In this case, as bucket content aproaches 0 drops, 1 drop becomes infinitely more, at least in calculus. Limits in calculus: "When a real function can be expressed as a fraction whose denominator tends to zero, the output of the function becomes arbitrarily large, and is said to "tend to infinity" For example, the reciprocal function, f ( x ) = 1/x tends to infinity as x tends to 0. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org…

Tends to infinity != infinity. Also, the fundamental theory of calculus requires a continuous function.

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

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