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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'

#221

Post by thaumasiotes »

itishappy wrote: post #220
thaumasiotes wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it's possible for a bucket to contain a negative amount of water? I should note that the product of zero and infinity being an indeterminate form is actually a result about the product of an infinitesimal (of small but indefinite magnitude) and an infinite value. If when you say "zero", you actually mean "zero", there is no ambiguity: zero is more infinitesimal than any infinite value is infinite, and the p…

Zero times any number is zero, but infinity is not a number. In order for multiplication to be valid, your elements must share a field.

Are you trying to make a point? The indeterminate forms are statements about limits. Those limits are statements about the possible range of certain operations on infinitesimal and infinite values. It's perfectly valid to multiply those values. And when zero is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.

You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.

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

#223

Post by itishappy »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #33
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country. So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for wh…

Out of curiosity, is there anything technical the Spanish authorities could do to block Starlink (i.e jamming)? Or are legal/bureaucratic measures the only solution?

Starlink terminals are jammable, but the jamming source will need to be in it's FOV and it uses quite a focused beam. Not particularly viable for an entire nation.

The ground stations would be a lot more vulnerable, but cutting the cable would be a lot easier than flying a Ku/Ka band jammer overhead.

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

#224

Post by fluoridation »

rbanffy wrote: post #216
fluoridation wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying that because the store sold you the belt you're using to beat your children, the owners should break into your house to physically stop you from doing so.

Is the US still providing updates and spares for Ukraine’s airforce? Modern military aircraft depend a lot on software updates to stay operational.

I fail to see the relevance.

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

#225

Post by CSMastermind »

bmitc wrote: post #134

I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...

I don't want to be dependant on Starlink (or any one provider) for internet.

I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.

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

#226

Post by flkenosad »

create-username wrote: post #2

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

Spain could build thier own cloudflare.

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

#227

Post by tryauuum »

gabeio wrote: post #93
VHRanger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you. Unless they are outright blocking your entire connection. That is precisely why one would use a vpn. A vpn most definitely can help get around blocking key words.

you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to

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

#228

Post by itishappy »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #221
itishappy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero times any number is zero, but infinity is not a number. In order for multiplication to be valid, your elements must share a field.

Are you trying to make a point? The indeterminate forms are statements about limits. Those limits are statements about the possible range of certain operations on infinitesimal and infinite values. It's perfectly valid to multiply those values. And when zero is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.

I am, thanks for noticing.

If you extend your field to include infinity (e.g. the extended reals, or the extended positive reals), only then is it valid to multiply by infinity. One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. This gives us conflicting results for zero times infinity, therefore 0*∞ is an indeterminate form.

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

#229

Post by jp42 »

rbanffy wrote: post #217
jp42 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why i am being downvoted for this :confused:

Most likely this part you didn’t realize happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43354309

Well I did not even bring Elon into my original post. What I wrote is true regardless of whether its starlink or some other constellation. e.g satphones are routinely used across the world in conflict/insurgency areas. Starlink is already being used in insurgency in NE part of India and so on.

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

#230

Post by sgt »

bombcar wrote: post #82
phmagic wrote: post #3

What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?

The way to do p2p communication without the Internet is to remove immediacy from it. Old email servers were configured this way, they’d try to communicate the next time they got a connection. For text it could be simple as encrypting and sending it to as many devices as you see until you get an ack back - something almost blockchain-like, but without the CPU and just signing. Ack’d messages would be purged from ThePi…

FIDONet was pretty rugged that way.
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