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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'

#251

Post by LAC-Tech »

oefrha wrote: post #154
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..

Did you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.

I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.

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

#252

Post by itishappy »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #237
itishappy wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field . But it's easy to extend the real numbers to a field that includes infinite and infinitesimal values. Limiting is then a projection from the hyperreals, which are a field, to the extended reals, which aren't. Instead of "lim", let's call this projection "f". 0·∞ is an indeterminate form because f(f⁻…

> You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field.

Fair enough. You're right, of course, and you've learned me a thing. Appreciate your time.

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

#253

Post by oefrha »

pc86 wrote: post #163
oefrha wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets. That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.

> These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time

Yet they’re still largely unknown. So the thought that reporting Internet interruptions in Africa => people all over planet earth will be talking about that in real life is just strange.

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

#254

Post by m3047 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #214
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a cool idea. Instead of initializing our hard disks with 0's we should fill them with things like that so that people have a chance of finding them as needed. Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?

Not who you're replying to, but they linked their GH in bio, which led me to this: https://github.com/m3047/pangolin

Yup that's it.

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

#256

Post by nradov »

arkh wrote: post #48
762236 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a problem starting new companies in the EU. It's hard to imagine the EU developing alternatives that people would want to use in such an environment.

The problem is not in starting a company. It's in the 20 to 100 million investment if needed: those do not exist here. You'll get up to 10 million investment from whatever bank + state arrangement no problem. But when you want to scale up you're fucked if it requires money. So no "let's get 1 billion users and then think about milking them" way to do business, you have to be profitable a lot earlier. And you better n…

So why have European capital markets remained so inefficient for so long? I've heard a lot of facile explanations about risk averse culture but I'm not convinced that really explains anything. Culture becomes quite malleable when people have an opportunity to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power.

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

#257

Post by aprilthird2021 »

gimme_treefiddy wrote: post #151
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets peek into whether those divisions are organic or driven through NGOs.

You think Indians as a people are divided because of NGOs?

Did NGOs start the Gujarat pogroms? Or tear down Babri Masjid or try to impose Hindi on the Southern states? Did NGOs cause the Kashmir conflict or caused Meitei and Kuki tribes to fight each other in the Northeast? Did NGOs cause Congress to invade the Golden Temple? Did NGOs cause the BJP to announce imposing the death penalty for converting girls out of Hinduism to other religions?

Come on man

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

#259

Post by pabs3 »

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..

These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.

https://ooni.org/

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

#260

Post by rbanffy »

fluoridation wrote: post #224
rbanffy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a passive kill switch. Not that we can rule out an active kill switch.
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