Life in an Internet Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Life in an Internet Shutdown

nytimes.com

116 pointslaurex65 comments

I was struck by one anecdote in the article, relating to Zimbabwe’s internet shutdown in the midst of a banknote shortage, which left many Zimbabweans unable to use the internet-based cash-analogue they habitually used in lieu of cash, and how this caused one businessman to “throw away half of his perishable goods”. WTF? Sell them on a “credit basis”! At worst you get nothing (which is equivalent to throwing them away, monetarily, with the added advantage that you actually are helping keep people fed) and in the best case leads to people settling their debt once the crisis has passed.

> Sell them on a “credit basis”!

In cultures where cash is king, broke people don't go to the store. They're not used to the store offering them credit.

I live in a developing country where cash is king. In my experience in cash cultures, stores offering credit is extremely common.

Your sweeping generalization is not just wrong but unnecessary. We're talking specifically about Zimbabwe, so all that matters is what is common in Zimbabwe and not what other countries do or do not do.

> Your sweeping generalization is not just wrong but unnecessary. We're talking specifically about Zimbabwe, so all that matters is what is common in Zimbabwe and not what other countries do or do not do.

I wouldn't be so hard on the grandparent. Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

My understanding is that stores do not offer credit to whoever just shows up. You need to build credibility or at least knows someone who knows the store keep.

I imagine if I were a shopkeeper and I had a choice between selling on credit to random people vs throwing something away, I'd probably throw it away or if I sold it, I'd want to mark it as money I won't get. I don't know why some random person would come back to me to repay me. Not that I know anything about Zimbabwe (my only interaction is with people who fled the country so I acknowledge my perspective is probably biased hence I won't try to make further sweeping generalizations about the government there).

Surely most of the people suddenly not having money would be habitual store clients (otherwise we’d need to understand why suddenly the store owner ordered twice as much produce as he usually does). So it makes sense that he would know them and presumably trust them. I summarise that embarrassed clients probably just stopped showing up.

I think this is more like a small store owned by one of your neighbors so how they do it is that they give everyone credit and just black-list all of those who don't pay

Since it's mostly cheaper items I think they can afford to do it that way and there are many people that go to this stores on a daily basis so it shouldn't cause much trouble to do it

Infoamtion is a necessity, but disinformation is a weapon.

I have lived in an Internet Shutdown that lasted for about a week. I was actually thankful for it. Don't get me wrong, It was inconvenient to say the least, but it probably saved thirty-odd lives.

You have to actually live in a tense environment (and be a minority) to understand how quickly misinformation and rumours can be spread that incite extreme violence and then counter-violence. Facebook/WhatsApp isn't very good at quickly taking down rumours, and people are easy to get charged when in an emotional state. The percentage of people who keep calm and let the situation die down is miniscule.

Reg. Kashmir, there have already been multiple instances fake videos/images shared by influential people, let alone everyday folks, within the last month (I'll put up links below later). You can only imagine the amount of inflammatory disinformation being shared by normal people. This stuff has already spread quicker than it is usually debunked, so the damage is already there.

True. Shekhar Gupta explained in a recent video about how dangerous rumors and rumor-mongers can be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=wqzCU1Y36ww

This is happening right now in Kashmir.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/28/india-restore-kashmirs-i...

It really makes me wonder whether a strong movement towards mesh networks could resolve this. What are the ways authorities could block a community network? At least information could be spread this way, and might have saved the Zimbabwean journalist.

Kashmir it's mentioned in the article.

It also mentions this, which I found surprisingly high:

In all, more than a quarter of the world’s nations have used the tactic at one point or another over the past four years.

Signal jamming. Transmission detection vans to find base c&c stations. Device confiscation and outlawing.

Laser mesh... There is an ongoing fight between the UK radio regulator and illegal radio stations. The regulator has detector vans, so it's a similar situation to what you describe.

They can find transmittors, but their objective is to find the studio, which needs a live link to the transmitter.

As I understand it, the pirates break out onto the roof of tall buildings, especially public housing towers, and place transmitters. These will be found, so they gotta have a way of linking them back to home.

Sure, they could use mobile data (has its own opsec problems), or hacked residential wifi and a VPN (add real prisong itme of a hacking charge to the sheet when you get court).

Apparently what they often do is use a cantena link - a focussed beam of wifi to some distant place, which can be very difficult to pinpoint accurately. I also saw a doc where they used lasers.

These days though, I think a lot of them just stream on the internet.

Do you have urls for any sources? sounds like an interesting read.

Other than the pirate stations around London, they're not quite as proliferate as they once were with the advent of the internet. They have a colourful history in the UK however, with some stations broadcasting from international waters in the 60's just off the UK to circumvent the monopoly the BBC and record companies had on music. I highly recommend watching 'The Boat That Rocked' for a good comedy based on it.

Below are some interesting reads on the culture:

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

https://www.transdiffusion.org/2008/08/01/on_the_run_the

http://www.thepiratearchive.net/

https://web.archive.org/web/20090324075718/http://www.freewe...

In the US it was released as "Pirate radio". A great movie under either title but my american friends didnt get the dunkirk reference in the final act.

Thank you!

Just wondering why can't Tor & the internet be used to transmit the source signal? Seems like a perfect candidate - the FM transmitter gets the source signal off a Tor Hidden Service - if it's seized there's no way to locate where the hidden service is actually hosted.

What I'm imagining is a true mesh network where there is no "home", only distributed data. You take down one transmitter, another one takes up the slack. It seems prudent in this case to learn know more about tracing, and thereby avoiding tracing, the source of a Wifi transmitter.

This is sort of the idea behind Piped Piper in Silicon Valley.. Everybody has an app that shares the data with everyone. My guess is that it is striped across the devices.

Has it’s own problems, similar to bitcoin. If you create a bunch of nodes that feed into a warehouse you might end up owning a majority of the data, and have de facto control of the network.

Plus the overuse of device radios, storage etc. 802.11s does great at keeping power low while acting as a pass through, but storing data on the device requires a lot of availability for the device, and duplication has to be done to make sure you can access your stripes. Good for single use messages, bad for anything large.

There may be a fix to that problem.. need to think about it.

> These days though, I think a lot of them just stream on the internet.

which is generally legal.

but then we are back to the original problem, the internet being down...

Cut electricity. That puts an end to modern communication.

Electricity is cut ten times a day in India. They know how to deal with that, everyone is running a generator.

Nope: solar panels, gas generators, even handcranked chargers are enough to keep a cellphone going.

But not a cellphone tower. Not covertly. And if cell towers are down, cellphones are useless.

> if cell towers are down, cellphones are useless.

The thread on the front page about HK shows that's not true.

I regularly get up a mountain and spend some time in a hut that is well off the grid. The end to modern communication is one of the reasons I spend time hiking to get up there.

Even still, lately, its been a great place get back to after a day of further marching around, to watch movies and catch up on some writing work, listen to or make some music (electronic) or hack on some code .. the point is: solar-all-the-things is actually working. There is so much energy up there... and especially on the side of a mountain.

On some spots up there, I can hang a portable water generator, and the camp will have electric heat .. a small wifi hub .. a couple miniPC's worth of movies and so on ..

So, I dunno, I think there is quite a way to avoid grid-based electricity consumption, as long as you a) have the gear, and b) are willing to go to remote places to harvest the hell out of it ..

Sneakernet is probably safer. Flash drives, wifi-direct between cellphones, etc. Plus it works without custom hardware (which may be restricted) and software (which requires specific knowledge).

No safer for the people smuggling the data. Getting caught with an encrypted usb drive can land you in a world of hurt.

Sure, it's still dangerous, but at least it's something you can try to hide, rather than broadcast around you!

We had jamming, frequency hopping, direction finding, etc. in WWII. Since then we’ve had 70+ years and hundreds of billions of dollars of electronic warfare R&D. If we’re competitive against the Russian or Chinese military industrial complex for control of RF in a battlefield scenario, we can certainly crush a civilian hobbyist mesh network.

I like how we supposedly have the serval mesh project but no APKs available any more or ever in iOS. I just wish we'd all pick one like Briar or Bridgefy to be the good enough default.

Heck, F Droid has Meshenger but it barely worked. Firechat and bridgefy are closed source so therefore compromised, so this is not an easy solve.

You are correct that the APK download at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.servalproj... is dead.

However, you can still download it from https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.servalproject/

RE: Briar, I've tested it before. It's a promising app idea, and generally has good UI, but I ran into a few issues I'll post for consideration/refutation.

My results were hit or miss as to whether messages would get delivered if both apps were open, one was open, one was closed, one or both were online, offline, or a mix. It's unclear as to whether it is supposed to work 'online' via Tor nodes or not, the documentation is confusing. Getting an answer to the question "will this work over normal cellular data?" has no definitive answer.

I didn't know about Serval, Briar nor Bridgefy. I did know about Firechat, and there's also p2pkit [1] but this one is closed source as well.

[1] - http://p2pkit.io/

A Kashmiri can tell what it feels like.

Source: I am Kashmiri

Elaborate?

Just doing a websearch on "kashmir internet shutdown" yields a plethora of "elaboration".

Gotta be a bit active when looking for information, instead of just waiting for it to fall in your lap.

What? The commenter volunteered they could provide first hand details... Isn't that better than second hand news sources?

find the others

And could get locked up for doing so.

I took their "Elaborate?" as a request to hear a HN user's perspective on the situation. Any old account off Google will do if you want a broad overview, but one from the kind of people who visit HN might have some valuable insight that's useful to the community.

You'll have to wait for his internet to come back on.

I am sorry, but I am actually scared to say anything. I left Kashmir a few days back. So, I am in another state and I don't think I am perfectly safe.

With the first link the chain is forged. The first speech censured,the first thought forbidden,the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably -picard

Well actually he's quoting the judge father of the woman interrogating him. But still a great line :)

Well actually that attribution is purely fictional. In reality the quote is properly attributed to Picard because Picard is the first fictional character to actually say the quote.

I'm not convinced that a "direct" quote from a fictional character bears any more weight in reality than a fictional attribution to another fictional character. Shouldn't the quote be attributed to the show writer(s)?

It is a silly distinction, but: In reality, millions of real people have observed Picard uttering that quote while zero real people have observed the judge's father uttering that quote.

If we're making silly distinctions, in reality those people saw Patrick Stewart utter the quote.

I would argue that it is not remotely silly to make a distinction between phrases uttered by an individual and phrases uttered by an individual playing a character (especially with pre-written lines). I would be far more comfortable attributing the quote to the writers of that episode than to Patrick Stewart.

However, in practice, it is difficult to attribute specific lines to specific writers given how scripts are produced. As such, lines are generally attributed to the characters that speak them.

Indian Occupied Kashmir faces internet shutdowns very often [1], for months on end. People are regularly arrested for voicing their opinion on social media and booked under draconian laws.

I was traveling to Kashmir (my home) recently and my whatsapp and phone image gallery was checked at the airport by Indian occupational forces.

There is also mass media propaganda that claims "everything is alright" in kashmir, when in reality India has been worse than a barbaric dictatorship [2] (fueled by jingoism and racism) in Kashmir.

[1] - https://internetshutdowns.in

[2] - https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInK...

At first, I read "Life is an Internet Shutdown", and dismissed it quickly as new wave/internet absence article telling me, that real life is only possible when my internet is broken...

Anyone catch the guy with the Namecheap shirt on?

For some reason nytimes doesen't want you to read them in incognito mode. Luckily they simply hide the article afterwards with JavaScript, and can be read without it

The reason is that they don't want you to circumvent the free article limit.

The formatting is slightly messed up, but it's on IPFS now

- https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTDqDoJv2UkHjYYYiTWNTEW8J9dBDvaM8dP7So...

- https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTDqDoJv2UkHjYYYiTWNTEW8J9...

slick! do you know how can i search ipfs?

https://www.ipse.io/ is one of the various IPFS search engines - but it doesn't look like it's indexed this article yet...

The racism is actually shown by Kashmiri Muslims who ethnically cleansed Kashmiri Hindus. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were forced to leave the Kashmir Valley.[1] Hundreds of Hindu temples were destroyed.[2][3] Even now they're forcing people from other Indian states to leave.[4]

If the behavior of Indian forces is really as bad as it is claimed then why no large scale migration of Kashmiri Muslims happened like it happened for Kashmiri Hindus or Rohingyas[5]?

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_of_Kashmiri_Hindus

[2]https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/208-temples-destroyed-in-kash...

[3]https://www.google.com/amp/s/arisebharat.com/2019/02/13/a-li...

[4]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2019...

[5]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_conflict

> If the behavior of Indian forces is really as bad as it is claimed then why no large scale migration of Kashmiri Muslims happened like it happened for Kashmiri Hindus or Rohingyas[5]?

A plausible answer (I know not if this is true or not) is that the Indian security forces are preventing people from emigrating. This is why you don't see a massive exodus of Uighurs from Xinjiang, for example.

Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. At least the parent comment had something to do with the topic.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20866359 and marked it off-topic.

How can the parent topic be something to do with the topic but this comment is not? How can one talk about the Kashmir conflict without discussing it's history? There's regularly discussions about various political/controversial topics in HN without them getting shut down. You are really showing your bias here, dang.

The parent comment had at least a tenuous connection to the topic of internet shutdowns, while yours became unhinged from that completely and was only about the politics of Kashmir. Both were bad, but yours was worse for HN for that reason. This has nothing to do with which sides you and the other person are on. I don't care, nor even look at the comments for that information.

It always feels like the mods are biased. The other side feels the mods are biased the other way. In reality we know nothing about Kashmir; we simply know is that HN is not a place for people to have flamewars about it.

On topic 4: India is encouraging citizens of other states to leave.

On topic 2,3: locals were fighting hindu locals mostly in response to political conflicts. This happens everywhere in all of India where temples and mosques get destroyed.

On topic 1, those were insurgents seeking independence.

Much of the violence against locals has been in response to political events. India has found it difficult to maintain peace in kashmir. And so has the kashmir govt.

But like normal terrorism, do not attribute the actions of a few to all people.

Lowering tension and then creating agreement is the only way to ensure peace. The current govt has not done that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com