Syria’s exam-related Internet shutdowns
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What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine. Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive.
Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on phone masts near schools.
Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody is using it - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access, and rapidly increasing.
They want people be to used to the fact that cutting internet is something mundane so the next time they do it because of a protest, nobody will care.
I think this analogy is good, except for 'desensitize' which should be 'normalize'. Fire drills particularly are meant to normalize responding to a fire alarm going off (to make sure people know how to get out of buildings fast), but certainly aren't meant to desensitize people to fire alarms.
Though in the case of internet shutdowns, desensitization and normalization are basically the same thing.
For the first world yes I get it this is unacceptable. For the third world in a war torn country? It's almost necessary.
If they're not stopping voice calls and there's a working landline within 100 metres or so, an enterprising cheat could probably set up a private Wi-Fi access point connected to an old-school modem doing dial-up either internationally or locally to a shortwave radio shack.
1. Shield the exam room against anything you can think of.
2. Find the few cheaters that manage to overcome your measures anyway. Give them STEM grants, recognition, whatnot.
3. Next exam round, find the people selling turn-key cheating solution and give them entrepreneurship grants. Flunk the people who bought the cheating solution.
4. Upgrade your countermeasures, go to step 1.
If you had an entire country worth of students taking exams from home, absolutely possible given the past year, and you wanted, as a government to prevent them cheating by accessing the internet, what, I wonder would the most obvious solution be?
For what it's worth, I still believe it's an utterly ridiculous measure, but how can we not be considering this possibility?
The gov only needs to block connections leaving the country, for example.
In fact for a paper based exam of fixed questions Internet is quite bad for cheating. You’d get better help by asking someone or just opening the book. Or even better if someone else can do it for you.
So, were you able to see why many are not seeing or not willing to see that possibility?
To a first approximation, cutting off mobile data is cutting off the internet. The same is true in many other countries; there's just not a lot of people with home internet connections, and often those aren't part of government forced internet shutdowns (sometimes on purpose to try to let businesses still work, sometimes because it's easier to get the handful of wireless carriers to do it than the sometimes many wireline carriers, sometimes because the government forgot). But anyway, if you cut off 90% of the people, it breaks the utility for communicating with people within your country.
Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
The union government's Covid response has been spectacularly bad, anyone who argues otherwise is a brainwashed idiot.
If INC was in government some of the more megalomaniacal screwups might have been avoided. Lockdown wouldn't have been announced just hours before it went into effect for example.
However, I don't see the overall results being much better. Be it Sanghis, Commies, Congressis or any flavour of regional satraps, I can't think of a single state government that actually did a halfway decent job.
Early 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53431672
Late 2020: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/compelling-que...
The CPI (M) can hardly be compared to the BJP, they’re complete opposites.
From the Hindu, a decidedly anti-BJP, left news org: “Political exigencies also led the government to deliberately delay conducting a serosurveillance study till local body poll results were out”.
What?
Imperialism as a stage of capitalism is alive and well. Rich countries remain rich by extracting wealth from poor countries, generally in the form of exporting capital to exploit cheap labour.
Communists are anti-imperialists and if elected in all of India would fight against British (and US and Western European) exploitation. The British state propaganda arm would of course be opposed to communists in India, so as to not threaten the profits of the British ruling class.
Rather than focus on the issues, just keep shouting about how bad the other side would've been if they had been in power.
Somehow, UK tories always found a way to make it Corbyn's fault. Trump ads showed pictures of Trump's america, claiming that's what would happen under Biden.
Yes, it's bad, but IMAGINE HOW BAD IT WOULD BE IF THEY WERE IN CHARGE.
Regardless of who THEY is, the people who will respond to those ads will do the actual legwork of filling in all the awful gaps in what could be happening.
It's ridiculous that it works, but it really seems to be effective.
The opposition would have crippled the country even worse, that other country violates human rights far more egregiously, and that other plumber would have needed even more attempts to get that "paranormal" leak fixed.
Nobody else will run, because by not being a career politician it means you didn't curate your life to be devoid of different random criticism from people just looking to derail your ambitions and character on the inter/national spotlight.
Are smart, educated and highly motivated professionals going to North India or are they leaving it?
North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent to other countries. Europe loses talent to the United States. It's a flawed comparison, but North Korea is not a better place to work and do business than Europe, which this comparison would imply.
It does. Nobody defects to North Korea, but there are thousands of North Korean refugees in the west. That should tell us something. Same thing for Cuba. Their inflow to outflow ratio is 0 (nobody wants in).
> Europe loses talent to the United States.
Net loss, but looking at the ratio it's still > 0 (some people move from the US to EU, just less than the other way around). So something like 1/4 (one person moving into the EU for 4 moving to the US).
If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.
Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc...
We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context.
But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day.
I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of society is dependent upon it.
The question then is, is that a good thing?
I'd bet on "no". Right, people on Syria get to know how to buy gas on a no-internet day, but they also have to maintain that knowledge and infrastructure every other day of the year.
We bought gas fine before the internet, and I don't think the internet has seriously improved our gas-buying experience, and yet...
You might be surprised how much communication there was between branch stores and HQ going back decades though before probably some point in the 90s it may have been over phone lines.
People would be surprised the Netflix button stopped working on their TV.
"No Netflix but I can still watch cable?"
Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.
I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.
You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place.
An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown.
A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'.
As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry.
I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large retailers were in a better position to just add incremental staff than they were.
This used to be the way things were here in Denmark, and yes we thought it was inconvenient and stupid so we got rid of it (almost, there are a few days left in the year where it is still the case, and they are inconvinient and stupid).
Definitely not in Poland
Carts line up ten deep, every aisle and register, in preparation for the impending disaster of Sunday's closure. And this happens every week. It's both bizarre and entertaining.
if you run your own business you can work whenever you want. you just can't have employees work those days.
restaurants, hospitals, transportation and similar industries get an exception to let employees work any day. restaurants usually close on mondays instead.
As to the rights argument, I tend to be wary of them in general, because any mention of a “right” tends to have an absolute or moral quality to it, and those are dangerous enough not to be used lightly or without justification.
The goal of guaranteeing people a holiday is not itself bad (I’m just not ready to call it a “right”), but can be reached in quite a few other ways, such as (off the top of my head) prohibiting employment contracts that span a weekend boundary or just flat out prohibiting contracts that mandate work on holidays except for (strictly optional) overtime. Each of the options can have additional effects (such as shaping the weekend ambiance of your city in a certain way or making overtime de facto obligatory for low-paying jobs), and I’m not against deciding that any of them is best, only against not recognizing the existence of the choice. My concern is the intellectual honesty, not the employment politics.
and that seems to be exactly how the law is meant to be understood from the way it is written.
the main problem with choice is that it is only the choice of the employer, not of the employee. and therefore having such a choice would be at the disadvantage of the employee.
there is a balance to be made between the convenience for the consumer and that for the employees. as an employee, having the same day off as for everyone else is what makes it possible to join other activities. if people start getting random weekdays off then suddenly most of my friends will not share the same time off as me. that's not workable.
therefore the more important question is, how many people get disadvantaged if we allow supermarkets to open on sundays, compared to how many get a benefit, and is it worth that tradeoff? obviously different countries feel different about that, but pretty much all of them still give everyone else the same weekend off instead of offering full flexibility for companies to choose what days to take off.
People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on.
It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason.
It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv
People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway.
"Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection.
From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.
Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.
From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.
How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID.
Also, most people use the CCP service of Algerie Post[0] to send and receive money nationally.
Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed.
From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me
This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing it to the stone age).
Internet's probably not on the top of the list of things you count on.
Teachers can use their service to grade student homework, and proctor (monitor) exams, complete with lockdown apps and eye-tracking via laptop cameras.
Maybe these governments are effectively offering the same service.
anyway, standarized exams are the best avaliable tool
I wish there were exams like that after high edu in my country, just like some top schools in india do it (GATE Exam)