Internet traffic in Israel surged 170% right after the Hamas attack | Hacker News Reader

Internet traffic in Israel surged 170% right after the Hamas attack

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There's another big factor at play: it's become increasingly easier to film yourself in combat and now encouraged by leadership for propaganda reasons.

I've been going to r/combatfootage everyday for the past ~3 years; it has exploded in popularity because like a lot of things in life, war is now recorded and disseminated wide. The ukraine war, specifically with drones outfitted with explosives, has shown this. GoPros seem almost standard for combat troops.

I have to imagine Israelis are learning about the conflict in realtime partly through the footage Hamas is releasing. The fact that footage is so unprecedented (fighters air gliding in, a Hamas reporter reporting from inside Israel) probably adds to the demand for this content.

I would say there has always been demand for war footage. The difference is now the actual footage is not filtered by governments, propaganda firms, and typical news media sensibilities. The internet is mostly everywhere, and seemingly everyone has some kind of device capable of filming high definition footage. Even if it's not encouraged, it's still going to be very, very difficult to stop unless you turn off parts of the global internet to your (nations) users.

Add to this that war is becoming heavily drone based, via both in purpose built weapons and improvised devices that have recording capability built in. War is not something that is far away, but something that is right now on the device you're carrying.

It's a good observation.

However, we need to keep in mind that just because it's not filtered by propaganda agents at the source doesn't mean that it cannot very easily be turned into propaganda. And that's even without counting the relative ease of manufacturing images (with or without AI).

Great point. No intermediary to filter which means this content gets mass dumped on TG, reddit, etc.

All major platforms are heavily moderated.

>I've been going to r/combatfootage everyday for the past ~3 years

There's few activities I can think of that are worse for your mental health. Consider taking a break from the fear/gore porn.

That subreddit disproportionately censors and removes videos from the other sides. Avoid it unless you enjoy Kool aid

Then visit other subreddits that don't. There are plenty of them.

Yes Funker530 is very good. They don't pick their winner and losers

https://funker530.com/

> I've been going to r/combatfootage everyday for the past ~3 years

For what reason do you do that ?

Cant wait for the first "attention" enhancing ai trained on go pro footage. Highlighting enemy combatants and mines, long before you see them.. Needs ar glasses though.

The grass is swaying, not in waves with the wind, here, here and here.

r/combatfootage mods are very strained right now

The data shows huge mobile uptick. So if a tragedy happen, a lot of people watch videos on their mobile phones.

Not having data, but I observed similar phenomena in Poland during first week of Russia reinvasion of Ukraine. So many people glued to phones during all kind of situations.

If you are fleeing your house at the last minute of stuck at work you are not dragging a desktop with you.

The phone is a powerful portable device; if it works, use that instead of a hand crank radio.

Well, the Israelis did cut power to the Gaza strip. Hamas of course expected this and probably has many backup generators and satellite links to keep online. As for the civilians...

civilians really dont have that privillege.

Well considering Israel just cut Gaza's electricity supply about an hour ago that would be an interesting war related chart.

With the 2nd graph, I am surprised it is that low given that full scale war is basically ongoing. Was some internet cut off in Israel as a result of the attacks?

It was a Sabbath/holiday - many (primarily Orthodox) Jews don't use phones/computers, etc.

If anything then, shouldn't there have been a larger spike? Wouldn't this qualify as a reason to override?

Absolutely, if you know there's something to check. A lot of people who don't use phones on Sabbath/holidays just didn't know what was happening, or at least not the scale of it.

There might also be network congestion; I would consider this the rate of traffic able to reach Cloudflare.

once again, Cloudshare limits the internet

No? Every mass disaster results in overwhelming a network as people rush to reach their loved ones and emergency services.

9/11 brought down the landline and mobile networks due to network congestion well before Cloudflare existed. Radio traffic on emergency responder networks was 5x normal, and that is before you consider that a lot of responders were off duty and did not bring their radios.

As it is the modern communications networks can hardly handle a planned large event like a music festival. So expecting the Internet to be peachy in an emergency is wishful thinking.

I wonder what cloudflare saw in the emergency test this week.

I'm a late adopter of HN, but was a bit surprised to see nothing about Israel/Hamas on the home page. Is that sort of political stuff forbidden, or is there just no interest in this community?

From the guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The most recent fluctuations of the war between Israel and its neighbors that has been going on literally since Israel existed with lulls but rarely more than a few weeks without new armed attacks or human rights abuses directed by one side against the other (and with, on both sides, deliberate or indiscriminate targeting, and systematic collective punishment of civilians being more a norm than an exception, with the excuse that what the other side is doing justifies it, makes even events that feature these not novel phenomena even in the context of the specific conflict.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The guideline criteria say not to submit flamebait, to submit things with interesting, novel intellectual discussion, and generally nothing that is on tv news.

I would imagine that the decades long Israeli/Palestinian conflict would violate all three.

> I would imagine that the decades long Israeli/Palestinian conflict would violate all three.

So would the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, and yet[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450336

Slightly offtopic, but it's interesting to read comments from that day knowing what we know now. Especially those stating that there will be no conventional war nor loss of life.

I'd add to this that I think that thread is why it's interesting to see/have these discussions on Hacker News. The "appropriate" places for these topics aren't especially interesting because they tend to be ideological echo chambers for one side or the other. That leads to trite and banal "discussion", if it can even be called that. Actually seeing 'real' people all across the spectrum of views, values, backgrounds, and so on is just so much more interesting.

The fact that these conversations are rare on HN, is why the conversation tends not to be trite and banal.

> I'm a late adopter of HN, but was a bit surprised to see nothing about Israel/Hamas on the home page. Is that sort of political stuff forbidden, or is there just no interest in this community?

Because it isn't reddit. I'm sure this forum is full of Israeli but also Muslim devs, do you really want that kind of strife on HN? I don't. There is no way that kind of discussion will not devolved into a giant mess.

It's even not because it's controversial, there has been outrageous topics on this forum (from my perspective), but it's already discussed everywhere else, with the exact same predictable results...

There is no interest in showing Israel being attacked but there is plenty of political discussion such as daily flamewars about ancient misdeeds of US three letter agencies (but almost never discussions when these agencies shut down a botnet or do something positive).

These rules are either applied unfairly or the community is full of shills that make it appear that way.

> but never discussions when these agencies shut down a botnet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35445867 (121 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37310772 (171 comments)

To echo others, it’s against policy. Not that we don’t care (we do) but that it’s better covered (and serviced) elsewhere, this isn’t the forum for those kinds of discussions.

It’s a guaranteed unproductive flame war. The exact same flame war that’s been happening about as long as the Internet has existed. It’s really boring at this point.

Just stop at unproductive. We don’t expect comments on HN to upend the power-structures which fuel this ongoing conflict.

Calling it boring — as if it had the potential to entertain - seems an bit insensitive to all the victims of the current and past hostilities.

Boring in the sense that any such threads are predictably flamewar. Not that the tragedy is boring.

JFC. Boring in the sense that exactly nothing new is going to be posted and anyone who’s seen a couple of these could write entire exchanges that will happen basically verbatim. The discussion is guaranteed to be 100% a repeat of all the other ones. So, boring.

I dunno, a thousand terrorists coordinating land, sea, and air (paraglider and drone) over WhatsApp with videographers posting professionally editing footage to Telegram in real-time is actually pretty interesting.

Funny we call them terrorists while hundreds of millions view them as freedom fighters trying to liberate their lands. I wonder if the East and the West are destined to just always collide. The staunch support by the western governments for their permanent-colony experiment in Palestine (ie Israel) is what leads to millions of Middle Easterners continually hating western governments.

Yes, because why wouldn’t you call the people killing innocent 20 year olds at a fucking rave freedom fighters? Or going in families homes and killing parents in front of their children? Or raping and murdering innocent women? Or kidnapping and mutilating women and children?

Idgaf what nationality people are. When they commit acts like these, they are _not_ fighting for freedom, and they are _not_ worthy of any kind of respect. If it’s Americans, Russians, Chinese, Germans, or Palestinians committing these atrocities, it is disgusting, and they are _terrorists_, and I really hope that there is swift and harsh retaliation against these horrible human rights violators.

Gabe, with all respect go read history. If you don’t want to read there are literally video interviews with old Israelis [1] who admit to being part of the death squads which went around killing Palestinian villagers and raping their women. This is what makes easterners describe what the Palestinians are doing as resistance for liberation.

I know Israelis want everyone to just move on from how bloody of a process it was to displace nearly one million indigenous Palestinians prior to announcing the foundation of their state. Unfortunately/fortunately — depending on your politics — we are (1) in modern times so most people don’t take kindly to European settler-colonial efforts and (2) the discomfort of Israelis with their history won’t erase the bloody genesis…

- 1: https://youtu.be/MQ1TAOibLss

The news may be interesting. No open-registration forum has generated an interesting thread about this topic since the very first such discussion that ever happened. It's basically one of those laws of the Internet.

You're right, and usually threads that do get up-voted are focused on specific technological novelties, whether in the title of the article or the content.

Just look at this story - the reasons it's considered "reasonable" for HN is because the framing is a technological story (internet traffic spike). That then also gives a small space for some people to discuss other aspects of this.

The Ukraine/Russia war was OK[1] to post, so it seems weird that Israel/Palestinian wouldn't be.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450336

A land invasion bordering what is now the EU hasn’t happened in over half a century.

And most of the posts are technical discussions about the implications of the war, like Russia trying to get an airplane to fly out of a wheat field; not inane “X has progressed 200 meters” or whatnot.

Check https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In general, even if it's submitted, it's up to a bunch of clicks on the small arrows to keep it on the first page, and other submissions might win instead.

Even if there was a "it must be about hardware or software" rule, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, otherwise we'd just end up getting another reddit.

this is another reddit. just with less functionality

Anything that can lead to flame wars is frowned upon and gets pruned in a number of ways. Political topics tend not to lead to useful, sober discussions.

Forbidden per the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Note it says "most" and "probably". Evening news grade stuff is still admissible if it fits the "On Topic" conditions.

This is all you need to know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z9UyPurVok

Relatively small amount of flaggers can keep a topic off the front page if they think it doesn't belong there.

That is simply not true. The organizations blame Israel for existing at the expense of the previous local population. A population, with a layered identity, existing since ancient Phillistine. Talk to chatgpt for an unbiased view of history. Many Palestinians are descendants of real Israelites who never left the region. The organizations blame Israel for terrorism and anti-Muslim rhetoric. They blame Israel for the truth that is internationally recognized, that Israel is an apartheid state - and therefore a criminal state. The world is calling that out. Of course Zionist terrorists can’t stand free speech after getting called out, just like they’ve done with every Israeli whistleblower of their own.

No one wants to work for supporters of a criminal apartheid state. Good for those students to be outraged!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/progressive-jewish-grou...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ending-israeli-aparthei...

Says Netanyahu: To the citizens of Gaza, I say. You must leave now. We will target each and every corner of the strip.”

Edited to remove false quote

>We will turn Gaza into a deserted island.

Looks like this may be a fake quote. Al Jazeera[0] is the only source I can find. Meanwhile, Politico[1] and other sources have a markedly different quote: "All the places where Hamas hides, operates from — we will turn them into cities of ruins."

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/7/world-is-watching-f...

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/israels-netanyahu-vows-might...

“I'm telling the people of Gaza: get out of there now, because we're about to act everywhere with all our force," from Agence France-Presse, via Barrons.

https://www.barrons.com/news/israel-pm-vows-to-turn-gaza-s-h...

Is not: "We will turn Gaza into a deserted island." Indeed, the corresponding part of the quote as Barron's has it is consistent with Politico's version, not with Al Jazeera's: "All the places in which Hamas is based, in this city of evil, all the places Hamas is hiding in, acting from -- we'll turn them into rubble."

there are many videos of Netanyahu speach today, including afp youtube channel, I couldn't locate this phrase.

This is kind of interesting. Netanyahu used an expression that I wasn't sure about, עיי חורבות, which actually sounds a lot like "Destroyed islands". I looked it up and apparently it just means "ruins", but I wonder if the first translation just misheard/misunderstood what he said.

The phrase "eeyay horavot" can mean "destroyed islands" or "destroyed villages", but you have typed עיי חורבות which means "destroyed villages", not איי חורבות which means "destroyed islands".

Basically if you're listening to the audio, you could interpret it either way, and the difference would only arise when you try to write it down or read it, because the "eeyay" for "island" and the other "eeyay" are homophones.

Since "eeyay horavot" is a standard compound-word that is transliterated in the Bible using עיי instead of איי the speaker likely meant "destroyed villages" instead of "destroyed islands".

And go where? Apartheid Israel has them interned with nowhere to go.

Gaza borders Egypt and the Mediterranean.

They are blockaded from the sea by Apartheid Israel:

https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline100...

Egypt is allied with the US who give them billions to keep it locked.

How do they leave?

They can’t, Israel imposes a blockade on their movement across the borders.

So does Egypt. It's not only the Israelis who are afraid of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

As an Egyptian, we are not afraid of Palestinians moving to Sinai [1]. Neither they want to leave their lands so that they will lose it forever. The last time they were told to leave it for a little then come back was in 1948. Will, they are waiting until now.

Hint: I welcome the downvotes. HN is majority US members who are historically (The Majority) pro Israeli point of view of everything. I understand that

[1] Maybe the regime is (but people in the Middle East are ruled by dictators who do not represent people's view either if they are Iran, Egypt or others)

i do remember egypt been rather unhappy when all of sudden weapons started to flow from gaza back to sinai to isis/muslim brotherhood/etc. and some personal as well

Apparently there are designated areas where IDF instructed them to go. But that's all I could glean based on a brief sentence in a CNN article that didn't elaborate on the details. It's certainly a good question...

https://nitter.net/Osinttechnical/status/1710794984322916572

> The IDF has issued specific instructions for residents in 7 areas of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to predetermined points. Targeted text messages are also outgoing.

this is still false quote. i saw him speaking live. he said to get out of the locations that are known to population as hamas/etc compounds, warehouses, etc.

. כל המקומות שהחמאס מסתתר בהם ופועל בתוכם - נהפוך אותם לעיי חורבות. אני אומר לתושבי עזה, צאו משם עכשיו.

> Edited to remove false quote

looks like your quote is still fake and not supported by reliable source.

It’s in this speech: https://youtu.be/jeZJulgUuD8?si=Yfy2Y4Np3ws9hwjg&t=101

"operate everywhere" and "target each and every corner of the strip" are different citation, also do you speak Jewish or you relied on youtube autotranslate captions with questionable quality?

I speak Hebrew. The direct translation is "we will operate everywhere and with full force".

The English subtitle "we will operate forcefully everywhere" has a very different meaning from your quote: "We will target each and every corner of the strip."

What is the difference in the meaning?

"Target each and every corner of the strip" implies the strip as a whole is the target. "Operate forcefully everywhere" merely implies that force will be brought everywhere in the strip against whatever the target may be (from context, Hamas).

Sheesh, I would have expected it to sure 1700%.

Also /r/israel is in "private community mode" and /r/palestine remains open. This is just for informative purposes.

Can we, like, stop killing each other for a day or two? Isnt it obvious already that war leads to an endless cycle of war? Attackers attack, defenders defend, the loser then seeks revenge, then they become the attacker, and potentially the winner, then the former winner becomes the loser seeking revenge and so on.

We have like endless space to colonise yet we fight for land here on earth as if we wont all eventually become that land. And once we do we’ll never ever come back.

It’s getting a bit boring to be honest.

Unfortunately, the status quo in Israel/Palestine is pretty garbage, and practically guaranteed to lead to conflict.

I know but i seriously wish there was a way to end all these boring primordial habits of ours and focus on stuff that matters, as a collective humanity.

graeber & wengrow showed historical societies that moved on from domination and hierarchy even well beyond dunbar numbers and after the discovery of agriculture (earlier than previously understood) but of course they still must defend against neighbors that seek to dominate them violently and institute new hierarchies and ownership structures. if you can envision society that lives with less violence and conflict over power, you must also accept that society must similarly defend itself in various ways from those who come not to visit but to take land, homes, resources and institute their own power structures over the ones already there living in that society you envision

I don't think we can ever change as a species to that extent while still being ourselves. The instincts that sit at our core have been there for hundred thousand years or so.

These habits may be the other side of our civilizational coin. Technological development tends to surge during wars.

> We have like endless space to colonise

I'll trade you a hundred acres of land on Pluto for your house. Sounds like a good trade?

Let's solve the crisis. Move all the Palestinians to Venus and all the Israelis to Mars. So much land available. Problem solved!

Location, location, location.

Sounds good to me. But you need to have ownership documents for it and means for transport. I’ll trade anytime.

Why should I provide your means of transport? Did the person you bought your home from provide you transport as well? You're getting so much extra land! You figure out how to make it useful.

Sure seems like you don't actually want it if you need me to subsidize you by billions of dollars to use it. Maybe it's not a great deal?

Maybe there's a reason why the Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over that land instead of just flying off to another planet. Not that I agree with the violence, but suggesting they just go colonize another planet instead isn't really a good answer.

Yeah that’s the whole problem really. It’s not arbitrary land they’re fighting over. It’s that land and it can be no other land. I don’t know how it resolves in any way we find tasteful by modern standards.

Moreover, even if the land wasn't perceived to be special, you can't uproot an entire society without forced ethnic cleansing. It is impossible to get all X million people to agree to that without force.

Yeah right? Like you could gift either side the equivalent or even double acerage of California or some other prime real estate in the Mediterranean or anywhere else on the planet and it wouldn't make a difference, God wills each side to have that land, each one has ancestors who laid claim to those specific hills for hundreds of years.

The original Zionists were more pragmatic than that. Herzl was considering Uganda at one point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme#%22A_very_land_f...

According to a podcast I recently listened to this is not entirely accurate. Herzl did consider Uganda, but not too seriously and it is assumed that he used it to raise support for the idea of a national jewish home and not to actually go there.

I dont know in which country you live in but in some you cant sell land without an access path. And since i cant simply walk to it you’d have to ensure that there are other means to get there. Also that’s part of the deal - cant provide it you wont get my house in return.

OK, I'll work with the FAA to make sure you can launch your rockets no problem. Then the path is just up! Problem solved.

Or I dunno, just jump really high. After all you're expecting the Palestinians or Israelis to get there on their own, it can't be that complicated right? Just colonize space, NBD. Then the path is just up! Problem solved.

Sure sounds like you're valuing your house billions and billions of dollars more than the land on Pluto. But why? There's so much space to colonize!

Maybe telling people to just go to space instead of fighting for a place on Earth to live isn't a great idea huh? Maybe some places are better than others to live?

> Sure sounds like you're valuing your house billions and billions of dollars more than the land on Pluto. But why? There's so much space to colonize

I am advocating for peace not communism. It’s a free market and thats what i want in return for my property.

No need to play hardball. Take it or leave it. I’m happy to leave for greener (well white-tan-brownish) pastures to make room for you. Find me transport and the house is yours.

Your point was:

> We have like endless space to colonise yet we fight for land here on earth

And yet you want so many billions of dollars in compensation in equipment to get you to your new homeland instead of just going there on your own. Why are you going to fight me to get what you consider fair compensation for your land on earth from me when I'm offering you so much on Pluto? There's so much land out there, a fair trade for your land should be near zero dollars right? After all there's nearly infinite supply! Quit being so attached to your home.

Nietzsche was right - humans, at their core, are driven by the will to power. It's the drive to manifest one's will upon the world. That drive is the cause for all wars and always has been. Sometimes someone with an extreme level of that drive makes it to the top while having control over a military, which allows them an extreme way to express their will. That's usually when wars break out. Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Mussolini, Jefferson Davis, King George III, Hitler, Putin and on and on.

The only way this stops is if it evolves out of us. That would take many thousands of years, but I don't think there's even selection pressure for this to happen. Actually, I think it's likely the opposite and we'll never lose the trait.

Are you like 20? Your own country and allies have probably thrown fuel into some of these fires historically.

> It’s getting a bit boring to be honest.

Learn some empathy. Or next time something happens to your country I'm gonna feel the same.

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