Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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
Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access.
It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)", 225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)", 145 comments)
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
If you break the internet and summon starlink yes I think pirates will take the void.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
Yeah? Where are the pirate ISPs of North Korea then?
Mate, you're fighting with ghosts here. There are legit ISPs in EU, you don't need pirate ones. And there are legit VPNs to bypass whatever soft government restrictions are in place. There's no point arguing about endless made up hypotheticals.
Why not? They literally throw USB sticks and optical media over the border. After my country broke away from communism, content consumption of foreign media was the highest priority.
In a lot of Europe, you can only buy a handful at a time (like 16), at a relatively hefty per-tablet price and only from a pharmacy (good luck on sunday in a lot of places).
In France, you can’t just grab it off the shelf yourself anymore: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200115-pharmacies-ordered-sel...
Sometimes I leave part of my 500 ct bottle from Amerika because I don’t know why I bought so many in the first place.
You must be fun at parties.
Why do you think so ? They kissed American ass for a long time. Why should they stop ?
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
Edit" it looks like the inter-satellite capacity might be able to handle more than I thought
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
Spain isn’t large enough, I suspect. But they can lean on starlink as long as they’re sold there.
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.
The old jokes about aggressive NFL Copyright enforcement would really pale in comparison to Spain developing a mature anti-satellite capability in order to disrupt soccer broadcast piracy at the physical layer.
Is it? I've seen a guy doing it by hand with a YAGI antenna and a little handled radio. But I could see it for many and the phased part. Also people have web models like this one showing the orbits.
Anyway yeah just mental exercise not really arguing for it
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.
In Southern Africa, they were bringing in grey imports of Starlink from the UAE and these units have been blocked.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4193788-musk-acknowledges...
Which is the correct thing to do when random people ask private companies to go to war.
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 are in a thread specifically talking about blocking swaths of the internet because of football games.
Like, we're impacting communications now.
We almost had this in the early 2000s, but then we regressed. People were excited about meshnets, when was the last time someone mentioned those? Too many people have forgotten and now many have been raised in this current form of the Internet thinking it's the only way. We need to think bigger. We need to push for IPv6 and basic internet connectivity (meaning ability to connect to any peer in the world) as a human right. Otherwise we build our lives around something that can be taken away on a whim over something as silly as grown men kicking a bladder around a field.
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 not require too much R&D.
So it's a "this is why we can't have nice things" more than anything else. The assholes always ruin things in the end. So instead of some idealistic dream of a world, we get this shithole dystopian reality.
When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
It's much rarer for a DA to say they want to find crimes a particular person committed and then direct others to go find evidence for whatever they can find evidence for.
I mean, FIFA is corrupt as hell and there's been plenty of documented cases of other social ills caused by European soccer fandom, but okay.
They were given those powers in court over Cloudflare via the Spanish government, with some help via a pressure campaign by US gov to protect US copyright globally.
Which isn’t something I’d want random companies to be doing, and a figurative drop in the bucket.
No multiply 0 by infinity and you don’t get one drop, ie 1/0 is undefined.
Further it wasn’t an empty bucket.
Limits in calculus: "When a real function can be expressed as a fraction whose denominator tends to zero, the output of the function becomes arbitrarily large, and is said to "tend to infinity" For example, the reciprocal function, f ( x ) = 1/x tends to infinity as x tends to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calculu...
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 product of zero with anything, including an infinitely large value, is zero.
Irrelevant, the discontinuity occurs at 0 not a negative number.
The limit of f(X) = (X-2)/(X-2) as X approaches 2 is 1, that doesn’t mean the function has a defined value at 2. Limits seem easy because most students really don’t understand limits and thus misuse them.
You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.
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.
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⁻¹(0) · f⁻¹(∞)) is not well defined. f is a many-to-one function, and in this case the different possibilities that come up as we invert it interact differently. In contrast, 2·∞ is not an indeterminate form because, while f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞) might be any value that is greater than all real numbers, it must always be greater than all real numbers, and therefore f(f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞)) is always ∞.
> One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.
In the extended reals, this is a result, not a rule, and it doesn't always hold. Again, the extended reals aren't a field. But even ignoring the question we're actively discussing, you should have been able to think of e.g. -3 · ∞.
That's assuming that when you said "such a system", you meant the extended reals. If you meant a field that extends the reals to include infinite values, it's just meaningless noise - there is no value called "infinity" that would even let you evaluate the claim true or false. But in any multiplication of two values, any infinite value can only simultaneously be the product and one of the multiplicands if the other multiplicand is 1. When we say that 2·∞ = ∞, the ∞ on the left and the one on the right are both infinitely large, but they aren't the same value.
Fair enough. You're right, of course, and you've learned me a thing. Appreciate your time.
The issue was arguably a lack of wells in an extreme situation, not a lack of water in the aquifer.
If the area can’t support the factories water use then shut down the factory permanently. Wanting to hook up to its infrastructure is all about a lack of public infrastructure.
Many aquifers are over used, but that’s a long term problem and has nothing to do with a drought in a single year.
Let The Market™ decide on access to drinking water:
The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation.
The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to allow suitable profit and growth.
The final tier is the new and not-required level. This is the new stuff, the crazy tech. Low/no laws, let everyone in this realm go crazy and experiment. The skies the limit.
But water? This is beyond the pale. And revolutions have gone on for this before.
> the parastatal Water and Drainage Services of Monterrey
Isn't that already the state owning the water supply?
Because there's a lot of money at stake surrounding soccer in Europe.
Because they pay the lawmakers to give them this power.
This isn't limited to just one company. The problem is how copyright has been abused and over-prioritized until it's become a threat to people's freedoms, to art, and to progress.
Copyright needs to be reined in so that no matter what the company is or what product they're pushing innocent people won't be negatively impacted just so that the industry can squeeze more profit from people while refusing to adapt.
Can you give some examples so we can see what harmless political satire you have in mind?
Issue here being the fact that insulting someone is a criminial offense (hope that's the correct english terminology) in Germany.
https://theweek.com/news/world-news/954635/willygate-german-...
e:/ Whether this is actual satire or not is up for debate i guess, but this was in my opinion way overblown
Sure, it's something like that, but it's more like "thou beest such a willy". ;D
but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things
Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.
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..
You see this especially in most of the former British colonies listed that continue to use British Colonial Era legislation for Law and Order. You see this is South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar), and much of Africa (eg. Nigeria, Kenya) as well
It's the classic "collectivist" versus "individualist" split, and it's something only individual countries can decide.
The issue is that no one would care.
There are children being sold into sexual slavery and you don't get that kind of reaction. You're definitely not going to get it because some random InstaSnapTwit in Nigeria can't get his fart app to work.
That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.
Also known as the fallacy of relative privation. This line of reasoning quickly leads to the conclusion that only bad thing worth caring about is the absolute worst thing happening.
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.
I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.
As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.
I mean, it's a disappointing that Facebook isn't available in Uganda, but I think there are some bigger ticket items on the continent to be concerned with first.
The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
I wouldn't be too certain about that.
I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.
The gossiped data would be:
> My public key is ABCD1234... and the most recent CID of my data is DCBA9876...
These devices need be on no other network at the time, just in range of each other.
At other times when they're near a node on the larger network they offload their discovered peers and the consult their trust graph to see which peers (new or already known) are both trusted in some capacity (maybe transitively) and interested in the same topics/apps. In those cases, that data syncs to their mobile device, and apps which reference it update.
This would work better if you dedicate some device somewhere to be permanently attached to a network node, but unlike what we're doing today there's no need for it to be maintained by the author of your apps. We can decouple those personas. If the device hosting your data ends up on another partition, you can dedicate a new device to the task without updating anyone, since nobody is hanging onto device identifiers anyway. Probably this just means leaving yesteryear's busted phone plugged in at home so it can be a cache for your data while the device in your pocket is offline. Your mobile device an update when it gets on the wifi.
So now you've got users carrying around data which other users might be interested in (beyond the peer-finding data), and it's organized by topic/app, so when two peers are nearby which share an interest (perhaps on the behalf of their peers, transitively), they can directly sync heavier data as well. I think that attaching a wifi router to every delivery truck would get you most of the way there, since it could move the data between houses it's delivering to.
This might mean network latencies measured in hours or days, which would be awkward, but at least it's never hard down because it never depends on the state of a unique server. Besides, if the partition-tolerant fallback works beyond a certain usability threshold then you've removed the incentive to disable the internet in the first place.
Maybe I don't have the details perfect, but something like this is possible and I don't think the difficult part is getting the underlying protocol right. Rather it's getting the apps we rely on to also work under the fallback paradigm. The necessary shift is to get away from request/response architectures and towards pub/sub ones. Fewer unique server identifiers and more trusted user keys and predicates about the degree to which those users trust different content hashes.
Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?
Certainly things like SSL and encryption have helped fight back against the spying eyes of governments and bad actors.
This is not a dig against making apps robust to network partitions
Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.
There are many mesh networks with Autonomous Systems Numbers, peering at internet exchanges, etc. You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
Well, to be fair....
- Membership of most IXPs is not that expensive and the smaller port sizes are not that expensive
- Many IXPs are moving to 10Gbps as the default port size (e.g. with a membership at LINX in London, you get your first default-size port for free, which is now 10Gbps at LINX).
- If you are running an eyeball network (i.e. xSP, WISP etc.) then you might as well just buy bare-minimum IP transit and save your money for your peering point memberships, since most of your traffic will be going to the CDNs etc. all of whom have open-peering policies at IXPs, so why pay more than you need to ?
- Moving to cynical-view territory, its a marketing expense ... become an IXP member, get a nice logo you can put on your website and give your salesdroids something to name-drop ....I don't know what this means. If all of my family and friends are on a private network, and I'm serving my copy of Wikipedia, and all of us are sharing our books, movies, and music, we have a bulletin board, voice and video chat...
No real value?
How do you get your books, movies, and music? How do you get new ones?
Yes, it has real value as a fill-in-the-gap until you can reconnect to the real internet. Long term I guess it still has some value as a way to look at a static collection of things (plus content generated by people on the mesh), but the real internet is much more valuable.
Even FM walkie talkies as a start.
Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable.
This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries with lots of land borders it might work. Especially if the border area had jungle or other low traffic terrain.
Many having wireless routers at their terminus to forward traffic to other cables. Other cables having vertices and graph-like structures so that they could tolerate cuts in individual lines.
The end result could be something quite authentic to ARPANET.
Get a switch and another computer and you have an Internet. Ok, we would generally call it an "intranet," but that's because -the- Internet with a capital I is specifically a net of intranets.
So, if you were to start an ISP, which is the proposal, you would buy an uplink to the rest of the Internet for your intranet that you just built, from another ISP or backbone provider.
But you don't have to do that, you could partner with another intranet, and have a separate Net. Similar to what happens in China actually.
My point is: the Internet is already peer to peer. You just have to use the technology. Thirty years ago every tech nerd knew how to start an ISP.
The only reason individuals don't do it as much anymore is because we want the ISP to lay dedicated cable for our connections, rather than just using the phone lines, and laying cable is really expensive.
But you could use phone or amateur radio (like the JS8 digital mode) if lower speeds are acceptable, or lay your own Ethernet or fiber if you're capable.
The only thing that makes today's Internet seem like it's not peer to peer is the investment needed to start an ISP with the performance modern consumers expect
Actually using an Internet based on IP addresses alone is ridiculously difficult. Quick, tell me how the IP protocol works using IP addresses alone! You can't type anything other than IP addresses into the address bar of your computer, and your browser can't make any secondary requests unless they're to a raw IP address. No using Google or Wikipedia unless you have their IP addresses memorized and have HOST file entries for all the secondary resources they request. You can't use HN to tell me; you need to find my computer's IP address and SSH in to me. Oh, and whatever certificate validation SSH does can't make any network requests to a DNS entry.
Google Search is useless on a p2p internet. Why would you want to search the corporate network on your separate net? Doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't use the global DNS system in this scenario either, you can just set up your own -- DNS is hierarchical but there's no reason you cannot have your own roots, or just pass around hosts files like the old days, either on sneakernet or using another protocol
> You can't use HN to tell me
HN wouldn't be on my private "peer to peer" internet, it's on the regular internet. Set up a mirror or find a route to the regular one through any one of your PEERS.
I don't get it, I thought the GP wanted to know how to set up their own Internet, or thought that the Internet was centralized. It's not. Build your own network, be creative, replace DNS if you need to. The tech is there, it's well-established, well-tested, and we use it today for the regular internet.
The grandparent only needs to read some man-pages.
It's a closed network, we can just hardcode everyone's address.
> Google is a private company, but if websearch ever goes offline, the utility of the Internet decreases dramatically. Some stupid percentage of webhosts are protected by Cloudflare; Cloudflare outages have taken large portions of the Internet offline. Same with AWS on the backend; when AWS has gone down, people find that a large number of the websites they depend upon go down too. Most people's consumer IPs are blocked off from the public Internet by their ISP and NAT.
All of this is irrelevant on a private network. I don't think you understood the comment you were replying to. The Internet is a bunch of little internets mashed together. Instead of mashing your internet with the others, you can provide services internally. No, other people's websites will not necessarily be on it, but they will anyway, because you'll probably provide a tunnel out to the wider internet. Anyway, you already have the internet, use it like you always did. The internet police don't make you give up the internet if you set up your own network.
You may not be able to appreciate the value of a communication system without access to google (you can download Wikipedia and serve it yourself if you find it a useful tool and your connection to the wider internet is endangered.) I remember an internet without Google, and I liked it more. The only thing Google ever did that was interesting was pagerank, and pagerank, being not resilient at all, was completely obsoleted by SEO. Everything else they've done has been a result of taking advantage of when they controlled an important market (access to the wider resource of the internet) for a few years over a decade ago.
When the internet goes down, my home network doesn't become either ridiculously difficult or useless. It will without pause or much notice still serve dozens of terabytes of data to anyone I allow to connect to wireless, and allow us to communicate with each other.
BBS's were useful.
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 ThePile and you could also expire them after a time. It’d be a few gigabytes perhaps, and could share diffs when you see another device.
They'll get 99.99% of people, but not me. I only need it for an hour or so to communicate meeting points. After that it's an added luxury for whatever comes after. It's my contribution to the prepping of my family.
I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.
If someone buys a gun in a foreign country, and after returning to his home country he shoots a man, is he subject to the laws of the foreign country? To me that sounds like it would be a breach of the sovereignty of the man's home country. Not that I'm saying this is an apt analogy, but it's certainly closer.
Some countries require an export license for some products and companies might get it to export to friendly countries and not get it for other countries. It's similar to sanctions. Those licenses apply even to some piece of software (spying tools et al.) Companies caught selling without a license are punished.
Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.
Yeah.
The internet is important. But if you go some places in this world you learn in a very swift fashion that it is not as important as housing, food, and water.
There's parts of the world that are not a fairy tale. Places where people have far more basic worries.
That said, if there are parts of Africa where people want the luxury of internet, they should, of course, be allowed access. The mere fact that they want it is an indication that they are in a relatively well off area.
You go to an undeveloped place, you wouldn't be worried about phones or internet access. You just accept that you're going to be off the grid for the duration of your stay in that village. Alternatively, you bring your communications equipment with you so that you can stay in touch with your, "base", for lack of a better term. But I can tell you right now, that equipment better not be dependent on internet access.
Internet should not be a luxury in any community. That is against the ethos of the web, which should be free, open and accessible. Your comment is needlessly patronizing and dismissive without actually presenting any evidence that the internet shouldn't be considered essential for any modern community.
But there are plenty of places where everything hasn't gone all digital, which makes living without internet much easier than it is in e.g. America.
On second thought, I’d wait 4 years before starting that.
In places like the US they can just use one of the gazillion laws on the books to charge anyone, then send the police on any corner to get them. There is no need to kill the internet.
It's important to be clear that the lack of government control in Central Africa has a lot to do with that same sort of geographic inaccessibility. There are whole countries in Asia that exist largely because of the difficulty of administering rugged frontier; the Amazon still exists largely because the Brazilian/Colombian/etc. governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
That's interesting because of how unusual it is. If there were hundreds of him, the US would be like central Africa.
> governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
I'm sure that governments feel better that you understand their problems. You're replying to somebody who is enumerating those problems, not reviewing individual governments and giving them a star rating.
The insistence on othering what clearly isn't an alien experience for our own society is annoying. It's also a bit dangerous, considering how the, "Just swoop in and merc the bastards," produced the Bundy approach; disrespect for the complexity of dealing with militias leads to tragedy.
Maybe inaccessible is the wrong word. Less-accessible? And big. Lots of ground to cover, even when you have an AF base nearby.
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
- The Authoritarian Cookbook
I have done a complete 180 on this issue in recent years.
It still requires a radio transmitter. If push comes to shove, a government can still track RF leakage or worst case GPS jamming (if it's really that existential).
Iran did the same thing when cracking down on Satelite TV and SatPhones during the crackdown of the Green Revolution (anti-Ahmedinijad protests in 2009) and anecdotally, Starlink terminals have been increasingly unstable in Iran.
I also vaguely remember a DIUx RFS within the past year for startups working on minimizing RF leakage from terminals.
It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."
Because they most likely didn't. On a separate tangent, I HATE how most CS majors can get a CS degree without even learning basics about electronics engineering or even computer architecture.
It's a shame because a lot of the craft used in DSP and RF Engineering has direct applications in ML (much of ML is itself a fork of Information Theory which started off as a DSP subfield)
RF is really where this discussion needs to be, you and your mate jim can set up a bunch of UBNT hardware and create your own intranet really god damn easily. No reliance on some guy who signed on to all your governments internet censorship laws.
Its not like elon is playing silly buggers with these laws, he is complying completely while championing free speech online.
>Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country
What kind of seppocentric drool is this statement?
LoraWAN and Wifi based local chat apps are about all that works for most protesters when the internet gets axed.