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

create-username

Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.

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

lenerdenator

I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.

Like, we're impacting communications now.

ryandrake

This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.

imachine1980_

this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest.

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est

autoexec

> This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem.

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.

lenerdenator

But why does the company have too much power?

Because there's a lot of money at stake surrounding soccer in Europe.

MichaelZuo

So then why hasn’t Europe made a viable competitor to Cloudflare yet…?

kiney

the problem here isn't football. It's rampant censoreship and net blocks in the EU. (same problem different methods in other EU countries. In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)

ohgr

I travel a lot in the EU and the Internet is a total shambles. Blocked stuff everywhere. Right down to VPNs not even working.

gambiting

>>In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)

Can you give some examples so we can see what harmless political satire you have in mind?

thrance

What kind of "harmless political satire"? Where can I find more about this?

seydor

it s not such a massive thing as it used to

but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things

globular-toast

Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.

outime

I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.

tastyfreeze

The internet attack resilience isn't meant to keep a single node online. It is to keep a communication network active even if parts are destroyed. That part works.

762236

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

dylan604

You say resilient to attack, yet it's also the opposite where it is very very easy for someone to attack someone to the point of removing their online presence. People will DDOS a site for the lulz. People will do it to cause problems for some perceived slight. Some will do it to hurt a competitor. It costs them pretty much nothing to have it happen. For those on the receiving end, it could be devastating. Their only affordable option is to use one of the megaCorp providers.

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.

1270018080

La Liga is the problem in this scenario

api

People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans.

When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.

pc86

Surely you're talking about a District Attorney deciding that an individual needs to be charged prima facie and saying he "will find a crime" right?

lenerdenator

> When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.

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.

thrance

I don't know how much of this tribalism is confined to the stadium. Personal experience makes me feel like there is a big overlap between Ultras and actual nationalists, but I'd like to see a study.

mixermachine

Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.

throwaway894345

If they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.

dylan604

Are you just stuck on it being a sports league? Just s/sports league/entity with lots of money/

VHRanger

VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.

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.

gabeio

> VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.

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.

sebmellen

Starlink is the only massively global ISP and (as far as I’m aware) has not cut off access for anyone based on their politics or location.

somedude895

That sounds insane! Do you have a source?

oefrha

nextts

Ah the old misunderstood IP address. It's not a street address guys!

yard2010

This is wild - thank you for the rabbithole

basisword

Thought you must be exaggerating but after reading further I’m shocked. I know the courts can be a tech illiterate but why are the Spanish courts this bad? Surely they see the consequences of the decision and immediately realise it’s stupid? The UK can be pretty bad with this stuff and the Premier League is huge but I have no concern of something this idiotic happening here.

crest

Maybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh

dylan604

Did anyone actually ever attempt the faxing a piece of black construction paper on an old sheet fed fax machine where you tape the top to the bottom prank? Was that even possible, or just urban legend?

mysteria

I've never heard of anyone making a paper roll with tape but I've definitely seen pranksters fax sheet after sheet of full black to waste paper and ink.

flkenosad

Spain could build thier own cloudflare.

wkat4242

Huh? I live in Spain and I've never had any issues with internet or any websites being cut off. I'm not sure when these matches are on though because I'm not interested in sports.

Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.

briandear

I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.

nextts

Why would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.

matwood

Starlink does come back to earth often in the same country or region as the user. Then it would fall under all the same blocking.

FirmwareBurner

Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country.

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.

ge96

Would be interesting if they could jam starlink by tracking/blocking the laser coming off the spacecraft (satellite) probably far fetched

lupusreal

Starlink doesn't defy local governments except when the US government greenlights it (offering service in Iran.)

1270018080

That's still just giving a different corporation the power to control communications

4b11b4

This should be an extremely high profile piece of news...

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..

oefrha

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

notavalleyman

Wagner* and russia's Libya intervention to continuously arm and support general khalifa haftar against the internationally recognised government

rbanffy

Usually it’s only the propaganda outlets that get blocked, not all internet access.

LAC-Tech

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

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

pc86

These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets.

That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.

oefrha

> These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time

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

technothrasher

"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.

pabs3

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

https://ooni.org/

bilbo0s

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

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.

alephnerd

In most countries, "curfews" are viewed as a justified legal construct. In most cases, internet shutdowns are clubbed with general curfews as well.

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.

rbanffy

At least in Brazil, blocks are limited to specific IP ranges and happen because companies defy court orders to hand over publisher data the court considers illegal - irregular electoral propaganda, misinformation campaigns, etc. Rumble, AFAIK, is blocked in Brazil right now. Twitter and WhatsApp were blocked more than once.

timewizard

This is Africa. So the first question you should ask yourself is "do they even have electricity 24 hours of the day?" The answer is generally "they're lucky to get 8 hours in a day."

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.

__MatrixMan__

Apps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether.

The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.

callc

I agree, but also am weary trying to solve societal issues with technical solutions. We naturally try to do this, using the tools we know. It’s a losing battle to fight technologically against a motivated state actor, like CCP. When your door gets knocked down and you get arrested for using e2e encrypted communications, technology will not save you.

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

m3047

I made a wifi firing range / disconnected collab environment to this end a few years ago. Has BIND (which takes over the world), Apache, DAV, Etherpad. I carry a VM of it around on my laptop "against the day".

__MatrixMan__

Thats a cool idea. Instead of initializing our hard disks with 0's we should fill them with things like that so that people have a chance of finding them as needed.

Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?

aspenmayer

Not who you're replying to, but they linked their GH in bio, which led me to this:

https://github.com/m3047/pangolin

api

Most of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.

__MatrixMan__

It would be fun to develop some kind of war games scenario where we see what we can make work in a less stable environment and make changes accordingly. Some kind of apocalypse conference or somesuch.

I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.

ironmagma

> stable

I wouldn't be too certain about that.

rbanffy

At least not anymore

folmar

Briar does just that

foundart

This? https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.

sofixa

But if the app doesn't have internet access, how would it discover the others on that same partition? (Assuming it's a wholesale internet/specific domains being fully blocked). If your phone/computer can't contact Telegram's servers, it doesn't matter.

m3047

By making its own "internet in a box": open wifi, DHCP and DNS, and Bob's your uncle. Anybody in range can play; everyone else is out of luck. Install NNTP so that news can move around by flooding, as nodes form new associations. Add a second wifi transceiver and some clever dynamic route discovery and you have a mesh network.

__MatrixMan__

I imagine using bluetooth for peer discovery, so you find peers by sharing an elevator with them, or stopping at the same intersection, standing in line at the grocery store etc. Although the network would probably never converge entirely, it would drift approximately towards convergence as long as the gossiped dataset stayed small.

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.

benced

This is especially notable when you consider African states are bad at basically everything you'd expect a state to be able to do but are apparently very capable of this.

mywittyname

Blocking internet access is pretty simple thing to do, especially compared to something like building and maintaining a bridge.

phmagic

What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?

spacebanana7

Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa.

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.

registeredcorn

"Internet is a little flaky today. Probably a bird perching on the fiber."

aaronbaugher

Before wireless came to my rural area, we used to joke about how the phone companies ran dialup over barbed wire. "Internet's down; deer must have broken the barbed wire again."

spacebanana7

Imagine having a mesh of hundreds of fibre optic cables strewn across the border.

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.

theodric

DIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.

nradov

Have WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.

simfree

Mesh networks like https://guifi.net have been reliably delivering internet longer than you have been a member of HN.

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.

memhole

I believe NYC has had one running for quite some time.

pessimizer

> And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.

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?

nextts

AM radio?

Even FM walkie talkies as a start.

null

[deleted]

jeffhuys

No internet here, but I'm setting up Meshtastic nodes between me and my family so we can keep messaging when internet stops working, or power goes out (solar panels).

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.

bombcar

The way to do p2p communication without the Internet is to remove immediacy from it.

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.

sgt

FIDONet was pretty rugged that way.

int_19h

Look up AREDN.

dingnuts

the Internet Protocol, IP, is already peer to peer. Assign yourself an address (V6) and get a peer, assign them an address, plug in a cable, voila!

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

nostrademons

IP is P2P, but a lot of the layers built on top of it are centralized, and very vulnerable to attack. DNS is hierarchical with 13 root name servers. 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.

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.

pessimizer

> DNS is hierarchical with 13 root name servers.

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.

dingnuts

in a small network you just put the hostnames in /etc/hosts and you're done, or you set up a local DNS server. The GP asked about "making a p2p internet," and that's how it's done. Hostnames are not a hard problem.

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.

Synaesthesia

Internet has become an essential right up there with housing, electricity, water etc.

Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.

Terr_

It's interesting to think that if the US Constitution had been created in today's technological environment, the founders would have authorized a federal United States Internet Service, as opposed to a postal one.

rbanffy

Maybe it’s time to create one.

On second thought, I’d wait 4 years before starting that.

hbn

It's essential if you live in a place where it's essential.

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.

null

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bilbo0s

Um.

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.

soulofmischief

Just because some people are deprived of it doesn't mean it shouldn't be a right. And the fact that some of these communities don't even have time to consider it a priority when they're also deprived of other basic rights doesn't mean that it isn't also a basic right. It's not a fairy tale to expect basic human rights. The entire world could be connected if that's what powerful people wanted.

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.

ty6853

Counterpoint: in the third world some 3rd rate shack with a shitty well or water source may often come 'free' as it stays in the family. I have seen people in the third world blow most their paycheck on phone and internet related charges since food/water/shelter may cost a villager in a farm basically nothing and the internet is entertainment and communication for a whole month.

bilbo0s

If they had access to internet, you weren't in the parts of Africa I'm talking about. There is a difference between undeveloped, developing and developed.

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.

nitwit005

Increasingly, you need the internet working to access your money or pay for things. I've found you unfortunately need to pay for food.

sexy_seedbox

So the problem is with the monetary system then.

matt3210

Some might say the other countries should stay out of it. For example people might say Switzerland should stay out of those nations issues. However, if Switzerland provided technology thought a normal market or not, to the rulers, they have already interfered with the natural progression of that nation. There is no hope of the people making the situation better while Switzerland is providing the rulers with tech and they're keeping it from the people.

fluoridation

That's like saying that because the store sold you the belt you're using to beat your children, the owners should break into your house to physically stop you from doing so.

rbanffy

Is the US still providing updates and spares for Ukraine’s airforce? Modern military aircraft depend a lot on software updates to stay operational.

fluoridation

I fail to see the relevance.

GuinansEyebrows

Individuals looking for belts and nation-states looking for networking equipment are not really the same thing… also belts don’t usually include service/maintenance contracts etc, or the ability to be revoked from the public at large (imagine the embarrassment)

fluoridation

It doesn't have to be the same, that's what makes it an analogy. What is the same is the relative relationships between the elements involved. Although, now that you've made me think about it, I guess it's not quite right anyway, because I doubt it's Switzerland selling technology, but Swiss companies. It'd be more correct to say that because you bought a belt from the store, the store-owner's father (as well as some of his neighbors, let's be real) should break into your house to stop you from beating your children with it.

dingnuts

lots of people think gun manufacturers should be liable if the customer shoots someone so it's not like this is an argument without precedent

gooboo

the portable starlink - it's fantastic for this sort of thing.

Also, I'm happy to give money to Starlink as I approve of DOGE cutting the waste and corruption.

And please 'don't start'. Best not be pawns in organised crimes retaliatory antics.

AustinDev

Not if you're in Senegal, Zimbabwe or South Africa. They've already outlaws or are on their way to outlawing Starlink from what I've read.

elchangri

all countries should delegate their communications sovereignty to the US, what could go wrong

bmitc

I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...

CSMastermind

I don't want to be dependant on Starlink (or any one provider) for internet.

I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.

bmitc

I was being sarcastic in case it wasn't clear. I agree with you.

aierjtlaj

And now Americans are giving this type of control to Musk, after he's demonstrated that he's happy to cut off a country's internet access during a war and he'll happily focus his company's resources on attacking his enemies. Genius.

hello_computer

I blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.

Acrobatic_Road

what are you using to block entire geographical regions?

hello_computer

it’s a secret

gunian

between tribalism genocidal maniacs that torture ppl and five eyes divide and conquer you kind of have to lol