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

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

> 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.

But why does the company have too much power?

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

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

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

>>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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

La Liga is the problem in this scenario

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?

> 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.

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.

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

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> 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.

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.

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

This is wild - thank you for the rabbithole

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

"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.

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

https://github.com/m3047/pangolin

At least not anymore

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."

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.

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.

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

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

So the problem is with the monetary system then.

I fail to see the relevance.

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.