[HN Gopher] Uganda's internet Shutdown
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Uganda's internet Shutdown
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-01-15 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's sad to see what has happened to Uganda.
|
| I lived there in '72 and '73. We had to leave in a hurry.
|
| It's one of the most beautiful nations on Earth. Absolutely
| stunning.
|
| Except for all the skulls.
|
| Bad Things Happened there, and it has never recovered.
|
| It has become a haven for religious crackpots. They had a
| Jonestown-type thing, a number of years ago, and it's a really,
| _really_ bad place to be gay (even closeted).
| ravenstine wrote:
| > it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
|
| Given that's where the "eat da poo poo" video originated, I'm
| not surprised.
| nomel wrote:
| > it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
|
| From what you saw, does this result in amplified masculinity,
| sexism, or gender roles?
| afandian wrote:
| I can confirm, having spent some time there 15 years ago. The
| daily headlines about police busts of homosexuals was
| terrifying.
|
| At some point Bob Geldorf called on Musevini to resign. The
| Ugandan papers carried knee jerk headlines of "is Geldorf
| gay?". It would have been comical had they not reflected a grim
| pervasive homiphobia.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Related, a few hours ago Bobi Wine (main opposition candidate)
| reported the military had entered his home. Unclear how the
| situation will play out, the incumbent is currently leading in
| the polls but there's been a huge amount of violence, arrests,
| etc. so I'm not sure one could say it's been a "free and fair"
| election.
| https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-01-15/uganda...
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| sadly, HN does not care about politics or real world, just the
| blinky lights and their 1s and 0s.
| dang wrote:
| There are tons of political discussions on HN. It's a
| difficult area, because some is on topic while some tends to
| turn into flamewar that destroys what the site is supposed to
| be for--but none of that has to do with the community "not
| caring".
|
| Please don't post unsubstantive flamebait, and please don't
| post supercilious dismissals. It would be nice if you'd stick
| to the site guidelines so we don't have to keep banning you.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| that's cool and all, but i was pointing a fact about the
| audience (case in point, it was the _bottom_ comment on the
| thread). And I didn 't put it in a way that gave away if I
| i think that is a feature or a bug :) take it easy.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| I resent that! I care about $$$ from adtech too.
| frenchy wrote:
| While it's true that few of us remotely understand what life
| is like for most people, I don't think it's fair to say that
| none of us care. For the most part, we don't have the
| slightest clue of how to even help.
| codebolt wrote:
| HN has a giant global user base. Wouldn't be surprised to
| find more than a few west Africans here. As for myself,
| here in northern Europe I'm a lead developer in
| finance/banking, but for a few weeks a year I'm a farmer in
| Nigeria. Just because someone is a geek for technical
| stuff, doesn't mean they have to have such a limited
| perspective on the rest of the world.
| samkater wrote:
| Does anybody have good overview/resources to learn more about how
| the internet "pipes" are configured at a national level? I can
| understand conceptually how a government could disable internet
| connectivity to _outside_ the country by having some control over
| the connections that cross borders. _Inside_ the country you
| would need to have control over the internal routing mechanisms
| as well, assuming the DNS lookups could all happen in-country?
| (this is not my field/I don't know the correct terminology).
|
| How would people with satellite internet connectivity be impacted
| (I assume there is some government entity able to turn off a
| satellite, but that probably only applies to a few countries in
| the world?)?
|
| EDIT: I should have thought about this for a few more minutes
| before posting the original question - the shutting down ISPs is
| glaringly obvious in hindsight... I am still interested in
| hearing people's thoughts on satellite internet, though. HN
| occasionally talks about initiatives to have LEO satellites
| provide internet access. If the people running the satellite were
| outside of your jurisdiction, it would seem like these instances
| would be mitigated for many places in the world?
| xxpor wrote:
| Another option is turning off the upstream side of eyeball
| connections. Basically, shutting off DLAMS, CMTS, etc.
| kortilla wrote:
| Government just calls ISPs and tells them to shut stuff down or
| face charges.
|
| > there is some government entity able to turn off a satellite,
| but that probably only applies to a few countries in the world
|
| A satellite internet provider can't provide service to a
| country without the complying with its government rules
| (assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between the
| country and the country of the satellite internet provider).
| toast0 wrote:
| Especially in a country with less infrastructure, there's
| usually only a small number of mobile carriers that service
| the vast majority of the internet use; sometimes the
| government only calls the mobile carriers, and ignores the
| wired carriers and dialup ISPs.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between
| the country and the country of the satellite internet
| provider
|
| Assuming the other country has something worth trading for. I
| imagine Uganda wouldn't really have anything to bargain with
| the US if a US satellite internet company rejected Uganda's
| request.
| xxpor wrote:
| https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/africa/east-
| africa/uganda
|
| In case anyone else is interested in the actual data for
| that.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Worst case, Uganda could just jam the satellites.
| stretchcat wrote:
| From what I understand, the US military is a major
| customer of commercial communication satellites. Jamming
| those satellites could be a very bad idea, regardless of
| who you were _intending_ to inconvenience.
| bluGill wrote:
| Problem is why would a satellite internet provider provide
| service? Money is the obvious answer, but how will
| customers get money to them?
|
| I could just see them continuing to provide service at no
| cost as a gesture of goodwill (particularly if their
| satellite covers another country), but only so long as
| limited customers use it that way. They won't be doing
| upgrades though. And it isn't hard to figure out who is
| getting internet in this way and physically confiscate
| their equipment.
| rank0 wrote:
| If you can't route traffic outside of the country, it doesn't
| matter if you can resolve domains. You still won't be able to
| reach your destination IP.
|
| DNS lookups still rely on your ability to route traffic outside
| your country anyways.
|
| Neither of the above points even matter if your government can
| control the ISPs operating in its border. Government says to
| ISPs: "cease operation or well put you all in prison"
| bluGill wrote:
| You replace the root DNS servers with your own. It isn't that
| hard, if you are reading this you should be able to figure
| out how to do it in less than a day.
|
| Google.com returns an ip of your favored in country search
| engine - most likely people get a https error when trying to
| go there, but those that ignore the error find search works
| for allowed things and the rest learn to use the favored
| search engine.
|
| You - as a national actor - can easily cut your country off
| from the internet while still getting many of the benefits of
| the internet.
| miga wrote:
| I just looked at the cached version of the UCC act 2013, and it
| seems that section 56 explicitly forbids switching off the
| service for any other reasons than failure to pay the dues.
|
| The cached version is still on Google...
| markdown wrote:
| The only way around this for countries where the rule of law is
| weak is Starlink.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704433
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749447
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25752875
| einpoklum wrote:
| It seems there is a bit of traffic left.
|
| Is that only government-sanctioned networks/stations? Or perhaps,
| people who don't go through the large ISPs?
| xapata wrote:
| For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a
| government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a
| counter-example.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for
| a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a
| counter-example.
|
| I'll bite.
|
| It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us
| actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical
| censorship have actually advocated that we build additional
| infrastructure for just this occasion.
|
| I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of
| the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy
| handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down
| the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a
| bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in
| Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents'
| online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build
| meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the
| financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after
| and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on
| Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply
| claim and they can get away with it.
|
| What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in
| the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as
| well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for
| the creation of an entirely new Internet.
|
| Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short
| period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support
| the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most
| of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming
| that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments
| as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out
| some of its satelites for private use to help build something
| like it.
|
| Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin
| community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent
| countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who
| don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues.
|
| But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from
| perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having
| non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the
| mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are
| other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll
| spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long.
|
| In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people
| in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and
| OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described
| as a _hypothetical situation_ while some of us have actually
| lived through this and used this technology to solve some of
| the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the
| 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper
| inflation etc...).
|
| We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most
| headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech,
| unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG
| aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of
| Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone
| else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to
| Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat 1:
| https://blockstream.com/satellite/
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I think, there was a talk some year ago about a country in
| South America. It think they had almost mo internet, but a
| large P2P wireless network all over the country.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Turning off the internet isn't impossible per-se, it's just
| very difficult without disastrous effects on the local economy.
| I don't know how developed Uganda is, but I can tell you for
| sure that if the internet is blocked in the US or any major
| European country, everything stops, including real-life things
| such as card payments and even airport timetable signs
| (interesting fact: most of the UK ones run a Chrome instance
| displaying a webpage hosted by a Romanian company). Even if
| access to national services is unaffected, those services
| themselves depend on various SaaSes that would be affected by
| the international blocking.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-
| ban-...
|
| here 500 days and counting of no high speed mobile internet
| for 8 million + souls. thats worlds biggest democracy for you
| /s
|
| honestly i have seen how life crashes without internet, its
| not fun
| selimthegrim wrote:
| How many online businesses got shuttered that you know of?
| iso1631 wrote:
| Here in a G7 country there have been many offline
| business shuttered this year. Life goes on.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My point was people in India love to sneer at Kashmiri
| supposed backwardness but kneecapping their ability to do
| business online is not going to win them plaudits.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > it's just very difficult
|
| It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt,
| Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Iran, last year. Internet was out for like two weeks.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| My intent was to say it's difficult without incurring major
| side-effects to the economy. I've updated my comment to
| clarify.
|
| Of course, if you don't have a significant economy to begin
| with or something else has already disrupted it (riots,
| uprising, etc - which could also be what prompts you to
| shut down the internet) then it's not a problem.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Or you simply value control over money. The economy is
| not the primary goal of everyone, not even all
| governments.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| You need some degree of economy to have control though.
| celim307 wrote:
| North Korea says sup
| iso1631 wrote:
| But evidence shows countries turning the internet off all
| the time, let alone specific filtering, and their
| economies haven't collapsed. India does it dozens of
| times a year.
|
| In most cases you don't need to completely turn
| everything off, just shut down the mobile networks, and
| maybe the big domestic broadband networks, and that's
| good enough.
| Izkata wrote:
| Didn't Egypt end up with citizen-run satellite or mesh
| networks that crossed borders? I vaguely remember people
| from other countries organizing on Twitter to provide it
| somehow.
| xxpor wrote:
| It's simple if you setup your infra in such a way you
| expect to be able to turn it off. It'd be a lot harder in
| the US where things are a lot more decentralized. In
| Uganda, I wouldn't be shocked if all connectivity to
| outside of the country went through one physical building.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Maybe the US, which is a very large country, but issue an
| order to the major ISPs (cellular and cable) to stop
| carrying domestic network traffic and you accomplish
| pretty much the same thing. Sure there may be some WISPs
| in the middle of nowhere which aren't affected, but
| you've accomplished most of your goal.
|
| There's two ways for internet to be shut down.
|
| One is legal -- the government tells registered ISPs
| "stop forwarding packets". Doesn't matter how good your
| connectivity is when you simply have to turn it off. Your
| protection there are courts etc, but it's not technically
| difficult.
|
| The other approach is extra-legal -- e.g a terrorist
| attack.
|
| Just look at the effect from a car bomb in Nashville last
| month, I quote from a newspaper:
|
| > The immediate repercussions were surprisingly
| widespread. AT&T customers lost service -- phones,
| internet or video -- across large parts of Tennessee,
| Kentucky and Alabama. There were 911 centers in the
| region that couldn't take calls; others didn't receive
| crucial data associated with callers such as their
| locations. The Nashville police department's phones and
| internet failed. Stores went cash-only.
|
| > At some hospitals, electronic medical records, internet
| service or phones stopped working. The Nashville airport
| halted flights for about three hours on Christmas. Rival
| carrier T-Mobile also had service issues as far away as
| Atlanta, 250 miles away, because the company uses AT&T
| equipment for moving customer data from towers to the
| T-Mobile network.
|
| The area effected was about 100,000 square miles, roughly
| the same size as Uganda. From one carbomb outside one
| building.
|
| I think there's only one major Internet Exchange point in
| Uganda (just like it seems there was one in the south
| east of the US), but there's certainly multiple fibres in
| and out. If you're in Mbarara and sending traffic to
| Rwanda it's unlikely to go via Kampala.
|
| Here's a network map of one provider in Uganda:
| https://bcs-ea.com/service/uganda/
|
| The UK has a few exchanges, but almost everything runs
| through Docklands in London - various Telehouse buildings
| within a mile of each other, Telecity etc. Almost all
| internet traffic in the UK runs through London, and the
| sites that aren't are owned by Linx (IXLeeds is the only
| one that isn't). A major flood breaching the Thames
| Barrier will cause chaos.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| I hope we never find out what happens if the US internet goes
| down. But with 2020's track record and what 2021 is starting
| to look like, we might find out!
| fastball wrote:
| Blockchains can still operate on decentralized P2P internet
| even if the main internet is shut down.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| You would still have to rely on one person still having
| access to the internet.
| rank0 wrote:
| This is not at all a practical solution. How much
| "decentralized P2P internet" infrastructure do you think
| there is in Uganda? Hell even in the US its virtually
| nonexistent. Which P2P internet should I use? IPFS? Helium?
| Any of the other blockchain internet vaporware?
|
| Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no
| resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge
| significantly from the original internet ledger.
| toolz wrote:
| It's not practical until it is - having your internet
| shutoff isn't practical either, but with that barrier put
| into place a lot of things become quickly more practical,
| relatively speaking.
| cronix wrote:
| As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
| Reedx wrote:
| Even without shutting off the internet, couldn't governments
| crush crypto by making it illegal to buy or transfer? Countries
| could do this simultaneously.
|
| That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations
| from using it, no?
|
| What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to
| hinge on getting too big to ban.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| The US outlawed gold in 1933, but as far as I can tell that
| only made people want it more.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
| johndevor wrote:
| Game Theory. Let's say the US bans crypto, well then Russia
| will embrace it.
|
| Also, drugs are illegal... and it hasn't stopped drugs from
| trading hands... drugs even manage to make their way into
| prisons.
| asdff wrote:
| The difference is you can make drugs. You can't make
| internet access.
| Reedx wrote:
| I think they will see that possibility, though. So the US,
| Europe and others could agree to ban it at the same time.
|
| Not all countries would need to sign on to essentially send
| it back to the stone age.
| nmlnn wrote:
| How would they enforce such a ban?
| gruez wrote:
| >So the US, Europe and others could agree to ban it at
| the same time.
|
| Ah yes, like how the US and Europe agreed to ban drugs?
| How's that working for them?
| [deleted]
| Reedx wrote:
| Terribly. But that's a good example of countries agreeing
| to ban something.
| jonnydubowsky wrote:
| I came across this project recently which solves for this
| problem.
|
| Locha.io
|
| https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
|
| https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
|
| A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide
| services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin
| transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a
| remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger
| antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish,
| extending the transmission range in several kilometers
| 02020202 wrote:
| this is great. no outside influence(bigtech+msm). that's how it
| should be everywhere.
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(page generated 2021-01-15 23:02 UTC)