[HN Gopher] Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in ant...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government
       protests
        
       Author : perihelions
       Score  : 292 points
       Date   : 2024-07-19 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
        
       | jamal-kumar wrote:
       | I think it's worth noting why this is happening. The country has
       | been giving out degrees and jobs to people who instead of working
       | and studying hard, to descendants of veterans in the country's
       | war against pakistan, and this level of nepotism has been going
       | on since the 70s which as you can easily imagine is not great for
       | those who see the value in getting these "basic livelihood for
       | hard work" things. So when people started protesting recently,
       | because for anyone with half a brain this is completely wrong,
       | the people without half a brain who benefit from this completely
       | fucked system responded by killing and raping students and now
       | there's no internet.
       | 
       | This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent
       | people very fast by the way.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | People who run a country into the ground are happy to maintain
         | the status quo as long as they're getting their share? Who
         | knew!?
        
           | adolph wrote:
           | Conjecture: there is no exit from despotry because more than
           | deriving happiness from the current state, the despot fears
           | dissolution. A counter-example might be post apartheid South
           | Africa or Idi Amin's exile, but there are sufficient examples
           | of worse personal and family outcomes to rule out simple
           | projections of psychopaths.
        
         | david_shi wrote:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Chhatra_League
         | 
         | The ruling party seems to be allied with a student paramilitary
         | to help act as their enforcers.
         | 
         | "Chhatra League distributes dormitory seats at Chittagong
         | University instead of authorities. Only those who join Chhatra
         | League after being enrolled, get the chance to stay in the
         | residential halls."
        
           | alephnerd wrote:
           | Slight quibble - the student paramilitary IS part of Hasina's
           | party (BAP).
           | 
           | It's the student wing.
           | 
           | In South Asia, all party student wings are basically
           | paramilitaries and gangs.
        
             | david_shi wrote:
             | It reminds me a lot of the Red Guards - the greatest
             | disaster could come from the party losing control of these
             | groups.
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | The original Indian and Pakistani founders had Soviet
               | education and influences. Moreover the Comintern was one
               | of the only fora at the time that was openly in support
               | of decolonization. The similarities aren't coincidental.
        
           | pmarreck wrote:
           | > The general secretary of Bangladesh Chhatra League
           | Jahangirnagar University unit, Jasimuddin Manik and his
           | followers celebrated the rape of 100th girls including at
           | least 20 students of the university in 1998.
           | 
           | Is it poverty that brings out the worst in people? Or
           | something else?
        
             | kelipso wrote:
             | Plenty of rich people celebrating rapes and children being
             | bombed in Gaza, so I doubt it's poverty.
        
         | mtalantikite wrote:
         | Important to note it wasn't just a 'war against Pakistan', but
         | a war for independence from Pakistan [1], which also included a
         | genocide against Bengalis by Pakistan and their allies [2].
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War
         | 
         | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide
        
           | pmarreck wrote:
           | from that link about the Bangladesh genocide (wow, I never
           | heard of this):
           | 
           | > Pakistan's imams declared Bengali Hindu women to be "war
           | booty";[11][12] and Pakistani fatwa were issued legitimizing
           | Bengali Hindu women as spoils of war.[12][13] Women who were
           | targeted often died in Pakistani captivity or committed
           | suicide, while others fled to India.
           | 
           | This is based on a non-contextual reading of Quran 4:24,
           | Quran 8:69, Quran 23:5-6:, Quran 33:50 and various hadiths,
           | which continue to be taken literally (when it is convenient
           | to do so) by belligerents, hundreds of years after they were
           | written. I refuse to cite them here because they are
           | offensive to humanitarian/modern ethical worldviews (and
           | because I do not wish to play a game of moral relativism).
        
             | Jun8 wrote:
             | I'll provide the links for the two suras cited above for
             | the curious:
             | 
             | An Nisa (the women) - https://quran.com/4,
             | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa. In dowry and
             | inheritance matters it's actually quite advanced for its
             | age.
             | 
             | Al Anfal (the spoils of war) - https://quran.com/8,
             | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal. These are, of
             | course, orthogonal to our moral values but not more
             | depraved than bounty customs employed hundreds of years
             | afterwards.
             | 
             | Prophet Mohammed himself took one fifth of the spoils,
             | including taking women as wives, eg see Safiyya bint
             | Huyayy, who was his tenth wife after her tribe was killed
             | (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiyya_bint_Huyayy).
             | 
             | I'm missing your point about adhering to these "when it's
             | convenient". This was standard practice for Muslim armies
             | for hundreds of years afterwards (of course others did the
             | same).
        
         | jl6 wrote:
         | Degrees as well as jobs? Are Bangladeshi universities diploma
         | mills?
        
         | trilbyglens wrote:
         | Country probably entirely underwater in the next 50 years
         | anyways....
        
       | sbdaman wrote:
       | There is also a widespread cellular outage. It's very, very
       | difficult (near impossible) to reach anyone in the country right
       | now.
        
       | chad1n wrote:
       | I've talked with a guy from Bangladesh over the last 3 days and
       | he said that he was at a party and he was about to be killed, so
       | he stopped going and started filming how other students are being
       | beaten by local police. The fact that the government blocked the
       | internet is pretty sad and I wish that no more people die.
        
         | arrowsmith wrote:
         | > he was at a party and he was about to be killed
         | 
         | I feel like your story is really missing some details.
        
           | pvarangot wrote:
           | I mean, those are the best parties
        
       | hackerlytest wrote:
       | Some context: Students are protesting to reform the quota system.
       | Which was abolished in 2018 after protest but recently brought
       | back again. The Quota system basically reserves 56% of public
       | sector jobs, i.e. 30% to relatives of war veteran.
       | 
       | The war happened in 1971. To get public job and avail the quota,
       | it must be their 3rd or 4th generation now. Which is plain
       | unfair.
       | 
       | But it's not about that, the gov loyalists and their goons fake
       | these veteran certificates to land these jobs. Bangladesh is one
       | of the most corrupted countries in the world after all. So real
       | veteran relatives are seldom the beneficiary.
       | 
       | These students just wanted to reform this system. But our fascist
       | gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students
       | until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.) This was completely
       | unprovoked and unnecessary. Basically any forms of dissent have
       | been dealt with this way since 2009. No one can criticize or
       | protest the big brother.
       | 
       | We have a dictatorship since 2009. People are angry - due to
       | corruption, inflation, joblessness and tyranny. This is just some
       | outburst of it.
       | 
       | When you see the videos how the police are killing teenagers and
       | university students in the road - our future generation - no one
       | can tolerate this.
       | 
       | Now the fascist gov has closed all internet and phone connection
       | to outside world. I can't contact my family anymore. I don't know
       | their well being.
       | 
       | There is of course more to it. But this is the summary.
        
         | xeromal wrote:
         | Thank you for the information. I'm sorry for you and your
         | family. Are public jobs so numerous that a lot of people
         | survive off of them?
        
           | geodel wrote:
           | Nope. It won't be numerous but grab whatever of the tiny pie
           | is the point. I am from neigboring country but situation is
           | same for jobs. For 10 govt job, 10K people can show up and
           | create riot like situation in little time.
        
         | alephnerd wrote:
         | > Now the fascist gov has closed all internet
         | 
         | I agree that Sheikh Hasina is extremely authoritarian and
         | corrupt dictator but imo JeI are the actual fascists, and the
         | BNP has absolutely been enabling them.
         | 
         | That said, I agree with you that Hasina's authoritarianism
         | needs to end.
         | 
         | Ideally all these old fossils (Hasina, Zia, Rahman, etc) need
         | to be purged and the actual youth (who are the majority of
         | Bangladesh) get a chance to have their voice in power.
         | 
         | It's a handful of elite 70 year olds who have been running a
         | country where the median age is 25 and are ruining it due to
         | their own personal drama from the 70s and 80s.
        
           | Karrot_Kream wrote:
           | Yeah I think "fascist" is too much for any actor not JeI but
           | authoritarian is right. They've cut off Internet and telecom
           | access after all, a dangerous game given how physically close
           | they are to West Bengal.
        
             | BadHumans wrote:
             | > Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist
             | political ideology and movement,characterized by a
             | dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism,
             | forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural
             | social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for
             | the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong
             | regimentation of society and the economy.
             | 
             | Source: Wikipedia
             | 
             | This sounds like the very definition of fascism to me.
        
               | alan-hn wrote:
               | Many people want to either tiptoe around or flat out
               | ignore the far right leanings of fascism to avoid what it
               | says about the US
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | Which part sounds like fascism?
               | 
               | The Awami League is ideologically a center-left party,
               | it's not far right. The quota system that's being
               | protested offers employment quotas to descendants of
               | revolutionaries and minorities. It was the party that
               | founded Bangladesh. Protests are occurring because of the
               | corruption and joblessness that results from these quotas
               | and because the law was overturned earlier but
               | reinstated.
               | 
               | Moreover there's no belief in a natural social hierarchy
               | or belief in subordination to the State. If anything the
               | Awami League has historically claimed to champion
               | minorities in the country like Hindus instead of
               | championing Muslim identities like JeI. There's no
               | concept of regimemting society at all by the Awami
               | League, again that's more JeI's domain with its belief in
               | Sharia.
               | 
               | Awami League is authoritarian and corrupt yes but not
               | fascist. The Middle East has plenty of authoritarian
               | dictatorships that engage in varying levels of human
               | rights abuses but that does not make them fascist
               | countries.
               | 
               | I'm sorry but your comment just comes off as really
               | uniformed about Bdesh and South Asian politics.
        
           | trompetenaccoun wrote:
           | Independent of points for or against their rule, the ageist
           | argument makes little sense. 25 year olds are generally
           | politically naive and easily manipulated. The average person
           | in their twenties has no idea about economics, geopolitics or
           | other such topics that are important to understand for
           | running a country. When you look at uprisings against ancient
           | leaders in countries with very young populations, they
           | regularly end up even worse then before, sadly. Take Sudan as
           | an example.
        
         | dotancohen wrote:
         | > But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+
         | unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.)
         | 
         | Is this what those students with the colored flags have been
         | protesting about in US universities for the past half year or
         | so?
        
           | 0x1ch wrote:
           | Not sure if you're a troll or not, but that would be related
           | to Israel and Palestine.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | News from yesterday
       | 
       | Related article for some context:
       | https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-t...
       | 
       | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370)
        
       | TulliusCicero wrote:
       | I wish the protestors all the best. Sad that this kind of
       | situation is happening.
        
       | TyrianPurple wrote:
       | When governments do such things, expect bad results. The
       | protesters' demands aren't unreasonable at all. Just be
       | meritocratic in civil service appointments.
        
         | InitialLastName wrote:
         | Yep, it's easy. Just flip the "off" switch on the privilege
         | structure that a huge chunk of the people who operate your
         | society benefit from (and expect their children to benefit
         | from). What could possibly go wrong?
        
       | frabjoused wrote:
       | If this can happen, can you imagine if the Internet was
       | centralized?
        
         | elashri wrote:
         | Internet is quasi centralized already. An outage or intentional
         | disruption by a couple of companies under US Jurisdiction can
         | disrupt global internet. Yes you would still have some
         | clustered connections here or there but most of internet
         | infrastructure is almost centralized already.
        
         | hdhshdhshdjd wrote:
         | We've got three operating systems, three giant cloud providers,
         | and a near monoculture of browser engines. It's not great, even
         | if it could be worse.
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | Telecom providers of various kinds are responsive to
         | governments so I'm not sure that it "isn't" centralized as far
         | as the ability for bad people to do these things goes.
        
       | TheRealPomax wrote:
       | Rather than an outage, this is a national internet kill switch
       | being used to deny the population access to information and the
       | ability to organize.
       | 
       | Because the supreme court reinstated a law that reserves a
       | whopping 30% of _all_ government jobs to only people with family
       | members who fought in a war 50 years ago. As anyone could have
       | trivially predicted, that doesn 't sit well with the entire
       | generation that's currently in school and hoping to actually, you
       | know, _get a job_ in the next few years.
        
       | fragmede wrote:
       | looking at https://outage.ant.isi.edu/ it seems Europe is having
       | a bad day too
        
         | jheidemann wrote:
         | In https://outage.ant.isi.edu, one should look at the circle
         | _colors_ , not just sizes. Circle colors indicate the fraction
         | of networks (technically: /24 IPv4 newtork prefixes) that are
         | down, and in Bangladesh, the hard red means nearly 100% are
         | unreachable.
         | 
         | While Europe has many circles and therefore some networks are
         | down, because they are blue that means it's only a few that are
         | unreachable. Europe has many, many networks.
        
           | trompetenaccoun wrote:
           | What's the explanation for what's going on in Europe though?
           | Is that the regular state of their network?
        
       | rbax wrote:
       | Has there been any indication from NetBlocks how they think the
       | government is blocking internet access? I can still see subnets
       | being announced from Bangledesh associated providers.
       | 
       | AS 17494 AS 38592 AS 136246 AS 152304 AS 24323
        
         | DaiPlusPlus wrote:
         | There's a Crowdstrike joke in there...
        
           | worstspotgain wrote:
           | Fascism, CrowdStriking since 1922.
        
       | oxqbldpxo wrote:
       | Is this how an Ai take over or state sponsored cyber attack would
       | look like?
        
         | spencerchubb wrote:
         | It _is_ a state sponsored cyber attack. It doesn 't just look
         | like one
        
       | neets wrote:
       | Is this just practice for September?
        
         | BadHumans wrote:
         | I dare ask, what happens in September?
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | [dupe]
       | 
       | Some more discussion:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396
        
       | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
       | A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me
       | that critical infrastructure is being set on fire
       | indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared
       | videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn't yet
       | have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and
       | telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last
       | year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2
       | weeks of poor internet for everyone.
       | 
       | Bangladesh as such has a severe lack of capital, and rebuilding
       | all this is costly.
       | 
       | Ideally protests should be peaceful. But along with protestors,
       | we tend to unleash anarchists who just want to watch the world
       | burn.
       | 
       | They also have rival political parties who clearly use this
       | situation to their advantage.
       | 
       | All is not what it seems. Truth is whatever you believe.
       | 
       | I hope for a swift restoration of law and order, followed by
       | productive dialogue. And for the love of god, let's not condone
       | setting things on fire. That will destroy innocent lives and what
       | little financial security they have built.
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | > Ideally protests should be peaceful.
         | 
         | Other people in the thread are saying that Bangladesh is a
         | dictatorship, and security forces are killing people for
         | protesting.
         | 
         | Just to be clear, if that's the case, violence against the
         | state is entirely justified. There is nothing morally wrong
         | about rebelling against autocracy, in fact, it's quite a good
         | thing.
        
           | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
           | It's easy to encourage this when there's nothing at stake. I
           | personally have friends and family who are trapped and fear
           | violent protestors as much as violent police.
           | 
           | And when the protests die down in a few days or weeks, there
           | will be even fewer jobs. And the attacks aren't against the
           | state but against the people as well.
        
             | lostlogin wrote:
             | Where is the line? Who people support and who a company
             | supports all becomes relevant in a civil war.
             | 
             | Quite how this gets resolved is beyond me - the west has
             | been quite happy to enjoy products from sweat shops, so is
             | probably complicit.
        
               | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
               | It's tanks vs sticks, the govt will prevail. In a few
               | days we'll all forget about this.
               | 
               | That said, I personally believe the future of the country
               | lies in private enterprise - not govt jobs. People in BD
               | want these govt jobs for job security. They need to rise
               | above that fear.
               | 
               | I hope more will choose the path of entrepreneurship -
               | whether by starting an AI company or a street-side
               | teashop - there's demand for both.
               | 
               | I've interacted with the software engineers at my
               | friend's company. The country has a lot of talented
               | coders. I consider myself a veteran programmer - I've
               | cracked all interviews thus far in the valley, but I get
               | out-coded by these young chaps who've not had access to
               | electricity till they were 15 (yes, there are still
               | villages without power).
               | 
               | Truly inspiring stuff. Not if only we can all stop
               | killing each other, the future will be bright :)
        
               | rubayeet wrote:
               | You are missing the point. It may look like protests are
               | about having a fair shot at getting government jobs on
               | the surface but it is more than that:
               | 
               | 1. Corruption / Nepotism - Quotas in gov jobs are
               | exploited by the powerful to hire people in important
               | positions who will keep them in power.
               | 
               | 2. Violence against Peaceful Protests - The protests
               | started peacefully until the police + the govt backed
               | student org (who work as hired goons for the ruling party
               | and do the dirty job cops are unable to do) started
               | violently suppressing them.
               | 
               | 3. A Head of State who appears to be inconsiderate - The
               | PM referred to the protesters with a term that is
               | _extremely_ offensive. There is a track record of this
               | Head of State using language that is unbecoming of their
               | station, or simply unacceptable (think MAGA but 100x
               | worse). Power keg exploded.
               | 
               | No matter how much talent or coding chops you have, you
               | can't thrive in a society where the powerful are
               | unchecked, unaccountable, and your right to protest
               | peacefully are met with extreme violence. Try to see the
               | world without the lense of SV.
        
             | TulliusCicero wrote:
             | Well obviously violence against random civilians is not
             | justified, the target should be the state, especially
             | leaders and security forces.
        
               | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
               | In most of these movements that discipline isn't
               | maintained. What do you think happens when thousands of
               | students, many of whom are discovering a city the first
               | time in their lives, suddenly realize they can set grand
               | things on fire?
               | 
               | There's certainly the core movement that is disciplined,
               | but its very hard to control the beasts in the fringes.
        
         | __green_pixel__ wrote:
         | The protest WAS peaceful until one protester was killed by the
         | Police for no reason.
         | 
         | Not sure how you are blaming the massive countrywide internet
         | outage on the protesters. It was literally announced by the
         | government that they were shutting everything down to control
         | the movement.
        
           | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
           | I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm saying buildings
           | were set on fire.
           | 
           | And yes we know that internet was shut by the government, but
           | we had a day of burning overhead optical fiber that serves as
           | the backbone for many peoples home internet connections.
           | 
           | My team of network engineers was brought in by some companies
           | to try and reroute and stabilize the country's infrastructure
           | before the full shut down.
           | 
           | And when the internet is turned back on, there are the
           | unlucky ones such as us who have to debug the remaining
           | issues and asses the damage of a burnt central node that all
           | ISPs connect through.
        
         | anigbrowl wrote:
         | _Ideally protests should be peaceful._
         | 
         | When there's no consequences for bad authoritarian behavior,
         | you get more of it. Your plea for law and order is (probably
         | inadvertently) a plea for the ongoing dominance of the
         | _established_ order. If it 's peaceful only because everyone is
         | afraid or unable to resist, then what you have is a police
         | state. And in authoritarian societies like that, peaceful
         | protest doesn't make any postive difference whatsoever, while
         | often making things noticeably worse for the protesters.
         | 
         | Even in places like the US/UK, nonviolent protests attract
         | violent repression and call by some people for even more
         | violent repression. Simply passively standing against the
         | established order is treated by some as a license to commit
         | violence upon the protesters.
         | 
         | You are right about Bangladesh having a lack of capital and the
         | costs of rebuilding, but you're basically arguing that capital
         | matters more than the people in society. I'm sure you would
         | never advocate just killing off/stripping the rights of some %
         | of the population to increase the average wealth, but that's
         | exactly what authoritarian regimes _do_ in practice. There 's
         | always a favored in-group (sometimes described as a
         | 'selectorate', imbued with sufficient political power to prop
         | up the incumbent regime in exchange for policy rewards) and a
         | disfavored out-group (the wrong ethnicity, or the wrong idea-
         | havers, or the wrong socioeconomic class) that gets saddled
         | with the costs. The recipe for successful authoritarians is to
         | strip wealth from the out-group(s) fast enough to keep the in-
         | group happy but not so fast that the out-groups decide they
         | have nothing to lose or that their loss rate is unacceptable,
         | causing them to react violently against the authority structure
         | and/or the in-group that benefits from it.
         | 
         | Capitalistic abundance through the satisfaction of demands by
         | enterprise and markets is a nice idea, but it is in no way
         | guaranteed. Very often the beneficial goods and services come
         | with negative externalities (pollution, waste, second-order
         | effects) that do not fall on the consumer beneficiaries.
         | Capitalists and industrialists (who are often but not always
         | the same) frequently avoid accounting for these; where they do
         | acknowledge the problems, they promote changing consumer
         | behavior to mitigate the problem, recycling being the most
         | obvious example. Sometimes this is effective, often not. The
         | problem is that you don't _have_ to generate positive
         | externalities to succeed in a capitalist system; you can have a
         | zero- or even negative-sum strategy and still win in many
         | situations, as long as you are good at divide-and-conquer and
         | frustrating attempts by your detractors to coordinate against
         | you politically /economically. This is why corporations spend
         | so much money on lobbying lawmakers and regulators, and also
         | why branding is such a huge industry, differentiating
         | _products_ as much as possible while downplaying the identity
         | of _producers_ to minimize the appearance of oligopoly.
        
           | Foofoobar12345 wrote:
           | Both sides of the political spectrum are authoritarian. Each
           | dominant party will do whatever in their power to hold onto
           | it.
           | 
           | That said, law and order is needed to sustain the population.
           | The pop density of BD is incredible - imagine half the
           | population of US crammed into the state of New York. Systems
           | and processes were what BD out of being considered a "basket
           | case " as Henry Kissinger (?) once famously called it. A lot
           | of it were built by NGOs and private parties.
           | 
           | Now you have these students who are protesting something
           | valid. But they are also not mature enough to realize that if
           | they start burning away the optical fibers and data centers,
           | they're destroying the systems they are using to self-
           | organize.
           | 
           | And what happens once they topple the govt? Who runs their
           | nuclear reactor and power stations? Who runs their comms?
           | 
           | Let's not throw away the baby with the bathwater and try and
           | find a more reasonable way.
        
         | yupyupyups wrote:
         | >A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me
         | that critical infrastructure is being set on fire
         | indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared
         | videos of many such burning buildings.
         | 
         | Targeting critical infrastructure doesn't sound like purely
         | "anarchistic" rioting to me. It sounds like something a foreign
         | hostile power would want to happen.
         | 
         | It reminds me of what is happening in Ukraine at the moment,
         | where critical infrastructure is being targeted to hurt the
         | civilian population. But here, instead of rockets, we have
         | goons who are paid to burn things down?
        
       | kkaahh wrote:
       | This protest, which started peacefully is currently the
       | consequence of absolute mishandling and mismanagement by the
       | government that resulted in close to 100 being shot dead by the
       | police.
       | 
       | The current protest is not about the quota system anymore. It is
       | the result of the systematic breakdown of social and economic
       | opportunities that stems from years of corruption and favouritism
       | within every sect of the economy.
        
       | logicchains wrote:
       | Is meshnet technology currently feasible/cheap enough that it
       | could be used to work around an internet shutdown in a country
       | with very high population density like Bangladesh?
        
       | floxy wrote:
       | Anyone know more about Starlink availability in Bangladesh? I see
       | there were some news articles last year mentioning trials. And
       | the prohibitive cost to the locals.
        
       | einpoklum wrote:
       | Maybe they just had Crowdstrike installed at some of their
       | Internet exchange control machines? :-\
        
       | Karrot_Kream wrote:
       | My friends are mostly Bdesh expats at this point. I wonder how
       | dangerous it would be to setup a link from Bdesh into India. It
       | would be a useful lifeline. Best wishes for the students and the
       | people of Bdesh, but the stuff we were seeing as late as
       | yesterday on Twitter was ugly. I hope those that can are using
       | their mobiles to take proof.
        
       | AlexDragusin wrote:
       | If you need visuals of the flatlining here it is:
       | https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bd
        
       | observationist wrote:
       | "Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle
       | coverage and online engagement with police killings at student
       | protest"
       | 
       | Calling things what they are instead of tortuously passive and
       | neutral descriptions should be standard. The headline sounds like
       | it's describing two separate things that just coincidentally
       | happen to be occurring at the same time.
        
         | bobthepanda wrote:
         | Headlines are usually written like this to avoid libel suits.
         | Even if you have a defensible case it's quite expensive to go
         | through the motions of a lawsuit.
        
           | observationist wrote:
           | Bangladesh is going to sue US journalists in a US court for
           | accurate headlines?
           | 
           | I'd love libel suits from hostile authoritarian regimes,
           | personally. For a journalism organization, that would seem to
           | be a badge of honor.
           | 
           | Something is deeply wrong if you have to essentially lie on
           | behalf of the bad guys or risk significant financial
           | penalties.
        
       | inglor_cz wrote:
       | Does Starlink work in Bangladesh?
        
       | anigbrowl wrote:
       | Given the prevalence of this sort of thing in authoritarian
       | countries, it's disappointing that mesh networking apps like
       | Briar and Firechat are not more well-resourced/ developed/
       | promoted. Popular messaging platforms like Signal, WeChat, and
       | Telegram offer a blend of convenience and security (different
       | apps having different priorities, eg Telegram prioritizes the
       | former over the latter), but they're all vulnerable to internet
       | shutdowns, which instantly dissolves any online community trying
       | to coordinate.
       | 
       | Mesh networks are generally slower and less reliable for large-
       | scale data transfer as well as less secure by virtue of their
       | distributed nature, but are more resilient in the event that
       | natural/ social disasters take down communications
       | infrastructure. Even janky analog radios work better.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | I changed the URL from
       | https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/112808500770031751 after
       | getting this email from a user:
       | 
       |  _If you figure the event is significant enough to be on the
       | front page, isn 't something about the event itself more
       | appropriate? as opposed to a tweet about the network being down
       | as stand-in_
       | 
       | That seems like a good point. I hope it doesn't context-shift the
       | comments too much (I'm in a meeting atm and don't have time to
       | check.)
        
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