[HN Gopher] Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
___________________________________________________________________
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
Author : WaitWaitWha
Score : 306 points
Date : 2025-12-18 17:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.schneier.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.schneier.com)
| stogot wrote:
| Its become clear that the axiom "The Net Interprets Censorship As
| Damage and Routes Around It" as no longer true. It hasnt been
| since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here
| is undeniable
| cyberax wrote:
| This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now
| frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for
| protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a
| bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
|
| So immediately local VPN companies started providing the
| unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
| hulitu wrote:
| It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were
| "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.
| stogot wrote:
| What name server / level3 event was this?
| karel-3d wrote:
| Ahh I just wanted to host my website in Afghanistan.
|
| (there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems
| its not illegal to send money there)
| ffuxlpff wrote:
| One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires
| constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a
| totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy
| and probable.
|
| Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore
| Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet
| for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
| dijit wrote:
| why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don't know this person).
|
| Its absolutely a good argument _against_ fragile IoT devices
| that have no local /offline mode and the ever increasing lurch
| of internet requirements for our daily life.
|
| I'm not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet
| connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication
| method (via BankID).
|
| EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber... well, thats an odd
| name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting
| the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely
| communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving
| life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
|
| Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if
| you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a
| state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a
| small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
| blueflow wrote:
| > this person is suggesting the answer to governments
| taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop
| freely communicating
|
| You equate comms with internet. Maybe you should talk to
| people IRL more often.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| No one in their right mind believes that you can
| accomplish widespread, high speed communication via
| "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.
| It has become a very important way that we share
| information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay
| informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good
| option at this point. But you know that, and you're just
| posting nonsense to have an argument.
| blueflow wrote:
| > No one in their right mind believes that you can
| accomplish widespread, high speed communication via
| "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.
|
| Nobody claimed that. I'm not sure whether this sort of
| comms is meaningful at all or whether "staying informed"
| is just the dopamine thing in effect.
|
| > Going back to the stone age
|
| Its actually 20 years ago. That's less than the median
| age.
| ffuxlpff wrote:
| The solutions requiring constant internet connection are
| pushed by states and companies because they help cutting
| costs and gathering information. However, the users are
| often more vulnerable to the risks if the technology fails
| but have relatively little say.
|
| The solutions that do much the same but require internet
| connection only once a day or even once an hour would be
| much more resilient and safe but currently there are few
| incentives for providers to develop and offer them.
|
| The extreme situations like war or dictatorship are good
| awakening calls but it is easy to see there are lots of
| risks involved even if things would go rather smoothly
| otherwise.
| noident wrote:
| Ted has some interesting ideas but I personally would not
| accept any life advice from him
| iberator wrote:
| Living without the Internet is still doable. Just a little bit
| harder.
|
| You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets
| physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT
| you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
|
| Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like
| going back to 1999.
| krior wrote:
| You are aware of the fact that a lot of the payment
| infrastructure relies on the internet today?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Sure, but it does not mean it is not possible as OP notes.
|
| More to your point though, even if it does, maybe it should
| not realy on it.
| Bender wrote:
| Depends where one lives. In my location there is zero
| dependency on the internet. It's just a convenience thing
| and the growing number of miscreants on the internet is
| negating that balance for me personally. Sooner than later
| I am going back to a landline and ditching the cell phone.
| goku12 wrote:
| We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or
| 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small
| leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were
| pretty effective for payments without much of an
| infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and
| books.
|
| I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's
| honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes
| aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can
| be done and were done without the internet. But more
| importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our
| over reliance on the internet for our financial activities.
| The first is that the government or a non-state actor can
| easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity
| unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively
| surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful
| players.
|
| The second major problem is if we ever face a post-
| apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We
| already have only a few fabs that can meet the global
| demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our
| vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused
| supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile
| markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses.
| Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their
| (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening
| to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and
| consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC,
| shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc.
| The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are
| extremely vulnerable to it.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I also think that you should be able to do stuff without
| requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff
| without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be
| overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many
| ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore
| should avoid damaging the natural environments for such
| technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working
| without them.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet
| centralization and government control of core infrastructure,
| which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples
| of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down
| to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of
| Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud
| provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really
| discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a
| variety of reasons and shutdown.
|
| As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines -
| programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers,
| product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the
| direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific
| niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the
| increasing centralization across every vendor category (three
| major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers,
| three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a
| handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL
| supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the
| open internet, but open technology in general.
|
| We need to be better advocates for and champions of the
| technological future we envision, rather than just blindly
| celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is
| merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| It's hard to be a better advocate without diving into the
| politics of why we're in the situation we are, which also
| doesn't address the amount of political power you and I have
| relative to the interests that want said technological
| consolidation to exist.
|
| And given that the tech community trends towards political
| philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-
| organization and anti-collectivist, I'm not sure how you begin
| to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
| nradov wrote:
| Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any
| technology, each successive generation inevitably requires
| larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments
| should do more to preserve competition but when it costs
| >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that
| inherently limits how many players the market can support.
| And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the
| timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to
| survive.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip
| manufacturing process that inherently limits how many
| players the market can support.
|
| Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion
| dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these
| numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of
| them, but why couldn't we have ten?
|
| Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so
| why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some
| companies make the fabs and other ones operate them,
| causing them each to require less capital and be easier to
| compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of
| equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate
| company?
|
| "It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated
| conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
| ksclk wrote:
| I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at
| this scale, so you can control everything. Given that
| there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you
| prevent companies from growing vertically? If you
| declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single
| entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively
| producing one huge vertical company as well?
| schubidubiduba wrote:
| By enforcing antitrust laws, like it has been done many
| times in history?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice
| at this scale, so you can control everything.
|
| In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys
| value and a single point of failure is a business risk
| even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
|
| As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital
| cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it
| would have cannibalized their film business, and now
| their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire
| company. As an example of the second, Intel has
| vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are
| behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could
| tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago
| and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved
| them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster
| back in the day and they got out-competed by, well,
| everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
|
| The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to _not_
| take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes
| both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own
| DRAM in their own devices. But it 's industry standard
| DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them
| for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a
| natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some
| reason, their device units could immediately switch to a
| competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in
| order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became
| uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the
| rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to
| a single internal customer. And having that serves as a
| canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it
| didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would
| otherwise have been a red flag.
|
| The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight.
| Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits
| until one of the internal units has a problem before
| realizing that it's a single point of failure for other
| business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after
| you've already hit the iceberg.
| mlsu wrote:
| Mostly the reason that these things are so capital
| intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do
| something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get
| crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.
|
| That's politics.
| immibis wrote:
| Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly
| defined by politics. For instance how you said that
| companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and
| they don't get another chance - there was an explicit
| political decision that companies should work that way.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every
| single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just
| cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the
| rest. I'm fine with the latter, personally, as the "why" is
| not really what they're debating. Whatever the cause(s), the
| end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action.
| We can unpack the "why" as we try to fix it.
| rconti wrote:
| == Call To Action
| tchalla wrote:
| Thanks. I don't know why people use obscure abbreviations and
| acronyms.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They think it makes them sound knowledgable.
| andruby wrote:
| I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use
| certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense.
| They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't
| common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC,
| CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN,
| but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither
| would using "HN")
| alberto_ol wrote:
| Without context ATM could be Asynchronous Transfer Mode
| or automated teller machine.
| sowbug wrote:
| At the moment
| codeflo wrote:
| > Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't
| be fine outside HN.
|
| The set of people who know the term "solid state drive"
| is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech
| enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB"
| and many other terms that have entered the mainstream
| primarily as an abbreviation.
|
| So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or
| spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the
| question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full
| term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer
| people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to
| action". I personally have done some front-end
| development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
| Izkata wrote:
| And "ATM machine" tells me most people think the acronym
| is the name instead of an acronym.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I don't know why people can't take 0.3 seconds to type
| "what does CTA stand for?" into their favorite search
| engine/LLM/text-message-to-a-friend. This is "Hacker"
| News, yes? What do hackers know how to do? Learn things,
| yes?
|
| Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on
| approximately every single post that has an abbreviation
| that someone doesn't know.
| kunley wrote:
| To be exact, it takes more time than 0.3s to type it,
| even for a fast typer.
|
| I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things?
| Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable,
| not more
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I googled it and it was defined as a marketing term, so I
| figured that can't be the right one in a comment about
| freedom of speech.
| nmz wrote:
| It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know
| about you, but search engines have become useless since
| last year, I'm talking downright unusable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTA
| stockresearcher wrote:
| The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about
| 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+
| years.
|
| Legislation the governor signed last week all but
| guarantees that it won't see its hundredth birthday
| except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses
| and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the
| duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do
| some of the driver hiring.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the
| acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author
| meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car
| keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I don't see why that's the author's responsibility to
| manage this for you.
| sowbug wrote:
| It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained
| for the reader to get the basic meaning without research.
| How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a
| sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep
| up?
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a
| piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to
| disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| No, they're just not pandering to children who can't help
| themselves.
| matsz wrote:
| Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-
| disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing;
| and also decently common in any branched of software
| engineering that interact with these topics, like... web
| development.
| knorker wrote:
| I've worked in software engineering on Internet things
| for decades and I have not once heard or seen this
| abbreviated before.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA
| as anything other than click or tap to action in which
| case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse
| CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context
| didn't even ring a distant bell either for call or click
| and I am glad it didn't.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to
| the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given
| situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an
| oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
| rconti wrote:
| Wait, the acronym for "Tap To Action" is "TPA"?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on
| 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am
| saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of
| acronyms, CTA is not common.
| xp84 wrote:
| I've worked with marketer types for over a decade and had
| them use the initialism "CTA" hundreds of times,
| understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no
| idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a
| UI diagram I'd have had no problem. This seems to me like
| a case where using an initialism in a different context
| than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind
| of be like saying "I plan to GTM for a few things after
| work today." You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I
| said "the GTM team" at work, but it is strange outside
| that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don't
| think people usually initialize "CTA."
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| What the hell does GTM even mean?
|
| How many industries can prosper by defining what the
| customer should get and have an endless stream of demand
| in response?
|
| Isn't GTM just "business 101"? I really don't understand
| how people can use the term and not realize they are
| screaming "we're going to do the basics of what we should
| have been doing all along".
|
| Imagine if software developers championed a "logic" based
| approach.
| Izkata wrote:
| If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a
| call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business
| videoconference software before Zoom took over.
| mc32 wrote:
| "Call to Action" is common. CTA instead of call to action
| is not common.
| immibis wrote:
| It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen
| used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind,
| CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on
| by any means necessary because we make money when you
| click on it"
| SapporoChris wrote:
| There is absolutely no issue with using obscure
| abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the
| first use.
| nervysnail wrote:
| IA (I agree).
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| IAOTM (I approve of this message)
| jhbadger wrote:
| In scientific papers (where acronyms are common) this is
| definitely the rule.
| sowbug wrote:
| The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when
| it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently
| capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.
|
| I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course
| since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost
| anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much,
| it's of course hard to be sure.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I really don't know why people refuse to look things up.
| And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-
| topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is.
| This place is a goddamn cesspool.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)
| that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't
| kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this
| context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service
| Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got
| Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's
| Association - obviously not helpful.
| blenderob wrote:
| > Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet
|
| No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never
| understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume
| everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete
| lack of empathy for the reader.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related
| to something written in the article as I had just opened up
| the comments
|
| Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets
| be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA
| (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since
| I assume a very significant proportion of people were
| confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation
| like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are
| definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall
| consensus on the whole thing is :)
| hodgesrm wrote:
| At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for
| Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective
| devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA
| graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived
| there. The meaning was well-understood.
|
| Moral: A good TLA can be surprisingly memorable.
|
| (edited)
| CompoundEyes wrote:
| Call to Arms! ^_^
| mxkopy wrote:
| Do unions work against corporate mergers? I'd imagine they do
| as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but
| I'm not that well versed in this sort of history.
| gbear605 wrote:
| It probably depends on the corporations. If a merger would
| result in all of the union's employees being laid off, of
| course the union would fight it.
| kruffalon wrote:
| Unions tend to work for people.
|
| If you think that working for people is against corporate
| interests then I think we should just be dine with
| corporations.
|
| I like people!
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Antitrust law does. That requires a government that cares to
| enforce the law.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Depends on the union and the laws under which they operate.
| thegrim000 wrote:
| >> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine
|
| "In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion,
| Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX
| activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the
| country, to replace internet and communication networks
| degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has
| since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and
| military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for
| humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on
| Russian positions.[6]"
|
| "In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend
| Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a
| counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been
| launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would
| have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely
| reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk
| "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
| noja wrote:
| " According to three people familiar with the command, Musk
| told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX,
| the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in
| areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the
| Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim." --
| https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-
| shutdown...
| throw93039r88 wrote:
| I am sure it is against Terms of Service to use Starlink to
| bomb people!
|
| Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It
| was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological
| catastrophe!
| OKRainbowKid wrote:
| IIRC, that tanker was chosen precisely _because_ it was
| empty and would not cause an ecological disaster. Not much
| of a miracle.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is a fascinating thought. War being against TOS. And
| enforced thusly. As an abstract idea that is not connected
| to reality on the ground it offers a.. view into today's
| mind and what it can be compelled with.
| gmdrigipo wrote:
| If Starlink does not enforce its TOS, it is a weapon used
| in the war (guidance system for drones), and its
| satellites are legitimate targets for air defence.
|
| West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because
| they may carry weapon or stuff!
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| My relatively mild amusement comes from war being against
| TOS, where war is effectively ultimate break of local
| level TOS. The only reason it is even discussed in this
| way is because, as war goes, it is contained. 'Real wars
| have no terms of service' is my subtle point.
|
| edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be
| able to articulate those thoughts.
| sedawkgrep wrote:
| > accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able
| to articulate those thoughts.
|
| No, you're simply thoughtful and a realist. To
| acknowledge something doesn't mean you agree with or
| endorse it.
| callc wrote:
| "It is a crime to commit crimes using our product or
| service"
|
| Yeah... crimes are crimes.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing
| centralization across every vendor category (three major x86
| server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three
| global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful
| of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier
| - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open
| internet, but open technology in general.
|
| Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization
| is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape
| out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple
| vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly
| from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion
| dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a
| technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity
| with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs _and_ some material improvement
| actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
|
| In the end the "free market" will _always_ lead to such
| concentration effects and, most importantly, to _de facto
| standards_ because the dominant actor(s) will always be the
| cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere
| else, is affordable".
|
| The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust
| legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant
| entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime
| changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
| Roark66 wrote:
| Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason
| why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian
| to more centrist.
|
| Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state
| sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out.
| Later I realised you need a balance between free market and
| interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to
| prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are
| very hard to come by in many parts of the world
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It didn't help that the fall of Yugoslavia and the USSR
| coincided with Thatcherism/neoliberalism. People widely
| mistook correlation for causation, although particularly in
| former pseudo-communist nations that was understandable
| given how fast progress came in...
|
| But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and
| painful, once the dust settled, _a lot_ of assets got
| looted and progress mostly stopped.
| vcliberal wrote:
| > From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing
| centralization across every vendor category (three major x86
| server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three
| global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful
| of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier
| - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open
| internet, but open technology in general.
|
| > We need to be better advocates for and champions of the
| technological future we envision, rather than just blindly
| celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
|
| There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE,
| etc.), so how I interpret what you're saying is that we need to
| abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
|
| I'm not going rally behind a government administration that
| seeks dictatorial power over everything. That's much worse than
| power spread over FAANG.
| alecco wrote:
| Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell
| from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft
| and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual
| coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings
| and pointless complexity.
|
| You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia.
| That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often
| insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted
| by corporations. That's why you can see great open things
| like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of
| its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global
| corporations.
|
| Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to
| develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically
| helping authoritarians, and completely against the open
| source and decentralization spirit.
|
| A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global
| corporations from participating. If not, after a few years,
| due to their power, money and influence, they will have
| taken over (again).
| goku12 wrote:
| > A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global
| corporations from participating. If not, after a few
| years, due to their power, money and influence, they will
| have taken over
|
| No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations
| from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the
| society itself. They have enough power, money and
| influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
|
| The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant,
| actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back
| together as a determined team. That can be achieved only
| by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be
| easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
|
| Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it
| and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the
| community should have just forked the standards, cut out
| the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and
| orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome
| extend their monopoly in web development, market share
| and future designs of the web.
|
| But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational
| system teaches us just enough values and advanced
| knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to
| these corporations, but never enough to question their
| motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the
| world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies
| personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the
| extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result.
| Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for
| prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice
| our happiness and relationships to enrich some
| remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
| FatherOfCurses wrote:
| How passionately do you feel about that position every time
| AWS us-east-1 goes down?
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll
| admit had me scratching my head...
| observationist wrote:
| We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a
| minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US
| internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe
| on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for
| some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of
| overreach.
|
| Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take
| away the circuses.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be
| and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment
| rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people
| an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just
| read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts
| enjoyful then buckle up!
|
| TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like
| scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks
| etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with
| open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge
| to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal
| people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected
| to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be
| expected to know all about ping pong.
|
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-...
|
| > Featuring the T-HEAD TH1520 SoC, 16GB RAM and 128GB storage
| at a price of EUR15.99 per month, Elastic Metal RV1 is
| accessible to all budgets
|
| Scaleway :- a non three global-scale public clouds offering
| riscv from a custom manufacturer from a list might be something
| of your interest then :)
|
| Sir, I understand that the world is getting centralized since
| that is the fact but I have started to frequent more on
| https://vpspricetracker.com/ , https://serverdeals.cc/ ,
| https://serververify.com/ , https://lowendtalk.com/ etc. (sorry
| for sending more links but I have a whole list of awesome stuff
| on a yopad/etherpad instance)
|
| Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and
| most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I
| talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
|
| Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue
| is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public
| scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put
| the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for
| picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they
| were other providers aside from these three
|
| Now you can read my other comments where people say that there
| are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read
| those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
|
| So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other
| issues which _can_ be fixed
|
| If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
|
| This may not be the comment you might want and even now after
| saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge
| traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-
| East-1 falls
|
| But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business
| to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest,
| there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion
| both in terms of pricing and many other things.
|
| I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who
| you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and
| CTA. If you are referring to something like a political
| agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have
| it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
|
| There are two ways of going through, either convincing the
| masses to have political voting and then create laws which try
| to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on
| that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but
| I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS
| exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
|
| These companies have malicious compliance and they have
| billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move
| faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
|
| A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but
| in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there
| exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
|
| So basically a movement where awareness is raised about
| corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems
| the best way moving forward.
|
| But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate
| with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of
| similar possibilities
| (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all
| day long :) )
|
| So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the
| notion/possibilities that there are other options
|
| Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see
| all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers
| themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry
| pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to
| even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of
| varying degrees
|
| In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and
| I had thought about compiling my own list of niche
| softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is,
| most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the
| recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am
| probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is
| thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these
| markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to
| tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in
| third world country and I still need to genuinely think through
| it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab
| lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to
| constantly power them
|
| The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call
| to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this
| happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and
| not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see
| happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a
| high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make
| effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
|
| Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only
| one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still
| see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy
| heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this
| on hackernews too.
|
| I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho,
| that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist
| in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from
| average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first
| place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our
| messages too
|
| I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly
| removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think
| that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for
| the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and
| many other things
|
| There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to
| have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and
| its mixed.
|
| I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still
| try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do
| but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so
| detached from reality and this is something I am going to work
| on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff
| geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds,
| hi jeff if you are reading this)
| stego-tech wrote:
| Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere
| (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given
| the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
|
| I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted
| exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy
| mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives,
| as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with
| the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick
| these sorts of posts tend to encourage. _The discussion was the
| point_ , and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have
| engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
|
| What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me
| afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we
| see now:
|
| Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean
| it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable
| yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One
| individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together,
| focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific
| problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? _That_
| is what drives meaningful change. _That_ is what defines
| tomorrow.
|
| Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone.
| Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix
| easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an
| orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more
| things and share them with others. Do things specifically
| because _you_ find value in them, even - and especially - if
| "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can
| share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions,
| the easier it is to change things for the better.
|
| Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're
| choices, not inevitabilities.
| modeless wrote:
| I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style
| intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an
| outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four
| years on leap day or something.
| flakes wrote:
| > Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
|
| Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your
| website.
| dylan604 wrote:
| would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a
| couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown
| wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would
| die because of it.
| ema wrote:
| Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that
| the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet
| shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled
| Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at
| the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing
| with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
| xmprt wrote:
| On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient
| to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society
| by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is
| able to handle more efficiently by having internet access
| (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's
| libraries) that would be lost without the internet.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| If we don't force critical systems to be resilient to an
| internet shutdown, we'll be doing the meme. Specifically:
|
| Weinberg's 2nd Law:
|
| If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote
| programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would
| destroy civilization.
| hnben wrote:
| we do annual unannounced firedrills and now one dies as a
| consequence.
| soerxpso wrote:
| That's because the unannounced firedrills don't involve
| setting the building on fire. A "drill" equivalent would be
| if we all _pretended_ the internet is down sometimes, and
| in some cases that still might be impossible to do without
| negative consequences.
| modeless wrote:
| Fire drills do involve denying access, though. We
| wouldn't need to bomb the datacenters but we would need
| to make them inaccessible.
| ansgri wrote:
| In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse
| infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced
| electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are
| patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation
| to invest significant money and time once to replace them by
| something more robust.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have
| happened this year across the world?
| https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...
| vjay15 wrote:
| its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| India doesn't do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA,
| Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest
| democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-
| things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e.
| millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in
| the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of
| state. Now, bow!
|
| PS. Don't forget the zero! You still owe us _that much_.
| goku12 wrote:
| I was confused for a minute after reading this, until I
| remembered that I'm on HN.
| ursAxZA wrote:
| If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style
| connectivity and off-grid power.
|
| Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline
| disappears.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > Starlink-style connectivity
|
| Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet
| shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet
| connectivity in Ukraine.
| ursAxZA wrote:
| Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the
| choke point to live -- in a state actor, or in a private
| operator.
|
| Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
|
| A government can shut you off for political reasons, a
| corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical
| ones.
|
| As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for
| safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the
| switch -- the only variable is who.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > in a state actor, or in a private operator.
|
| multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are
| the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region
| invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
| ursAxZA wrote:
| I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is
| currently no other LEO broadband provider that is
| meaningfully comparable at a global scale.
|
| Starlink is often treated as the reference point not
| because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because
| there is no second network at a similar scale that could
| realistically serve as a failover today.
|
| If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature
| operators exist, then yes -- absent coordinated political
| or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain
| online.
|
| However, even that surviving operator would not
| necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region.
| Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because
| maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not
| free -- it requires massive capex and opex, ground
| stations, regulatory permissions, and local political
| approval.
|
| True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical
| construct than an operational reality.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| == Low Earth Orbit
| try_the_bass wrote:
| Notably absent from TFA...
|
| Probably because it's not actually a truthful
| characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to
| find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need
| to resort to disinformation to do it.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Are you trying to argue that Starlink isn't cut off
| Ukrainian access? Because they did and it was well
| documented.
| onethumb wrote:
| Is that true? This comment suggests otherwise, with
| citations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351511
| jedimastert wrote:
| That particular section I have to Wikipedia article seems
| to have gone through a bunch of anonymous edits back and
| forth around the content of this citation
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-
| musk...
| nradov wrote:
| The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly
| resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in
| some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the
| spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like
| Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
|
| We need some similar killer application for satellite
| connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the
| technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time
| that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
| symbogra wrote:
| In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make
| sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have
| it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged
| tourists to access theirs.
| krautburglar wrote:
| Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any
| intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be
| excommunicated.
|
| Whether it's ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned
| engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our
| systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are
| good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe
| people will host more information offline, and become less
| dependent on cloud services...
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > Surprise internet shutdowns are good
|
| I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good
|
| For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of
| contingency.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Which reminds me that I've let my connection to this group lapse
| for... about a decade: https://air-stream.org/
|
| Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist
| in most cities.
| bdcravens wrote:
| While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the
| current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the
| Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
|
| https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this
| planet that does not see information flow as a vector that
| needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely
| will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just
| very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it
| helps that corporate interests prevent it.
| goku12 wrote:
| > In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent
| it.
|
| As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet -
| was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting
| of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a
| military objective. But that design was actually useful to
| the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a
| uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire
| internet.
|
| I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with
| multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is
| something that the corporate world always does. They choose
| and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve
| their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do
| it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects
| that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was -
| bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We
| just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular
| cohesive resilient network.
|
| We inherited the current mess that we call the internet
| because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy
| corporate interests. They are responsible for our current
| predicament in the first place.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I
| also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would
| become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as
| unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
|
| << We inherited the current mess that we call the internet
| because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy
| corporate interests. They are responsible for our current
| predicament in the first place.
|
| Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now
| the push is to centralize, _BUT_ lets speculate if they
| would push for decentralization if it meant it became
| useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet --
| assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if
| they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I
| am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
| goku12 wrote:
| > had the planners thought the internet would become as
| big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained
| as it was at the beginning?
|
| Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that
| design because it started as a research project. The
| corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such
| a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the
| day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant
| question is if they had any reason to believe that it
| wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples
| where research labs and academia came up with products
| that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the
| possibility and were generous enough?
|
| > Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate
| if they would push for decentralization if it meant it
| became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they
| would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite
| communication standard.
|
| That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think.
| They would probably cooperate and create an open standard
| - but only because they want to compete with the dominant
| player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard
| would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of
| being open, and only they can practically setup anything
| with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web
| standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware,
| many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They
| don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and
| easy-to-implement designs, ever.
| immibis wrote:
| They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was
| about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so
| people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were
| 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with
| Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of
| the total."
|
| https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
| ezoe wrote:
| > In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce.
|
| Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and
| tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles
| and motolovs.
|
| It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power
| blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
| amelius wrote:
| Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever
| used for something like this.
| goku12 wrote:
| Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have
| enough tactical EMP devices to do the job.
|
| PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
| immibis wrote:
| The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2.
| It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing
| them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's
| factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's
| usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't
| actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems
| to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control
| temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As
| soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
|
| It probably has something to do with the strict top-down
| control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large
| organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
| hannukahharry wrote:
| This is concerning in the comments:
|
| > I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it's
| not good.
|
| What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I
| think it's a valid "read between the lines" of an insider. I
| think they're saying that they're alarmed that Silicon Valley is
| supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he's doing
| what's best for their welfare, while it's clear based on the
| activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without
| internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could
| either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may
| plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what
| would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and
| dangerously naive nationalism.
| g947o wrote:
| Related: this is an interesting case study
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html
| bschne wrote:
| fun anecdote about Ethiopia doing this to prevent cheating in
| national exams ---
| https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20
| wereHamster wrote:
| I just recently learned of Meshtastic
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore
| (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and
| group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet,
| rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder
| to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can
| already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow
| though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry
| messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
| gzalo wrote:
| The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has
| a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So
| more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.
|
| I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this
| purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios
| would yield great results
| alnwlsn wrote:
| In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I
| can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home,
| about 5 miles.
|
| However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and
| distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git
| clone, pnpm install, etc.)
|
| I've been working on a virtual machine with all the
| dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and
| it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with
| typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who
| really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which
| doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off
| gridness" of it is touted.
|
| Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain
| the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
| donohoe wrote:
| Its been happening a lot and its becoming more prevalent. This
| coverage from 2022 is still highly relevant and digs into some
| details:
|
| https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/
| kallo wrote:
| Ha
| sowbug wrote:
| The recently released _One Battle After Another_ reinforces the
| impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In
| the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost
| certainly be at play.
| yoan9224 wrote:
| The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool
| is deeply concerning, especially given how technically
| unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases,
| governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're
| literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS
| at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to
| an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
|
| What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can
| coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens
| lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic
| impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account
| for destroyed business relationships, lost international
| contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as
| "internet shutdown country."
|
| The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh
| networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth
| but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires
| hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only
| works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The
| hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out
| via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when
| cellular is down?
|
| We need international frameworks treating internet access as
| critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to
| water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate
| technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log
| shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather
| than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns
| but would create accountability records.
| indigo945 wrote:
| It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about
| deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the
| world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet
| shutdowns during important political events, or even just
| national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for
| decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins
| the great prize here?
| IceHegel wrote:
| I'm against internet shutdowns, but I cringe at the phrase
| "international community." Who does that even include?
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