11 ms·

Syria’s exam-related Internet shutdowns

146 points by jgrahamc 5y ago

dt3ft 5y ago
What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period, say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look like? What kind of changes would we see? (provided, emergency services stay reachable).
- grecy 5y ago
  You could just ask your parents. If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.
  - overcast 5y ago
    No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to the time before it. They are asking what would our "today" look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week. Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
    - ghaff 5y ago
      The problem is that a huge number of things that weren't dependent on network connectivity now are. Now, having said that, in many places in the US, stores were mostly closed on Sunday so it sort of was a "day of rest" in many places.
- DicIfTEx 5y ago
  The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls under the excluded ‘emergency’ category.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance, and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be open).
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and do things before there was an Internet that they could connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or going somewhere.
    - resoluteteeth 5y ago
      Yes but I don't know if people would be willing to deal with those things now.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I don't know. Normally, I often get together with friends on a weekend day. We coordinate things beforehand via email but we mostly don't really need Internet otherwise.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > provided, emergency services stay reachable Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc... We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context. But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day. I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course, without breaking a sweat." But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      On the other hand, if we had started years ago regularly arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day, as apparently Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come to rely on the internet for so much basic infrastructure. I doubt buying gas is down in Syria when they shut down the internet. It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of society is dependent upon it.
      - jrochkind1 5y ago
        (and the other piece is, I doubt the US government has the ability to easily "shut down the internet" for a day -- at least I hope they don't, although they might, they shouldn't, and if they do it shouldn't be easy or expected. Cause they would definitely use that ability for nefarious ends).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 5y ago
  Many people would lose access to transportation of many different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs. Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  There’s nothing stopping people from taking a day off of the internet if they want. Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    Still an interesting thought experiment.
  - blfr 5y ago
    There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a market day in medieval towns.
    - foxpurple 5y ago
      Without the internet it would be rather difficult to coordinate anything with others since you can’t contact them. I assume phone and sms is included in this blockout since they run over the internet now and could be used to build the internet from scratch if excluded.
- lagadu 5y ago
  No electronic payments? We'd see most people unable to pay for gas or food, huge economic impact from that alone. I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  I’d guess it’d be similar to how some European cities prohibit all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive. You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place. An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ISOC-PolicyBrief-Shutdowns-2019.pdf https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown. A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to be closed on Sundays. The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'. As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry. I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
    - dantheman 5y ago
      The local population does view it as inconvenient and many wish that things would be open. Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It was pretty normal in the US as well until a few decades ago. When I was an undergrad, very little in the city I lived was open on a Sunday. I remember it being a nuisance as an undergrad. I often had classes and other things to do during the week and often had sports on Saturday, so finding the time to do shopping runs during the week could be a pain. Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large retailers were in a better position to just add incremental staff than they were.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would applications improve their capabilities around caching, local processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as the "optimal" state but not required? What services are impossible to process locally? e.g. cache map data, road conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps.. purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism, etc...
- swiley 5y ago
  The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because that's what it's become.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  All websites that allows you to stream things would have a short term download feature. People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on. It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason. It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  It would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway. "Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
- jjk166 5y ago
  Probably the same thing that would happen if we shut off electricity or running water for one day a month. There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
- awb 5y ago
  There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur there are places like that and people living a fully disconnected lifestyle. So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection. From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.
stewx 5y ago
How does cutting off Internet access across the board not dramatically hamper daily life and business? They must rely a lot less on it than we do in highly developed countries.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Nowadays there's a new meme in the form of "Tell me you're X without telling me you're X". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing it to the stone age).
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  The country has been in a brutal civil war for a decade now, with something like half the population displaced from their homes. Internet's probably not on the top of the list of things you count on.
  - tbirdz 5y ago
    On the contrary, I think Internet access would be even more important in that kind of situation
    - hn8788 5y ago
      You can't eat internet access, or use internet access for shelter or self-defense, so it's probably not important for a lot of people.
      - tbirdz 5y ago
        No but you can use it to check news and current events, safety conditions, communicate with friends and family, and find information to help you survive better
      - bagacrap 5y ago
pranau 5y ago
This happens in North Indian states as well where the state governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting the same morons (I’m sorry but I do not have a charitable word for them) back into power.
- unmole 5y ago
  Because the other set of morons are not necessarily any better.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Ah yes, the evergreen complaint in Indian politics. No matter how bad the current government is, it’s supporters will claim the alternative is worse. Even when tens of thousands of people were dying because of COVID, people like this would say “abe librandu (hey libtard), if not Modiji then who?” Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
    - unmole 5y ago
      I'm not even remotely a BJP supporter, as my comment history will attest to. The union government's Covid response has been spectacularly bad, anyone who argues otherwise is a brainwashed idiot. If INC was in government some of the more megalomaniacal screwups might have been avoided. Lockdown wouldn't have been announced just hours before it went into effect for example. However, I don't see the overall results being much better. Be it Sanghis, Commies, Congressis or any flavour of regional satraps, I can't think of a single state government that actually did a halfway decent job.
      - lucian1900 5y ago
        Kerala did much better than other states in terms of a rational and effective response to covid.
pimterry 5y ago
Even if you accept "it must be completely impossible for students to access the internet during exam periods" as an important goal (it seems very extreme to me, but whatever) I'm astonished that cutting the entire country's internet off is the only way to achieve that. What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine. Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive. Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on phone masts near schools. Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody is using it - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=SY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access, and rapidly increasing.
- padastra 5y ago
  At some level of incompetence, you might ask whether the underlying assumptions are wrong -- for example, perhaps they're looking for excuses to reduce internet access more generally.
  - jl6 5y ago
    One could imagine a 365-day excuse calendar which provides a cover story for any time they want to shut down the internet. Today’s excuse is exams.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      This whole story belongs under April 1st sadly
  - _old_dude_ 5y ago
    It's like a fire drill. The government wants to desensitize people. They want people be to used to the fact that cutting internet is something mundane so the next time they do it because of a protest, nobody will care.
Tempest1981 5y ago
Government or no, the online-exam business is the hot new space that text-book companies are pivoting too. Teachers can use their service to grade student homework, and proctor (monitor) exams, complete with lockdown apps and eye-tracking via laptop cameras. Maybe these governments are effectively offering the same service.
naveen99 5y ago
Ironically, California is getting rid of the exams.
carschno 5y ago
I suppose exams of which answers are googleable are not very useful for anything other than pushing piles of facts (temporarily) into students' heads. But I also suppose that the Syrian governement is probably not the best counterpart to argue about progressive education methods with.
Off 5y ago
This happens here in Algeria too, when students pass the Baccalaureate exams, the Internet gets cut daily for a week from 8am to 5pm. It's been like this for 5 years now and nobody seems to care.
- andix 5y ago
  How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Something tells me that Algeria probably hasn't moved its entire social infrastructure online quite as aggressively as the US. Presumably there is still some offline telephony (POTS? Cellular service? SMS?) that functions to do almost everything that you listed. Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.
    - andix 5y ago
      Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed. From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.
      - Off 5y ago
        Sorry for the late reply, to answer your first question: How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID. Well, our economy isn't centered around the Internet that much, we have some variant of a local debit card called CIB and those cards aren't allowed to be used online to purchase goods or services, we can only use them to pay the bills and most people use them to withdraw money at the ATMs. Master Card and Visa debit cards are available but the fees are too high, and both have the same restrictions, they don't work when used online. Most orders are done in person, over the phone, via email, or using online stores and paying cash at the delivery. Also, most people use the CCP service of Algerie Post[0] to send and receive money nationally. Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed. If you've been to Tunisia and Morocco, the banking experience there is far better, they don't have restrictions on the cards. From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later. Not really, from what i know living here, we already had the infrastructure of phones before the democratization of the Internet, i remember using dialup modems to connect to the internet back in the 2000s. [0]: https://www.poste.dz/ https://www.poste.dz/
karmicthreat 5y ago
These super tests are dumb in any case. All it ends up measuring is who is most effective at cheating. The people that came up with this system probably wouldn't be able to pass it legitimately either.
- tester756 5y ago
  cheating on this kind of exams? good luck anyway, standarized exams are the best avaliable tool I wish there were exams like that after high edu in my country, just like some top schools in india do it (GATE Exam)
dang 5y ago
Since the more in-depth article hasn't been discussed on HN before, we've switched the URL to that from https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1405487207377522696 https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1405487207377522696.
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  Cheers!
627467 5y ago
People worry about government regulations to cryptocurrency adoption... This seems much more of a threat: trivially easy internet cutoff
FredPret 5y ago
This is like burning down the house because it has a spider in it, except it's not reasonable

146 points by jgrahamc 5y ago

What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period, say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look like? What kind of changes would we see? (provided, emergency services stay reachable).

grecy 5y ago
You could just ask your parents. If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.
- overcast 5y ago
  No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to the time before it. They are asking what would our "today" look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week. Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The problem is that a huge number of things that weren't dependent on network connectivity now are. Now, having said that, in many places in the US, stores were mostly closed on Sunday so it sort of was a "day of rest" in many places.
DicIfTEx 5y ago
The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls under the excluded ‘emergency’ category.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance, and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be open).
- ghaff 5y ago
  You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and do things before there was an Internet that they could connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or going somewhere.
  - resoluteteeth 5y ago
    Yes but I don't know if people would be willing to deal with those things now.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I don't know. Normally, I often get together with friends on a weekend day. We coordinate things beforehand via email but we mostly don't really need Internet otherwise.
viraptor 5y ago
> provided, emergency services stay reachable Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc... We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context. But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day. I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course, without breaking a sweat." But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    On the other hand, if we had started years ago regularly arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day, as apparently Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come to rely on the internet for so much basic infrastructure. I doubt buying gas is down in Syria when they shut down the internet. It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of society is dependent upon it.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      (and the other piece is, I doubt the US government has the ability to easily "shut down the internet" for a day -- at least I hope they don't, although they might, they shouldn't, and if they do it shouldn't be easy or expected. Cause they would definitely use that ability for nefarious ends).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sneak 5y ago
Many people would lose access to transportation of many different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs. Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
There’s nothing stopping people from taking a day off of the internet if they want. Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Still an interesting thought experiment.
- blfr 5y ago
  There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a market day in medieval towns.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    Without the internet it would be rather difficult to coordinate anything with others since you can’t contact them. I assume phone and sms is included in this blockout since they run over the internet now and could be used to build the internet from scratch if excluded.
lagadu 5y ago
No electronic payments? We'd see most people unable to pay for gas or food, huge economic impact from that alone. I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
I’d guess it’d be similar to how some European cities prohibit all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive. You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place. An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ISOC-PolicyBrief-Shutdowns-2019.pdf https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown. A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to be closed on Sundays. The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'. As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry. I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
  - dantheman 5y ago
    The local population does view it as inconvenient and many wish that things would be open. Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It was pretty normal in the US as well until a few decades ago. When I was an undergrad, very little in the city I lived was open on a Sunday. I remember it being a nuisance as an undergrad. I often had classes and other things to do during the week and often had sports on Saturday, so finding the time to do shopping runs during the week could be a pain. Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large retailers were in a better position to just add incremental staff than they were.
LinuxBender 5y ago
I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would applications improve their capabilities around caching, local processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as the "optimal" state but not required? What services are impossible to process locally? e.g. cache map data, road conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps.. purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism, etc...
swiley 5y ago
The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because that's what it's become.
tomjen3 5y ago
All websites that allows you to stream things would have a short term download feature. People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on. It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason. It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
stickfigure 5y ago
It would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway. "Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
jjk166 5y ago
Probably the same thing that would happen if we shut off electricity or running water for one day a month. There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
awb 5y ago
There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur there are places like that and people living a fully disconnected lifestyle. So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection. From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.

stewx 5y ago

How does cutting off Internet access across the board not dramatically hamper daily life and business? They must rely a lot less on it than we do in highly developed countries.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Nowadays there's a new meme in the form of "Tell me you're X without telling me you're X". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing it to the stone age).
ceejayoz 5y ago
The country has been in a brutal civil war for a decade now, with something like half the population displaced from their homes. Internet's probably not on the top of the list of things you count on.
- tbirdz 5y ago
  On the contrary, I think Internet access would be even more important in that kind of situation
  - hn8788 5y ago
    You can't eat internet access, or use internet access for shelter or self-defense, so it's probably not important for a lot of people.
    - tbirdz 5y ago
      No but you can use it to check news and current events, safety conditions, communicate with friends and family, and find information to help you survive better
    - bagacrap 5y ago

pranau 5y ago

This happens in North Indian states as well where the state governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting the same morons (I’m sorry but I do not have a charitable word for them) back into power.

unmole 5y ago
Because the other set of morons are not necessarily any better.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Ah yes, the evergreen complaint in Indian politics. No matter how bad the current government is, it’s supporters will claim the alternative is worse. Even when tens of thousands of people were dying because of COVID, people like this would say “abe librandu (hey libtard), if not Modiji then who?” Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
  - unmole 5y ago
    I'm not even remotely a BJP supporter, as my comment history will attest to. The union government's Covid response has been spectacularly bad, anyone who argues otherwise is a brainwashed idiot. If INC was in government some of the more megalomaniacal screwups might have been avoided. Lockdown wouldn't have been announced just hours before it went into effect for example. However, I don't see the overall results being much better. Be it Sanghis, Commies, Congressis or any flavour of regional satraps, I can't think of a single state government that actually did a halfway decent job.
    - lucian1900 5y ago
      Kerala did much better than other states in terms of a rational and effective response to covid.

pimterry 5y ago

Even if you accept "it must be completely impossible for students to access the internet during exam periods" as an important goal (it seems very extreme to me, but whatever) I'm astonished that cutting the entire country's internet off is the only way to achieve that. What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine. Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive. Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on phone masts near schools. Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody is using it - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=SY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access, and rapidly increasing.

padastra 5y ago
At some level of incompetence, you might ask whether the underlying assumptions are wrong -- for example, perhaps they're looking for excuses to reduce internet access more generally.
- jl6 5y ago
  One could imagine a 365-day excuse calendar which provides a cover story for any time they want to shut down the internet. Today’s excuse is exams.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    This whole story belongs under April 1st sadly
- _old_dude_ 5y ago
  It's like a fire drill. The government wants to desensitize people. They want people be to used to the fact that cutting internet is something mundane so the next time they do it because of a protest, nobody will care.

Tempest1981 5y ago

Government or no, the online-exam business is the hot new space that text-book companies are pivoting too. Teachers can use their service to grade student homework, and proctor (monitor) exams, complete with lockdown apps and eye-tracking via laptop cameras. Maybe these governments are effectively offering the same service.

naveen99 5y ago

Ironically, California is getting rid of the exams.

carschno 5y ago

I suppose exams of which answers are googleable are not very useful for anything other than pushing piles of facts (temporarily) into students' heads. But I also suppose that the Syrian governement is probably not the best counterpart to argue about progressive education methods with.

Off 5y ago

This happens here in Algeria too, when students pass the Baccalaureate exams, the Internet gets cut daily for a week from 8am to 5pm. It's been like this for 5 years now and nobody seems to care.

andix 5y ago
How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Something tells me that Algeria probably hasn't moved its entire social infrastructure online quite as aggressively as the US. Presumably there is still some offline telephony (POTS? Cellular service? SMS?) that functions to do almost everything that you listed. Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.
  - andix 5y ago
    Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed. From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.
    - Off 5y ago
      Sorry for the late reply, to answer your first question: How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID. Well, our economy isn't centered around the Internet that much, we have some variant of a local debit card called CIB and those cards aren't allowed to be used online to purchase goods or services, we can only use them to pay the bills and most people use them to withdraw money at the ATMs. Master Card and Visa debit cards are available but the fees are too high, and both have the same restrictions, they don't work when used online. Most orders are done in person, over the phone, via email, or using online stores and paying cash at the delivery. Also, most people use the CCP service of Algerie Post[0] to send and receive money nationally. Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed. If you've been to Tunisia and Morocco, the banking experience there is far better, they don't have restrictions on the cards. From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later. Not really, from what i know living here, we already had the infrastructure of phones before the democratization of the Internet, i remember using dialup modems to connect to the internet back in the 2000s. [0]: https://www.poste.dz/ https://www.poste.dz/

karmicthreat 5y ago

These super tests are dumb in any case. All it ends up measuring is who is most effective at cheating. The people that came up with this system probably wouldn't be able to pass it legitimately either.

tester756 5y ago
cheating on this kind of exams? good luck anyway, standarized exams are the best avaliable tool I wish there were exams like that after high edu in my country, just like some top schools in india do it (GATE Exam)

dang 5y ago

Since the more in-depth article hasn't been discussed on HN before, we've switched the URL to that from https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1405487207377522696 https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1405487207377522696.

jgrahamc 5y ago
Cheers!

627467 5y ago

People worry about government regulations to cryptocurrency adoption... This seems much more of a threat: trivially easy internet cutoff

FredPret 5y ago

This is like burning down the house because it has a spider in it, except it's not reasonable