12 ms·
Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests
- einpoklum 2y agoMaybe they just had Crowdstrike installed at some of their Internet exchange control machines? :-\
- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- m0rissette 2y ago/me goes back in the trans closet
- xeromal 2y agoCultural tendencies turned out to be a pendulum when we assume it was a linear progression.
- throwaway5752 2y agoBecause it's easier than it has ever been to be a fascist, that's why. Fascism is lives on xenophobia, ignorance, and inequality. It is aided by being able to control the flow of information and manipulate people's emotions. The last several decades of attacking wealth redistribution has created the inequality, and what we've built with social media is essentially a Fascism toolkit. AI advancements are getting better and better about keeping people angry and irrational. All it takes is the backing of several smart, sociopathic wealthy people and the right figurehead; most people are more amoral than they'd admit and will go with the flow.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> The last several decades of attacking wealth redistribution has created the inequality This isn't true on the face of it. Redistribution wouldn't be on the populist agenda if inequality didn't exist. It's like saying that anti-vax people created the disease in the first place.
- hd4 2y agoWeaponization of the monetary system.
- talldayo 2y agoBut the US dollar has always been weaponized
- onetokeoverthe 2y ago[dead]
- BurningFrog 2y agoThey've always been around, and I think the trend is still towards more democracy and freedom cross the world. That doesn't make the news though.
- dylan604 2y ago> we might even see the rise of a Christian fanatic government. you mean another one. the church has been in charge for large chunk of history.
- sph 2y agoReal talk: blame social media algorithms keeping us into our echo chambers. They are unable to show you a mixed and impartial slice of the world, but if you one day click on topic X, they'll keep recommending related topics until all you see is topic X. All you see is people talking about topic X, they become viral and spread even further. We, through naivety and greed, made the internet this way. It's not gonna get better any time soon, now that politics, social media and news keep feeding from themselves in a spiral of polarisation. I am not familiar with that part of the world, but the relative neighbour of Bangladesh, Myanmar, has seen massive genocide and devastation thanks to hate campaigns that spread like wildfire thanks to Facebook a few years ago, while the fat cats in Silicon Valley in their ivory towers were totally oblivious first, and incapable later of dealing with it, while tens of thousand died and hundred of thousands fled as refugees. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://youtu.be/K8B0bWO9u3M?si=x2WYJ_kGoipr6WWF https://youtu.be/K8B0bWO9u3M?si=x2WYJ_kGoipr6WWF
- jamal-kumar 2y agoI think it's worth noting why this is happening. The country has been giving out degrees and jobs to people who instead of working and studying hard, to descendants of veterans in the country's war against pakistan, and this level of nepotism has been going on since the 70s which as you can easily imagine is not great for those who see the value in getting these "basic livelihood for hard work" things. So when people started protesting recently, because for anyone with half a brain this is completely wrong, the people without half a brain who benefit from this completely fucked system responded by killing and raping students and now there's no internet. This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent people very fast by the way.
- esafak 2y agoPeople who run a country into the ground are happy to maintain the status quo as long as they're getting their share? Who knew!?
- bilbo0s 2y ago[flagged]
- esafak 2y agoIt can happen to any country. I do not suggest Bangladesh is special.
- snowpid 2y agoThough I like your humbleness, there are more countries and visitors on HN from other countries than the USA and Bangladesh.
- mschuster91 2y agoWell... the UKs Tories have been a corrupt shitshow for the last decade. Germany's President Steinmeier was involved in the Murat Kurnaz mess (an Afghani dude wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo), the Chancellor in the Cum Ex tax-cheating scandal, and the opposition parties are taking lessons from Trump in rhetoric tactics. Italy's government is composed of a literal post-fascist party whose youth openly glorifies Mussolini, and then you got the legacy of Europe's most corrupt and creepy politician (Berlusconi). No matter where you look, corruption and unpunished scandals galore in the West. And the general public doesn't care.
- sbdaman 2y agoThere is also a widespread cellular outage. It's very, very difficult (near impossible) to reach anyone in the country right now.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chad1n 2y agoI've talked with a guy from Bangladesh over the last 3 days and he said that he was at a party and he was about to be killed, so he stopped going and started filming how other students are being beaten by local police. The fact that the government blocked the internet is pretty sad and I wish that no more people die.
- arrowsmith 2y ago> he was at a party and he was about to be killed I feel like your story is really missing some details.
- hackerlytest 2y agoSome context: Students are protesting to reform the quota system. Which was abolished in 2018 after protest but recently brought back again. The Quota system basically reserves 56% of public sector jobs, i.e. 30% to relatives of war veteran. The war happened in 1971. To get public job and avail the quota, it must be their 3rd or 4th generation now. Which is plain unfair. But it’s not about that, the gov loyalists and their goons fake these veteran certificates to land these jobs. Bangladesh is one of the most corrupted countries in the world after all. So real veteran relatives are seldom the beneficiary. These students just wanted to reform this system. But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.) This was completely unprovoked and unnecessary. Basically any forms of dissent have been dealt with this way since 2009. No one can criticize or protest the big brother. We have a dictatorship since 2009. People are angry - due to corruption, inflation, joblessness and tyranny. This is just some outburst of it. When you see the videos how the police are killing teenagers and university students in the road - our future generation - no one can tolerate this. Now the fascist gov has closed all internet and phone connection to outside world. I can't contact my family anymore. I don't know their well being. There is of course more to it. But this is the summary.
- xeromal 2y agoThank you for the information. I'm sorry for you and your family. Are public jobs so numerous that a lot of people survive off of them?
- geodel 2y agoNope. It won't be numerous but grab whatever of the tiny pie is the point. I am from neigboring country but situation is same for jobs. For 10 govt job, 10K people can show up and create riot like situation in little time.
- csomar 2y agoI think it's more about justice than the number of jobs or whether you get it or not. Many people will be happy when they perceive that a fair process has been established in granting these jobs. Especially when income is hard to come by.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoNews from yesterday Related article for some context: https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-total-internet-shutdown-amid-student-protests-235907085.html https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-t... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TulliusCicero 2y agoI wish the protestors all the best. Sad that this kind of situation is happening.
- TyrianPurple 2y agoWhen governments do such things, expect bad results. The protesters' demands aren't unreasonable at all. Just be meritocratic in civil service appointments.
- InitialLastName 2y agoYep, it's easy. Just flip the "off" switch on the privilege structure that a huge chunk of the people who operate your society benefit from (and expect their children to benefit from). What could possibly go wrong?
- im3w1l 2y agoIt's not so obvious to me. I think it's easy for a rich country to just "solve" security by throwing money at fancy gear, but these poor countries they must have some way of incentivizing people to die helplessly in a ditch. Handing out privileges to relatives is one such way. There is some similarity to the system of nobility. Although this seems to give lesser privileges but to more people compared to that. Now what these protests reveal is that similar to the warriors of the past, these protestors are willing to risk death for these privileges. This suggests a pragmatic solution, that instead of abolishing the privilege, they could offer a path for these protestors to also be granted it. This could redirect their youthful energy and ambition into more useful avenues. </armchair>
- frabjoused 2y agoIf this can happen, can you imagine if the Internet was centralized?
- elashri 2y agoInternet is quasi centralized already. An outage or intentional disruption by a couple of companies under US Jurisdiction can disrupt global internet. Yes you would still have some clustered connections here or there but most of internet infrastructure is almost centralized already.
- hdhshdhshdjd 2y agoWe’ve got three operating systems, three giant cloud providers, and a near monoculture of browser engines. It’s not great, even if it could be worse.
- duxup 2y agoTelecom providers of various kinds are responsive to governments so I'm not sure that it "isn't" centralized as far as the ability for bad people to do these things goes.
- TheRealPomax 2y agoRather than an outage, this is a national internet kill switch being used to deny the population access to information and the ability to organize. Because the supreme court reinstated a law that reserves a whopping 30% of all government jobs to only people with family members who fought in a war 50 years ago. As anyone could have trivially predicted, that doesn't sit well with the entire generation that's currently in school and hoping to actually, you know, get a job in the next few years.
- fragmede 2y agolooking at https://outage.ant.isi.edu/ https://outage.ant.isi.edu/ it seems Europe is having a bad day too
- jheidemann 2y agoIn https://outage.ant.isi.edu https://outage.ant.isi.edu, one should look at the circle colors, not just sizes. Circle colors indicate the fraction of networks (technically: /24 IPv4 newtork prefixes) that are down, and in Bangladesh, the hard red means nearly 100% are unreachable. While Europe has many circles and therefore some networks are down, because they are blue that means it's only a few that are unreachable. Europe has many, many networks.
- trompetenaccoun 2y agoWhat's the explanation for what's going on in Europe though? Is that the regular state of their network?
- rbax 2y agoHas there been any indication from NetBlocks how they think the government is blocking internet access? I can still see subnets being announced from Bangledesh associated providers. AS 17494 AS 38592 AS 136246 AS 152304 AS 24323
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoThere's a Crowdstrike joke in there...
- worstspotgain 2y agoFascism, CrowdStriking since 1922.
- oxqbldpxo 2y agoIs this how an Ai take over or state sponsored cyber attack would look like?
- spencerchubb 2y agoIt is a state sponsored cyber attack. It doesn't just look like one
- neets 2y agoIs this just practice for September?
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396
- workfromspace 2y agoWarning: recursion
- kkaahh 2y agoThis protest, which started peacefully is currently the consequence of absolute mishandling and mismanagement by the government that resulted in close to 100 being shot dead by the police. The current protest is not about the quota system anymore. It is the result of the systematic breakdown of social and economic opportunities that stems from years of corruption and favouritism within every sect of the economy.
- logicchains 2y agoIs meshnet technology currently feasible/cheap enough that it could be used to work around an internet shutdown in a country with very high population density like Bangladesh?
- jillesvangurp 2y agoYou would need to educate the masses first on how to use this stuff. And you end up sort of carrying an active beacon around. Which probably isn't a great strategy if you want to hide in plain sight of people empowered to just shoot you on sight. Most phones don't have a huge range in any case. So, covering a wide area with a mesh network would be very vulnerable against repression. Just take out all the nodes that you can detect. If your phone picks them up, the suspect is within line of sight probably. Technology has very few answers to repressive regimes like this. Mostly people get afraid and refrain from using the things that might get them in jail and self police. That also breeds trust issues. The DDR regime ultimately got children to rat out their relatives. Modern repressive regimes are learning from each other as well when it comes to identifying and neutralizing pockets of resistance. The Bangladesh playbook was perfected by the Chinese, Iran, Myanmar, etc. Usually those regimes only end when people get hungry and angry enough. As long as you keep the economy going, regimes can last a long time. And of course North Korea perfected the art of repressing a starving nation. So even that is not a show stopper. We're not at zero risk of regressing into living under oppressive regimes like that. I live in Germany where the scars of communism and fascism are still very visible. It only takes some rogue fools to win an election to roll back the clock a century.
- ianburrell 2y agoMesh doesn’t have the bandwidth. You would be sending a whole country over a wireless link. Multiple wireless links. Even with some special point to point links, you can’t beat fiber. The other problem would be how to do the routing. The world sends the IP addresses to routers which are disconnected. Network is centralized so all the packets from country go to the router. Would have to VPN, which the whole country would have to install.
- Foofoobar12345 2y agoA friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn’t yet have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2 weeks of poor internet for everyone. Bangladesh as such has a severe lack of capital, and rebuilding all this is costly. Ideally protests should be peaceful. But along with protestors, we tend to unleash anarchists who just want to watch the world burn. They also have rival political parties who clearly use this situation to their advantage. All is not what it seems. Truth is whatever you believe. I hope for a swift restoration of law and order, followed by productive dialogue. And for the love of god, let’s not condone setting things on fire. That will destroy innocent lives and what little financial security they have built.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago> Ideally protests should be peaceful. Other people in the thread are saying that Bangladesh is a dictatorship, and security forces are killing people for protesting. Just to be clear, if that's the case, violence against the state is entirely justified. There is nothing morally wrong about rebelling against autocracy, in fact, it's quite a good thing.
- Foofoobar12345 2y agoIt’s easy to encourage this when there’s nothing at stake. I personally have friends and family who are trapped and fear violent protestors as much as violent police. And when the protests die down in a few days or weeks, there will be even fewer jobs. And the attacks aren’t against the state but against the people as well.
- lostlogin 2y agoWhere is the line? Who people support and who a company supports all becomes relevant in a civil war. Quite how this gets resolved is beyond me - the west has been quite happy to enjoy products from sweat shops, so is probably complicit.
- floxy 2y agoAnyone know more about Starlink availability in Bangladesh? I see there were some news articles last year mentioning trials. And the prohibitive cost to the locals.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoMy friends are mostly Bdesh expats at this point. I wonder how dangerous it would be to setup a link from Bdesh into India. It would be a useful lifeline. Best wishes for the students and the people of Bdesh, but the stuff we were seeing as late as yesterday on Twitter was ugly. I hope those that can are using their mobiles to take proof.
- dyauspitr 2y agoThe last thing India wants is Bangladeshi refugees. I mean the Modi government is actively in the process of trying to expel the Muslim Bangladeshis that came in the 1970s.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoSorry when I meant link I specifically meant a network link. A way to route net traffic out of the country. It wouldn't be too hard given how far the outskirts of Dhaka are from the West Bengal border and plenty of Indian Bengalis have ties in Bangladesh.
- AlexDragusin 2y agoIf you need visuals of the flatlining here it is: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bd https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bd
- observationist 2y ago"Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle coverage and online engagement with police killings at student protest" Calling things what they are instead of tortuously passive and neutral descriptions should be standard. The headline sounds like it's describing two separate things that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at the same time.
- bobthepanda 2y agoHeadlines are usually written like this to avoid libel suits. Even if you have a defensible case it’s quite expensive to go through the motions of a lawsuit.
- observationist 2y agoBangladesh is going to sue US journalists in a US court for accurate headlines? I'd love libel suits from hostile authoritarian regimes, personally. For a journalism organization, that would seem to be a badge of honor. Something is deeply wrong if you have to essentially lie on behalf of the bad guys or risk significant financial penalties.
- bobthepanda 2y agoNot the US, but this actively happens pretty frequently in the UK, which is often just as financially damaging. https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-libel-privacy-law-defamation-westminster/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-libel-privacy-law-defamat...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 2y agoDoes Starlink work in Bangladesh?
- pkaye 2y agoFrom what I read it got approved but their government last year but Star Link plans were to make it available next year. But it likely need a ground station which could still be blocked by the government.
- anigbrowl 2y agoGiven the prevalence of this sort of thing in authoritarian countries, it's disappointing that mesh networking apps like Briar and Firechat are not more well-resourced/ developed/ promoted. Popular messaging platforms like Signal, WeChat, and Telegram offer a blend of convenience and security (different apps having different priorities, eg Telegram prioritizes the former over the latter), but they're all vulnerable to internet shutdowns, which instantly dissolves any online community trying to coordinate. Mesh networks are generally slower and less reliable for large-scale data transfer as well as less secure by virtue of their distributed nature, but are more resilient in the event that natural/ social disasters take down communications infrastructure. Even janky analog radios work better.
- dang 2y agoI changed the URL from https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/112808500770031751 https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/112808500770031751 after getting this email from a user: If you figure the event is significant enough to be on the front page, isn't something about the event itself more appropriate? as opposed to a tweet about the network being down as stand-in That seems like a good point. I hope it doesn't context-shift the comments too much (I'm in a meeting atm and don't have time to check.)
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIt is really odd to me that Bangladesh even exists as a nation, and that it is an officially Islamic nation. This country was formed as a result of the partition of India, where the British empire left a mess on their way out by subdividing India into what is now Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. But really these countries should be recombined into India - their status as religious ethnostates is unacceptable in the modern world and given that Islam came to the region through brutal genocidal invasions by Arabs in the Middle East, it seems strange to give those colonizing invaders their own land and ethnostate. Pakistan and Bangladesh have also been messy throughout their existence, and continually on the brink - as current conditions show.
- vinnyvichy 2y agoMostly under the (non-)guidance of one Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the one described as "every inch the King". https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/25/1/89/151/Generations-of-Memory-Remembering-Partition-in https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/25/1/89/151/Gene...
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI am not very familiar with the backstory here. Are you saying one person pushed for this? I assumed it was a purposeful strategy of the crown, for a departing colonizer (Britain) to weaken a former vassal state that might otherwise seek revenge for hundreds of years of colonial rule.
- vinnyvichy 2y agoHe didn't push for this, but he was tasked to see Partition through, and he bungled the job, hence "non- guidance". Maybe no fault of his, but you can get a deeper nuance of the larger issues at play by thinking about how he personally could have otherwise done an okay job. Taking the maxim to not assume malice to its pedantic conclusion. Plus, it's easier to think about a constrained space of individual actions and intentions even if the wider politics are so complex. At that moment in time, Mountbatten was perhaps the personification of the Crown (and he would have known it)
- stonethrowaway 2y ago[flagged]
- throwawaybd 2y agoI am here to give context, in as much unbiased way as I can. Bangladesh started its journey as East Pakistan in 1947 after breaking away from India. Pakistan's political upper echelon were dominated by Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis. And it siphoned all resources and wealth of East Pakistan to West, and treated it as its colony. Bangladesh, or EP was more populous and more resources-rich. But it suffered under WP. Now, after a massive cyclone and loss of thousands of lives with millions homeless and uprooted, WP rulers did not come to aid. And, in an unrelated way, a Bengali politician was to be elected Prime Minister for whole of Pakistan. But WP elites didn't want that. In this time, WP rulers wanted to eradicate Bengali, the mother tongue of EP, the more populous fraction of population and impose Urdu. Bangladeshi people revolted taking the issues of election, cyclone, and language simultaneously. Protests started peacefully. But WP rulers used military for genocide and massacre. Tens of thousands of women were gangraped, raped and killed. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and tortured- many students and intellectuals. Hindus were the main target, but they didn’t spare Bengali Muslims either. So, a war of independence ensued, and rebels become victorious. India engaged in a war with Pakistan and won that war, too. Now, there was a small but non trivial part population of EP supported the WP rulers in name of radical religion. They and their descendants are in current BD population, too. They are in political-religious org Jamat-e-Islami. Supported and allied by BNP. So, Sheikh Hasina, the current PM, was actually popular and won elections fairly in the beginning. But, she wouldn’t concede fair seats to opponents who were often pro-Pakistan but not always. In the name of national integrity and safety. In tandem, the ruling party became corrupt to the core, and its loyalists and cronies made bank in corruption. There is always consensus against the ruling party and the PM. And what began as a anti-quota protest, now has become a anti-establishment movement. The people protesting now are mostly normal people. But a significant portion are pro-Pakistan radical Islamist fundamentalist. But the rulers want to paint all of them as being pro-Pak, fundamentalists. This is how dissent was handled for the last 15 years. I have many friends in Bangladesh or who lived there. Now, ruler party's central policies are pro-minority. But, local partymen do perpetrate against minority. So, they have slowly become what they fought.
- rldjbpin 2y agothoughts and prayers to those caught up in this and i hope for a peaceful resolution. this should ring alarm bells for the other south asian neighbours who shared similar colonialism past. socialist policies for the marginalized several decades ago seems to always bite back when leaders don't bring out more opportunities and instead play with the politics of handing out favourable access. if some of these countries dream to call themselves developed in the future, they need to introspect whether you would need quotas and reservations after achieving it.
- onlyperson 2y ago[flagged]
- cute_boi 2y agoWhen Government bans internet, people should never vote for them. They are the most evil one and I think all country should get together and sanction them.
- rysertio 2y agoThe government rigs the elections here.
- bvan 2y agoI lived in BGD back in the 70’s, and the same two alternating dynasties still seem to have a hold on the country. Very sad.
- olsbkj 2y ago[dead]