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Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'
- create-username 2y agoHere, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that. Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
- somedude895 2y agoThat sounds insane! Do you have a source?
- joey_spaztard 2y agohttps://torrentfreak.com/laliga-blocks-cloudflare-again-new-pirate-iptv-providers-anything-in-the-way-250218/ https://torrentfreak.com/laliga-blocks-cloudflare-again-new-...
- oefrha 2y agoPreviously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157000
- nextts 2y agoAh the old misunderstood IP address. It's not a street address guys!
- sickofparadox 2y agoEven if it were, you still need to prove the person you are accusing is in the building!
- yard2010 2y agoThis is wild - thank you for the rabbithole
- briandear 2y agoI have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.
- nextts 2y agoWhy would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.
- matwood 2y agoStarlink does come back to earth often in the same country or region as the user. Then it would fall under all the same blocking.
- haneefmubarak 2y agoI imagine that the blocking is semi-voluntary by the local ISPs, not at a transit or peering level. Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
- generalizations 2y agoI think the relevant quote here is, "they can shake their fist at the sky".
- perihelions 2y agoSatellite internet isn't a philanthropy project. Whoever's selling it is operating a retail front in the client's country, running payment processing and delivering or shipping physical satellite dishes. Even if the satellite vendor is aligned with your interests (I'm not touching that third-rail topic)—if your government doesn't want you to have satellite internet, you won't have it. Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access. It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)", 225 comments) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)", 145 comments)
- mixermachine 2y agoTruly a case where VPNs do make sense.
- throwaway894345 2y agoIf they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.
- dylan604 2y agoAre you just stuck on it being a sports league? Just s/sports league/entity with lots of money/
- throwaway894345 2y agoNo, it's wild that any private entity has the legal censorship authority. My own country is catapulting into authoritarianism, but as far as I'm aware, we haven't gotten to the point yet where private entities are unilaterally disconnecting users from broad swaths of the Internet.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- VHRanger 2y agoVPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you. Apart from something like starlink and even then they're not playing nice with geographical access most of the time based on politics, whims of a narcissist, or just business.
- sebmellen 2y agoStarlink is the only massively global ISP and (as far as I’m aware) has not cut off access for anyone based on their politics or location.
- lenerdenator 2y agoI'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two. Like, we're impacting communications now.
- globular-toast 2y agoOr, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.
- outime 2y agoI know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
- globular-toast 2y agoYou're replying to a thread where people lose internet connectivity when a bunch of men are kicking a ball around a field.
- alexvitkov 2y agoThis has nothing to do with ipv4/ipv6 and the "ridiculous hacks" we do to keep ipv4 going. Those work just fine. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
- globular-toast 2y agoIf we want to use the internet as a communication network then we need peer-to-peer connectivity. We can't get than on IPv4. Resilience is pointless if everyone needs to connect to the same (few) middlemen before they can establish any kind of connection to a peer. It's no better than the old telephone system that needed an exclusive physical link between correspondents. We almost had this in the early 2000s, but then we regressed. People were excited about meshnets, when was the last time someone mentioned those? Too many people have forgotten and now many have been raised in this current form of the Internet thinking it's the only way. We need to think bigger. We need to push for IPv6 and basic internet connectivity (meaning ability to connect to any peer in the world) as a human right. Otherwise we build our lives around something that can be taken away on a whim over something as silly as grown men kicking a bladder around a field.
- crest 2y agoMaybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh
- dylan604 2y agoDid anyone actually ever attempt the faxing a piece of black construction paper on an old sheet fed fax machine where you tape the top to the bottom prank? Was that even possible, or just urban legend?
- mysteria 2y agoI've never heard of anyone making a paper roll with tape but I've definitely seen pranksters fax sheet after sheet of full black to waste paper and ink.
- wkat4242 2y agoHuh? I live in Spain and I've never had any issues with internet or any websites being cut off. I'm not sure when these matches are on though because I'm not interested in sports. Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.
- flkenosad 2y agoSpain could build thier own cloudflare.
- basisword 2y agoThought you must be exaggerating but after reading further I’m shocked. I know the courts can be a tech illiterate but why are the Spanish courts this bad? Surely they see the consequences of the decision and immediately realise it’s stupid? The UK can be pretty bad with this stuff and the Premier League is huge but I have no concern of something this idiotic happening here.
- phmagic 2y agoWhat are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
- theodric 2y agoDIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.
- nradov 2y agoHave WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
- simfree 2y agoMesh networks like https://guifi.net https://guifi.net have been reliably delivering internet longer than you have been a member of HN. There are many mesh networks with Autonomous Systems Numbers, peering at internet exchanges, etc. You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
- traceroute66 2y ago> You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully. Well, to be fair.... - Membership of most IXPs is not that expensive and the smaller port sizes are not that expensive - Many IXPs are moving to 10Gbps as the default port size (e.g. with a membership at LINX in London, you get your first default-size port for free, which is now 10Gbps at LINX). - If you are running an eyeball network (i.e. xSP, WISP etc.) then you might as well just buy bare-minimum IP transit and save your money for your peering point memberships, since most of your traffic will be going to the CDNs etc. all of whom have open-peering policies at IXPs, so why pay more than you need to ? - Moving to cynical-view territory, its a marketing expense ... become an IXP member, get a nice logo you can put on your website and give your salesdroids something to name-drop ....
- junaru 2y agoGiven how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoWhat? They don't block Internet because they want their people united. They do it because they are authoritarians who want to control every aspect of people's lives. India doesn't top the list of countries that cut Internet access because it's a haven of national unity, lol. It's probably a country more divided than any Western ones.
- ty6853 2y agoThe irony here is the government has little grip in much of central Africa. Militias roam the bush with little fear of law. Places like CAR are nations only because europeans drew it like that on a map. Killing the internet may be the only lever of control for the central government, they cannot control people's lives to nearly the extent is done in most the west. In places like the US they can just use one of the gazillion laws on the books to charge anyone, then send the police on any corner to get them. There is no need to kill the internet.
- h2zizzle 2y agoWe just had that whole Cliven Bundy thing happen a few years ago, no? Also, large swathes of the western US, Alaska, Appalachia, etc., are often difficult for authorities to access (at least quickly). It's important to be clear that the lack of government control in Central Africa has a lot to do with that same sort of geographic inaccessibility. There are whole countries in Asia that exist largely because of the difficulty of administering rugged frontier; the Amazon still exists largely because the Brazilian/Colombian/etc. governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
- pessimizer 2y ago
- MikeBenemorhbc 2y ago[dead]
- hello_computer 2y agoI blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.
- Acrobatic_Road 2y agowhat are you using to block entire geographical regions?
- hello_computer 2y agoit’s a secret
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoApps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether. The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
- api 2y agoMost of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.
- ironmagma 2y ago> stable I wouldn't be too certain about that.
- rbanffy 2y agoAt least not anymore
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIt would be fun to develop some kind of war games scenario where we see what we can make work in a less stable environment and make changes accordingly. Some kind of apocalypse conference or somesuch. I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.
- sofixa 2y agoBut if the app doesn't have internet access, how would it discover the others on that same partition? (Assuming it's a wholesale internet/specific domains being fully blocked). If your phone/computer can't contact Telegram's servers, it doesn't matter.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI imagine using bluetooth for peer discovery, so you find peers by sharing an elevator with them, or stopping at the same intersection, standing in line at the grocery store etc. Although the network would probably never converge entirely, it would drift approximately towards convergence as long as the gossiped dataset stayed small. The gossiped data would be: > My public key is ABCD1234... and the most recent CID of my data is DCBA9876... These devices need be on no other network at the time, just in range of each other. At other times when they're near a node on the larger network they offload their discovered peers and the consult their trust graph to see which peers (new or already known) are both trusted in some capacity (maybe transitively) and interested in the same topics/apps. In those cases, that data syncs to their mobile device, and apps which reference it update. This would work better if you dedicate some device somewhere to be permanently attached to a network node, but unlike what we're doing today there's no need for it to be maintained by the author of your apps. We can decouple those personas. If the device hosting your data ends up on another partition, you can dedicate a new device to the task without updating anyone, since nobody is hanging onto device identifiers anyway. Probably this just means leaving yesteryear's busted phone plugged in at home so it can be a cache for your data while the device in your pocket is offline. Your mobile device an update when it gets on the wifi. So now you've got users carrying around data which other users might be interested in (beyond the peer-finding data), and it's organized by topic/app, so when two peers are nearby which share an interest (perhaps on the behalf of their peers, transitively), they can directly sync heavier data as well. I think that attaching a wifi router to every delivery truck would get you most of the way there, since it could move the data between houses it's delivering to. This might mean network latencies measured in hours or days, which would be awkward, but at least it's never hard down because it never depends on the state of a unique server. Besides, if the partition-tolerant fallback works beyond a certain usability threshold then you've removed the incentive to disable the internet in the first place. Maybe I don't have the details perfect, but something like this is possible and I don't think the difficult part is getting the underlying protocol right. Rather it's getting the apps we rely on to also work under the fallback paradigm. The necessary shift is to get away from request/response architectures and towards pub/sub ones. Fewer unique server identifiers and more trusted user keys and predicates about the degree to which those users trust different content hashes.
- matt3210 2y agoSome might say the other countries should stay out of it. For example people might say Switzerland should stay out of those nations issues. However, if Switzerland provided technology thought a normal market or not, to the rulers, they have already interfered with the natural progression of that nation. There is no hope of the people making the situation better while Switzerland is providing the rulers with tech and they're keeping it from the people.
- fluoridation 2y agoThat's like saying that because the store sold you the belt you're using to beat your children, the owners should break into your house to physically stop you from doing so.
- rbanffy 2y agoIs the US still providing updates and spares for Ukraine’s airforce? Modern military aircraft depend a lot on software updates to stay operational.
- fluoridation 2y agoI fail to see the relevance.
- rbanffy 2y agoIt’s a passive kill switch. Not that we can rule out an active kill switch.
- dingnuts 2y agolots of people think gun manufacturers should be liable if the customer shoots someone so it's not like this is an argument without precedent
- GuinansEyebrows 2y agoIndividuals looking for belts and nation-states looking for networking equipment are not really the same thing… also belts don’t usually include service/maintenance contracts etc, or the ability to be revoked from the public at large (imagine the embarrassment)
- 4b11b4 2y agoThis should be an extremely high profile piece of news... Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"? Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..
- alephnerd 2y agoIn most countries, "curfews" are viewed as a justified legal construct. In most cases, internet shutdowns are clubbed with general curfews as well. You see this especially in most of the former British colonies listed that continue to use British Colonial Era legislation for Law and Order. You see this is South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar), and much of Africa (eg. Nigeria, Kenya) as well It's the classic "collectivist" versus "individualist" split, and it's something only individual countries can decide.
- bilbo0s 2y agoImagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"? The issue is that no one would care. There are children being sold into sexual slavery and you don't get that kind of reaction. You're definitely not going to get it because some random InstaSnapTwit in Nigeria can't get his fart app to work.
- oefrha 2y agoDid you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.
- pc86 2y agoThese things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets. That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.
- jp42 2y agoInternet shutdown typically happens during riots/ violent protests. Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent. Though Starlink has to follow country's laws and actually shutdown the internet. Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country and they will find ways to enable the internet for protesters with starlink or some other ways.
- alephnerd 2y ago> Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent It still requires a radio transmitter. If push comes to shove, a government can still track RF leakage or worst case GPS jamming (if it's really that existential). Iran did the same thing when cracking down on Satelite TV and SatPhones during the crackdown of the Green Revolution (anti-Ahmedinijad protests in 2009) and anecdotally, Starlink terminals have been increasingly unstable in Iran. I also vaguely remember a DIUx RFS within the past year for startups working on minimizing RF leakage from terminals.
- bilbo0s 2y agoA lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering. It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."
- alephnerd 2y ago> A lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering. Because they most likely didn't. On a separate tangent, I HATE how most CS majors can get a CS degree without even learning basics about electronics engineering or even computer architecture. It's a shame because a lot of the craft used in DSP and RF Engineering has direct applications in ML (much of ML is itself a fork of Information Theory which started off as a DSP subfield)
- protocolture 2y agoStarlink just transmits to a ground station thats 99% of the time in the same country. Its not some magical space internet, its just regular internet bottled and delivered by satellite. RF is really where this discussion needs to be, you and your mate jim can set up a bunch of UBNT hardware and create your own intranet really god damn easily. No reliance on some guy who signed on to all your governments internet censorship laws.
- Synaesthesia 2y agoInternet has become an essential right up there with housing, electricity, water etc. Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.
- bilbo0s 2y agoUm. Yeah. The internet is important. But if you go some places in this world you learn in a very swift fashion that it is not as important as housing, food, and water. There's parts of the world that are not a fairy tale. Places where people have far more basic worries. That said, if there are parts of Africa where people want the luxury of internet, they should, of course, be allowed access. The mere fact that they want it is an indication that they are in a relatively well off area.
- ty6853 2y agoCounterpoint: in the third world some 3rd rate shack with a shitty well or water source may often come 'free' as it stays in the family. I have seen people in the third world blow most their paycheck on phone and internet related charges since food/water/shelter may cost a villager in a farm basically nothing and the internet is entertainment and communication for a whole month.
- bilbo0s 2y agoIf they had access to internet, you weren't in the parts of Africa I'm talking about. There is a difference between undeveloped, developing and developed. You go to an undeveloped place, you wouldn't be worried about phones or internet access. You just accept that you're going to be off the grid for the duration of your stay in that village. Alternatively, you bring your communications equipment with you so that you can stay in touch with your, "base", for lack of a better term. But I can tell you right now, that equipment better not be dependent on internet access.
- ty6853 2y agoWell yes in places with no internet access people don't buy internet, but it's a bit tautological. People who survive by subsistence but come upon hard money somehow, in some place with towers, I have personally seen them blow a whole month pay on phone credits and it wasn't uncommon.
- bmitc 2y agoI thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...
- CSMastermind 2y agoI don't want to be dependant on Starlink (or any one provider) for internet. I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.
- bmitc 2y agoI was being sarcastic in case it wasn't clear. I agree with you.
- benced 2y agoThis is especially notable when you consider African states are bad at basically everything you'd expect a state to be able to do but are apparently very capable of this.
- mywittyname 2y agoBlocking internet access is pretty simple thing to do, especially compared to something like building and maintaining a bridge.
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- jaco6 2y ago[dead]
- gooboo 2y ago[flagged]
- gunian 2y agobetween tribalism genocidal maniacs that torture ppl and five eyes divide and conquer you kind of have to lol