A Broken Undersea Cable Knocked Mauritania Offline For Two Days, Affected Another Five Nations (fortune.com) 36
The West African nation of Mauritania lost all internet access for 48 hours due to an undersea cable break, according to infrastructure analysts. From a report: The break, which took place a couple weeks ago, provides a reminder of how much internet users rely on the cables that connect their countries. According to Dyn, the Oracle-owned internet performance firm, the African Coast to Europe (ACE) cable was cut near Noukachott in Mauritania on March 30. It's not clear what caused the break, but six countries entirely rely on that one cable for their connectivity, and all -- Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and the Gambia -- saw a big impact. The impact in Mauritania was the worst, with its two-day outage, while Sierra Leone also had big problems. The latter country also had a big outage on April 1, but that may well have been down to government action -- African governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access, particularly around election time or during periods of unrest.
Time to think about redundant access (Score:2)
Really. If it's critical, you have have two internet access points, at least.
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Why do you think a government can only do one thing at a time?
It would be inefficient to allocate 100% of government resources to working on the literacy rate. As there are people, smart people, who will not be good at that topic, but would be good at making a better internet infrastructure for their country.
Also better internet can help with general literacy, as still the primary form of communication is via written word.
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Because it's the polite way to address them. .ms domain" ;)
".mr domain, meet
Russian 'research vessels' (Score:2)
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Intelligence-based TLA: "Sorry, about that. Our engineers thought they had finished installing our MIM, but they missed a step in their post-op checklist. Don't worry though, nothing to see here, business as usual."
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Anything is possible of course, but if you want a best guess..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Binney is one of the real guys. The guys who've been penetrating all the networks are from the US not Russia.
Notorious, right (Score:4, Informative)
While some (third-world mostly, not only African) governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access during key periods, it's becoming clear that many types of political and commercial organizations, be it in evolved or developing nations, and even entities not associated with government, are becoming proficient in interfering with citizens's internet use - through internet access (e.g. corporate interests from ISPs such as net neutrality), unfair use of information (such as targetted ads), or flat out privacy and freedoms violations (such as Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, IRIS, etc etc). There's absolutely no need to single out African Nations' Governments, since it has become a widespread practice.
At least in African nations things are a lot more transparent - a relevant number of even the most illiterate citizens will see through internet downtime on pre-election days as something planned, and that will, hopefully, affect their voting decision.
The worst kind of influence is the one we don't comprehend, or even get to see. And that's only becoming obvious now thanks to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it's been here in some form even before internet times, through media, censorship, marketing and lobbying. The only common denominator is that it always emanates from entities with poor ethics and morality.
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I understand perfectly the African internet access problem, which as you state, does exist and by itself hampers development on what are, supposedly, developing nations. I work on a for-profit research which has projects targeting better internet access in Africa - we make hardware that attempts to deploy back-haul-like technology on a smaller scale so that it becomes cheaper to repeat signals from town halls and other central structures to village periphery. Of course other problems come from further up th
Not just African governments that are doing this (Score:1, Flamebait)
Yea. You may want to take a look closer to home, subs. Western governments have been in on this for some time.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/ar... [sfgate.com]
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Cue the idiots (Score:3, Informative)
Cue the idiots who mention a wireless tech.
Guys, this is not hard. The undersea cables connect countries because it's more expensive to go over land, and in some cases the land doesn't exist, or is in politically unstable locations.
Like an undersea cable between the US and Asia, has redundancy, but a cable between two African nations? Nope. Go look at the map.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
The only African country with redundant cables is South Africa, connected by both the west and east. Everything South of Keyna on the east side and Gabon on the West side has two.
The only less connected region is Alaska.
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Maybe there was originally one for blankes and one for the kaffers?
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We have those morons here in Australia.
A National Broadband Network rolled out, intended to be fibre and the neanderthals suggested "wireless will beat fibre in 10 years anyhow, you're wasting money!!"
I won't deny, 4G USB dongles, did end up doing better than I expected them ever capable, in both speed and download quota offered, but vs Fibre? Future proofing? These idiots opinions should be relegated to the trash sadly.
Unfortunately, everyone has an opinion on something, even those who aren't technically s
LEO Satellites (Score:1)
Perhaps low Earth orbit satellites are a good idea, after all. Except, of course, for that next devastating solar flare.