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The Internet Politics

Internet Blackouts Skyrocket Amid Global Political Unrest (axios.com) 51

Where there's a coup, there will probably be an internet outage. From a report: Internet disruptions in Myanmar early Monday morning coincided with reports that top politicians, including the country's de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, were being rounded up by the military. That's no surprise: internet blackouts are now common around the world when power hangs in the balance. At least 35 countries have restricted access to the internet or social media platforms at least once since 2019, according to Netblocks, a group which tracks internet freedom. Authorities have used the outages to reduce or prevent unrest -- or to hide it from public view. Blockages are particularly common around elections in Africa, most recently in Uganda. Netblocks also reported disruptions in Russian cities during recent protests over the detention of Alexey Navalny. Neighboring Belarus also disrupted the internet during recent protests, as have countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe.
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Internet Blackouts Skyrocket Amid Global Political Unrest

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  • by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @12:48PM (#61019582) Homepage Journal

    I assume Comcast and Centurylink have been taking over small countries a lot recently.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      During a political unrest, infrastructure is usually the first to take a hit. America, Much of Europe, and countries with a strong rule of law and political succession planning, tend to handle political unrest without hitting the infrastructure side as hard.

      Say Your job is to make sure the Internet cables are maintained. You get paid directly or indirectly by the government. If such government is in shambles, the fact that you are doing work for what ever government that is currently paying the bills, m

  • Star link fixes this issue, if it is an issue and not a feature.
    • Re:Solution (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @01:31PM (#61019754)

      Kinda, however with Star Link, you will still need to be sure that you can get the equipment sent over to you. Also we need to be sure Companies like Space X get approval to launch into space. Also traffic will end back at terrestrial locations who are at the whim of local governments.

    • It does not.

      The reason why MOBILE DATA (and not internet in general) is being killed during protests is twofold:

      1. The protests are 99% organized over Telegram and Signal today. Shutting off mobile data AND WiFi in all coffee shops (as requested by the Russians last two weekends) effectively beheads the protest. They are wondering like zombies and do not know what to do.

      2. It makes impossible to stage standard brainwashing and indoctrination by doctoring police response videos especially in countries w

      • if there is a large band of people in close proximity, one would think that an app could be devised that could create an ad-hoc network among them. The phones support wifi after all.
        • by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
          I've never understood why this approach isn't more popular. If nothing else than for the sheer engineering/experimentation aspect of it. Maybe people would be skeeved out by the privacy concerns. But an interesting app would be:
          • Have simple ASCII named channels (a bit like USENET was structured).
          • Use both Bluetooth and 802.11 to find adjacent devices and sort by RSSI.
          • N-cast messages received on one path out to other interfaces (i.e. all nodes participate in forwarding).
          • Update the UI along the way to show
        • That does not solve the two main problems:

          1. How to get instruction from your handler abroad. 99% of the protests in Russia last week were run from Berlin. There were no local heads in most of the cities. All instructions were from abroad. As a result, clamping down on connectivity resulted in practically no protests where it was done.

          2. How to upload content about the protest in real time and take the narrative.

          You do not need mesh as there is little or no need to exchange data between the protesters

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @01:07PM (#61019654)

    The reasons for the coup.

    I mean no matter what one thinks of them. Any coup is a risky maneuver. So there had to be intense reasons, at least dom their point of view.

    Because right now, I cannot even freaking judge if this is nutjobs seeing evil where there was none because of some induced ideology (like religion), or maybe the government was not nice and actually a foreign puppt government doing horrible things, ... and I do not like jumping on any bandwagon without that info whatsoever!

    Yes, I will look it up.
    But this complaint is about how this crucial info is conveniently completely left out in the "news".
    Nobody just revolts without reason. What happened?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Boiled down synopsis: Used to be completely military controlled. With Aung San Suu Kyi in power, the military's influence on the country was being balanced on a knife-edge while attempting to allow Suu Kyi to carry on her duties. Then there was a huge landslide election victory for Suu Kyi's political party, which lead the military to believe they were being forced out of power altogether. They rallied and took Suu Kyi and other party members hostage rather than cede what power they have left, and have n

  • Every time the internet goes down: "OMG the boog is finally kicking off!"

    A->B: coup -> shutdown
    ! B->A: shutdown -> coup

    Sadly, however, we will probably continue to have massively terrible internet thanks to the huge amounts of red tape that make running new lines very expensive.

  • Myanmar, Uganda, and of course our favorite foul Russia. Are the slashdot populist dare to mention the internet block out by the world's largest democracy and a new US ally in its fight against China [theconversation.com]?

    • Good preventative move actually. One of the more interesting aspects of the FIRST weekend of the protests in Russia, namely the protests 23rd of January was TikTokers riding the protest to collect video material for influencer videos. Exhibit A: Our great liberal light newspaper, the Guardian promoting the brave protesters raining snowballs on the horrible Vlad Henchmen: https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]

      Minor problem, not protesters, TikTok crews including one led by a well known TikToker going under the

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Facebook and Twitter are actively manipulating voters by supressing stories that doesn't help their guy.
  • The coordinated takedown of posts related to organizing, misinformation, and apps like Parler where organizing is suspected is the norm in the US, unless the companies are listed on the stock market for a half billion dollars and have close working relationships with the FBI. There is a hundred times worse action and organizing done in other countries right on the big tech boys websites but these American companies don’t speak the language well so don’t moderate as well or at all. Other countrie
    • There is a hundred times worse action and organizing done in other countries right on the big tech boys websites but these American companies don’t speak the language well so don’t moderate as well or at all.

      1. Machine translation is more than good enough for this nowdays.

      2. Most countries have watchdogs and laws nowdays. Facebook simply ignores them and fits everything to our own narrative. Ditto for Twitter. TikTok is an interesting oddball here, because it seems to care only about money and does not give a shit about illegal content if it makes any. Not sure that this is sustainable - India will be joined by others at this rate.

      • Machine learning only works with real human oversite and control. Let's say you had a complete hands off approach. You just let machine learning ban things that were flagged the most. This is obviously easily abused. At minimum you need someone deciding what should and shouldn't be banned. Machine learning didn't decide that all posts mentioning the US election on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter would all get 'disputed,' 'false,' or 'for more information' tags. Machine learning had zero idea it needed to put
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Actual coups and blackouts, not just hype and hysterics from bored kids and CNN.

  • Here in the US (Score:1, Interesting)

    by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
    Here in the US when a coup happens they simply ban you from Twitter and Facebook.
    • and weirdly it seems to work.

      R.I.P. Parler - we barely knew thee. You were far less radical and vile than 4chan but couldn't manage to stay up for two years. People will have to find other back alleys of the Internet to talk about the best rifle caliber and other inane bullshit.

    • by khchung ( 462899 )

      Here in the US when a coup happens they simply ban you from Twitter and Facebook.

      Because Twitter and FB are only willing to do that for coup in the US.

      For any other country, they won't do shit and the only option for their government is to either blackout the whole Internet, or completely block Twitter and FB.

      • by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
        The only way for us (the world) to win (collectively) is to stop using Twitter and Facebook. Their ad revenue is how to hurt them. Fewer eyeballs means less revenue.
  • I've always thought that if the US was serious about propagating free communication, it should airdrop satellite phones/tablets or satellite wifi+4G solar hubs in all those asshole countries. With a free pornhub account on top for islamic countries !
  • While in the more advanced US, blackouts have been perfected to only target unapproved speech.

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