Just tangentially related to the topic at hand, but I have a question to ask HN.
The main trans-Pacific cable connection between Vietnam and the US tends to be damaged several times a year (3<n<10 is my guess), which severely slow downs any connection to the outside of Vietnam during the time it is under maintenance. This always happens suspiciously during major political holiday (Independence day and the likes), so Vietnamese has just assumed that is a blatant censorship attempt. The wiki page has an outage section you can read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-America_Gateway , it doesn't list anything beyond 2018, but the situation is the same.
So my question is, how likely it is that the cable system are just really shitty? Or is the assumption of bald-faced censorship correct?
Undersea cable is pretty unreliable. Most major cables expect to break every few years.
Usually breaks are caused by humans (ships pulling anchors, sabotage/spying). Sometimes they're natural (caused by wildlife, ocean floor movement, flaws in the cable design).
Fixes usually take a few hours if they happen at the endpoints, or weeks if they happen somewhere under the ocean.
Interestingly, spying breaks always involve three simultaneous breaks in the cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in the middle to put spy equipment. They do this so the people operating the cable can't tell where the spy equipment was inserted, since otherwise you can tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes back to the end.
Using statistical methods, you can see how frequently you'd expect a cable to break at different points along it's length simultaneously, and it happens a lot more than raw chance would suggest.
> Most of the outages have been located at the intra-Asia segments between Hong Kong and Singapore, with most problems occurring in the Vietnam section, while the segment between Hong Kong and the Philippines seems to have fewer problems. The segments between the Philippines and the United States are quite stable.
If you can go thousands of miles across the Pacific and be "quite stable", and a shallower, shorter run through similar ocean floor and ship traffic conditions between HK and the Philippines suffers fewer outages than one to Vietnam, yeah, censorship seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.
I have Viettel fiber and I very rarely feel the effects of cable disruptions. Most times I wouldn't even notice until someone complains about it on an expat or neighborhood group.
This is less the case for people using other providers.
Kind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a "superpower" country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue.
FB might have just opened Pandora's box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.
If you look at the history of Facebook it becomes clear that they don't care about morals at all.
It's just about money, if upholding moralic aspects does profit then through a better image and more trust they will do so. If it doesn't cost them much they might still do so. But the moment it affects their profit they will not do so, through they might pretend they hadn't had a choice or similar.
Facebook obeys the law everywhere it is enforced. Some laws are better than than others.
Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like
Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.
I'm a little surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Various countries, groups, and, probably, individuals have a big say in what you see returned as search results on Google, what's available on YouTube, and more. Until, possibly, very recently, Pakistan had veto power over what Google was allowed to show on YouTube—and not just in Pakistan.
Well, that explains it. I've been using FB on VPN for more than a month until last week. At the time I thought that the outages were due to increased traffic - perhaps they were routing locally and hadn't provisioned enough resources. I wish they didn't buckle.
Internet has been all around wonky in the region lately. I'm in Cambodia but opennet routes through vietnam. Things like S3 buckets getting bps download speeds on the regular connection and jumping to mbps on vpn. Hours versus seconds of download time.
Nothing prevents shareholders to pursue ethical goals or at least make an ethical decisions once in a while. Somehow you assume their best interest necessarily is in conflict with morals or truth but I don't see it. Decision to implement unjust ruling is unusual. It's not surprising for Facebook to do so, I agree. But it's not a rule for a publicly traded company by a virtue of fiduciary responsibilities.
I hate that HN allows downvotes for disagreement rather than off-topic or non-sensical commenting. You make a good point. I'm reminded of the movie Avatar, "there’s one thing that shareholders hate more than bad press, and that’s a bad quarterly statement."
So shareholders are the problem. Let's abolish them and see what else interferes with good ethical choices and fix that and keep going. That's how things get better.
Politically, it's still an autocratic state, but economically the country has opened up to the global market since the 1980's, not unlike China.
> Human rights have long been a matter of much controversy between the Government of Vietnam and some international human rights organizations and Western governments, particularly that of the United States. Under the current constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only one allowed to rule, the operation of all other political parties being outlawed. Other human rights issues concern freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.
Vietnam is home to several ethnic minorities and a range of religions and beliefs. There haven been frequent regional tensions and uprisings over the past decades and Vietnam itself has also had disputes over borders with Cambodia and China right after the end of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam and Facebook have a rocky past, but Facebook is well embedded in Vietnamese society by now. For instance, it is a bedrock for small business owners as it allows them to escape restrictions which are enforced on street shops. So, it's a source of wealth, but at the same time, it irks authorities enough to create tensions.
So if Facebook pulls out of Vietnam, their economy is likely to suffer because of their own internal politics.
Sounds like another excellent reason to leave the country and refuse to support the regime until actual democracy is in place.
(Of course, you could say that argues that companies should leave the US now as well, but that's another can of worms.)
Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society, anywhere. And regardless of its spot benefits anywhere, it is still an overall negative influence.
[+] [-] NhanH|6 years ago|reply
So my question is, how likely it is that the cable system are just really shitty? Or is the assumption of bald-faced censorship correct?
[+] [-] londons_explore|6 years ago|reply
Usually breaks are caused by humans (ships pulling anchors, sabotage/spying). Sometimes they're natural (caused by wildlife, ocean floor movement, flaws in the cable design).
Fixes usually take a few hours if they happen at the endpoints, or weeks if they happen somewhere under the ocean.
Interestingly, spying breaks always involve three simultaneous breaks in the cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in the middle to put spy equipment. They do this so the people operating the cable can't tell where the spy equipment was inserted, since otherwise you can tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes back to the end.
Using statistical methods, you can see how frequently you'd expect a cable to break at different points along it's length simultaneously, and it happens a lot more than raw chance would suggest.
[+] [-] user5994461|6 years ago|reply
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541664/fishermen-pull...
Of course there are also accidental breakages and other things. That is to say there are many root causes, not necessarily intuitive.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|6 years ago|reply
If you can go thousands of miles across the Pacific and be "quite stable", and a shallower, shorter run through similar ocean floor and ship traffic conditions between HK and the Philippines suffers fewer outages than one to Vietnam, yeah, censorship seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.
[+] [-] netsharc|6 years ago|reply
Imagine if your job is to drive the tractor on the beach that would "chop" the cable up once or twice every year...
[+] [-] phonon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawngee|6 years ago|reply
This is less the case for people using other providers.
[+] [-] callamdelaney|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://texyt.com/vietnam+internet+cable+stolen+by+thieves+00...
[+] [-] piokoch|6 years ago|reply
FB might have just opened Pandora's box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.
[+] [-] blago|6 years ago|reply
For anecdotal evidence, I have been ordering food on FB every day for the last month. My wife is watching a life-streaming apparel sale as we speak.
[+] [-] dathinab|6 years ago|reply
It's just about money, if upholding moralic aspects does profit then through a better image and more trust they will do so. If it doesn't cost them much they might still do so. But the moment it affects their profit they will not do so, through they might pretend they hadn't had a choice or similar.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.
[+] [-] leephillips|6 years ago|reply
https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-af...
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blago|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnoizu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 908087|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuff4ben|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MiroF|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zentiggr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaptArmchair|6 years ago|reply
> Vietnam is a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic, one of the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politic...
Politically, it's still an autocratic state, but economically the country has opened up to the global market since the 1980's, not unlike China.
> Human rights have long been a matter of much controversy between the Government of Vietnam and some international human rights organizations and Western governments, particularly that of the United States. Under the current constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only one allowed to rule, the operation of all other political parties being outlawed. Other human rights issues concern freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam
Vietnam is home to several ethnic minorities and a range of religions and beliefs. There haven been frequent regional tensions and uprisings over the past decades and Vietnam itself has also had disputes over borders with Cambodia and China right after the end of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam and Facebook have a rocky past, but Facebook is well embedded in Vietnamese society by now. For instance, it is a bedrock for small business owners as it allows them to escape restrictions which are enforced on street shops. So, it's a source of wealth, but at the same time, it irks authorities enough to create tensions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-r...
[+] [-] zentiggr|6 years ago|reply
Sounds like another excellent reason to leave the country and refuse to support the regime until actual democracy is in place.
(Of course, you could say that argues that companies should leave the US now as well, but that's another can of worms.)
Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society, anywhere. And regardless of its spot benefits anywhere, it is still an overall negative influence.
[+] [-] mcphage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipsum2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoobab|6 years ago|reply
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