Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

[create-username]

Here, 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

[lenerdenator]

I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.

Like, we're impacting communications now.

[somedude895]

That sounds insane! Do you have a source?

[mixermachine]

Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.

[crest]

Maybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh

[briandear]

I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.

[basisword]

Thought 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.

[wkat4242]

Huh? 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]

Spain could build thier own cloudflare.

[4b11b4]

This 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..

[oefrha]

Did 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.

[bilbo0s]

Imagine 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.

[alephnerd]

In 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.

[pabs3]

These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.

https://ooni.org/

[timewizard]

This is Africa. So the first question you should ask yourself is "do they even have electricity 24 hours of the day?" The answer is generally "they're lucky to get 8 hours in a day."

I mean, it's a disappointing that Facebook isn't available in Uganda, but I think there are some bigger ticket items on the continent to be concerned with first.

[rbanffy]

At least in Brazil, blocks are limited to specific IP ranges and happen because companies defy court orders to hand over publisher data the court considers illegal - irregular electoral propaganda, misinformation campaigns, etc. Rumble, AFAIK, is blocked in Brazil right now. Twitter and WhatsApp were blocked more than once.

[__MatrixMan__]

Apps 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]

Most of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.

[sofixa]

But 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.

[m3047]

I made a wifi firing range / disconnected collab environment to this end a few years ago. Has BIND (which takes over the world), Apache, DAV, Etherpad. I carry a VM of it around on my laptop "against the day".

[callc]

I agree, but also am weary trying to solve societal issues with technical solutions. We naturally try to do this, using the tools we know. It’s a losing battle to fight technologically against a motivated state actor, like CCP. When your door gets knocked down and you get arrested for using e2e encrypted communications, technology will not save you.

Certainly things like SSL and encryption have helped fight back against the spying eyes of governments and bad actors.

This is not a dig against making apps robust to network partitions

[folmar]

Briar does just that

[phmagic]

What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?

[spacebanana7]

Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa.

Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable.

This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries with lots of land borders it might work. Especially if the border area had jungle or other low traffic terrain.

[theodric]

DIY 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.

[dingnuts]

the Internet Protocol, IP, is already peer to peer. Assign yourself an address (V6) and get a peer, assign them an address, plug in a cable, voila!

Get a switch and another computer and you have an Internet. Ok, we would generally call it an "intranet," but that's because -the- Internet with a capital I is specifically a net of intranets.

So, if you were to start an ISP, which is the proposal, you would buy an uplink to the rest of the Internet for your intranet that you just built, from another ISP or backbone provider.

But you don't have to do that, you could partner with another intranet, and have a separate Net. Similar to what happens in China actually.

My point is: the Internet is already peer to peer. You just have to use the technology. Thirty years ago every tech nerd knew how to start an ISP.

The only reason individuals don't do it as much anymore is because we want the ISP to lay dedicated cable for our connections, rather than just using the phone lines, and laying cable is really expensive.

But you could use phone or amateur radio (like the JS8 digital mode) if lower speeds are acceptable, or lay your own Ethernet or fiber if you're capable.

The only thing that makes today's Internet seem like it's not peer to peer is the investment needed to start an ISP with the performance modern consumers expect

[jeffhuys]

No internet here, but I'm setting up Meshtastic nodes between me and my family so we can keep messaging when internet stops working, or power goes out (solar panels).

They'll get 99.99% of people, but not me. I only need it for an hour or so to communicate meeting points. After that it's an added luxury for whatever comes after. It's my contribution to the prepping of my family.

[bombcar]

The way to do p2p communication without the Internet is to remove immediacy from it.

Old email servers were configured this way, they’d try to communicate the next time they got a connection.

For text it could be simple as encrypting and sending it to as many devices as you see until you get an ack back - something almost blockchain-like, but without the CPU and just signing.

Ack’d messages would be purged from ThePile and you could also expire them after a time. It’d be a few gigabytes perhaps, and could share diffs when you see another device.

[int_19h]

Look up AREDN.

[bmitc]

I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...

[CSMastermind]

I 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.

[benced]

This 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]

Blocking internet access is pretty simple thing to do, especially compared to something like building and maintaining a bridge.

[matt3210]

Some 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]

That'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.

[Synaesthesia]

Internet 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.

[Terr_]

It's interesting to think that if the US Constitution had been created in today's technological environment, the founders would have authorized a federal United States Internet Service, as opposed to a postal one.

[hbn]

It's essential if you live in a place where it's essential.

But there are plenty of places where everything hasn't gone all digital, which makes living without internet much easier than it is in e.g. America.

[bilbo0s]

Um.

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.

[hello_computer]

I 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]

what are you using to block entire geographical regions?

[gunian]

between tribalism genocidal maniacs that torture ppl and five eyes divide and conquer you kind of have to lol

[AustinDev]

Not if you're in Senegal, Zimbabwe or South Africa. They've already outlaws or are on their way to outlawing Starlink from what I've read.

[elchangri]

all countries should delegate their communications sovereignty to the US, what could go wrong

[junaru]

Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.

[mystified5016]

Libraries are bad and should be banned because you might find Mein Kampf in the nonfiction section

[aprilthird2021]

What? 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.

[gimme_treefiddy]

Note how almost no one will acknowledge this is happening in the backdrop of unravelling of USAID and how certain powers in the world sow discord in other countries.

I have done a complete 180 on this issue in recent years.

[jp42]

Internet 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]

> 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.

[protocolture]

Starlink always sides with the government. ALWAYS. Starlink doesnt make anything impotent. They just retransmit to a ground station in the same country. They signed on to every anti speech law in your country. They do business. Musk does not care about you or free speech.

>Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country

What kind of seppocentric drool is this statement?

LoraWAN and Wifi based local chat apps are about all that works for most protesters when the internet gets axed.

[daveguy]

Starlink puts "internet shutdown" in the hands of just one asshole oligarch.

[jp42]

why i am being downvoted for this :confused: