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 2 hours ago [-]
I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.
Like, we're impacting communications now.
ryandrake 48 minutes ago [-]
This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.
imachine1980_ 32 minutes ago [-]
this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest.
Wow, I try to come up with an exaggerated hypothetical and it turns out to be a real example. We live in a ridiculous world.
cluckindan 14 minutes ago [-]
Look up artisanal oil refining.
Retric 27 minutes ago [-]
That’s not literally the same thing, it was a protest over them for not “connect wells of their property to the public service supply network.”
Which isn’t something I’d want random companies to be doing, and a figurative drop in the bucket.
MichaelZuo 34 minutes ago [-]
So then why hasn’t Europe made a viable competitor to Cloudflare yet…?
AdmiralAsshat 30 minutes ago [-]
Cloudflare isn't the company with too much power in the above scenario: La Liga is. CF isn't turning off access because they want to, it's because La Liga convinced a court that Cloudflare is promoting "piracy" with the various websites they host (some of which, constituting less than a rounding error of the overall sites they host, may host pirated soccer streams), and convinced a court to have Cloudflare blocked.
niceice 25 minutes ago [-]
For the same reason they don't build any tech companies in Europe.
globular-toast 2 hours ago [-]
Or, 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 2 hours ago [-]
I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
globular-toast 14 minutes ago [-]
You're replying to a thread where people lose internet connectivity when a bunch of men are kicking a ball around a field.
dylan604 39 minutes ago [-]
You say resilient to attack, yet it's also the opposite where it is very very easy for someone to attack someone to the point of removing their online presence. People will DDOS a site for the lulz. People will do it to cause problems for some perceived slight. Some will do it to hurt a competitor. It costs them pretty much nothing to have it happen. For those on the receiving end, it could be devastating. Their only affordable option is to use one of the megaCorp providers.
So it's a "this is why we can't have nice things" more than anything else. The assholes always ruin things in the end. So instead of some idealistic dream of a world, we get this shithole dystopian reality.
762236 1 hours ago [-]
There seems to be a problem starting new companies in the EU. It's hard to imagine the EU developing alternatives that people would want to use in such an environment.
arkh 1 hours ago [-]
The problem is not in starting a company. It's in the 20 to 100 million investment if needed: those do not exist here.
You'll get up to 10 million investment from whatever bank + state arrangement no problem. But when you want to scale up you're fucked if it requires money. So no "let's get 1 billion users and then think about milking them" way to do business, you have to be profitable a lot earlier. And you better not require too much R&D.
api 1 hours ago [-]
People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans.
When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
pc86 1 hours ago [-]
Surely you're talking about a District Attorney deciding that an individual needs to be charged prima facie and saying he "will find a crime" right?
mixermachine 4 hours ago [-]
Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.
VHRanger 54 minutes ago [-]
VPNs 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.
gabeio 4 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
sebmellen 42 minutes ago [-]
Starlink 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.
throwaway894345 2 hours ago [-]
If 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 35 minutes ago [-]
Are you just stuck on it being a sports league? Just s/sports league/entity with lots of money/
crest 58 minutes ago [-]
Maybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh
dylan604 36 minutes ago [-]
Did 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?
I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.
nextts 4 hours ago [-]
Why 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 4 hours ago [-]
Starlink 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 4 hours ago [-]
I 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 3 hours ago [-]
I think the relevant quote here is, "they can shake their fist at the sky".
perihelions 2 hours ago [-]
Satellite 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.
Would be interesting if they could jam starlink by tracking/blocking the laser coming off the spacecraft (satellite) probably far fetched
tbihl 6 minutes ago [-]
Tracking satellites is computationally intensive, Starlink has many satellites, and friends generally don't jam friends' communication satellites.
The old jokes about aggressive NFL Copyright enforcement would really pale in comparison to Spain developing a mature anti-satellite capability in order to disrupt soccer broadcast piracy at the physical layer.
FirmwareBurner 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country.
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
spacebanana7 2 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, is there anything technical the Spanish authorities could do to block Starlink (i.e jamming)? Or are legal/bureaucratic measures the only solution?
bombcar 24 minutes ago [-]
There are countries where starlink isn’t available. But if you get one from a nearby country and keep quiet it works.
Spain isn’t large enough, I suspect. But they can lean on starlink as long as they’re sold there.
entropyneur 54 minutes ago [-]
Hopefully not something that can happen in Spain, but in authoritarian countries they simply arrest or otherwise penalize the end users.
s1artibartfast 1 hours ago [-]
They can roll up to the starlink ground station and turn of the power or cut the cords.
Edit" it looks like the inter-satellite capacity might be able to handle more than I thought
I believe I recall them bragging about increases to horizontal bandwidth in the later designs. You may be thinking of the original network?
ty6853 3 hours ago [-]
Booted out of where, space?
Muromec 3 hours ago [-]
Starlinks isnt a charity, so they collect payments for service and payments are not going through space for sure
sneak 2 hours ago [-]
Booted out of the market. Payments, banking, interconnection, contractual agreements.
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
FirmwareBurner 2 hours ago [-]
Booted out of the country mate. Why are you acting daft? Do you think Starlink could operate in Spain without a regional/EU branch that serves Spanish customers, collects payments, pays Spanish/EU taxes and can be summoned to court if it doesn't follow Spanish laws?
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
ty6853 2 hours ago [-]
HAM isn't an acronym, FYI.
If you break the internet and summon starlink yes I think pirates will take the void.
FirmwareBurner 2 hours ago [-]
How many pirate ISPs exist in EU? How many of them have satellites in orbit?
ty6853 2 hours ago [-]
How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
FirmwareBurner 24 minutes ago [-]
>it doesn't stop them.
Yeah? Where are the pirate ISPs of North Korea then?
Mate, you're fighting with ghosts here. There are legit ISPs in EU, you don't need pirate ones. And there are legit VPNs to bypass whatever soft government restrictions are in place. There's no point arguing about endless made up hypotheticals.
concordDance 2 hours ago [-]
It could using crypto, but Spain would complain to the USA and they'd back down.
hinkley 34 minutes ago [-]
Three years ago they would. Not for the next four.
jp42 17 minutes ago [-]
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 12 minutes 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)
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.
daveguy 8 minutes ago [-]
Starlink puts "internet shutdown" in the hands of just one asshole oligarch.
4b11b4 30 minutes ago [-]
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..
alephnerd 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
matt3210 50 minutes ago [-]
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 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
GuinansEyebrows 22 minutes ago [-]
Individuals 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)
fluoridation 11 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't have to be the same, that's what makes it an analogy. What is the same is the relative relationships between the elements involved. Although, now that you've made me think about it, I guess it's not quite right anyway, because I doubt it's Switzerland selling technology, but Swiss companies. It'd be more correct to say that because you bought a belt from the store, the store-owner's father (as well as some of his neighbors, let's be real) should break into your house to stop you from beating your children with it.
dingnuts 14 minutes ago [-]
lots of people think gun manufacturers should be liable if the customer shoots someone so it's not like this is an argument without precedent
__MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
Most of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.
ironmagma 1 hours ago [-]
> stable
I wouldn't be too certain about that.
sofixa 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
phmagic 3 days ago [-]
What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
bombcar 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
spacebanana7 2 hours ago [-]
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.
registeredcorn 1 hours ago [-]
"Internet is a little flaky today. Probably a bird perching on the fiber."
theodric 3 days ago [-]
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.
nradov 3 days ago [-]
Have 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 2 days ago [-]
Mesh networks like 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 4 hours 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 ....
memhole 57 minutes ago [-]
I believe NYC has had one running for quite some time.
pessimizer 15 minutes ago [-]
> And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
I don't know what this means. If all of my family and friends are on a private network, and I'm serving my copy of Wikipedia, and all of us are sharing our books, movies, and music, we have a bulletin board, voice and video chat...
No real value?
AnimalMuppet 11 minutes ago [-]
How did you get your copy of Wikipedia? How do you update your copy of Wikipedia?
How do you get your books, movies, and music? How do you get new ones?
Yes, it has real value as a fill-in-the-gap until you can reconnect to the real internet. Long term I guess it still has some value as a way to look at a static collection of things (plus content generated by people on the mesh), but the real internet is much more valuable.
nextts 4 hours ago [-]
AM radio?
Even FM walkie talkies as a start.
5 hours ago [-]
dingnuts 1 hours ago [-]
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
nostrademons 1 hours ago [-]
IP is P2P, but a lot of the layers built on top of it are centralized, and very vulnerable to attack. DNS is hierarchical with 13 root name servers. Google is a private company, but if websearch ever goes offline, the utility of the Internet decreases dramatically. Some stupid percentage of webhosts are protected by Cloudflare; Cloudflare outages have taken large portions of the Internet offline. Same with AWS on the backend; when AWS has gone down, people find that a large number of the websites they depend upon go down too. Most people's consumer IPs are blocked off from the public Internet by their ISP and NAT.
Actually using an Internet based on IP addresses alone is ridiculously difficult. Quick, tell me how the IP protocol works using IP addresses alone! You can't type anything other than IP addresses into the address bar of your computer, and your browser can't make any secondary requests unless they're to a raw IP address. No using Google or Wikipedia unless you have their IP addresses memorized and have HOST file entries for all the secondary resources they request. You can't use HN to tell me; you need to find my computer's IP address and SSH in to me. Oh, and whatever certificate validation SSH does can't make any network requests to a DNS entry.
dingnuts 9 minutes ago [-]
in a small network you just put the hostnames in /etc/hosts and you're done, or you set up a local DNS server. The GP asked about "making a p2p internet," and that's how it's done. Hostnames are not a hard problem.
Google Search is useless on a p2p internet. Why would you want to search the corporate network on your separate net? Doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't use the global DNS system in this scenario either, you can just set up your own -- DNS is hierarchical but there's no reason you cannot have your own roots, or just pass around hosts files like the old days, either on sneakernet or using another protocol
> You can't use HN to tell me
HN wouldn't be on my private "peer to peer" internet, it's on the regular internet. Set up a mirror or find a route to the regular one through any one of your PEERS.
I don't get it, I thought the GP wanted to know how to set up their own Internet, or thought that the Internet was centralized. It's not. Build your own network, be creative, replace DNS if you need to. The tech is there, it's well-established, well-tested, and we use it today for the regular internet.
The grandparent only needs to read some man-pages.
hello_computer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MikeBenemorhbc 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
junaru 3 hours ago [-]
Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.
mystified5016 2 hours ago [-]
Libraries are bad and should be banned because you might find Mein Kampf in the nonfiction section
aprilthird2021 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ty6853 3 hours ago [-]
The 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 2 hours ago [-]
We 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.
Rendered at 15:35:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
Like, we're impacting communications now.
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est
Which isn’t something I’d want random companies to be doing, and a figurative drop in the bucket.
So it's a "this is why we can't have nice things" more than anything else. The assholes always ruin things in the end. So instead of some idealistic dream of a world, we get this shithole dystopian reality.
You'll get up to 10 million investment from whatever bank + state arrangement no problem. But when you want to scale up you're fucked if it requires money. So no "let's get 1 billion users and then think about milking them" way to do business, you have to be profitable a lot earlier. And you better not require too much R&D.
When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
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.
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.
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 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)", 225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)", 145 comments)
The old jokes about aggressive NFL Copyright enforcement would really pale in comparison to Spain developing a mature anti-satellite capability in order to disrupt soccer broadcast piracy at the physical layer.
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
Spain isn’t large enough, I suspect. But they can lean on starlink as long as they’re sold there.
Edit" it looks like the inter-satellite capacity might be able to handle more than I thought
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
If you break the internet and summon starlink yes I think pirates will take the void.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
Yeah? Where are the pirate ISPs of North Korea then?
Mate, you're fighting with ghosts here. There are legit ISPs in EU, you don't need pirate ones. And there are legit VPNs to bypass whatever soft government restrictions are in place. There's no point arguing about endless made up hypotheticals.
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)
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.
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..
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.
The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
I wouldn't be too certain about that.
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.
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.
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.
Well, to be fair....
I don't know what this means. If all of my family and friends are on a private network, and I'm serving my copy of Wikipedia, and all of us are sharing our books, movies, and music, we have a bulletin board, voice and video chat...
No real value?
How do you get your books, movies, and music? How do you get new ones?
Yes, it has real value as a fill-in-the-gap until you can reconnect to the real internet. Long term I guess it still has some value as a way to look at a static collection of things (plus content generated by people on the mesh), but the real internet is much more valuable.
Even FM walkie talkies as a start.
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
Actually using an Internet based on IP addresses alone is ridiculously difficult. Quick, tell me how the IP protocol works using IP addresses alone! You can't type anything other than IP addresses into the address bar of your computer, and your browser can't make any secondary requests unless they're to a raw IP address. No using Google or Wikipedia unless you have their IP addresses memorized and have HOST file entries for all the secondary resources they request. You can't use HN to tell me; you need to find my computer's IP address and SSH in to me. Oh, and whatever certificate validation SSH does can't make any network requests to a DNS entry.
Google Search is useless on a p2p internet. Why would you want to search the corporate network on your separate net? Doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't use the global DNS system in this scenario either, you can just set up your own -- DNS is hierarchical but there's no reason you cannot have your own roots, or just pass around hosts files like the old days, either on sneakernet or using another protocol
> You can't use HN to tell me
HN wouldn't be on my private "peer to peer" internet, it's on the regular internet. Set up a mirror or find a route to the regular one through any one of your PEERS.
I don't get it, I thought the GP wanted to know how to set up their own Internet, or thought that the Internet was centralized. It's not. Build your own network, be creative, replace DNS if you need to. The tech is there, it's well-established, well-tested, and we use it today for the regular internet.
The grandparent only needs to read some man-pages.
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.
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.