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.
but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things
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.
Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.
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..
I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.
As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.
That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.
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.
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.
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.
The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.
The gossiped data would be:
> My public key is ABCD1234... and the most recent CID of my data is DCBA9876...
These devices need be on no other network at the time, just in range of each other.
At other times when they're near a node on the larger network they offload their discovered peers and the consult their trust graph to see which peers (new or already known) are both trusted in some capacity (maybe transitively) and interested in the same topics/apps. In those cases, that data syncs to their mobile device, and apps which reference it update.
This would work better if you dedicate some device somewhere to be permanently attached to a network node, but unlike what we're doing today there's no need for it to be maintained by the author of your apps. We can decouple those personas. If the device hosting your data ends up on another partition, you can dedicate a new device to the task without updating anyone, since nobody is hanging onto device identifiers anyway. Probably this just means leaving yesteryear's busted phone plugged in at home so it can be a cache for your data while the device in your pocket is offline. Your mobile device an update when it gets on the wifi.
So now you've got users carrying around data which other users might be interested in (beyond the peer-finding data), and it's organized by topic/app, so when two peers are nearby which share an interest (perhaps on the behalf of their peers, transitively), they can directly sync heavier data as well. I think that attaching a wifi router to every delivery truck would get you most of the way there, since it could move the data between houses it's delivering to.
This might mean network latencies measured in hours or days, which would be awkward, but at least it's never hard down because it never depends on the state of a unique server. Besides, if the partition-tolerant fallback works beyond a certain usability threshold then you've removed the incentive to disable the internet in the first place.
Maybe I don't have the details perfect, but something like this is possible and I don't think the difficult part is getting the underlying protocol right. Rather it's getting the apps we rely on to also work under the fallback paradigm. The necessary shift is to get away from request/response architectures and towards pub/sub ones. Fewer unique server identifiers and more trusted user keys and predicates about the degree to which those users trust different content hashes.
Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?
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
Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.
Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.
On second thought, I’d wait 4 years before starting that.
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.
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.
Internet should not be a luxury in any community. That is against the ethos of the web, which should be free, open and accessible. Your comment is needlessly patronizing and dismissive without actually presenting any evidence that the internet shouldn't be considered essential for any modern community.
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.
- The Authoritarian Cookbook
I have done a complete 180 on this issue in recent years.
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.
It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."
>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.
