Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'
theguardian.com289 points by adrian_mrd 13 days ago
289 points by adrian_mrd 13 days ago
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
I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.
Like, we're impacting communications now.
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.
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.
> We live in a ridiculous world.
Let The Market™ decide on access to drinking water:
That's why I haven't taken life so seriously and been as uptight about things in recent years; because life sure as hell doesn't take us serious lol
Your hypothetical involved Coca-Cola directing the service cutoff. It doesn't sound like that was real.
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.
It's the same aquifer though, right?
If the factory had simply shut down without hooking up their infrastructure, the area still would have had the exact same short term issues.
The issue was arguably a lack of wells in an extreme situation, not a lack of water in the aquifer.
Aquifers are not infinite in capacity, so it's a valid point.
Again not what this was about.
If the area can’t support the factories water use then shut down the factory permanently. Wanting to hook up to its infrastructure is all about a lack of public infrastructure.
Many aquifers are over used, but that’s a long term problem and has nothing to do with a drought in a single year.
One drop in an empty bucket is infinitely more water.
> One drop in an empty bucket is infinitely more water.
No multiply 0 by infinity and you don’t get one drop, ie 1/0 is undefined.
Further it wasn’t an empty bucket.
In this case, as bucket content aproaches 0 drops, 1 drop becomes infinitely more, at least in calculus.
Limits in calculus: "When a real function can be expressed as a fraction whose denominator tends to zero, the output of the function becomes arbitrarily large, and is said to "tend to infinity" For example, the reciprocal function, f ( x ) = 1/x tends to infinity as x tends to 0.
Tends to infinity != infinity. Also, the fundamental theory of calculus requires a continuous function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calculu...
You think it's possible for a bucket to contain a negative amount of water?
I should note that the product of zero and infinity being an indeterminate form is actually a result about the product of an infinitesimal (of small but indefinite magnitude) and an infinite value. If when you say "zero", you actually mean "zero", there is no ambiguity: zero is more infinitesimal than any infinite value is infinite, and the product of zero with anything, including an infinitely large value, is zero.
> You think it's possible for a bucket to contain a negative amount of water?
Irrelevant, the discontinuity occurs at 0 not a negative number.
The limit of f(X) = (X-2)/(X-2) as X approaches 2 is 1, that doesn’t mean the function has a defined value at 2. Limits seem easy because most students really don’t understand limits and thus misuse them.
Quantum physics tells us all particles are waves, so it’s possible that the amount of water will be negative in some point in time, as long as the average value is not negative. ;-)
Zero times any number is zero, but infinity is not a number. In order for multiplication to be valid, your elements must share a field.
Are you trying to make a point? The indeterminate forms are statements about limits. Those limits are statements about the possible range of certain operations on infinitesimal and infinite values. It's perfectly valid to multiply those values. And when zero is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.
You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.
I am, thanks for noticing.
If you extend your field to include infinity (e.g. the extended reals, or the extended positive reals), only then is it valid to multiply by infinity. One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. This gives us conflicting results for zero times infinity, therefore 0*∞ is an indeterminate form.
You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field.
But it's easy to extend the real numbers to a field that includes infinite and infinitesimal values. Limiting is then a projection from the hyperreals, which are a field, to the extended reals, which aren't. Instead of "lim", let's call this projection "f".
0·∞ is an indeterminate form because f(f⁻¹(0) · f⁻¹(∞)) is not well defined. f is a many-to-one function, and in this case the different possibilities that come up as we invert it interact differently. In contrast, 2·∞ is not an indeterminate form because, while f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞) might be any value that is greater than all real numbers, it must always be greater than all real numbers, and therefore f(f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞)) is always ∞.
> One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.
In the extended reals, this is a result, not a rule, and it doesn't always hold. Again, the extended reals aren't a field. But even ignoring the question we're actively discussing, you should have been able to think of e.g. -3 · ∞.
That's assuming that when you said "such a system", you meant the extended reals. If you meant a field that extends the reals to include infinite values, it's just meaningless noise - there is no value called "infinity" that would even let you evaluate the claim true or false. But in any multiplication of two values, any infinite value can only simultaneously be the product and one of the multiplicands if the other multiplicand is 1. When we say that 2·∞ = ∞, the ∞ on the left and the one on the right are both infinitely large, but they aren't the same value.
> You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field.
Fair enough. You're right, of course, and you've learned me a thing. Appreciate your time.
Are you in an alternate dimension where Snow Crash literally happened?!
Burbclaves coming next: https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-leg...
Its one of the reasons why I am a market based socialist.
The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation.
The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to allow suitable profit and growth.
The final tier is the new and not-required level. This is the new stuff, the crazy tech. Low/no laws, let everyone in this realm go crazy and experiment. The skies the limit.
But water? This is beyond the pale. And revolutions have gone on for this before.
I might've got a bad translation, but :
> the parastatal Water and Drainage Services of Monterrey
Isn't that already the state owning the water supply?
> This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem.
This isn't limited to just one company. The problem is how copyright has been abused and over-prioritized until it's become a threat to people's freedoms, to art, and to progress.
Copyright needs to be reined in so that no matter what the company is or what product they're pushing innocent people won't be negatively impacted just so that the industry can squeeze more profit from people while refusing to adapt.
But why does the company have too much power?
Because there's a lot of money at stake surrounding soccer in Europe.
> But why does the company have too much power?
Because they pay the lawmakers to give them this power.
So then why hasn’t Europe made a viable competitor to Cloudflare yet…?
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.
Technically LaLiga is only allowed to sue because the gov created aggressive IP/piracy rules, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_Sinde
They were given those powers in court over Cloudflare via the Spanish government, with some help via a pressure campaign by US gov to protect US copyright globally.
That said, Cloudflare absolutely has too much power. Centralizing the internet makes it fragile and maximizes the collateral damage caused by draconian copyright enforcement.
If there was a viable competitor, then it wouldn’t matter so much if it was blocked or not…
The same IP rules would apply to anybody hosting any site that could have the pirated streams...
That's a bad thing in this case. I don't want website blocking to be easier.
Must be a lack of regulations and compliance procedures giving potential entrepreneurs the legal framework to work within.
the problem here isn't football. It's rampant censoreship and net blocks in the EU. (same problem different methods in other EU countries. In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)
I travel a lot in the EU and the Internet is a total shambles. Blocked stuff everywhere. Right down to VPNs not even working.
>>In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)
Can you give some examples so we can see what harmless political satire you have in mind?
Andy Grote comes to mind. Someone tweeted "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy") at him. Got his house searched and everything for that.
Issue here being the fact that insulting someone is a criminial offense (hope that's the correct english terminology) in Germany.
https://theweek.com/news/world-news/954635/willygate-german-...
e:/ Whether this is actual satire or not is up for debate i guess, but this was in my opinion way overblown
> "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy")
Sure, it's something like that, but it's more like "thou beest such a willy". ;D
What kind of "harmless political satire"? Where can I find more about this?
"Pimmelgate", Stefan Niehoff raid are two examples of hilariously disproportionate law enforcement response for minimal offense.
those are the better k own examples. But its pretty common. Friend of mine got raided for posting a meme that contained a swastika in negative context.
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.
I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
You're replying to a thread where people lose internet connectivity when a bunch of men are kicking a ball around a field.
This has nothing to do with ipv4/ipv6 and the "ridiculous hacks" we do to keep ipv4 going. Those work just fine. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
If we want to use the internet as a communication network then we need peer-to-peer connectivity. We can't get than on IPv4. Resilience is pointless if everyone needs to connect to the same (few) middlemen before they can establish any kind of connection to a peer. It's no better than the old telephone system that needed an exclusive physical link between correspondents.
We almost had this in the early 2000s, but then we regressed. People were excited about meshnets, when was the last time someone mentioned those? Too many people have forgotten and now many have been raised in this current form of the Internet thinking it's the only way. We need to think bigger. We need to push for IPv6 and basic internet connectivity (meaning ability to connect to any peer in the world) as a human right. Otherwise we build our lives around something that can be taken away on a whim over something as silly as grown men kicking a bladder around a field.
The internet attack resilience isn't meant to keep a single node online. It is to keep a communication network active even if parts are destroyed. That part works.
Who cares about a single node? You shouldn't need a node in the middle for two parties to communicate. That's the point.
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.
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.
So why have European capital markets remained so inefficient for so long? I've heard a lot of facile explanations about risk averse culture but I'm not convinced that really explains anything. Culture becomes quite malleable when people have an opportunity to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power.
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.
it s not such a massive thing as it used to
but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things
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.
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?
I expect that's not what they were talking about, but I bet what you are talking about can happen just about anywhere.
District Attorneys everywhere charge first and then prove the crime afterwards, right?
Well typically a case is referred to them by law enforcement or a criminal complaint, then they review the evidence and decide whether or not to go to trial.
It's much rarer for a DA to say they want to find crimes a particular person committed and then direct others to go find evidence for whatever they can find evidence for.
Which DA went after a particular person without referral by law enforcement or a criminal complaint? If this was really such a breach of ethics, surely it would be trivial for the political party in question to first make a criminal complaint? It's not obvious to me that the complaint/referral matters much?
I don't know how much of this tribalism is confined to the stadium. Personal experience makes me feel like there is a big overlap between Ultras and actual nationalists, but I'd like to see a study.
> When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
I mean, FIFA is corrupt as hell and there's been plenty of documented cases of other social ills caused by European soccer fandom, but okay.
That sounds insane! Do you have a source?
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157000
Ah the old misunderstood IP address. It's not a street address guys!
Even if it were, you still need to prove the person you are accusing is in the building!
Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.
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.
Are you just stuck on it being a sports league? Just s/sports league/entity with lots of money/
No, it's wild that any private entity has the legal censorship authority. My own country is catapulting into authoritarianism, but as far as I'm aware, we haven't gotten to the point yet where private entities are unilaterally disconnecting users from broad swaths of the Internet.
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.
> VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.
Unless they are outright blocking your entire connection. That is precisely why one would use a vpn. A vpn most definitely can help get around blocking key words.
you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to
> you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to
You are in a thread specifically talking about blocking swaths of the internet because of football games.
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.
Not quite true, but merits of me saying this is murky (I'm not going to fault Starlink).
In Southern Africa, they were bringing in grey imports of Starlink from the UAE and these units have been blocked.
Not true at all, Elon Musk has already cut off access for Ukraine because of his own personal views[1]. There's a reason why he's currently hated in most of Europe.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4193788-musk-acknowledges...
That article is heavily slanted, while providing the facts hidden in the text: Starlink was never enabled in Sevastopol. Musk simply denied an informal request to enable it to be used in a first strike, and deferred that decision to the DoD, which he contacted.
Which is the correct thing to do when random people ask private companies to go to war.
Maybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh
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've never heard of anyone making a paper roll with tape but I've definitely seen pranksters fax sheet after sheet of full black to waste paper and ink.
I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.
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.
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.
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?
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
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
I believe I recall them bragging about increases to horizontal bandwidth in the later designs. You may be thinking of the original network?
Starlink terminals are jammable, but the jamming source will need to be in it's FOV and it uses quite a focused beam. Not particularly viable for an entire nation.
The ground stations would be a lot more vulnerable, but cutting the cable would be a lot easier than flying a Ku/Ka band jammer overhead.
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.
Hopefully not something that can happen in Spain, but in authoritarian countries they simply arrest or otherwise penalize the end users.
Booted out of where, space?
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.
Starlinks isnt a charity, so they collect payments for service and payments are not going through space for sure
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.
HAM isn't an acronym, FYI.
If you break the internet and summon starlink yes I think pirates will take the void.
How many pirate ISPs exist in EU? How many of them have satellites in orbit?
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.
>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.
Do we suspect there's significant demand for internet in North Korea? Market potential, sure. But I'm guessing if you asked North Korea what information distribution they wanted, they would say they just want a more honest newspaper.
>Do we suspect there's significant demand for internet in North Korea?
Why not? They literally throw USB sticks and optical media over the border. After my country broke away from communism, content consumption of foreign media was the highest priority.
> How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
In a lot of Europe, you can only buy a handful at a time (like 16), at a relatively hefty per-tablet price and only from a pharmacy (good luck on sunday in a lot of places).
In France, you can’t just grab it off the shelf yourself anymore: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200115-pharmacies-ordered-sel...
Sometimes I leave part of my 500 ct bottle from Amerika because I don’t know why I bought so many in the first place.
It could using crypto, but Spain would complain to the USA and they'd back down.
Three years ago they would. Not for the next four.
> Three years ago they would. Not for the next four.
You must be fun at parties.
Why do you think so ? They kissed American ass for a long time. Why should they stop ?
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.
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.
I think the relevant quote here is, "they can shake their fist at the sky".
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.
[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)
Interestingly, I don't think you have to purchase the starlink in the same country you plan to use it (else what would be the point of the Mini version).
"they fan shake their fist at the sky... and with the other hand strangle payments that are very much terrestrial"
Starlink doesn't defy local governments except when the US government greenlights it (offering service in Iran.)
Would be interesting if they could jam starlink by tracking/blocking the laser coming off the spacecraft (satellite) probably far fetched
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.
> Tracking satellites is computationally intensive
Is it? I've seen a guy doing it by hand with a YAGI antenna and a little handled radio. But I could see it for many and the phased part. Also people have web models like this one showing the orbits.
Anyway yeah just mental exercise not really arguing for it
Its much easier to ban imports and periodically do sweeps to locate terminals on the ground and confiscate/arrest the criminals operating them illegally. A Cessna or helicopter with GPS and directional antennae tuned to the right frequency bands is well within the reach of even banana republics.
That's still just giving a different corporation the power to control communications
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.
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.
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..
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.
Wagner* and russia's Libya intervention to continuously arm and support general khalifa haftar against the internationally recognised government
Usually it’s only the propaganda outlets that get blocked, not all internet access.
I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.
I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.
> It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.
As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.
These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets.
That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.
> These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time
Yet they’re still largely unknown. So the thought that reporting Internet interruptions in Africa => people all over planet earth will be talking about that in real life is just strange.
"That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger."
Also known as the fallacy of relative privation. This line of reasoning quickly leads to the conclusion that only bad thing worth caring about is the absolute worst thing happening.
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.
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.
These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.
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.
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.
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.
Most of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.
It would be fun to develop some kind of war games scenario where we see what we can make work in a less stable environment and make changes accordingly. Some kind of apocalypse conference or somesuch.
I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.
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.
By making its own "internet in a box": open wifi, DHCP and DNS, and Bob's your uncle. Anybody in range can play; everyone else is out of luck. Install NNTP so that news can move around by flooding, as nodes form new associations. Add a second wifi transceiver and some clever dynamic route discovery and you have a mesh network.
I imagine using bluetooth for peer discovery, so you find peers by sharing an elevator with them, or stopping at the same intersection, standing in line at the grocery store etc. Although the network would probably never converge entirely, it would drift approximately towards convergence as long as the gossiped dataset stayed small.
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.
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".
Thats a cool idea. Instead of initializing our hard disks with 0's we should fill them with things like that so that people have a chance of finding them as needed.
Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?
Not who you're replying to, but they linked their GH in bio, which led me to this:
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
Briar does just that
This? https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.
What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
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.
"Internet is a little flaky today. Probably a bird perching on the fiber."
Before wireless came to my rural area, we used to joke about how the phone companies ran dialup over barbed wire. "Internet's down; deer must have broken the barbed wire again."
Growing up, my grandpa would joke that "someone tripped over the extension cord" when the power went out.
Imagine having a mesh of hundreds of fibre optic cables strewn across the border.
Many having wireless routers at their terminus to forward traffic to other cables. Other cables having vertices and graph-like structures so that they could tolerate cuts in individual lines.
The end result could be something quite authentic to ARPANET.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ....> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> DNS is hierarchical with 13 root name servers.
It's a closed network, we can just hardcode everyone's address.
> 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.
All of this is irrelevant on a private network. I don't think you understood the comment you were replying to. The Internet is a bunch of little internets mashed together. Instead of mashing your internet with the others, you can provide services internally. No, other people's websites will not necessarily be on it, but they will anyway, because you'll probably provide a tunnel out to the wider internet. Anyway, you already have the internet, use it like you always did. The internet police don't make you give up the internet if you set up your own network.
You may not be able to appreciate the value of a communication system without access to google (you can download Wikipedia and serve it yourself if you find it a useful tool and your connection to the wider internet is endangered.) I remember an internet without Google, and I liked it more. The only thing Google ever did that was interesting was pagerank, and pagerank, being not resilient at all, was completely obsoleted by SEO. Everything else they've done has been a result of taking advantage of when they controlled an important market (access to the wider resource of the internet) for a few years over a decade ago.
When the internet goes down, my home network doesn't become either ridiculously difficult or useless. It will without pause or much notice still serve dozens of terabytes of data to anyone I allow to connect to wireless, and allow us to communicate with each other.
BBS's were useful.
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.
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.
I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...
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.
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.
Blocking internet access is pretty simple thing to do, especially compared to something like building and maintaining a bridge.
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.
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.
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)
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.
The way these countries treat their citizens is rarely a secret. I'd say a better analogy is that gun stores should not sell guns to known felons.
What would prevent gun stores from selling guns to criminals would be the law and the punishments doled out by the government. So if your argument is that Switzerland should punish Swiss companies for dealing with oppressive governments, then yeah, maybe. That's not the topic of discussion, though.
If someone buys a gun in a foreign country, and after returning to his home country he shoots a man, is he subject to the laws of the foreign country? To me that sounds like it would be a breach of the sovereignty of the man's home country. Not that I'm saying this is an apt analogy, but it's certainly closer.
> if your argument is that Switzerland should punish Swiss companies for dealing with oppressive governments
Some countries require an export license for some products and companies might get it to export to friendly countries and not get it for other countries. It's similar to sanctions. Those licenses apply even to some piece of software (spying tools et al.) Companies caught selling without a license are punished.
Is the US still providing updates and spares for Ukraine’s airforce? Modern military aircraft depend a lot on software updates to stay operational.
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
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.
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.
Maybe it’s time to create one.
On second thought, I’d wait 4 years before starting that.
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.
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.
Just because some people are deprived of it doesn't mean it shouldn't be a right. And the fact that some of these communities don't even have time to consider it a priority when they're also deprived of other basic rights doesn't mean that it isn't also a basic right. It's not a fairy tale to expect basic human rights. The entire world could be connected if that's what powerful people wanted.
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.
Counterpoint: in the third world some 3rd rate shack with a shitty well or water source may often come 'free' as it stays in the family. I have seen people in the third world blow most their paycheck on phone and internet related charges since food/water/shelter may cost a villager in a farm basically nothing and the internet is entertainment and communication for a whole month.
If they had access to internet, you weren't in the parts of Africa I'm talking about. There is a difference between undeveloped, developing and developed.
You go to an undeveloped place, you wouldn't be worried about phones or internet access. You just accept that you're going to be off the grid for the duration of your stay in that village. Alternatively, you bring your communications equipment with you so that you can stay in touch with your, "base", for lack of a better term. But I can tell you right now, that equipment better not be dependent on internet access.
Well yes in places with no internet access people don't buy internet, but it's a bit tautological. People who survive by subsistence but come upon hard money somehow, in some place with towers, I have personally seen them blow a whole month pay on phone credits and it wasn't uncommon.
Increasingly, you need the internet working to access your money or pay for things. I've found you unfortunately need to pay for food.
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.
between tribalism genocidal maniacs that torture ppl and five eyes divide and conquer you kind of have to lol
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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.
all countries should delegate their communications sovereignty to the US, what could go wrong
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Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.
Libraries are bad and should be banned because you might find Mein Kampf in the nonfiction section
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.
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.
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.
> We just had that whole Cliven Bundy thing happen a few years ago, no?
That's interesting because of how unusual it is. If there were hundreds of him, the US would be like central Africa.
> governments understandably have trouble administering thousands of square miles of jungle.
I'm sure that governments feel better that you understand their problems. You're replying to somebody who is enumerating those problems, not reviewing individual governments and giving them a star rating.
There are hundreds of Cliven Bundys.
The insistence on othering what clearly isn't an alien experience for our own society is annoying. It's also a bit dangerous, considering how the, "Just swoop in and merc the bastards," produced the Bundy approach; disrespect for the complexity of dealing with militias leads to tragedy.
The US doesn't have that kind of geographic inaccessibility. Cliven Bundy is alive, not because the US couldn't locate him, not because the US couldn't reach that location with overwhelming force, but because the US decided that killing him was a less optimal move than letting him be an annoyance for a while, and eventually arresting and trying him.
I don't think that's entirely it. It's true that they could have easily killed him, but that might have touched off a much wider-spread insurrection, in a location where the geography gives locals advantages in a guerilla-style approach to resistance. The choice then becomes, "Get involved in a domestic quagmire," or, "Carpet bomb conservation areas and natural wonders."
Maybe inaccessible is the wrong word. Less-accessible? And big. Lots of ground to cover, even when you have an AF base nearby.
"Keep the bad parts, eliminate the good parts."
- The Authoritarian Cookbook
Lets peek into whether those divisions are organic or driven through NGOs.
You think Indians as a people are divided because of NGOs?
Did NGOs start the Gujarat pogroms? Or tear down Babri Masjid or try to impose Hindi on the Southern states? Did NGOs cause the Kashmir conflict or caused Meitei and Kuki tribes to fight each other in the Northeast? Did NGOs cause Congress to invade the Golden Temple? Did NGOs cause the BJP to announce imposing the death penalty for converting girls out of Hinduism to other religions?
Come on man
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.
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.
> 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.
A lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering.
It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."
> A lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering.
Because they most likely didn't. On a separate tangent, I HATE how most CS majors can get a CS degree without even learning basics about electronics engineering or even computer architecture.
It's a shame because a lot of the craft used in DSP and RF Engineering has direct applications in ML (much of ML is itself a fork of Information Theory which started off as a DSP subfield)
Starlink just transmits to a ground station thats 99% of the time in the same country. Its not some magical space internet, its just regular internet bottled and delivered by satellite.
RF is really where this discussion needs to be, you and your mate jim can set up a bunch of UBNT hardware and create your own intranet really god damn easily. No reliance on some guy who signed on to all your governments internet censorship laws.
Starlink also uses optical inter-satellite links. Ground stations aren't necessarily required to be near to the customer.
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.
Starlink puts "internet shutdown" in the hands of just one asshole oligarch.
Not really, but he does comply with every law.
Eventually yes, but it took 1 month or so of Twitter being blocked for the company to comply with a court order and have a representative in Brazil to receive court orders.
Starlink does it proactively. They come into a new jurisdiction, they purchase satellite spectrum, they achieve a carrier license and incorporate all metadata retention, blocklists and whatever and then sell their services.
Its not like elon is playing silly buggers with these laws, he is complying completely while championing free speech online.
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> Fact check: Mostly true
That's not what that link says.
"... the claim that Musk had ordered Starlink coverage in Crimea 'turned off' wasn't entirely accurate. (Both CNN and The Washington Post subsequently corrected their reports.)"
why i am being downvoted for this :confused:
Most likely this part you didn’t realize happened:
Well I did not even bring Elon into my original post. What I wrote is true regardless of whether its starlink or some other constellation. e.g satphones are routinely used across the world in conflict/insurgency areas. Starlink is already being used in insurgency in NE part of India and so on.