Slashdot Mirror
Internet Blackout in Myanmar Stalls Citizen Report
StonyandCher writes "The government in Myanmar has reportedly cut off Internet access in the troubled country.
The loss of Internet access in Myanmar has slowed the tide of photos and videos shared with the rest of the world but people outside of the troubled country continue to use new media sites and other technologies to protest military activity in the Southeast Asia country."
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... is exactly why you don't want to destroy the utility of the HF radio spectrum to sell it to broadband-over-power-line Internet providers.
You don't want to put all of your communication eggs in one government-controlled basket.
The first thing an oppressive government usually does when unrest is rising is to make sure independent news and reports can't escape, so the only source for information is the official one. They actually took their time to do that, given that the civil war has started almost half a month ago.
Well, maybe their astrologer said they should wait 2 more weeks 'cause then the stars are aligned or something.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess this goes back to the idea that if you can control the information going to and from people, you can control the people themselves. It is really a statement of where the internet is today in terms of importance around the world. I would like to see if anyone from this country manages to make an "underground" makeshift connection to the internet. Also, does any one else find it interesting that the group forming together to protest for the rights of the monks is on facebook?
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149/
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549/
I have never used a satellite internet provider, but I know that they do exist. Could someone on slashdot explain what is required for such service? I assume a modem which would be registered with a satellite provider. What is the feasibility of smuggling such things into Burma?
Now I'm no birdkeeper, but have you ever tried to gzip a pigeon before?
coding is life
as someone mentioned before, call the country Burma. That's the name which signifies that you don't accept the legitimacy of the murders who have stolen the country and ruled over it for all these years.
Also, I don't get the anti-bush tag, he seems to be doing a lot more than most to help the situation...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
have you ever tried to gzip a pigeon before?
Compressing a pigeon is not difficult (though a little messy), it's decompressing it that I can't quite figure out.
Burma DOES have oil. Chevron (US) and Total (French) are two of the biggest benefactors. China, Russia and India all have billions invested as well. So long as the money keeps coming, no one seems to care who is in power or how they exercise it...
Burma is a very resource-rich country. The problem is that rather than the wealth going to the people, it is funneled into the pockets of the military generals (who then splurge on their daughters' weddings)
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Burma has tons of oil. Chevron and Total are the two Western companies profiting the most, but China, India and Russia all have significant (read multi-BILLION dollar) investments as well..
Clearly, the situation in Myanmar is all America's fault. If they hadn't invented the Internet, then it couldn't be cut off.
If they've cut off every single international phone line you can still radio data in and out. People tend to think that going high tech is the way to break out of these kinds of situations - e.g. satellites etc. - when often going back to flashing light semaphore or carrier pigeon is more likely to succeed.
Losing the connection to Burma slightly, the Romans employed four flags on poles to communicate messages up and down Hadrian's Wall. In ideal conditions they could get a 4-bit message from one end to the other (70-something miles) in a matter of seconds - that's a pretty good bitrate for something with no electricity behind it. Granted you can't get streaming video of monks being beaten up at that kind of bandwidth but radio's a different story.
And setting up mobile radio stations is probably easier than installing a massive communications line of wooden poles without the military noticing. Many brave individuals carefully concealed both receivers and transmitters throughout occupied Europe often at great personal risk, for example. Communications routed around damage even back then. I'm sure there are people within that country right now beaming data out. I wonder where messages in bottles cast out on their beaches would wash ashore. You could squeeze quite a bit of memory into a bottle.
Anyway, I think what I'm rambling about is that there's always a way. I just hope there are enough people with the balls out there taking these risks and, much more importantly, I hope that their messages do not fall on deaf ears. Sadly I feel some of the more powerful countries, who might otherwise be in a position to levy some immense pressure on the Burmese junta, are somewhat under-staffed at the moment. Although it's fair to say that some other countries - that are most definitely not under-staffed - remain on the outside of this affair for rather more cryptic and apparently self-serving reasons.
All said with humble and awkward apologies for commenting on the topic while enjoying a comfortable yet-to-be-oppressed privileged lifestyle.
the American firm Fortinet, which runs the Myanmar Wide Web.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
Oh, grow up.
Iran and Iranians are only too happy to aid the insurgents in Iraq for the very, very simple reason that a bunch of total cunts dropped weapons of mass destruction on them in the form of nerve gas and bio weapons. Who were these bastards that went beyond any acceptable limits of civilised behaviour? Well, goodness me! It seems that it was the good old US of fucking A and it's ongoing mission to bring democracy and strong IP laws to the world! And strangely, dropping plagues on Iran has led to anti-American feeling there?! They're just unreasonable, those ragheads.
If America had treated my country the way the US treated Iran, I'D be an insurgent too, and I suspect you would too, without any need to listen to anti-China fairy stories.
Apart from anything else, there's a mountain of reasons to hate China without having to make new ones up. Unless, of course, you are really just trying to justify some other totally unconnected policy.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"