Slashdot Mirror
Internet Shutdown Adds To Venezuela's Woes
Slashgear reports that many state-run internet links in Venezuela have been shut down by that country's government, as censorship efforts there step up along with widespread turmoil, partly in the form of widespread anti-government protests. The article begins: "Don’t expect one whole heck of a lot of tweets coming out of Venezuela in the immediate future as President Nicolas Maduro’s government has shut down the internet and select TV channels. Having shut down Twitter access for the area this past week, Venezuela’s state-run ISP CANTV has been cut in areas such as San Cristobal. This area is a regional capital in the west of the country and CANTV controls the vast majority of internet connectivity in the area. The Electronic Frontier Foundation made note that Venezuelans working with several different ISPs lost all connectivity on Thursday of this past week. Users lost connectivity to the major content delivery network Edgecast and the IP address which provides access to Twitter’s image hosting service while another block stopped Venezuelan access to the text-based site Pastebin."
I'm Venezuelan and I live in San Cristobal, my Internet service was cut 36 hours by my ISP (Cantv which is the biggest in the country and fastest, but it's owned by the goverment). This was due to prevent comunication because my city is one with the most prostest in the country, also, a the same time where it was shutdown, the Minister of Defence annouced militar strategies to control riots in the city. People are using Twitter and Zello app, to comunite and to know what's happening because traditional media is not publishing this events.
...Joseph Kennedy sings his praises
That doesn't really work for you if you are in the damaged / isolated area.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I don't know why incumbent governments ever think this is a valid why to curb public sentiment. In every single situation where they try to do this to control the population it does the exact opposite and incites them to get off their lazy bottoms and rebel. They must not realize that cutting off internet access also cuts off pornography which means you have a lot of angry frustrated men with some serious aggression to work out roaming the streets. It is the worst move I can imagine.
It senses any attempt to do so as damage and routes around it.
Yes, but with less bandwidth.
I use a private ISP (Intercable) and while my ping to www.google.com usually sits around 100 ms, now it's usually at 800 ms or so.
Now it might be backbones shutting down or it might just be that everyone is on youtube and twitter trying to get news and clogging the links.
There's also a lot of people recommending VPN apps for their computer or phone to get around censorship, others using zello or other apps to get news and communicate, and so on.
Funny this is what gets talked about rather than Maduro kicking CNN out of the country, the dead protesters or the armed 'non-government' supporters atttacking them. But hey, this is /. I guess.
I have no idea of what other party are you implying might benefit? Is Google expanding Fiber to South America?
If you look at his account, it is brand new and this is his only post. I've noticed this kind of thing on various sites when there's a story on Venezuela that is critical of the government or that talks about the problems happening. People who have never posted before pop up and say it isn't true, or blame the US, or whatnot.
Now maybe they were longtime readers who just happened to suddenly decide to participate, but I kinda doubt it. I think it is a bunch of pro-government types that are out to shill. Could be officially sanctioned, could just be a bunch of nationalist types (which all countries seem to have) that are doing it of their own accord.
Seems to be happening fairly often with Venezuela stories though, so one way or another I think this is a concerted effort on the part of some people, and not just happenstance.
The rest of the latin american governments, except Chile and maybe Paraguay are controlled by "socialists".
Colombia and Mexico are both run by right-of-center governments (at least by Latin American standards). Both are firmly anti-Maduro, especially Colombia, since Venezuela has actively supported the FARC guerrillas operating inside Colombia.