Iraq Shuts Down Internet In Entire Country To Prevent Exam Cheating (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Iraqi government has ordered ISPs to shut down Internet access in the entire country to prevent exam cheating for Iraq's official exams for secondary and high schools. This is the second year in a row when Iraq does this, after the same thing happened in 2015. Companies like Akamai and Dyn also noted the government's poor decision on Twitter. It appears that Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras to combat exam cheating. The country's Internet went dark May 14-16th, between 05:00 AM and 08:00 AM GMT. An Iraqi ISP leaked on Facebook the content of an email it received from state officials.

Comments

Re:arrogance

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Who the fuck said anything about "brown people?"

If the same thing happened in say, Alabama, we'd comment on it too. .

Stupid is as stupid does, no matter the skin color or location. The sheer ridiculousness of taking net access away from an entire country "for the children" is what's being mocked here, not the technological abilities in Iraq.

As to your air travel strawman, The US was trying to determine what had happened. We had no way of knowing that there were NOT more terrorists lined up, and the severity of 9/11 was a bit higher than some kids cheating on an exam. In retrospect, that reaction might not have been warranted, but seeing as how nothing like that had ever happened before, there are worse ways we could have reacted.