Slashdot Mirror
Who Is Getting Left Behind In the Internet Revolution? (sciencemag.org)
Reader sciencehabit writes: The internet is often hailed as a liberating technology. No matter who you are or what kind of country you live in, your voice can be amplified online and heard around the world. But that assumes that people can get on the internet in the first place. Research has shown that poverty and remoteness can prevent people from getting online, but a new study out today also shows that just belonging to a politically marginalized group can translate to poorer access. The study, published online today in Science, provides the first global map of the people being left behind by the internet revolution. Mapping the internet is hard. Although it is true that every computer with a connection has a real-world location, no one actually knows where they all are. Rather than being organized top-down, the world's computers are connected to each other by a bushy, redundant network of servers. Each country builds and maintains its own infrastructure for connecting citizens to the wider internet. The decision to expand and maintain the infrastructure in one region and not another is up to those in power. And therein lies the problem: Ethnic and religious minorities who are excluded from their country's political process may also be systematically excluded from the global internet.
Poor people politically marginalized. Details at 11.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Would the solution possibly be a sort of mesh network, where devices with wifi could share a network with others in a chain until one device has internet access somewhere, thus giving access to all? I realize there are pitfalls and security risks, as well as performance limitations but for some in remote regions with little money or political support, it may be the only hope.
Who Is Getting Left Behind In the Internet Revolution?
The lucky ones }:-)
(runs & hides)
Considering that's basically what a sovereign nation is, that's only a problem for
A) Those nations only, and
B) People who don't respect the sovereignty of nations
We all are man. We all are...
"Rather than being organized top-down, the world's computers are connected to each other by a bushy, redundant network of servers" which are eavesdropped upon from the top down, natch...
We must keep advancing at all costs. We can't keep stopping to help the very few who can't keep up.
Internet is expensive for everyone. As a thought experiment, divide what you make by $11,880, the poverty line, and then multiply your internet bill is by that much. In other words, if you make the average US income of: 53,657, you end up with a poverty harshness factor of: 4.516582491582492. Now multiply your internet bill by that much, such as the average internet bill of $45. You end up with an poverty adjusted bill of $203.24. That is not insignificant. In reality it's much worse. My phone is my 3rd most expensive thing after housing for which there is no HUD help, and food, for which I can't get foodstamps. I am below the poverty line.
[I tried to submit an article stating that California's phone credit program isn't working, but it never made it, like almost all the others I posted.]
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
In general I think the simplest answer is that those who are forbidden by their ISPs/governments from operating servers are the ones being actively disadvantaged. The one in control of the server, is in control of the 'free' speech on the internet.
Looking at the groups listed in the article, those folks are missing more than just Internet. Maybe we should focus on their basic human needs first.
But ~$100m caught fire. Too soon? Oh well.
And most of Slashdot shit on their attempt to expand Internet access to these people.
I don't pull out the "privilege" card often but, man they quack like ducks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Lets start with the easy one. Remoteness is lumped in to Poverty. Hmm, I wonder why that is? It's the reason we tend to distrust media today in general. This is a open way to inflate the numbers and make people look worse than they are. Look, if you are Poor in the US you have access to much more than if you are at the bottom of middle class. That's not to say you have a higher chance of using them, but tax payers have put in all these programs.
Next, we go a bit more complex and say "Yes, history shows that knowledge is power and the powerful tend to try and keep knowledge from people." There is a lot done regularly to try and change that, but I don't see too many people taking action. The last was a teenager who killed themselves facing 120 years in jail. That aside, we still are not "that" bad. Books used to be extremely expensive and printed in languages which cost money to learn for the majority of history. Around the time of the Reformation however, that changed. Knowledge has become more and more available if people seek it out, but that last part is a chronic failure of humans. People can not be forced to learn, and learning is rather difficult and time consuming. People want to win the lottery and will scheme for numbers instead of learning simple algebra problems, even though they are guaranteed a payout with education yet slim odds of winning a lottery.
Are there people who make it intentionally hard for people to learn? I'm pretty sure some of the reports I read about 3rd world countries are true so "yeah". We won't do any more about them than we do about our allies in the Middle East killing women for getting raped or being the wrong Religion or having the wrong sexual preference. The conversation should be framed in very specific terms, but it won't be because that's not the agenda.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
from the ./ summary:
Advocacy of individual economic freedom is often criticized because, among the many possible exercises of that freedom, is radical capitalism: the single-minded pursuit of profits over all other social concerns. Yet, a dedication to monetary profit alone in such conditions as described in the linked study would be preferable to the actual circumstance: a dedication to denying an oppressed group a vital service. Certainly there is much to be made by selling these groups internet service and someone is forgoing profits by not making those sales. More accurately, someone is compelled by government to forgo profits.
If all you want to do is make big profits, by definition you do not want to limit those profits by declining sales to politically unpopular groups.
The economist Milton Friedman said, "Human freedom and economic freedom work together." I disagree because that understates the connectedness of those freedoms; the two are one-in-the-same.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
non union us IT workers!
We need trump to get rid of the H1B's.
Poor people are treated by the political classes exactly like cattle. They are milked and bred.
If you doubt this, look at all policy surrounding the poor and ask yourself what you would do differently if you wanted to raise a permanent underclass to exploit.
The rapture is for the righteous. All others go straight to hell by way of Newark.
On the internet, everyone's voice is equally irrelevant.
I expect a Score of 5, recognition of me me me, and tons of posts to this thread glorifying me and my ideas. Which don't need to be explained, I'm on the internet!
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
This is akin to preaching to the choir.
I would expect an article about "How the lack of internet is having long term consequences" be available in dead tree form.
Oh. Not that kind of politically marginalized group.
Alternative Right.
Nothing bilking the American middle class of a paltry 100 or 200 billion taxdollars couldn't solve.
this to me? (I'm a mechanical engineer BTW)
no one actually knows where they all are
Don't the ISP's know where they are and why is this difficult information to find? Someone is plugging in to main trunk lines. Can't you ask them (the people paying the bills) where it's connected and so on down the line until you get to the end user, or at least very close?
Throw off your shackles of non-connectivity. The revolution will not be televised, but you will be able to complain endlessly on social media.
Huh, Huh, Huh, He said Bushy!
i think it's a matter of information gaps, not necessarily that the information isn't there but that it's not in a handy ready to transmit form and it hasn't all been collated into one spot outside of some NSA operation.
basically ISPs serve their customers. their work is downstream. all of their customer data is relevant downstream. well, unless they're selling names and addresses to advertisers.
so sure the ISPs know where all their customers are, but the other ISPs don't. and there's no central repository of this private business information for others to glean from. unless we're talking about several ISPs that are all operated by the same umbrella corporation for the sake of avoiding public accusations of market monopoly.
now let's consider how you're going to find all the ISPs of some other country. sure, in the united states all ISPs register with the FCC. there's not necessarily an analog in every other country, especially when we start getting down to countries that should be undeveloped but ran ahead and screwed their shit up by developing some things too fast and other things too slowly. countries where basically you can see something like a beautiful 100,000 luxury bus dropping off the side of a mountain because there's nothing but some mud clinging to the side of a mountain and somebody felt that was a road. or you see something like a team of guys trying to get a backhoe off a truck by lowering it down on its own arm because they can't afford a mother. fucking. ramp. it's literally one of history's oldest tools and here they have a hydraulic shovel and a diesel engine truck and they don't have a fucking ramp. so somewhere out there is an ISP that doesn't even have to have a license to pay a guy with one towel around his dick and another around his head to go out also without a license and climb a pole using a rope and almost get electrocuted while hanging cat-5 from a wooden pole using carpentry staples. unless the third world we're talking about is a united state trailer park in which case the registry they're using is probably the sex offender registry.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Neither of you understand. If the poor have internet access, and internet access does translate into free speech, then the poor get a voice. In my analysis, that is step number one for them and all of us best addressing the situation.
Most of these places, are 3rd world countries, or have oppressive dictatorships, that don't want their citizens educated or informed on what is going on, via an outside independent source. As for the countries in Africa, when you live in mud & straw huts, drink from a ditch beside your hut, I don't think internet access is #1 on their priority list.
@me
f.you
Seen any on TV, in power, or getting press lately?
They're pretty much the fringe.
Alternative Right.
White women, sitting along, dissatisfied with their cubicle jobs...
What else could they do but agitate for power through political means?
I doubt that WHITE POWER means WHITE SUPREMACY, but even so, FEMINISM clearly means FEMALES FIRST, even if not FEMALE SUPREMACY.
Alternative Right.
Education is a basic human need, and Internet is (among other things) a tool for fulfilling that need.
In the context of poor people and poor countries: Chmod 444 TheInternet Get them online, but have them lurk for a few years.
just belonging to a politically marginalized group can translate to poorer access.
That's not terribly suspicious. First and foremost, the internet exists to serve the privileged. From those who had/have the time to make it, to those who use its existence to better their own situation in life. Who's worrying about - let's say - it's impact on the education of the young? Clearly not very many people, since ordered, graduated, high-quality writng and tools to access it with are certainly not a substantial part of what's here (apart from, for example, -some- college professors to put -some- of their materials onlilne). It's largely dedicated to insubstantial entertainment for the masses (like the old mass media), as well as specialist forums for the already-educated.
There once existed an FM pioneer who complained "look what you've done to my child!" That early complaint has developed into a perennial pattern seen all across implementations of technology. While it's new and fun, people like Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have big, substantial dreams for it. And then the promise is dissipated, diluted to serve the same old mundanities. We had a chance to keep that from happening, but once again we're stumbling into the same old mental pitfalls that made the 20th century possible.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Who have to remove a camera memory card, get to a "computer" and upload their images.
Or use some wifi or bluetooth network to try and send the images to a "computer" to then upload.
Buy into some brand and then locked into some branded software that tries to network with the camera and some parts of social media.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
re "i think it's a matter of information gaps, not necessarily that the information isn't there but that it's not in a handy ready to transmit form and it hasn't all been collated into one spot outside of some NSA operation."
State and federal police globally are thinking of the same NSA level tasking per ip, or interesting person they find.
Police spy on web, phone usage with no warrants (Feb 18 2012)
http://www.smh.com.au/technolo...
"Access is authorised by senior police officers or officials rather than by judicial warrant."
Mapping the internet is easy if every provider has to help via logs or a per provider real time server for police access able to reverse any ip in use to an account national.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is a bit of an aside, but I have discovered a lot of interactions between individuals and the government, interactions that are 'required,' now 'require' an internet connection.
I just got a letter in the mail State informing me that no one at my address is registered to vote. Which is wrong. To look it up I can go on-line, or mail it it. But going on-line I can see that I may be registered to vote at the wrong address, for example.
Or Medicare recently announced that if you try to do things on-line, you need a text or cell phone--land phone won't do, so they can send you a confirming password good for one session. What if you don't have a cell phone, can't afford one, or like me, simply don't want one? Medicare does offer a solution, which I'm guessing is slow and cumbersome.
But, and this is my favorite, as the march to the internet goes on, agencies dealing with the homeless, the super poor, etc. also are requiring you apply on-line or do things on-line.
I suspect some laws/regulations get passed pushing the internet for whatever reason, and the Agency to Pick up Sick Homeless People has no choice.