Slashdot Mirror
Governments Shut Down the Internet More Than 50 Times in 2016 (thewire.in)
An anonymous reader writes: Governments around the world shut down the internet more than 50 times in 2016 -- suppressing elections, slowing economies and limiting free speech. In the worst cases internet shutdowns have been associated with human rights violations, Deji Olukotun, senior global advocacy manager at digital rights organisation Access Now told IPS. "What we have found is that internet shutdowns go hand in hand with atrocities," said Olukotun. "In Ethiopia there's been consistent blocking this year of social media and internet." Dozens of people have died in protests in Ethiopia in 2016, "many of them during the kind of blackout where it's difficult to report on what's happening," he said. Several leaders used internet shutdowns to affect democratic processes, including elections. "In Uganda in February 2016 there was a shutdown of social media networks by President Museveni and that again happened in Gambia (in December) surrounding the election," Olukotun added. In other cases, three governments chose to shut down the internet because they thought that it would stop students from cheating on their exams, he said. "On the whole most governments want to expand internet access," said Olukotun.
However governments do not seem to have taken into account the potential repercussions of the shutdowns, beyond the limits of free speech. According to an estimate, internet shutdowns resulted in a loss of $2.4 billion in 2015.
Agreed. These articles are to make us forget that Clinton should be in jail.
So that's why... I thought it was my horrible ISP.
Or the National Enquirer?
It's access to the Internet that was shut down.
Or just a tiny portion?
Darn you Roy and Moss for giving Jen the black box!
I haven't had a stable connection for more than two weeks. If it was stable enough that a disruption would indicate a possible covert operation I could script for that, but I would get a false alert every week. I'm pretty sure my cable company isn't the only one that sucks for stability and problem determination, ....Comcast
Does this mean that third world countries have a more dependable internet service than we do?
Instead of shutting down the internet, he'll just tweet that it should be the protesters who should get a job!
Like him.
maybe it wasn't actually shut down???
Governments around the world shut down the internet more than 50 times in 2016
No, no they didn't...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
... on the picture of TFA: the person in the photo is doing it wrong!
The block after the people are used to it (and, thus, dependent of it somehow) is a very bad to free speech and information flow: no, there's very few things "much, much worse" than it, if any - this kind of thing undercovers very serious violations os human rights!
It's time for you sharp people out there to figure out a backup plan for this nonsense, and move information another way!!
Ivan, the election is over. Go home. We have no more rubles for you. I told Brenski and Mitya last week stop coming here, the job is gone now, but you come in to my internet cafe each day for 16 hours and posting Hillary e-mails Hillary Benghazi Hillary Hillary on reddit. Worse, you going home to Novgorod hellhole and post the same thing on Slashdot!! We aren't even paying you for this!!
According to an estimate, internet shutdowns resulted in a loss of $2.4 billion in 2015.
Is that all? That's roughly 1% of Apple's annual revenue for perspective. Basically they're saying that you could achieve the same financial impact by Apple going on a long weekend. I realize $2.4 billion is a large number and certainly enough to be consequential to those affected but in the grand scheme of things it's just not as much of an impact as one might think. Obviously it's a hard number to pin down with any precision but I kind of would have expected a larger number.
The Google Uses Trump!
They're pissed off because their near-monopoly of the lib-left newspapers, CNN (Clinton News Network), MSNBC (Most Socialist Network on Basic Cable), etc was easily bypassed. That's what cost Hillary the election.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...
> Three years before Matt Drudge changed the world and how news would be
> consumed, President Bill Clinton's White House feared that the Internet was allowing
> average citizens, especially conservatives, to bypass legacy gatekeepers and
> access information that had previously been denied to them by the mainstream press.
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
3 years later, it happened. One of the "legacy gatekeepers", Newsweek was considering doing a story breaking the Clinton-Lewinski scandal. But management killed the story. Instead a lowly store clerk with a modem broke the story... you've heard of Matt Drudge http://www.drudgereport.com/ Hillary clinton's reaction was to whine about the lack of "gatekeepers".
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08...
What would've happened if Hillary had won?
> Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign has sent out a fundraising
> email arguing the website Breitbart News has no "right to exist,"
> and suggests that if elected, the website will be shut down entirely.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user