The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
— https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts enjoyful then buckle up!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?
The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.
I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
The quote has nothing to do with a well regulated militia. It's about whether the technical ability for internet shutdowns has been built or not.
>A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?)
>The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy.
Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
I am going to be the odd one out here and say that internet should be cut off during protests and other unrests. It might even slow down colour revolutions and give the state some breathing space to manage public sentiment.
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow!
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
Living without the Internet is still doable.
Just a little bit harder.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience.
Just like going back to 1999.
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
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== Call To Action
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
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Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
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Call to Arms! ^_^
>> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.” — https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
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I am sure it is against Terms of Service to use Starlink to bomb people!
Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
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> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
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How passionately do you feel about that position every time AWS us-east-1 goes down?
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
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This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll admit had me scratching my head...
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
Antitrust law does. That requires a government that cares to enforce the law.
It probably depends on the corporations. If a merger would result in all of the union’s employees being laid off, of course the union would fight it.
Unions tend to work for people.
If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations.
I like people!
Depends on the union and the laws under which they operate.
We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts enjoyful then buckle up!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-...
> Featuring the T-HEAD TH1520 SoC, 16GB RAM and 128GB storage at a price of €15.99 per month, Elastic Metal RV1 is accessible to all budgets
Scaleway :- a non three global-scale public clouds offering riscv from a custom manufacturer from a list might be something of your interest then :)
Sir, I understand that the world is getting centralized since that is the fact but I have started to frequent more on https://vpspricetracker.com/ , https://serverdeals.cc/ , https://serververify.com/ , https://lowendtalk.com/ etc. (sorry for sending more links but I have a whole list of awesome stuff on a yopad/etherpad instance)
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
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One of these things is not like the others..
Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?
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The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.
Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
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we do annual unannounced firedrills and now one dies as a consequence.
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While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
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They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.
I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.
What name server / level3 event was this?
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power.
Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
> Starlink-style connectivity
Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator.
Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.
As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
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Is that true? This comment suggests otherwise, with citations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351511
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Notably absent from TFA...
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
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Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
> In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce.
Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs.
It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
The quote has nothing to do with a well regulated militia. It's about whether the technical ability for internet shutdowns has been built or not.
>A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?)
>The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy.
Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever used for something like this.
Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have enough tactical EMP devices to do the job.
PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
Its been happening a lot and its becoming more prevalent. This coverage from 2022 is still highly relevant and digs into some details:
https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/
The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
Which reminds me that I've let my connection to this group lapse for... about a decade: https://air-stream.org/
Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist in most cities.
I am going to be the odd one out here and say that internet should be cut off during protests and other unrests. It might even slow down colour revolutions and give the state some breathing space to manage public sentiment.
I’m against internet shutdowns, but I cringe at the phrase “international community.” Who does that even include?
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
Related: this is an interesting case study https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html
did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have happened this year across the world? https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...
its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow!
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
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fun anecdote about Ethiopia doing this to prevent cheating in national exams --- https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
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Ted has some interesting ideas but I personally would not accept any life advice from him
Living without the Internet is still doable. Just a little bit harder.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like going back to 1999.
You are aware of the fact that a lot of the payment infrastructure relies on the internet today?
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This is concerning in the comments:
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
Ahh I just wanted to host my website in Afghanistan.
(there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems its not illegal to send money there)
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
> Surprise internet shutdowns are good
I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good
For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.
Ha
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