I lived there in '72 and '73. We had to leave in a hurry.
It's one of the most beautiful nations on Earth. Absolutely stunning.
Except for all the skulls.
Bad Things Happened there, and it has never recovered.
It has become a haven for religious crackpots. They had a Jonestown-type thing, a number of years ago, and it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
> It has become a haven for religious crackpots. They had a Jonestown-type thing, a number of years ago, and it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
It would be remiss to avoid mentioning that American Evangelical "Missionaries" were a (if not the) driving force[1] behind the clampdown on gay folk in Uganda - perhaps you were alluding to them when you said it's became a haven for them ;)
I can confirm, having spent some time there 15 years ago. The daily headlines about police busts of homosexuals was terrifying.
At some point Bob Geldorf called on Musevini to resign. The Ugandan papers carried knee jerk headlines of "is Geldorf gay?". It would have been comical had they not reflected a grim pervasive homiphobia.
Comparing present day Uganda to Uganda under Idi Amin is a grossly incorrect stature to take. Tbh this comment is a bit triggering for myself as a Ugandan and quite a misrepresentation of the country. Since this is right at the top, I feel like I need to respond.
All the skulls - That's not a thing, I can't recall seeing any growing up in Uganda. Sure there have been wars in the country but that was decades ago...
Bad things happened there and it has never recovered:
The country has developed significantly since the 70s just like most other places in the world. That statement is so far from the truth
Homosexuality: Definitely a strong opposition to it in the country. However, the media representation is an extreme versus the day to day. If you are gay in Uganda, I do agree that it is probably best to stay in the shadows
I urge you to please think about what you are going to write before writing such a comment. You haven't lived in the country for 40 years. Can you really know anything about it's present state?
Good point. You have extremely valid criticism, and I appreciate your writing them.
I loved the nation, when I lived there, and it had a profound impact on my life. Leaving was heartbreaking. I have "survivors' guilt" from that, as I suspect that all the kids I used to play with were probably killed. I still have items with bayonet holes in them, from when the soldiers were making sure that my father wasn't smuggling out his students (who were all killed). I sincerely wish you well in your continued growth and success. It has been worse.
Idi Amin and Milton Obote killed around a million folks; from the end of colonialism, through the mid 1970s. I remember -extremely well- public executions in the park in Kampala.
I also remember how rich, cosmopolitan and modern the nation was, in 1972, and how it collapsed -almost overnight- after Amin kicked out the Asians. From what I see, it has never regained that stature. It was in really good shape, pre-Amin. The income from tea, alone, made it the richest country in East Africa. The rich, volcanic soil, meant that you could grow almost anything there. It also has vast mineral wealth (my mother was a geologist, and I remember touring mines in the Southwestern part of the country). I still have samples of ore from those mines on my shelf.
The LRA has probably been the most horrifying thing for me.
You have my thanks and support. Good luck, and Godspeed.
Related, a few hours ago Bobi Wine (main opposition candidate) reported the military had entered his home. Unclear how the situation will play out, the incumbent is currently leading in the polls but there's been a huge amount of violence, arrests, etc. so I'm not sure one could say it's been a "free and fair" election. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-01-15/uganda...
Turning off the internet isn't impossible per-se, it's just very difficult without disastrous effects on the local economy. I don't know how developed Uganda is, but I can tell you for sure that if the internet is blocked in the US or any major European country, everything stops, including real-life things such as card payments and even airport timetable signs (interesting fact: most of the UK ones run a Chrome instance displaying a webpage hosted by a Romanian company). Even if access to national services is unaffected, those services themselves depend on various SaaSes that would be affected by the international blocking.
Ugandan here. I spoke with my family in Kampala yesterday (cell phone calls still work) and whilst some things like atms not working are an issue, for the most part things are working, especially since there is a large use of mobile money for payments
I hope we never find out what happens if the US internet goes down. But with 2020's track record and what 2021 is starting to look like, we might find out!
Even without shutting off the internet, couldn't governments crush crypto by making it illegal to buy or transfer? Countries could do this simultaneously.
That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations from using it, no?
What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to hinge on getting too big to ban.
A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish, extending the transmission range in several kilometers
This is not at all a practical solution. How much "decentralized P2P internet" infrastructure do you think there is in Uganda? Hell even in the US its virtually nonexistent. Which P2P internet should I use? IPFS? Helium? Any of the other blockchain internet vaporware?
Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge significantly from the original internet ledger.
I think, there was a talk some year ago about a country in South America. It think they had almost mo internet, but a large P2P wireless network all over the country.
> For all you Bitcoiners talking about how it's impossible for a government to turn off the internet, this appears to be a counter-example.
I'll bite.
It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion.
I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it.
What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet.
Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it.
Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues.
But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long.
In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...).
We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing.
Well said. Also, using Gotenna's TxTenna ( https://txtenna.com/) with Blockstream satellite downloading of bitcoin block data, one can send and receive bitcoin transaction data all without local internet connectivity.
Does anybody have good overview/resources to learn more about how the internet "pipes" are configured at a national level? I can understand conceptually how a government could disable internet connectivity to _outside_ the country by having some control over the connections that cross borders. _Inside_ the country you would need to have control over the internal routing mechanisms as well, assuming the DNS lookups could all happen in-country? (this is not my field/I don't know the correct terminology).
How would people with satellite internet connectivity be impacted (I assume there is some government entity able to turn off a satellite, but that probably only applies to a few countries in the world?)?
EDIT: I should have thought about this for a few more minutes before posting the original question - the shutting down ISPs is glaringly obvious in hindsight... I am still interested in hearing people's thoughts on satellite internet, though. HN occasionally talks about initiatives to have LEO satellites provide internet access. If the people running the satellite were outside of your jurisdiction, it would seem like these instances would be mitigated for many places in the world?
Government just calls ISPs and tells them to shut stuff down or face charges.
> there is some government entity able to turn off a satellite, but that probably only applies to a few countries in the world
A satellite internet provider can’t provide service to a country without the complying with its government rules (assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between the country and the country of the satellite internet provider).
> assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between the country and the country of the satellite internet provider
Assuming the other country has something worth trading for. I imagine Uganda wouldn’t really have anything to bargain with the US if a US satellite internet company rejected Uganda’s request.
Especially in a country with less infrastructure, there's usually only a small number of mobile carriers that service the vast majority of the internet use; sometimes the government only calls the mobile carriers, and ignores the wired carriers and dialup ISPs.
If you can't route traffic outside of the country, it doesn't matter if you can resolve domains. You still won't be able to reach your destination IP.
DNS lookups still rely on your ability to route traffic outside your country anyways.
Neither of the above points even matter if your government can control the ISPs operating in its border. Government says to ISPs: "cease operation or well put you all in prison"
You replace the root DNS servers with your own. It isn't that hard, if you are reading this you should be able to figure out how to do it in less than a day.
Google.com returns an ip of your favored in country search engine - most likely people get a https error when trying to go there, but those that ignore the error find search works for allowed things and the rest learn to use the favored search engine.
You - as a national actor - can easily cut your country off from the internet while still getting many of the benefits of the internet.
I just looked at the cached version of the UCC act 2013, and it seems that section 56 explicitly forbids switching off the service for any other reasons than failure to pay the dues.
I'm looking forward to more countries opening the door to Starlink for the economy boast and access to their people but also to reduce the chances of this happening.
If there was a ground station outside of the country the shutdown wouldn't have had an affect unless they tried to police each person running the dish during the ban.
Readit News
I lived there in '72 and '73. We had to leave in a hurry.
It's one of the most beautiful nations on Earth. Absolutely stunning.
Except for all the skulls.
Bad Things Happened there, and it has never recovered.
It has become a haven for religious crackpots. They had a Jonestown-type thing, a number of years ago, and it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
It would be remiss to avoid mentioning that American Evangelical "Missionaries" were a (if not the) driving force[1] behind the clampdown on gay folk in Uganda - perhaps you were alluding to them when you said it's became a haven for them ;)
1. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/scott-lively-an...
At some point Bob Geldorf called on Musevini to resign. The Ugandan papers carried knee jerk headlines of "is Geldorf gay?". It would have been comical had they not reflected a grim pervasive homiphobia.
All the skulls - That's not a thing, I can't recall seeing any growing up in Uganda. Sure there have been wars in the country but that was decades ago...
Bad things happened there and it has never recovered: The country has developed significantly since the 70s just like most other places in the world. That statement is so far from the truth
Homosexuality: Definitely a strong opposition to it in the country. However, the media representation is an extreme versus the day to day. If you are gay in Uganda, I do agree that it is probably best to stay in the shadows
I urge you to please think about what you are going to write before writing such a comment. You haven't lived in the country for 40 years. Can you really know anything about it's present state?
I loved the nation, when I lived there, and it had a profound impact on my life. Leaving was heartbreaking. I have "survivors' guilt" from that, as I suspect that all the kids I used to play with were probably killed. I still have items with bayonet holes in them, from when the soldiers were making sure that my father wasn't smuggling out his students (who were all killed). I sincerely wish you well in your continued growth and success. It has been worse.
Idi Amin and Milton Obote killed around a million folks; from the end of colonialism, through the mid 1970s. I remember -extremely well- public executions in the park in Kampala.
I also remember how rich, cosmopolitan and modern the nation was, in 1972, and how it collapsed -almost overnight- after Amin kicked out the Asians. From what I see, it has never regained that stature. It was in really good shape, pre-Amin. The income from tea, alone, made it the richest country in East Africa. The rich, volcanic soil, meant that you could grow almost anything there. It also has vast mineral wealth (my mother was a geologist, and I remember touring mines in the Southwestern part of the country). I still have samples of ore from those mines on my shelf.
The LRA has probably been the most horrifying thing for me.
You have my thanks and support. Good luck, and Godspeed.
Given that's where the "eat da poo poo" video originated, I'm not surprised.
From what you saw, does this result in amplified masculinity, sexism, or gender roles?
In any case, it wasn't the issue, when I lived there. All that happened afterwards.
When I was there, this nice chap called Idi Amin was throwing a party, and we decided to tender our regrets.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/jan/14/bobi-wine...
Dead Comment
It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
here 500 days and counting of no high speed mobile internet for 8 million + souls. thats worlds biggest democracy for you /s
honestly i have seen how life crashes without internet, its not fun
That would effectively stop ~99% of the affected populations from using it, no?
What's the counterargument to this possibility? It seems to hinge on getting too big to ban.
Also, drugs are illegal... and it hasn't stopped drugs from trading hands... drugs even manage to make their way into prisons.
Locha.io
https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
https://www.github.com/btcven/locha/tree/master/documentatio...
A Harpia node is a Locha Mesh standalone node which can provide services on the network such as an Internet gateway, Bitcoin transactions broadcast, latest blocks data, Electrum Server, a remote monerod, or any other. This device can have a larger antenna plugged, a power amplifier, or even a satellite dish, extending the transmission range in several kilometers
Any Blockchain operating in a small region would have no resiliency, be vulnerable to 51% attacks, and diverge significantly from the original internet ledger.
I'll bite.
It's not that we don't think it can happen, in fact those of us actually adept in financial censorship as well as physical censorship have actually advocated that we build additional infrastructure for just this occasion.
I've been involved in the HK protests since the inception of the Yellow Movement, where we saw the CCP making its heavy handed presence felt and then had the local police shut down the internet in protest zones. This lead to the use of a bluetooth based app Fire Chat [0], which had also been used in Iraq when governments decided to crack down on 'dissidents' online. I personally never stopped advocatin for them to build meshnets and become familiar with p2p solutions as the financial censorship was soon to follow, and did not long after and still remains to this day: Jimmy Lai's charges is based on Money laundering something they do not have to prove simply claim and they can get away with it.
What came after that, especially for me as a I was involved in the CJDNS project in Switzerland and dabbled with hyperboria as well as Zeronet in the US for a short period, saw the need for the creation of an entirely new Internet.
Meshnets could serve only a limited capability for a short period of time, guifi is a cool project, but it cannot support the types of infrastructure we've all been reliant on for most of modern existence. I hold a lot of hope for Starlink becoming that after it becomes profitable and recovers its investments as we are in dire need of a new system. Or at least leases out some of its satelites for private use to help build something like it.
Thus, we have made progress towards that end in the Bitcoin community, though in my opinion not enough as we've spent countless hours debating BS topics about people and things who don't matter rather on solving some of the more glaring issues.
But Blockstream, even for all their misgivings and are far from perfect, are still moving toward the desirable end of having non-internet based transactions a priority to propagate on the mainchain-layer 1 protocol with their satellite [1]. There are other solutions as well, ham radio based tx etc... but I'll spare you the details of that for now as this is getting long.
In short, you're talking about some of the most paranoid people in tech with an understanding of cryptography based tools and OPSEC who understand the implications of what you've described as a hypothetical situation while some of us have actually lived through this and used this technology to solve some of the most pressing issues in massive Humanitarian crises in the 21st century (Maidan Revolution in Kiev, Venzuela hyper inflation etc...).
We're not all 'moonbois' and scammers though that gets the most headlines (I'm looking at you Micheal Saylor), and our tech, unlike even the stuff you overly compensated guys in FAANG aimlessly build and maintain to the detriment of much of Humanity, has this weird habit of working even when everyone else says it's dead: to this day nothing even comes close to Bitcoin's (the Network) reliability. Nothing.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat 1: https://blockstream.com/satellite/
How would people with satellite internet connectivity be impacted (I assume there is some government entity able to turn off a satellite, but that probably only applies to a few countries in the world?)?
EDIT: I should have thought about this for a few more minutes before posting the original question - the shutting down ISPs is glaringly obvious in hindsight... I am still interested in hearing people's thoughts on satellite internet, though. HN occasionally talks about initiatives to have LEO satellites provide internet access. If the people running the satellite were outside of your jurisdiction, it would seem like these instances would be mitigated for many places in the world?
> there is some government entity able to turn off a satellite, but that probably only applies to a few countries in the world
A satellite internet provider can’t provide service to a country without the complying with its government rules (assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between the country and the country of the satellite internet provider).
Assuming the other country has something worth trading for. I imagine Uganda wouldn’t really have anything to bargain with the US if a US satellite internet company rejected Uganda’s request.
DNS lookups still rely on your ability to route traffic outside your country anyways.
Neither of the above points even matter if your government can control the ISPs operating in its border. Government says to ISPs: "cease operation or well put you all in prison"
Google.com returns an ip of your favored in country search engine - most likely people get a https error when trying to go there, but those that ignore the error find search works for allowed things and the rest learn to use the favored search engine.
You - as a national actor - can easily cut your country off from the internet while still getting many of the benefits of the internet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704433
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749447
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25752875
The cached version is still on Google...
If there was a ground station outside of the country the shutdown wouldn't have had an affect unless they tried to police each person running the dish during the ban.
Is that only government-sanctioned networks/stations? Or perhaps, people who don't go through the large ISPs?