Even if you accept "it must be completely impossible for students to access the internet during exam periods" as an important goal (it seems very extreme to me, but whatever) I'm astonished that cutting the entire country's internet off is the only way to achieve that.
What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine. Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive.
Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on phone masts near schools.
Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody is using it - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access, and rapidly increasing.
At some level of incompetence, you might ask whether the underlying assumptions are wrong -- for example, perhaps they're looking for excuses to reduce internet access more generally.
Given the year+ we've just had, I'm more surprised to see comments like this ignoring the possibility that perhaps students aren't sat in schools or exam rooms?
If you had an entire country worth of students taking exams from home, absolutely possible given the past year, and you wanted, as a government to prevent them cheating by accessing the internet, what, I wonder would the most obvious solution be?
For what it's worth, I still believe it's an utterly ridiculous measure, but how can we not be considering this possibility?
Uhm. Without Internet they can't take tests from home unless you mail it to them - at that point cheating becomes much easier by just meeting up with your buddies and doing the test together.
In fact for a paper based exam of fixed questions Internet is quite bad for cheating. You’d get better help by asking someone or just opening the book. Or even better if someone else can do it for you.
So, were you able to see why many are not seeing or not willing to see that possibility?
I agree that the shut-down seems over-broad, but, at the same time, might it be too narrow? Couldn't people also use "non-data" mobile communications, like SMS or even voice calls, for cheating?
If they're not stopping voice calls and there's a working landline within 100 metres or so, an enterprising cheat could probably set up a private Wi-Fi access point connected to an old-school modem doing dial-up either internationally or locally to a shortwave radio shack.
People have been cheating on exams long before the internet existed. The only way to guarantee no one cheats on an exam is to never give the exam in the first place. I think exams are the “good reason” the government has given the public to justify shutting off internet access, I don’t think it’s the real reason.
This is the Syrian government we're talking about here. Recent history may indicate that one shouldn't trust them to be entirely truthful about their reasons for doing things
Not sure why this is downvoted. It wouldn't be such a surprise if a bunch of people were "disappeared" during the shutoff period, or some other such thing. Turning off the internet makes it harder to mobilize opposition. Syria's is a dictatorship after all.
From that stat page, Syrians have about 9 fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people, and fixed telephone lines were only a bit more, but mobile phone subscriptions were more than one per person.
To a first approximation, cutting off mobile data is cutting off the internet. The same is true in many other countries; there's just not a lot of people with home internet connections, and often those aren't part of government forced internet shutdowns (sometimes on purpose to try to let businesses still work, sometimes because it's easier to get the handful of wireless carriers to do it than the sometimes many wireline carriers, sometimes because the government forgot). But anyway, if you cut off 90% of the people, it breaks the utility for communicating with people within your country.
This happens in North Indian states as well where the state governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting the same morons (I’m sorry but I do not have a charitable word for them) back into power.
I generally agree, but this doesn't work in countries that restrict cross border movement of their own citizens.
North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent to other countries. Europe loses talent to the United States. It's a flawed comparison, but North Korea is not a better place to work and do business than Europe, which this comparison would imply.
if I wanted to rule without opposition I might take steps to drive away or suppress the intelligentsia, so I'm not sure what your metric is really measuring, maybe effectiveness of my tyranny?
Ah yes, the evergreen complaint in Indian politics. No matter how bad the current government is, it’s supporters will claim the alternative is worse. Even when tens of thousands of people were dying because of COVID, people like this would say “abe librandu (hey libtard), if not Modiji then who?”
Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period, say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look like? What kind of changes would we see? (provided, emergency services stay reachable).
Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc...
We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context.
But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day.
I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course, without breaking a sweat."
But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
I’d guess it’d be similar to how some European cities prohibit all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive.
You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place.
A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to be closed on Sundays.
The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'.
As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry.
I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
That sounds about right. Depending upon what "shutting down the Internet" means. Does everyone need to now have a POTS landline again if they want to communicate with anyone on a Sunday? But, in general, some combination of alternative systems for critical purposes and lots of things, including most shopping and other services, simply shutting down for the day.
the reason for the closure is employment laws. employees simply have the right to not be forced to work on sundays or public holidays.
if you run your own business you can work whenever you want. you just can't have employees work those days.
restaurants, hospitals, transportation and similar industries get an exception to let employees work any day. restaurants usually close on mondays instead.
People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway.
"Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a market day in medieval towns.
There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur there are places like that and people living a fully disconnected lifestyle.
So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection.
From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.
I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would applications improve their capabilities around caching, local processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as the "optimal" state but not required? What services are impossible to process locally? e.g. cache map data, road conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps.. purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism, etc...
The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls under the excluded ‘emergency’ category.
The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because that's what it's become.
All websites that allows you to stream things would have a short term download feature.
People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on.
It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason.
It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance, and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be open).
You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and do things before there was an Internet that they could connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or going somewhere.
Many people would lose access to transportation of many different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs.
Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to the time before it. They are asking what would our "today" look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week. Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
This happens here in Algeria too, when students pass the Baccalaureate exams, the Internet gets cut daily for a week from 8am to 5pm. It's been like this for 5 years now and nobody seems to care.
How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID.
Something tells me that Algeria probably hasn't moved its entire social infrastructure online quite as aggressively as the US. Presumably there is still some offline telephony (POTS? Cellular service? SMS?) that functions to do almost everything that you listed.
Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.
How does cutting off Internet access across the board not dramatically hamper daily life and business? They must rely a lot less on it than we do in highly developed countries.
Fortunately for them things seem to have entered in a status-quo that strongly resembles peace since the Battle of Aleppo ended (that was about 4 years ago) and more generally since the Syrian Army's latest offensive in Idlib was stalled by the Turkish troops (late 2019 - early 2020).
This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing it to the stone age).
I suppose exams of which answers are googleable are not very useful for anything other than pushing piles of facts (temporarily) into students' heads. But I also suppose that the Syrian governement is probably not the best counterpart to argue about progressive education methods with.
Readit News
What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine. Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive.
Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on phone masts near schools.
Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody is using it - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access, and rapidly increasing.
They want people be to used to the fact that cutting internet is something mundane so the next time they do it because of a protest, nobody will care.
Deleted Comment
If you had an entire country worth of students taking exams from home, absolutely possible given the past year, and you wanted, as a government to prevent them cheating by accessing the internet, what, I wonder would the most obvious solution be?
For what it's worth, I still believe it's an utterly ridiculous measure, but how can we not be considering this possibility?
In fact for a paper based exam of fixed questions Internet is quite bad for cheating. You’d get better help by asking someone or just opening the book. Or even better if someone else can do it for you.
So, were you able to see why many are not seeing or not willing to see that possibility?
If they're not stopping voice calls and there's a working landline within 100 metres or so, an enterprising cheat could probably set up a private Wi-Fi access point connected to an old-school modem doing dial-up either internationally or locally to a shortwave radio shack.
To a first approximation, cutting off mobile data is cutting off the internet. The same is true in many other countries; there's just not a lot of people with home internet connections, and often those aren't part of government forced internet shutdowns (sometimes on purpose to try to let businesses still work, sometimes because it's easier to get the handful of wireless carriers to do it than the sometimes many wireline carriers, sometimes because the government forgot). But anyway, if you cut off 90% of the people, it breaks the utility for communicating with people within your country.
Are smart, educated and highly motivated professionals going to North India or are they leaving it?
North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent to other countries. Europe loses talent to the United States. It's a flawed comparison, but North Korea is not a better place to work and do business than Europe, which this comparison would imply.
Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc...
We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context.
But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day.
I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place.
An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown.
A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'.
As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry.
I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
if you run your own business you can work whenever you want. you just can't have employees work those days.
restaurants, hospitals, transportation and similar industries get an exception to let employees work any day. restaurants usually close on mondays instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv
People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway.
"Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.
So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection.
From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.
I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.
Deleted Comment
People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on.
It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason.
It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.
Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.
Internet's probably not on the top of the list of things you count on.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me
This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing it to the stone age).