Unrest in Gabon leads to Internet shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Unrest in Gabon leads to Internet shutdown

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> Update: September 2, 0945 UTC: the Internet remains disconnected in Gabon.

"Statement by the Secretary-General (UN) on the situation in the Gabonese Republic" (from yesterday)

https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2016-09-01/sta...

  I call on the government to immediately restore
  communications, especially the Internet, SMS and the
  independent radio and television.

"Gabon is the latest African country to shut down its internet as election protests grow" (~2h ago)

http://qz.com/771996/gabon-is-the-latest-african-country-to-...

  The government of Gabon shut down the internet on Wednesday
  (Aug. 31) following the announcement president Ali Bongo
  was re-elected by a slim margin for a second seven-year
  term in office.

...a second seven-year term in office.

Wow those are long terms. As obnoxious as a president is after eight years, after fourteen he must be pretty much intolerable.

I think that's understating things. This guy is the son of the previous President, who was in office for 42 years. Seems like more of a dynastic system with a veneer of democracy.

Yep. And the results from the last region were delayed for like 3 days, turned out to have a 99% participation rate and 99.5% voted for the guy.

If elections are going to be basically meaningless anyway, I guess it's OK to do them less often to save money.

The interesting thing is that Gabon shut down the Internet right after announcing the results.

In Congo, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the internet was shut down right before the votes and stayed shut down for days after.

Looks like someone was unprepared.

What options are available to connect to the internet, if your ISP is forced to shutdown in circumstances like this?

Some years ago, one could use phone lines and dial up modems. Are these still viable? What about Ham radio?

Sat internet, which is pretty common in Africa from my experience.

none really.

VSATs may be an option but : - they're highly visible (which makes a physical shut-down easier) - there has been some sort of crackdown (or rather, tax-up-until-it-gets-too-expensive) on the use of said technology.

Going further, if your VSAT provider is local, they will probably shut down your service the same way any other ISP has.

So Iridium/Thuraya is really the only option.

> Unrest in Gabon...

And less than a month ago, I was thinking that Gabon is probably the most stable country in Africa. Now this.

What about others with a "real" democracy, like Benin, Botswana, Ghana?

Ghana has had some issues recently related to electricity, but you have a point with Benin, Botswana, especially, the latter.

So how does a country technically shuts down the entire internet? Like this or what Turkey sometimes does?

The government orders the ISPs to cut the connections - how they ISPs actually do it is up to them - whether they power down the routers or simply enable firewall rules.

EDIT: Here's a relevant article by Cloudflare about the Syrian shut-off: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-interne...

In small countries, especially in Africa, there might be only one or two Internet exit points for the entire country. It's not like the US where there can be a dozen or two Internet traffic exit points.

ISP are ordered to do so.

You can resist but then there will be consequences...

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