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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the horrible moves by the dictatorship, the wording in this article does pose a point about the centralisation of the internet.

Based on the title, I was expecting to read about internet shutdowns and peer to peer networks. Instead, it's just a story about DPI and VPNs.

Nothing here is being "hot-wired". Blocking social media isn't "shutting down the internet" in any technical sense. Turning off cell networks because of protests is, but those actions aren't being circumvented here. Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.

I do wonder if the general population would claim the internet is turned off just because Google, Facebook and Twitter aren't available. By these definitions, does China have internet access? It's interesting to me to see how years of internet access and growing up around smart devices has taught people so little about the actual workings of the internet.

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I think car mechanics are also upset that years of driving cars have taught people so little on how a car works. For many people turning off Facebook and Amazon is turning off the Internet because its the only sites they visit.

I think equating "only using F, A, and G" with "don't know how cars work" is plain wrong in this metaphor. Not knowing how cars work would equate more to "don't know what a router/switch does" which is... fine I guess, for most users who just plug a plastic box into an outlet.

Only using the 2 or 3 major websites, in car speak, would likely more look like "only know the road to the mall, the job, and the daycare and doesn't even realize there are other places one might conceivably go" which is... not fine in my book, and yes, I'm frustrated about that.

Dropping the metaphor.

People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet. So they have all this crazy equipment with functions they never even imagined, and only use it to browse a few websites. So I actually think the issue is even worse than what you describe and I'm frustrated about it too.

>People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet

I see that a lot of my fellow nerds have this feeling and I'm honestly, non-trolly curious about why this is. People have wants and needs (get email from boss, watch video, lookup a recipe) and they learn how to do that specific task. Most people don't know what the internet is, or what a even what computer is beyond a simple mental model that allows them to do what they think they want to do.

For most things, this is exactly how you I and everyone else lives their lives too. Like everyone else I'm sure there are systems that you use on a daily basis which you don't understand beyond the specific steps that you need to know in order to accomplish your task. I don't have anything beyond the most basic pharmacological understanding of how the prescription drugs I take work, and I probably never will yet I depend on them daily.

Most people will never understand most things. I see that as utterly normal.

To me, the unusual part is that there are people who live with and use systems on a daily basis without ever becoming curious about them. I mean, hours and hours of every day, dependent on the internet and people never stop and ask, “What is this thing? How does it work?”

In that vein, I was pretty impressed the other day by the Wikipedia article on traffic lights.

What kind of functionality are you referring to? Ad blocking at the network level? Local network of files? Wouldn't mind a weekend project for something cool.

Yes all of those things. One thing about this network illiteracy that I actually like, is that I can go on craigslist and pick up some pretty kickass hardware for 10-20$, because no one knows what it is, its true power, what its worth.

I was hoping for more examples than the two I just thought of off the top of my head.

Try load balancing your internet traffic over an array of directional wifi antennas, all connected to different, legally accessible, networks.

https://freifunk.net/en/

It's actually a cool project, but never got really big.

> I think car mechanics are also upset that years of driving cars have taught people so little on how a car works

To an extent I'm sure that dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is tiring

On the other hand dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is lucrative

It's not a bad metaphor to consider, but computer networks are tools of open-ended interaction with wider society, entering contracts, getting (and nowadays often giving up) information.

So the public being clueless about the Internet is more like being clueless about basic law and finance, or in more extreme cases something like telling apart the fiction and non-fiction programs on TV. On the other hand, you should be fine thinking of your car as just a means of transportation.

This misunderstanding by "normal" users is nothing new, I remember in the late 90s hearing phrases similar to "remember that the web isn't the Internet" all the time. Funnily enough, this is how my mom got introduced to IRC -- she used it for several years in the early 2000's and even flew abroad to meet people she talked to.

People will always apply the duck test to their technical experiences: what is the Internet for a 15 year old? Most likely it's something along the lines of the web, and a few mobile applications. As long as "what you use" goes down, the "Internet", for a normal user, is down.

Just like there was a point to educating people about it in the late 90s, there's a point in educating people about it now: what you see and use on a daily basis is not "the Internet".

A 15 year old is usually able to draw a clear distinction between service not being available, the network connection to their device not working, the ISP being down and the Internet at large being dysfunctional.

How does this contradict anything of what I said?

In which parts of the world, and from which kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds?

In most of the developed world, of the backgrounds where kids own smartphones.

Even so, it's still debatable, but thanks for the clarification - it seems those are important qualifiers when making a sweeping statement like that.

Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.

It's still the correct phrase. There are two meanings of the word 'internet' - one is the infrastructure, and the other is the websites and services people access using the infrastructure. You're assuming the first meaning while the article is talking about the second meaning.

A few weeks ago Cloudflare(?) had an outage and I felt very limited. It felt like the internet was down for me. Say GCP, AWS had outages, you won't even be able to order a Lyft to take you home.

those are still end users.

what if a colleague told you "network down" and you had to ask

" can you ping google.com? how about 8.8.8.8? can you ping gateway? can you tracepath with port? how about telnet? " ?

another version is "what does tcpdump say?"

yet another version(when the complaint is "website down" instead of "network down") is "whats the http response?"

People would be upset about Facebook because of their pictures.

But if Twitter were off the air for a week, IMO the world would be measurably better and people would fight to keep it down.

From my perspective, you'd be exactly wrong.

I've never had an account on any FB property - avoid it like the Spyware plague that it is. Yet others find FB, Instagram, etc. very useful, even tho if I had to remove one thing to improve the internet, FB would be at the top of my list.

OTOH, Twitter, which I used to formally deride like you, I've found to be immensely useful, as I can directly link to & occasionally converse with top leaders and experts in many fields, and get direct links to the source papers/articles, without filtering, delays, & distortions of the regular media (but ya, one needs to heavily use the Block function in political discussions to maintain civility/sanity). It's also clear that Twitter is used a lot by all news orgs, it's often the 1st place news breaks, and every journo is active on it.

So, seems that it really is about each individual users' needs.

If these were removed from the internet, replacements would be active almost immediately. Would they be better/worse? Who knows?

Twitter can be useful and I use it in a manner that benefits me. But it's impact on society is so awful it defeats the utility.

Their chronic corporate irresponsibility and disregard of abuse is unconscionable. Entities controlling fake or bot accounts, combined the amplification effect on the platform basically have turned it into disinformation as a service.

It so trivial to manipulate institutions and tastemakers that Twitter can be used to undermine them. Check out local public officials or B-list corporate types and what they follow. At that scale, you as a guy with a credit card can trivially insert a narrative into that persons feed to manipulate their perspectives or actions. There are entities doing this at scale to influence policy.

Facebook is pretty malevolent as well. But I don't think that it undermines institutions like Twitter. It targets the broader public. They are more like TV brand marketing without editorial standards and with more focused targeting. Nazis couldn't get ads on your local TV station in 1990, but they can on Facebook.

Ah, from that perspective - vulnerability to exploitation on societal scale by bad actors - both are a severe problem.

Part of the problem is the technical/feature sets of each platform, and a lot of it is the corp management or failure of management.

While the bot/troll hordes on Twitter are a serious problem disrupting many conversations, I'm almost thinking FB is more of a problem because the desinformatsiya can be more specifically targeted, and spread with less visibility outside the particular set of connections.

So, I fully agree, from the POV of preserving democracy, I'd have zero hesitation in fully & finally terminating either/both today, if there were remotely more responsible replacements.

Twitter can be very noisy and obnoxious, but it does a pretty good job of surfacing real time updates on a global scale. Facebook tends to be closed groups, with limited opportunity to challenge the veracity, allowing for mistruth and hatred to spread unchecked.

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