I wonder what the Islamic jurispudence behind this is given that enslaving other Muslims is pretty explicit haram afaik, but then again Afghan Islam is like Chechen Islam in that it is built on top of the original moral systems (Pashtunwali/Vaynakh)
I mean, the exact same arguments can be used for everything that goes through "parallel import", like German cars or luxury clothes.
The basic problem is that controlling beyond the 2nd sale is operationally/economically impossible for most companies. And don't even start with the refurbished market, it's a complete free for all.
>Universities haven't caught up. Many CS programs still focus on theoretical foundations. Which means that fewer graduates train to deploy Kubernetes clusters, fine-tune large language models, or architect zero-trust security frameworks. Candidates lack the skills for industry-ready AI/cloud roles and many companies report that fresh graduates often need 6-12 months of intensive upskilling.
The whole point of your first year of work is that you get upskilled super hard. If you are hiring a fresh grad with the plan that they are a net positive before 8-12 months you are gonna have a horrible time.
My prediction: Before end of 2026 at least one European government (likely Denmark or Norway) will get hit with OFAC sanctions. This is the one lever that Trump has apart from tariffs that is super painful and does not need any approval from Congress AFAIK.
Assuming that still does not lead to impeachment and conviction that's on the US, and I'm pretty sure that the EU will stand united against such pressure. The temperature in the room has changed considerably in the last 90 days.
The same as any other century. The whole point of Michelangelo is that he went beyond the limits of his time. To be the Michelangelo of today you need to go beyond the limits/tastes of today, not of Michelangelo's time. And the Michelangelo of today would not be identifiable in any way with Michelangelo given where modern art ended up in terms of style.
It's like that quote about it taking Picasso 4 years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.
Or think of it this way: Your average math PhD today is way better at math than Galois, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. But they are nowhere near them because the field moved into a different stratosphere entirely.
Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state.
I think a lot of them took a look at how Twitter and Facebook were used for organising during the Arab spring and decided that it was by far the most dangerous non-military threat.
Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink, I've seen rumors that they are using Russian EW systems but those same systems are not so effective jamming Starlink-guided drones on the frontlines.
>Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state.
Which technologically advanced democratic countries DON'T have this capability already developed and deployed?
Do you think the 3 letter agencies in the likes of UK, Israel, Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc don't know how to turn off the internet in their countries? They'd be really incompetent if they don't.
Switzerland even had all its bridges wired with explosives from like the 19th century and all the way through the cold war to blow them up inc ase of an invasion.
Do you think the internet infra is somehow spared this kind of strategic planning?
The USA cannot do it, because there is actually a law against cutting off communications systems dating back to 1944. Of course there have been attempts to make it possible.
This "current administration" thinking is exactly the problem. When your version of the current administration had the power to diminish the power of the administration, did it do that? None of them do.
Somehow there's always a failure of imagining that whatever the current administration is won't always be current.
> X cannot do it, because there is actually a law against Y
Famous last words.
I'm more than shocked that people STILL haven't learned how quickly laws came become meaningless. Which is why history keeps repeating itself.
If fascist government goons break into your house to kill you, do you think waving a piece of paper with the law in their face will stop them? Isn't that the whole point the found fathers made the Second Amendment? Even they knew this 300 years ago. Have people already forgotten?
I was going to say! I actually laughed out loud at the computer screen when reading OP's comment. There is no way "There's a law against it" is going to stop the current administration (with all three branches of government aligned) from doing whatever the heck it wants.
I'm actually not shocked judging by that comment that you don't know how pyramid of authority works in most countries, and in this context, the US.
Most countries (including the US, obviously) follow their laws. Can you please give an example for a first world country that *consistently* ignores it's own laws?
History repeats itself because people ignore history, not because people ignore the law.
Sorry, I expressed my thoughts wrong. What I meant to say was that laws can change overnight based on mob political feels or black swan events (WW2, 9/11, etc.)
So just because something is illegal for the government TODAY, doesn't mean it will stay like that for the next 500 years.
Laws aren't real, they're just made up constructs on worthless pieces of paper, but the only thing that is always consistently real is the enforcement of the will of state through means of violence and they'll put that in writing to give it legitimacy but ultimately the people in charge of the guns can make whatever they want legal or illegal.
You're right, but what do you care what happens in 500 years?
The world changes. Maybe in 50 years child pornography will be legal, who knows? It doesn't change based on what those rulers want, because in a true Democratic country, the people rule.
> Can you please give an example for a first world country that consistently ignores it's own laws?
In the US, it's standard to do ten miles an hour over the speed limit past a cop, and there's probably 20 Federally illegal marijuana dispensaries within a few miles of me. Our current President got convicted of 34 felonies, but any possible consequences were automatically voided when he got elected again.
> Isn't that the whole point the found fathers made the Second Amendment?
At the risk of going off on an entirely different direction ... no, I don't think that was the point of the second amendment, not really. It was more about making sure they had something that would function like a standing army (in the absence of the real deal) should a foreign government invade. Defense against tyranny from our own government doesn't really feel like it was something they worried deeply about (at least with regards to the right to bear arms), and the self-defense justification for the second amendment wasn't even a commonly held viewpoint until about the 20th century.
> The USA cannot do it, because there is actually a law against cutting off communications systems dating back to 1944. Of course there have been attempts to make it possible.
The link you provided says:
In 1942, during World War II, Congress created a law to grant President Franklin D. Roosevelt or his successors the power to temporarily shut down any potentially vulnerable technological communications technologies.
The Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act would reverse the 1942 law and prevent the president from shutting down any communications technology during wartime, including the internet.
The House version was introduced on September 22 as bill number H.R. 8336, by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI2). The Senate version was introduced the same day as bill number S. 4646, by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
The bill did not pass and did not become law. So what are you referring to?
Even if your optimism had some basis in reality, about 12 guys with $5 serrated pocket knives bought on aliexpress could knock out 80% of communications in under an hour. Fiber optic strands are alarmingly tiny, and wrapped in day-glo orange plastic tubing making them intentionally easy to find.
For whatever reason it's taboo to talk about how fragile infrastructure is, but if you wanted to shut something like comm links down, that's a problem for whoever installs the new judiciary. Chances are, whoever gets the job of being the new judiciary is likely to rule it as acceptable use of emergency powers.
Does it really matter what is illegal if it is pardoned?
Starting insurrection to overthrow election? Pardoned. Killing police officer? Pardoned. Ordering contract killings? Pardoned. Large scale drug smuggling operation to the US? Pardoned.
Brand anyone who follows the law as a criminal and make sure to have them fired, and you can even ignore the constition that says power to regulate trade lies with the senate and enough of civil society might just decide to play along.
I highly doubt the Swedish government has a way to turn off our internet. Our government doesn't own our internet infrastructure, it's owned by private companies. The government could impose legislation to force providers to comply with shutting down international peering but I have a hard time seeing it pass.
Well. I can't talk for the current government of Sweden, but if I was the supreme leader of a Swedish Dictatorship, I am pretty confident that I could accomplish that by sending some very persuasive soldiers along with a government officer with some papers ordering those private companies to do whatever the fuck I wanted unless their executives wanted to experience some extra holes in their bodies.
Luckily Sweden is not a dictatorship and doesn't have a supreme leder. Our government can't just hand-wave things. There's the legislative branch which must've had the foresight to make laws that allows the executive branch to order operators to comply.
The parent asked "Which technologically advanced democratic countries DON'T have this capability already developed and deployed?" and there are many, every country on earth isn't run by warmongering corrupt idiots.
In case of war or major cataclysmic event, your government will definitely just hand-wave a lot of things you take for granted in order to keep the country and society from collapsing, including elections, democracy, freedom of speech, internet access, travel, etc since then the nation's survival becomes more important than your individual rights and freedom. See Covid hysteria, Ukraine war, etc.
I think coddled people from rich countries who never saw anything but prosperity since WW2 and no conflicts or events with major loss of life, have no idea just how radical governments can switch in an instant when society is threatened with collapse.
Does Sweden not have the equivalent of the UK's civil contingency act?
Section 2 basically allows the Westminster government to make regulations as they see fit during an emergency, but with a short time scale (like a month or so) before parliament gets a say.
So what? If it's on Swedish ground then it's under Swedish government(military) enforcement in case the shit hits the fan.
>The government could impose legislation to force providers to comply with shutting down international peering but I have a hard time seeing it pass.
Do you think if Russia invades Sweden tomorrow, private businesses can still do whatever they want like in peacetime, or will they have to follow the new waartime rules set by the government and enforced by armed soldiers knocking on their door dragging them to court if they refuse to comply?
> Do you think if Russia invades Sweden tomorrow, private businesses can still do whatever they want like in peacetime
Pretty much
> or will they have to follow the new waartime rules set by the government and enforced by armed soldiers knocking on their door dragging them to court if they refuse to comply?
They'll be dragging them to court. We're a democracy, we don't just send soldiers after our own.
No offense but you're out of touch with reality if you think that's how a country under existential threat acts, still treating citizens with oven mitts and keeping lengthy bureaucratic due processes for everything.
I think this type of idealistic fantasy world mentality is exactly why Europe has been so ill prepared to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Americans often achieve the same ends with different means; use of mass surveillance to account for the threat of open communication, forcing sales of social media platforms to friends of the regime, domain seizures on pirate sites, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) laws, Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) laws, etc.
The American model is still preferable, but being preferable often gives people the false impression that open communication is a solved problem because they have limited assurances at the political level when what they should be after is more expansive assurances at the technical level.
Yes it would not be hard to take down a few data centers or services (just seize their domain) but that’s not remotely close to completely turning off the Internet. There are millions of servers on the U.S. Internet outside of major data centers.
We also run tons of crucial stuff over commercial links thanks to encryption. Taking Internet trunks offline would disrupt most domestic functions of government, for example.
If the government has already been disrupted, then who is taking down the Internet?
No, the goal of “take down the Internet” is to degrade the organizing of protestors / agitators / insurgents, while preserving the ability of government to organize against them. It only works if the government has a separate sufficient infrastructure, or completely controls routing on shared infrastructure. Neither of those are true in the U.S.
To pick just one recent newsworthy example, the federal government does not have a way to deny Signal messaging to their opponents, while preserving their own use of it.
> If the government has already been disrupted, then who is taking down the Internet?
A disrupted regime can still be a dangerous regime. The Islamic State largely couldn't govern, but they could certainly get organized enough to wreck shit.
> It only works if the government has a separate sufficient infrastructure, or completely controls routing on shared infrastructure. Neither of those are true in the U.S.
Maybe it's hopelessly optimistic of me, but I like to think the giant organization that includes FEMA has some plans for what to do if the internet isn't available.
> To pick just one recent newsworthy example, the federal government does not have a way to deny Signal messaging to their opponents, while preserving their own use of it.
But could they survive without it? Probably. The protocol is open source.
The "internet" is different things to different people. For the masses: if you take down the datacenters - or more easily coerce the leadership of the magnificent 7 you effectively turn of the internet for most people
My guess is that in Ukraine the Russian EW systems are deployed tens of kilometers back from the line of contact to protect them from artillery strikes and fiber optic drones. These Russian EW systems are likely used to protect command posts and logistics bases but not the line of contact.
But because Iran is not yet an active war zone the Iranians can deploy those systems close to the cities.
Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions. So using a Starlink terminal in Iran seems to come with a high risk that security forces can locate and arrest you.
> Also, Starlink terminals can be located via their RF emissions.
Starlink terminals use highly-directional antennas that point at the sky (see. beamforming) and therefore they don't leak much in terms of RF emissions. So unless you can afford to maintain a host of overhead drones on permanent rotation and wide-area coverage, it would be very hard to actually locate anybody. Not that it's impossible, but largely intractable at scale. We use Starlink a lot in Ukraine, and even though the russians have platforms with sophisticated signal processing capabilities (think Xilinx RFSoC) perfectly capable of locating emissions from most communication equipment, they are still unable to locate Starlink terminals. And this is along the frontline, mind you. To cover all of Iran would surely be prohibitive.
In addition to jamming the radio signals directly, Starlink terminals use GPS, so jamming GPS can hurt connectivity. Iran has been jamming GPS in an effort to reduce the effectiveness of foreign military attacks, but maybe they've stepped it up a notch in the past week. People in Ukraine are probably so accustomed to GPS jamming that they've all gone to Advanced -> Debug Data -> "Use Starlink positioning exclusively".
Ukraine has one other advantage: The jamming tends to come from one direction. If you set up a barrier on that side of the antenna, the signal from the satellites is less likely to be drowned out. People in Iran have no idea where the jammers are in related to themselves. If they're in a city, they might be surrounded.
Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies, so it's quite possible for governments to find the terminals and confiscate/destroy them. Still, it's a lot more difficult to shut down than a few fiber optic lines.
> Starlink terminals also require a clear view of the sky and they broadcast on certain frequencies
That's not quite true. You can conceal the terminal using a number of materials that won't significantly interfere with the signal like a thin piece of cloth or a thin plastic bag (like a garbage bag) as long as the cover doesn't get too wet.
The west would cut the internet the second shit got real. No question.
Europe is already flirting with it. Look at their draconian internet speech laws. If you think that ISPs would try to stand up to the government you should read about how quickly they bent over after the PATRIOT act.
> Still wonder how exactly they are interdicting Starlink
a good cyberwarfare attack would be disabling whatever is being used to prevent Starlink from working. Even if it only lasts for 12 hours the flood of images, video, and just general communication from inside Iran to the world would be a blow to the regime.
In Germany we have the Bundesnetzagentur an agency that drives around and measures the power of your WiFi. If its to high you get fined, and they really do manage to triangulate you.
I would guess the Iranian government is capable of at least the same: Triangulating specific radio frequency sources.
> This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary.
I definitely disagree with this. Currently there is no reason to believe we'll ever have sentient AI, or AGI or whatever term you prefer, much less a runaway one. There is definitely reasons to worry about governments using this power in an era of increasing authoritarianism, I mean we're talking about this because it is literally happening right now to cover up a massacre.
I don't want the power to turn off all communications to exist, because I don't want my political enemies to have it if they win an election.
> shutting down all communications and power are our only defense against a runaway AI system
Wouldn't a centralized ability to shut down all communications and power also be one of the most vulnerable targets to an runaway AI attack though? Seems like a double edged sword if I've ever seen one.
Eh if you're gonna go that far with your logic then a runaway AI system intelligent and malevolent enough to require turning off the whole damn Internet in a place (or more likely globally, defeating the point anyway) will also be intelligent enough to use alternative means of communication.
Frankly, we need to get to a place where it is impossible to do shut down the internet in a country like this. P2P and distributed networks might see a resurgence here
Any RF comms can be jammed, you will need ground to satellite laser communications to accomplish this (or you were close enough to a terrestrial free space optics ground station outside of nation state borders a satellite isn't required).
RF comms can't realistically be jammed across the entirety of a whole country, though, so this is definitely a case of "something is better than nothing", and it absolutely makes sense to establish community-level networking/comms at least.
Plane was the test bed for the military application in my citation, the ground station could be ground or roof mounted and camouflaged. As it would emit no RF, you would have to know where to look for it to find it (unlike say, StarLink ground terminals, which are detectable).
If you emit RF in a contested environment as a civilian, you can be found using multilateration (for this context, I assume if you have military comms equipment, you have access to exotic RF that will make this difficult similar to have quick and saturn). SDR networks on the public internet enable this today, as long as there are enough receivers online in an area and you know what you're looking for, so I don't think it's beyond the grasp of nation state actors.
Eh I don't think there are enough jammers to get everywhere. Otherwise a twinkling sea of laser light house to house repeaters, red stars in the dark is a pretty sounding dystopia.
...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. Everyone was being reasonable, but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse.
non-democratic states like north korea
And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. AFAIR the list of openly non-democratic states is quite small: Saudi Arabia, some microstates like the Holy See, and ~6 non-micro "Executive constitutional monarchies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_o...)
No. It's about iran, so it'll get stuck on the frontpage for a while. If this was about israel, then you'd have point.
> but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse.
The US has massacred people, even protestors. Are you saying we are not a democracy?
> And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too.
There is a difference between one claiming to be a democracy and another that actually is. No?
It honestly blows my mind that some people read about a national government killing thousands of protestors in the span of a few days amid a backdrop of decades of authoritarian repression and think "meh, NBD, other countries have done bad things too".
EDIT: But WAY more importantly, c'mon the HN admins are not super biased. I disagree with them on lots of policy decisions, but implying that they're a secret Zionist influence is goofy. They delete political threads of all kinds with gusto unless it's incredibly important or somewhat tech-related.
reply