Internet Shutdown Adds To Venezuela's Woes 194
Slashgear reports that many state-run internet links in Venezuela have been shut down by that country's government, as censorship efforts there step up along with widespread turmoil, partly in the form of widespread anti-government protests. The article begins: "Don’t expect one whole heck of a lot of tweets coming out of Venezuela in the immediate future as President Nicolas Maduro’s government has shut down the internet and select TV channels. Having shut down Twitter access for the area this past week, Venezuela’s state-run ISP CANTV has been cut in areas such as San Cristobal. This area is a regional capital in the west of the country and CANTV controls the vast majority of internet connectivity in the area. The Electronic Frontier Foundation made note that Venezuelans working with several different ISPs lost all connectivity on Thursday of this past week. Users lost connectivity to the major content delivery network Edgecast and the IP address which provides access to Twitter’s image hosting service while another block stopped Venezuelan access to the text-based site Pastebin."
This is true (Score:5, Informative)
And while Maduro murders Venezuelans... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Internet cannot be shut down. (Score:5, Informative)
It senses any attempt to do so as damage and routes around it.
Yes, but with less bandwidth.
I use a private ISP (Intercable) and while my ping to www.google.com usually sits around 100 ms, now it's usually at 800 ms or so.
Now it might be backbones shutting down or it might just be that everyone is on youtube and twitter trying to get news and clogging the links.
There's also a lot of people recommending VPN apps for their computer or phone to get around censorship, others using zello or other apps to get news and communicate, and so on.
Funny this is what gets talked about rather than Maduro kicking CNN out of the country, the dead protesters or the armed 'non-government' supporters atttacking them. But hey, this is /. I guess.
He's s shill probably (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at his account, it is brand new and this is his only post. I've noticed this kind of thing on various sites when there's a story on Venezuela that is critical of the government or that talks about the problems happening. People who have never posted before pop up and say it isn't true, or blame the US, or whatnot.
Now maybe they were longtime readers who just happened to suddenly decide to participate, but I kinda doubt it. I think it is a bunch of pro-government types that are out to shill. Could be officially sanctioned, could just be a bunch of nationalist types (which all countries seem to have) that are doing it of their own accord.
Seems to be happening fairly often with Venezuela stories though, so one way or another I think this is a concerted effort on the part of some people, and not just happenstance.
Beware of the media manipulations (Score:2, Informative)
So, a handful of people (the recent "protests" were in the number of hundreds, maybe a few thousands at most, nothing of a big and massive popular protest, as Venezuela had in the past, with both opposition and chavistas massing hundred of thousands, even millions) violently protest, attack public infrastructure (city halls, metro stations, hospitals, ...). People are killed - not by the police, but by the protesters, most of the death are _chavistas_ not opposition.
Then, the opposition start a massive media manipulation, with photos and videos of repression taken from all around the world (Chile, Spain, Greece, ...) pretending it's the Venezuelan government doing it. All the western media jump on that, and without a single second of critical thinking, claim Maduro is repressing.
And now, some governmental Internet links have problem functioning. It must be Maduro doing censorship ! From France, I've troubles reaching many Venezuela government sites, like VTV (state TV) website, or CanTV (public operator) website. Why would Maduro censor his own sites ? Especially VTV ! And why would he cut CanTV, while it's just one operator among many, especially on mobile Internet (and most people in Venezuela, especially among the opposition, have a cell phone) ? It just doesn't make sense.
Couldn't it be that the violent protests damaged the infrastructure ? Couldn't it be that the Venezuela opposition, which is _very_ rich (they have the 1% among them, and they get massive funding from the US), is doing some DDoS or similar attack on CanTV ? Couldn't it be a sabotage, from opposition workers inside CanTV, or from abroad ? I should remind you that during the 2003 oil "strike" in Venezuela, the US corporation that handled the computer systems of PDVSA (state oil company in Venezuela) sabotaged them, just to add to the chaos and create the conditions for a military coup.
Given all this past and all those facts, shouldn't we wait until the exact reasons of the (very partial) shutdown of CanTV services are known before yelling "censorship" or "dictatorship" ? Because that's exactly what the Venezuelan extreme-right wants us to do, and it's not the first time they would manipulate media and perform false flag attacks to do it (remember the events of 2002, where the opposition killed people, blamed Chávez to justify a coup).
Re:He's s shill probably (Score:3, Informative)
No under capitalism no one is exploited. Values exchanges for value and nobody does anything forcibly against their will. It's only when you add government activity beyond the protection of private property that you get exportation. Suddenly there all these regulations and tax requirements and other things that require people to do things.