A connectivity blackout means people cannot contact friends, family or even ambulances to help the injured.
Israel is carrying out Nazi style retribution on a civilian population and the West is endorsing it. It’s cut off communication to mask war crimes.
The mask has really come off the white supremacist nature of Zionism and the West’s complicity in racist, colonial brutality.
Are there internet-like protocols where you can daisy chain transmission of text and pictures from device to device over WiFi or Bluetooth? Seems like we see these situations pop up fairly frequently and there would be some value in being able to spread communications that way without an ISP.
Yes, there are a bunch of p2p mesh network apps. I don’t know of any that have widespread adoption. I think Google and Apple should consider building a “disaster mode” into Android and iOS so that you are guaranteed to have it before you even need it.
Of course, governments won’t like that, because it means that people will be able to continue communicating despite blackouts.
Maybe ask Elon, he’s literally got a network that can’t be blocked. (Unless he shuts it down again like he did in Ukraine)
Right. This is why we need a P2P network with no hubs that can be shut down by any government or individual.
A network bought and paid for by the US military-intelligence state. It would be of no use for, to paraphrase imperial speak, non-moderate rebels.
Briar can do this. One of the coolest things about it is that you can also share the app directly once you have it downloaded, so you only need one person to have it beforehand.
Nice, downloaded
@TheButtonJustSpins cool, getting it now!
Hopefully so. Most of what we’ve been able to see in the past 24 hours has been from people with satellite phones, which is a slow process.
these would drain device’s battery and there is no electricity to recharge
We need more widespread use of solar recharging.
You can already get crank, solar, battery chargers, although they aren’t too common. I have one, it’s pretty neat. The solar is probably the best… it takes a lot or cranking to retain a stable charge.
@Corkyskog the solar ones are readily available in my country (priced at about 2-3 hours’ worth of minimum wage).
But we need to roll these out to places that might need them more.
Crank ones sound interesting. I’ve only seen radios and torches.
Yeah it’s definitely emerging that we need some sort of backup system for communicating with each other when regimes pull the plug.
I wish we could have a starlink-esque system that’s federated. But as @Silverseren says, that could be slow…
Here’s what worries me: The U.S. Space Force revealed artist renderings of the X-37B grabbing satellites in orbit. Which means it’s now impossible to launch satellites and expect them to stay up there if there’s a war with the U.S.
@pinkdrunkenelephants yikes good point. Or even if the satellites are inconveniencing someone the US has “strategic” support for like Israel or Saudi Arabia.
There must be a way though. Maybe something smaller?
There are micro satellites you can build yourself and have launched. They call them CubeSats and they actually would be perfect for a grassroots rebellion.
You’d have to bribe India or China to launch them, though, and keep the launch secret from the U.S. But in principle, it could be done.
EDIT: A dude responded to me by saying:
I want to know why such an innocuous comment would be removed, unless my conspiracy theory about the major Lemmy nodes being run by shills has some truth to it. Bro only said India and China are corrupt too so we need to look into other launch options. There’s no way that violates any rule of any major instance.
@pinkdrunkenelephants that sounds great! India and China are also quite repressive. We need to work on some other way to launch?
Yeah that’ll be nice to setup with the technically challenged during missile strikes
@mojo I guess we need to set it all up in advance.
Tbh the way I see it, the first way forward is decentralization, like the platform we’re talking on right now. From there, I think the next step is portable accounts and mesh nets on top of our decentralization networks. That it should be a combination of the two, with mesh networking be redundancy for when situations like this happen. That’s what I think the optimal end goal with communication should be imo.
@mojo yes! That sounds really good. I know it might seem idealistic but I really feel like decentralization is freeing us from more constraints than we realize.
What a great idea. Market it to the prepped/collapse community— profit.
Technical question: how did Israel cut Gaza off from cell networks? Is there some kind of jamming technology, did they literally destroy/disable all cell towers serving Gaza, or did they get Verizon or whoever to stop providing service? Or something else?
They blew up the telecommunications company building that was the main circuit board for all phone and internet signals. They also focused on destroying as much of the physical infrastructure, such as cell towers, as they could.
This had minimal impact on anything Hamas was doing, since they have physical landline cables down in their tunnel systems.
So the targeted destruction was aimed to harm the civilian population and their ability to communicate, not Hamas.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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The WhatsApp voice note, sent from the city of Deir al-Balah, provides one of few insights available into what is happening in Gaza - and how civilians are coping since Israel intensified air strikes and expanded its ground operations on Friday night.
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In the last communication we had with a professor in Gaza on Friday, he told us he was too scared to follow Israeli evacuation orders and move south, in case his family were caught in a strike on the journey.
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But a small number of people in Gaza have foreign SIM cards that can pick up Israeli or Egyptian masts - and the BBC has been able to establish limited contact with several of them.
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“We didn’t expect that we would see morning,” he said, adding that heavy bombing had hit “streets, governmental buildings, open fields, the beach”.
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In a separate video posted on Instagram, a badly wounded man is rushed out of a building as crowds shout desperately for an ambulance.
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“Ambulances and civil defence teams are no longer able to locate the injured, or the thousands of people estimated to be still under the rubble,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said.
(tldr: 5 sentences skipped)
The original article contains 679 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
And yet they keep firing missiles at Israel.
Not the same people.
Since their people have been fighting tooth and nail for 2 millennia, I’m curious why this is in the news lately… Is Ukraine getting boring? Sorry if I don’t sound sympathetic, but I don’t like holy wars.
War is fine as long as it’s not a “holy”?
No, it’s not fine. But a magical sky god war can have no end. There’s no negotiation that will make either side give in.
“A magical sky god war” is being financed by our taxes and Saudi royalty. There is no “holy war”. It was always about resources, political influence and greed. Religion is just a smoke screen.
Just because you got bored of one war, doesn’t mean this genocide should be overlooked.
The genocide has been going on for decades. The conflict in that region has been going on for centuries. And you’re right, there is a lot of interest in controlling that area for many reasons. One of them is religion. I’m not overlooking anything.
You don’t think new wars or escalations of them should be in the news because Ukraine is still in a war?
It’s not new, and it doesn’t really seem like much of an escalation. Are the number of people dead on either side more than last year of this millennia-long holy war for the mythical holy land?
I’m not saying we should pretend there isn’t anything else going on, but this is just the same shit day after day with them. It’s not news.
I mean, it’s news because the weapon manufacturers are salivating.
You don’t think the war escalated? Really?
I think there’s a lot going on this month in that region, yes. Escalated? That’s not the word I’d use.
What I predict is nothing ever changes there, and the Muslims and Jews will be forever at war over a mythical plot of land.
So colonialism and imperialism are just “holy wars” to you?
Not to mention the fact that this particular conflict isn’t two thousand years old, it’s just 76 years old. Some Palestinians are still alive who remember the Nakhba.
Yeah I keep forgetting Jerusalem has been pretty peaceful /s
