The journalists were holding their laptops in their hands and carried placards, which read: “100 days, No Internet”. (Photo: Twitter/MirzaWaheed)
SpaceX, on November 11, launched 60 mini ‘Starlink’ satellites. This is the second batch of an orbiting network meant to provide global internet coverage.
The ‘Falcon’ rocket launched into the morning sky, marking the unprecedented fourth flight of a booster for SpaceX.
The compact flat-panel satellites – weighing just 575 pounds (260 kilograms) each – will join the other 60 launched in May.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, wants to put thousands such ‘Starlink’ satellites in orbit, to offer high-speed internet service everywhere. Musk plans to start service next year in the northern US and Canada, with global coverage for populated areas after 24 launches.
Last month, Musk used an orbiting Starlink satellite to send a tweet: “Whoa, it worked!!” Employees gathered at company bases on both coasts cheered when the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
“These boosters are designed to be used 10 times. Let’s turn it around for a fifth, guys,” company’s launch commentator said.
This also marked the first time SpaceX used a previously flown nose cone. The California-based company reuses rocket parts to cut costs.
Stacked flat inside the top of the rocket, the newest satellites were going to manoeuvre even higher following lift-off, using krypton-powered thrusters. SpaceX said there was a potential problem with one of the 60 that could prevent it from moving beyond its initial 174 mile-high (280 kilometre-high) orbit.
In that case, the faulty satellite will be commanded to re-enter and burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Each satellite has an autonomous system for dodging space junk.
In September, however, the European Space Agency had to move one of its satellites out of the way of a Starlink satellite. SpaceX later said it corrected the problem.
SpaceX is among several companies interested in providing broadband internet coverage worldwide, especially in areas where it costs too much or is unreliable. Others include OneWeb and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.
According to Musk, Starlink revenue can help SpaceX develop rockets and spacecraft for traveling to Mars, his overriding ambition.
[“source=moneycontrol”]
Project will be implemented through Kerala State Electricity Board and Kerala IT Infrastructure Limited | REUTERS image for representation
State cabinet has given a nod for Rs 1,548 crore high-speed internet project in Kerala.
The project aims to provide free high-speed internet to over 20 lakh below poverty line (BPL) households. The government has plans to complete the project by 2020.
The project has been named Kerala Fiber Optic Network (KFON).
Those eligible for a free connection will be provided the internet at a low cost. The optical fiber network in Kerala will enable the people of the state to be part of the internet of things.
Companies having internet service provider license can use the optical fiber network to provide their services in the state.
This network can also be used for cable TV network.
The project will be implemented through Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) and Kerala IT Infrastructure Limited.
The tender was won by a consortium led by Bharath Electronics Limited.
The projects aims to improve the information technology (IT) infrastructure at educational institutions, ports and airports.
Presently, only 20 per cent of the total mobile towers in the state are connected and once the KFON is implemented all mobile towers will be part of the network.
[“source=indiatoday”]
Image posted on Facebook by Dilip Ghosh.
The internet is pretty amused with West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh’s statement that Indian cows’ milk contains gold. At a programme in Burdwan district, Ghosh said, “A feature of the Indian cow is that its milk contains gold. That’s the reason the colour of the milk is yellowish.”
During his speech, Ghosh also justified the reason behind his ‘gold’ opinion about cow’s milk and added, “The Indian cows have humps, which the foreign cows don’t have. The foreign cow has a straight back, like a buffalo. The hump has an artery, called ‘swarnanari’ (gold artery). When sunlight falls on it, gold is made.”
“So the texture turns yellow or golden. This milk has preventive properties. A person can live on this kind of milk only. You don’t have to eat anything else. It is a complete food,” he said.
It wasn’t just the gold bit but Dilip Ghosh also said during his speech that “it is a heinous crime to insult, kill cows, and eat beef in the holy land of India. We will look upon them as anti-socials.”
[“source=indiatoday”]
It’s been called an online Iron Curtain.
On Friday, a controversial law went into force that enables Russia to try to disconnect its internet from the rest of the world, worrying critics who fear the measure will promote online censorship.
The Kremlin says its “sovereign internet” law, which was signed by President Vladimir Putin in May, is a security measure to protect Russia in the event of an emergency or foreign threat like a cyberattack. The law will allow Moscow to tighten control over the country’s internet by routing web traffic through state-controlled infrastructure and creating a national system of domain names.
In theory, the measure would allow Russia to operate its own internal networks that could run independently from the rest of the World Wide Web.
Experts doubt whether such a move is technically possible and say the law is, instead, an attempt by the Russian government to censor information online.
“To be able to manage the information flow in their favor, they have to have a system in place beforehand,” said Sergey Sanovich of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy in a CNBC interview.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Russia to protest the measure earlier this year, while human rights advocates warned the law threatens free speech and media.
“The ‘sovereign internet’ law purports to provide a legal basis for mass surveillance and allows the government to effectively enforce online existing legislation that undermines freedom of expression and privacy,” Human Rights Watch said in a blog post Thursday.
Putin has taken a series of other steps to try to curb online freedoms, such as banning encrypted messaging service Telegram, but many of those attempts have proven to be unsuccessful.
“The goal is to be able to block what they don’t want without harming the network overall,” Sanovich said.
Russia not like China
Unlike China’s Great Firewall, which was built on a tight concentration of state-run network operators, Russia allowed its internet to develop freely over the past three decades. Undoing global network connections is tricky, according to Andrew Sullivan, president and CEO of the Internet Society.
“You can think of the network connectivity like water that is trying to get to the lower ground; it’s going to keep trying to flow,” he told CNBC. “You have to do a whole lot of work to make sure that the traffic won’t flow.”
Sullivan said Russia has tried to carry out tests to block its internet in the past but the networks proved to be resilient. The new law, he said, will end up making the internet less reliable for users in Russia.
“By using this regulatory model for the internet when the internet isn’t really designed to work that way, we risk doing damage,” he said.
[“source=cnbc”]
Union Minister Jitendra Singh was speaking at separate meetings of the District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committee in Doda and Kishtwar districts of J&K. (Photo: PTI)
Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Tuesday said that the suspension of internet services in Jammu and Kashmir has helped in averting some major terror incidents in the last two months.
Jitendra Singh also said that those who are opposing the curb on the internet either have a vested interest in the continuance of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir or they want to play politics at the cost of India’s sovereignty and common man’s safety.
Speaking at separate meetings of the District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committee, known as ‘Disha’, in Doda and Kishtwar districts, Jitendra Singh said that the elimination of several terrorists in Kishtwar was possible because of the suspension of the internet.
The suspension has also helped in flushing out terrorists operating in Kishtwar and other parts of the Chenab region, Jitendra Singh said.
Jitendra Singh said that certain political activists in the Kashmir valley have been continuously raising a hue and cry over the suspension of internet because they are the “beneficiaries of terrorism” and their politics has, over the last three decades, “survived due to dismal voter turn-out under the fear of militancy”.
“But more pathetic is the case of the fringe elements in Jammu region who have fallen in the trap of this pro-terror jargon and are trying to denounce the suspension of internet,” Jitendra Singh said.
Jitendra Singh said that these political activists are devoid of issues and are therefore desperate to make an issue even if it is at the cost of common man’s life.
Jitendra Singh said that some of these fringe leaders, who otherwise proclaim themselves to be nationalists or patriots or self-styled guardians of Jammu, are actually issuing thoughtless statements which are music for Pakistan and also an endorsement as well as support for those who have been executing terror attacks in Jammu region.
Jitendra Singh pointed out to the recent nabbing of the terrorists who were travelling from Lakhanpur towards Jammu and said that they could be intercepted due to the ban on the internet.
Similarly, Jitendra Singh said, the other day, some terrorists being chased out of Kishtwar by security forces, barged into the house of a local citizen in Batote but were liquidated because they were devoid of the internet connection to be guided by their cohorts.
At the same time, Jitendra Singh said that a number of infiltration bids from the border could be foiled because a stray infiltrator, who did manage to cross over to this side could not be helped by his associates to carry out further movement as had been the practice earlier by using internet, Whatsapp and similar means.
Jitendra Singh said that some critics tend to look at the restrictions “through the prism of abrogated Article 370”.
Jitendra Singh called upon the “learned” journalists to do a thorough scanning of past 30 years of militancy and find out on how many occasions the internet was suspended.
At times, it was suspended for an equal or even longer period, when Article 370 was very much in place, Jitendra Singh said and asked media to draw comparisons between the pace of development activity during those periods of internet suspensions and the present period.
[“source=indiatoday”]
Over the past year, the Russian government has spoken at length about the establishment of a domestic internet. The idea, according to lawmakers and those in the Kremlin, is to have an internet that can be tightly controlled by the state—and potentially disconnected from the global net entirely.
Now, Russia plans to execute a so-called disconnection test of the internet sometime in October—right ahead of Nov. 1, when a new law about domestic internet kicks into gear. Russia plans to then repeat this test at least once a year. What some had called fantasy is now closer to reality, and the implications are important for global cybersecurity and what may occur in Russia as a result.
For brief historical context: In February, a draft law was introduced in the Russian Parliament that aimed to make this long-discussed idea of a domestic internet a reality. This draft underwent subsequent revisions, although the gist of the proposal is the same: giving broader and deeper regulatory oversight of the internet to Roskomnadzor, the Russian internet regulator. (Back in March, Robert Morgus and I wrote that this “RuNet” was not a new idea, and many technical and political challenges lay ahead for Russia.) Before the proposal was signed, there were rumblings of a “disconnect test” scheduled for April 1. While that didn’t take place, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law in May, with it planned to take effect on Nov. 1. Since then, news about the RuNet has been relatively quiet. That is, until recently, when it became clear the Russian government has been busy since the law’s passage.
For one, “equipment is being installed on the networks of major telecom operators,” Alexander Zharov, head of Roskomnadzor, told reporters. Tests will be carried out “carefully” in the first round, he said, in order to ensure that traffic and servers are not affected. Then, “combat mode” tests will be initiated. It’s unclear what combat mode means, but presumably this is something closer (at least in theory) to total isolation of the RuNet, perhaps in response to an emergency.
The Russian government has also purportedly started rolling out deep packet inspection, a more sophisticated internet filtering technique, which it started testing last year. As highlighted in reporting by independent Russian news outlet Meduza, this may certainly relate to the Russian government’s repeated—and largely unsuccessful—efforts to ban use of the encrypted messaging app Telegram. The filtering techniques used by the government weren’t precise enough, so the app’s use of workarounds enables Russian users to circumvent censorship mechanisms.
But a rollout of deep packet inspection is also broader than just looking to block encrypted messaging services. Deep packet inspection is a powerful tool for internet filtering in general—for instance, look at how China uses it as part of its Great Firewall. Since better control of internet traffic that flows into and out of Russia is a core component of the push for a domestic Russian internet, the use of DPI therefore plays well into the RuNet goal.
Other regulatory pushes continue as well, such as an effort to require Facebook and Twitter to store Russian users’ data within Russian borders by the end of the year. This practice of storing certain data locally—termed data localization—can be employed for a variety of reasons, from cost savings (i.e., it’s cheaper to have certain data located in a certain place) to privacy protections (i.e., desires to try to keep data away from foreign eyes). But the Russian government has been particularly focused on requiring data localization for foreign firms, presumably to get access to encrypted communications. For instance, Roskomnadzor has pushed Apple to locally store certain kinds of data, and the government has enacted rules to force companies to store user data and encryption keys in certain places. This recent effort focused on Facebook and Twitter is an extension of this yearslong battle.
With all of these and, likely, other yet-to-be-reported changes since May, a disconnection test of the Russian internet in the near future looks more likely. There are a number of motives at play behind this push for a domestic internet, including (but not limited to) a growing desire on the part of many authoritarian governments to exert greater sovereignty over the internet within their borders; fears in the Kremlin, particularly on the part of Putin, about the free flow of information and its potential to undermine regime stability; reactions in the Russian government to the U.S. Defense Department’s “defend forward” cyber strategy, which involves more action by the U.S. military to deter cyberattacks and stop them closer to the source; and a desire to justify practices like tighter internet censorship, surveillance, and control by depicting Russia as under constant information and cyberwar onslaught from foreign powers. All of these drivers make it unlikely that Russia will abandon this domestic net pursuit in the near future.
The Russian government, like many governments today, is increasingly concerned about reliance on foreign information communication technologies. Pushing for greater supply chain independence, in this vein, could include reducing Russian society’s reliance on the global internet. It’s also about different understandings of “information security”—which we take in the West to mean the technical protection of 1s and 0s, but has greater cultural significance in Russia’s long history of the state controlling media like television and the internet. Rhetoric around a “global and open internet” pushed by many liberal democracies has been perceived far differently in the Russian government due to different values and strategic objectives, yes, but also due to cultural differences. This, too, is unlikely to change in the near future.
As the U.S.-China technological confrontation intensifies, it’s important to not overlook other countries—in this case, Russia—and how they fit into global cooperation and competition over digital technologies and their regulation. The Russian government is in the process of drafting an artificial intelligence strategy, for instance, and Sino-Russian cooperation continues to deepen in economic, military, and technological dimensions. Testing a domestic internet, therefore, is not just another step in the pursuit of a practical goal—a controlled, isolatable domestic internet—it signifies the Russian government’s commitment to technological sovereignty, especially from the West.
For all these reasons, the implications—unlike the RuNet—are hardly constrained to Russian borders. The Russians may be pushing internet fragmentation deeper than ever before, and their actions may inspire others to follow suit. The implications for human rights are also pronounced, as well as for businesses that may desire to operate in the Russian market and have already run into regulatory challenges, like the mandated storage of certain data within Russia’s borders.
Russia will undoubtedly face setbacks in its push to create a domestic internet. After all, technical implementation of such a project would be difficult for any country. But as it moves toward the capabilities for an internet disconnection test, this could mark a significant moment in the history of the network we once called truly global.
[“source=slate”]
Marge Stockford of Portland works on her laptop Friday at Arabica Coffee after finishing a cup of cappuccino. Stockford chose the spot for its Internet connection because she had been without power since Thursday’s early-morning nor’easter. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
A nor’easter that knocked out power to nearly 200,000 Maine customers early Thursday also left many homes and businesses in the state without internet service – and no way to find out when that service might be restored.
Unlike power utilities Central Maine Power and Emera Maine, internet service providers such as Spectrum and Consolidated Communications do not offer detailed information on their websites about where internet service is down, how many customers are affected and when service is expected to be restored.
Internet companies know internally how many customers are experiencing outages in the wake of storms, but they don’t want to broadcast that information because it would let competitors know where their customers are, one company executive said. They can’t accurately predict when service will be restored because internet providers are required by law to wait until the power utilities have completed repairs before they can get to work on restoring service, he said.
In most cases, the same utility poles that carry power lines also are strung with cables that deliver phone, cable TV and internet service to homes and businesses. If a storm knocks out power in a particular area, it also can affect those other services, either because a cable has snapped or because of power loss to special equipment in the field that allows copper cables to carry high-speed data over the internet.
Delivering high-speed internet service over copper cables requires special equipment placed on poles at regular intervals known as “power inserters,” which boost the electrical current carrying the data, said Chris Whelan, director of network engineering at Biddeford-based internet service provider GWI. Each power inserter has a battery backup that generally lasts a few hours, he said, and when the battery is drained following an extended power outage, cable or DSL internet service no longer will work until power is restored.
“Which is why, oftentimes, utility line power will be lost, and a customer will go and plug in their generator and (say), ‘Hey, look, my internet’s working,’ and then it stops working after a couple hours,” Whelan said.
This week’s nor’easter caused widespread and significant destruction when strong winds and heavy rains felled trees throughout southern Maine, downing lines, damaging cars and homes, and delaying or canceling classes across the region. Damage along the coast was especially severe.
CMP reported a peak of about 180,000 storm-related customer outages as a result of the storm, while Emera Maine reported a peak of about 40,000 outages. But that sort of detailed information never has been available to internet customers experiencing storm-related service outages in Maine.
For example, instead of providing outage maps or charts showing how many customers are currently experiencing outages in each part of the state, cable TV and internet service provider Spectrum’s web page devoted to outages simply states, “Variables, such as the duration and severity of the storm, will affect service restoration. Be assured that repairs will be made as quickly as possible once the storm clears and it is safe for our technicians to return to normal operations.”
The website also provides an automated phone service for customers to leave a number to be notified when their internet service has been restored.
Third-party websites such as istheservicedown.com and downdetector.com provide their own information about internet service outages based on real-time analyses of network activity and customer outage reports on social media and other online platforms. However, those websites don’t have the ability to estimate when service is likely to be restored.
Barry Hobbins, Maine’s public advocate to the state Public Utilities Commission, said the lack of outage information available to internet customers is something he intends to examine, while noting that the PUC does not regulate internet service, and that no utility in Maine is required by law to provide such information.
“It needs to be addressed,” Hobbins said.
The lingering outages disrupted workers who rely on home-based internet services, including Marge Stockford, 62, of Portland, who camped at Arabica Coffee House on Thursday and Friday after the storm knocked out internet and electricity at her condominium on York Street.
Stockford works remotely as a consultant and is also in the hunt for a full-time job, so internet was essential. In front of her, a laptop and a phone sat tethered to chargers plugged into a nearby wall outlet.
“I got an email recently that my cable’s back, but that’s irrelevant if I don’t have electricity,” Stockford said.
Not even the internet providers themselves can predict when service will be restored after a storm because of their reliance on power utilities to repair all the damaged power lines first, Whelan said. The best thing customers can do is lobby for fiber-optic internet service, either from their incumbent provider or a municipal broadband network. Whelan said fiber-optic service to the home, the only type of service GWI provides, does not require power inserters and rarely goes down in a storm.
“The GWI network actually didn’t experience any outages (from the storm Thursday),” he said. “The only reason why people didn’t have service in the GWI network was because they didn’t have power.”
[“source=pressherald”]
SAN FRANCISCO – On Oct. 29, 1969, professor Leonard Kleinrock and a team at the University of California at Los Angeles got a computer to “talk” to a machine in what is now known as Silicon Valley.
The event gave birth to a network that later became known as the internet — hailed at first as a boon to equality and enlightenment, but also with a dark side that has emerged over time.
As UCLA marks the anniversary, Kleinrock is opening a new lab devoted to all things related to the internet — particularly mitigating some of the unintended consequences of the medium, which is now used by 4 billion people worldwide.
“To some point it democratizes everyone,” Kleinrock said.
“But it is also a perfect formula for the dark side, as we have learned.”
So much is shouted online that moderate voices are drowned out and extreme viewpoints are amplified, spewing hate, misinformation and abuse, he contended.
“As engineers, we were not thinking in terms of nasty behavior,” said Kleinrock, who is now 85.
“I totally missed the social networking side,” Kleinrock added. “I was thinking about people talking to computers or computers talking to computers, not people talking to people.”
The new Connection Lab will welcome research on topics including machine learning, social networking, blockchain and the “internet of things,” with an eye toward thwarting online evils.
Kleinrock expressed particular interest in using blockchain technology to attach reputations to people or things online to provide a gauge of who or what to trust.
For example, someone reading an online restaurant review would be able to see how reliable that author’s previous posts have been.
“It is a network of reputation that is constantly up to date,” Kleinrock said.
“The challenge is how to do that in an ethical and responsible fashion; anonymity is a two-edged sword, of course.”
He blamed many of the internet’s ills on businesses hawking things that are outdated or unneeded, violating the privacy of people in order to increase the company’s profit.
Instead of the clever lone hackers who vexed the internet in its early days, bad actors now include nation-states, organized crime and powerful corporations “doing big, bad things,” Kleinrock lamented.
“We were not the social scientists that we should have been,” Kleinrock said of the internet’s early days.
He regretted a lack of foresight to build into the very foundation of the internet tools for better authenticating users and data files.
“It wouldn’t have avoided the dark side, but it would have ameliorated it,” he said.
He remained optimistic about the internet’s woes being solved with encryption, blockchain or other innovations.
“I do still worry. I think everyone is feeling the impact of this very dark side of the internet that has bubbled up,” Kleinrock said.
“I still feel that the benefits are far more significant; I wouldn’t turn off the internet if I could.”
In the early days, the U.S. telecommunications colossus AT&T ran the lines connecting the computers for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in a project backed with money from a research arm of the U.S. military.
A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitized information into packets fired between machines with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock.
A grad student began typing “login” to log in to the distant computer, which crashed after getting the “o.”
“So the first message was ‘lo’ as in ‘Lo and behold,’” Kleinrock recounted. “We couldn’t have a better, more succinct first message.”
Kleinrock’s team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET because funding came from the research agency, which had been established in 1958.
Credit for creating the internet is a topic of debate, since there are a series of key moments in its evolution, including arrival of protocols for how data is routed and creation of the World Wide Web system of online pages.
The name “internet” is a shortening of the “internetworking” allowed when one computer network could collaborate with another, according to Marc Weber, curatorial director at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
“The billion-dollar question is, what kind of beast has the internet become?” Weber asked. “It has become the default main way for humans to communicate, and that is not small.”
While marking its 50th anniversary, the internet as we know it is a “rowdy teenager” in the eyes of Internet Society chief technology officer Olaf Kolkman.
“The internet has done more good than harm,” Kolkman said.
“The biggest challenge we have in front of us is that while we cope with big problems enabled by global connectivity that we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
[“source=japantimes”]
Peak time for being on the internet in Britain is 21:00 on Wednesdays, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests.
By contrast 04:45 on weekdays is the quietest time, it says.
The ONS has started analysing internet traffic volume for the first time, using publicly available data from one of Britain’s largest internet exchanges.
However, it acknowledges the early results are not conclusive.
One expert told the BBC the data used had a significant limitation because it was unlikely to have included box-set streaming.
Spotting trends
The study made use of data from the London Internet Exchange (Linx), which connects internet service providers and content delivery networks.
It operates exchanges in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Manchester, but some of the data was extrapolated from the London area alone.
Andrew Ferguson from the news website ThinkBroadband told the BBC that while the study had merit, often online box-set viewing will not be included in Linx data as this is delivered in a different way.
“This is not the full story but when combined with other data can reveal trends, rather than absolute figures,” he said.
While the ONS said it was still working on the statistics, it found that internet traffic in the UK increases in winter and decreases in summer.
Linx London data throughput
2011 to 2019 monthly average
Other insights included that traffic:
- falls between 16:00 and 18:00 with its lowest point at 18:00 on weekdays (not weekends)
- is quietest between 02:00 and 07:00
- peaks at 21:00 on weekdays, particularly midweek
- is generally quieter at weekends and bank holidays
- peaks at 13:00 during weekends
- Saturday night is lowest data flow
The ONS made comparisons with other data such as road traffic information – for example, matching an increase in traffic on the M25 motorway around London during the time that internet data traffic was lower, as people commuted home after work.
This approach also revealed some interesting behaviours around special events: there was not a significant spike in data flow during online shopping sale cyber- Monday, and during the England v Croatia football World Cup semi-final in 2018 there was more data exchanged during half time and before the extra time at the end of the match than there was during game itself.
“Insights on large-scale events such as adverse weather and sports could potentially help to provide measurements of economic impact over time,” wrote Philip Stubbings, lead data scientist at the ONS Data Science Campus.
[“source=bbc”]