Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests

Some context: Students are protesting to reform the quota system. Which was abolished in 2018 after protest but recently brought back again. The Quota system basically reserves 56% of public sector jobs, i.e. 30% to relatives of war veteran.

The war happened in 1971. To get public job and avail the quota, it must be their 3rd or 4th generation now. Which is plain unfair.

But it’s not about that, the gov loyalists and their goons fake these veteran certificates to land these jobs. Bangladesh is one of the most corrupted countries in the world after all. So real veteran relatives are seldom the beneficiary.

These students just wanted to reform this system. But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.) This was completely unprovoked and unnecessary. Basically any forms of dissent have been dealt with this way since 2009. No one can criticize or protest the big brother.

We have a dictatorship since 2009. People are angry - due to corruption, inflation, joblessness and tyranny. This is just some outburst of it.

When you see the videos how the police are killing teenagers and university students in the road - our future generation - no one can tolerate this.

Now the fascist gov has closed all internet and phone connection to outside world. I can't contact my family anymore. I don't know their well being.

There is of course more to it. But this is the summary.

I think it's worth noting why this is happening. The country has been giving out degrees and jobs to people who instead of working and studying hard, to descendants of veterans in the country's war against pakistan, and this level of nepotism has been going on since the 70s which as you can easily imagine is not great for those who see the value in getting these "basic livelihood for hard work" things. So when people started protesting recently, because for anyone with half a brain this is completely wrong, the people without half a brain who benefit from this completely fucked system responded by killing and raping students and now there's no internet.

This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent people very fast by the way.

This protest, which started peacefully is currently the consequence of absolute mishandling and mismanagement by the government that resulted in close to 100 being shot dead by the police.

The current protest is not about the quota system anymore. It is the result of the systematic breakdown of social and economic opportunities that stems from years of corruption and favouritism within every sect of the economy.

I changed the URL from https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/112808500770031751 after getting this email from a user:

If you figure the event is significant enough to be on the front page, isn't something about the event itself more appropriate? as opposed to a tweet about the network being down as stand-in

That seems like a good point. I hope it doesn't context-shift the comments too much (I'm in a meeting atm and don't have time to check.)

I've talked with a guy from Bangladesh over the last 3 days and he said that he was at a party and he was about to be killed, so he stopped going and started filming how other students are being beaten by local police. The fact that the government blocked the internet is pretty sad and I wish that no more people die.

Has there been any indication from NetBlocks how they think the government is blocking internet access? I can still see subnets being announced from Bangledesh associated providers.

AS 17494 AS 38592 AS 136246 AS 152304 AS 24323

There is also a widespread cellular outage. It's very, very difficult (near impossible) to reach anyone in the country right now.

My friends are mostly Bdesh expats at this point. I wonder how dangerous it would be to setup a link from Bdesh into India. It would be a useful lifeline. Best wishes for the students and the people of Bdesh, but the stuff we were seeing as late as yesterday on Twitter was ugly. I hope those that can are using their mobiles to take proof.

When governments do such things, expect bad results. The protesters' demands aren't unreasonable at all. Just be meritocratic in civil service appointments.

Anyone know more about Starlink availability in Bangladesh? I see there were some news articles last year mentioning trials. And the prohibitive cost to the locals.

If you need visuals of the flatlining here it is: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bd

A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn’t yet have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2 weeks of poor internet for everyone.

Bangladesh as such has a severe lack of capital, and rebuilding all this is costly.

Ideally protests should be peaceful. But along with protestors, we tend to unleash anarchists who just want to watch the world burn.

They also have rival political parties who clearly use this situation to their advantage.

All is not what it seems. Truth is whatever you believe.

I hope for a swift restoration of law and order, followed by productive dialogue. And for the love of god, let’s not condone setting things on fire. That will destroy innocent lives and what little financial security they have built.

Rather than an outage, this is a national internet kill switch being used to deny the population access to information and the ability to organize.

Because the supreme court reinstated a law that reserves a whopping 30% of all government jobs to only people with family members who fought in a war 50 years ago. As anyone could have trivially predicted, that doesn't sit well with the entire generation that's currently in school and hoping to actually, you know, get a job in the next few years.

News from yesterday

Related article for some context: https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-t...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370)

I wish the protestors all the best. Sad that this kind of situation is happening.

Is meshnet technology currently feasible/cheap enough that it could be used to work around an internet shutdown in a country with very high population density like Bangladesh?

When Government bans internet, people should never vote for them. They are the most evil one and I think all country should get together and sanction them.

I am here to give context, in as much unbiased way as I can.

Bangladesh started its journey as East Pakistan in 1947 after breaking away from India. Pakistan's political upper echelon were dominated by Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis. And it siphoned all resources and wealth of East Pakistan to West, and treated it as its colony. Bangladesh, or EP was more populous and more resources-rich. But it suffered under WP. Now, after a massive cyclone and loss of thousands of lives with millions homeless and uprooted, WP rulers did not come to aid. And, in an unrelated way, a Bengali politician was to be elected Prime Minister for whole of Pakistan. But WP elites didn't want that. In this time, WP rulers wanted to eradicate Bengali, the mother tongue of EP, the more populous fraction of population and impose Urdu. Bangladeshi people revolted taking the issues of election, cyclone, and language simultaneously. Protests started peacefully.

But WP rulers used military for genocide and massacre. Tens of thousands of women were gangraped, raped and killed. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and tortured- many students and intellectuals. Hindus were the main target, but they didn’t spare Bengali Muslims either.

So, a war of independence ensued, and rebels become victorious. India engaged in a war with Pakistan and won that war, too.

Now, there was a small but non trivial part population of EP supported the WP rulers in name of radical religion. They and their descendants are in current BD population, too. They are in political-religious org Jamat-e-Islami. Supported and allied by BNP.

So, Sheikh Hasina, the current PM, was actually popular and won elections fairly in the beginning. But, she wouldn’t concede fair seats to opponents who were often pro-Pakistan but not always. In the name of national integrity and safety.

In tandem, the ruling party became corrupt to the core, and its loyalists and cronies made bank in corruption.

There is always consensus against the ruling party and the PM. And what began as a anti-quota protest, now has become a anti-establishment movement.

The people protesting now are mostly normal people. But a significant portion are pro-Pakistan radical Islamist fundamentalist.

But the rulers want to paint all of them as being pro-Pak, fundamentalists. This is how dissent was handled for the last 15 years.

I have many friends in Bangladesh or who lived there. Now, ruler party's central policies are pro-minority. But, local partymen do perpetrate against minority. So, they have slowly become what they fought.

Given the prevalence of this sort of thing in authoritarian countries, it's disappointing that mesh networking apps like Briar and Firechat are not more well-resourced/ developed/ promoted. Popular messaging platforms like Signal, WeChat, and Telegram offer a blend of convenience and security (different apps having different priorities, eg Telegram prioritizes the former over the latter), but they're all vulnerable to internet shutdowns, which instantly dissolves any online community trying to coordinate.

Mesh networks are generally slower and less reliable for large-scale data transfer as well as less secure by virtue of their distributed nature, but are more resilient in the event that natural/ social disasters take down communications infrastructure. Even janky analog radios work better.

Is this just practice for September?

looking at https://outage.ant.isi.edu/ it seems Europe is having a bad day too

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396

I lived in BGD back in the 70’s, and the same two alternating dynasties still seem to have a hold on the country. Very sad.

Maybe they just had Crowdstrike installed at some of their Internet exchange control machines? :-\

Does Starlink work in Bangladesh?

If this can happen, can you imagine if the Internet was centralized?

It is really odd to me that Bangladesh even exists as a nation, and that it is an officially Islamic nation. This country was formed as a result of the partition of India, where the British empire left a mess on their way out by subdividing India into what is now Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. But really these countries should be recombined into India - their status as religious ethnostates is unacceptable in the modern world and given that Islam came to the region through brutal genocidal invasions by Arabs in the Middle East, it seems strange to give those colonizing invaders their own land and ethnostate. Pakistan and Bangladesh have also been messy throughout their existence, and continually on the brink - as current conditions show.

thoughts and prayers to those caught up in this and i hope for a peaceful resolution.

this should ring alarm bells for the other south asian neighbours who shared similar colonialism past.

socialist policies for the marginalized several decades ago seems to always bite back when leaders don't bring out more opportunities and instead play with the politics of handing out favourable access.

if some of these countries dream to call themselves developed in the future, they need to introspect whether you would need quotas and reservations after achieving it.

"Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle coverage and online engagement with police killings at student protest"

Calling things what they are instead of tortuously passive and neutral descriptions should be standard. The headline sounds like it's describing two separate things that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at the same time.

Is this how an Ai take over or state sponsored cyber attack would look like?