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India is kind of cute. In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian
by lebuffon 2mo ago
India is kind of cute.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
- toast0 2mo agoLots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.
- em-bee 2mo agoisn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly? on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
- toast0 2mo agoYes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about. > on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly. Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's not the tech they care about, it's the network structure.
- em-bee 2mo agosure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.
- inigyou 2mo agoNot on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.
- em-bee 2mo agoi don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something that allows me to pre-authorize who can call me. this is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the point is that VOIP in particular is hardly relevant except in a few specific use cases.
- inigyou 2mo agoWhat do you use - WhatsApp? That's VOIP.
- em-bee 2mo agothat depends on how you define VOIP. strictly going by the term any voice sent over the internet is VOIP. but since PSTN can be routed over the internet too, that would be included as well. but i am talking about the system that uses a standardized protocol over a federated network with a VOIP or SIP client with a public address that allows you to reach any other public address on the internet, just like email. whatsapp is a private network, not federated and only works with a whatsapp owned client. to qualify i would have to be able to call someone on whatsapp with a generic VOIP client. this is comparable to googles text messaging system that is built on xmpp. it used to be possible that i could use any xmpp client on any xmpp server to reach people on google. at that point google was xmpp. but when they removed public access it stopped being standard xmpp but became a custom fork of it.
- SoftTalker 2mo agovoip is pretty effectively banned, or at least marginalized, in the USA. Can't use a Google Voice number for most payment services, for example.
- inigyou 2mo agoDoes jmp.chat work?
- golemotron 2mo agoReminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."
- josefresco 2mo agoStarlink can be jammed.
- mothballed 2mo agoIt would be easier to shoot it out of the sky than try and jam a whole country from starlink
- verdverm 2mo agoPutting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.
- inigyou 2mo agoMight be easier to jam the uplink. Just modify some starlink units to transmit nonsense and place them around the country.
- kristjank 2mo agoJamming can be defeated quite funnily, by digging a pit and putting the antenna at the bottom of it.
- josefresco 2mo agoThanks for sharing, very interesting: https://www.technology.org/2023/08/01/did-russia-learn-to-jam-starlink-satellites-ukraine-is-already-using-a-simple-but-effective-protection/ https://www.technology.org/2023/08/01/did-russia-learn-to-ja...
- 2mo ago
- kube-system 2mo agoAnd it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc. This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
- iamnothere 2mo agoThey could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kube-system 2mo agoI'm not suggesting people should give up, I'm suggesting that some countries can resort to doing very uncute things when faced with noncompliance. When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.
- iamnothere 2mo agoFair enough, yes people should be ready to fight for their rights (physically if necessary). The tone of your post came across as an attempt to demoralize. Intentional or not, my comment was a pushback against that.
- inigyou 2mo agoReminds me of FSF versus some Uyghur. Summary: FSF: if you use PGP your communications will be unreadable by outsiders. Some Uyghur: bruh, the government assigned a Han Chinese person to live in my house and watch me whenever I use technology.
- gruez 2mo ago
- satvikpendem 2mo agoThat's funny considering the scale of WhatsApp now in the country.
- inigyou 2mo agoAs I understand it's primarily an anti spam thing. They will allow apps to spam you but the telephone network is sacred.
- inigyou 2mo agoThat is still the case. I looked up this law. It is strictly forbidden to ever connect the POTS network to an IP network. End of story.