If you go by examples like that then there are a number of nations you cannot support at all - consider for example that China has the Uyghur concentration camps, US has Guantanamo Bay and now the new prisons in partnership with El Salvador. Belgium got away scottfree with their genocide in Africa, Turkey carried out a genocide in Armenia, France still collects fines from its previous colonies etc.
This is absolutely true and I am referring to Bangalore - the so-called IT capital of India. Here the Internet access is completely controlled by the mafia. But in a lot of cities, this is not the case.
Then you should take a better look. Each local ISP has their own self-designated territory or "area". They don't let any other ISPs establish themselves in their areas, beating them up or cutting their wires if they try - you can talk to any ISP technician and they'll tell you about it. 90% of the fluctuations in network are from a cable cut, often by competing agencies.
It's also one of the big reasons why AirFibre is becoming more prominent - can't cut cables if there are no cables.
The above commentor uses "mafia" not in the literal sense but he's talking about the mafia-like system where each ISP has territories they fight over.
Tbh, it's manageable in Bangalore, since the territories are already established and there's not much interference but much more horrible in other areas - we had to suffer with a shitty ISP in my hometown for years bc they kept cutting cables & bullying any other ISP that tried to come in.
Actually, I am talking about a literal mafia. In my area there is just one "official" internet provider (Airwire) which is partly owned / controlled by a politician who was recently accused of killing a property owner who refused to sell the property for peanuts to him.
If any other internet provider enters this area, their people get beaten and their lines get cut. They cause problems for even BSNL which is a government-owned provider. They periodically cut their lines.
So yes, this is an actual mafia. I have been warned by them that I don't any choice but take their lines. They even threaten you if you take products like Jio airfiber.
I have access to airtel, act broadband, jio fiber, bsnl and earlier hathway and I have switched between them and no one cut my cable and gave me grief ... no mafia present in our and the surrounding areas. Ofc the kinda ppl you talk abt may be there, but we shld not generalize.
This is India. If people are informally reporting corruption in some institution, you'll be on the right track if you believe it to be true. There will never be any formal studies of such cartels. Journalists who attempt to report on such things are regularly murdered. Most people are simply oblivious. You saw in the main e-waste story how the journalist seemed oblivious to the cartel in front of his eyes. If you stay in an independent house, not a flat, you might want to look into cartels of water tankers too.
It is time to get the government to recognise mobile phones as being full fledged computers and which require the same consumer protections. Just because you are carrying it around all the time doesn't make it any less a computer.
> It is time to get the government to recognise mobile phones as being full fledged computers…
Mobile phones are not, and have never been, general-purpose computers. If you think they're locked down now, you'd be completely astounded to learn what the industry was like pre-iPhone/pre-App Store.
I was hacking on firmware for the couple Sony Ericssons I had, replacing major system components like sound drivers with no problems. Installing third-party applications without first asking for permission from your master was normal and expected. They were about as open as current Android is, and probably more so than Android in another five years.
What is a "general purpose" computer? who decides what is "general" or not? what can you not do in a mobile phone which you cannot do on a regular desktop / laptop computer? If anything, a mobile phone has MORE capabilities - such as GPS, the gyro etc. So it is a superset of features of a "general" computer like a desktop or a laptop and not a subset of features making it a "non-general" limited computer.
This sort of flexibility has its own problems and it is only possible because of the very lax type system of PHP but it is also extremely powerful when it comes to developing reusable frameworks.
I am amazed that you also managed to write a browser engine!
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