[HN Gopher] Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests
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Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-01-23 19:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (netblocks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (netblocks.org)
| jcpenny1 wrote:
| Please be very careful of pasting Netblocks links here. They have
| no documented methodology and put users at risk by scanning for
| websites without any consent.
|
| https://netblocked.org/
|
| https://twitter.com/Berryhillj/status/1300776162868826114
| tpmx wrote:
| So,
|
| Navalny produced this 1h52m Russian-language video that was
| published on Youtube 4-5 days ago, just after he returned to
| Russia and was arrested:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI (it has English
| subtitles)
|
| _Putin 's palace. History of world's largest bribe_
|
| It's _very_ well produced. I saw all of it and it helped me
| understand a lot of the history of how the current gang of eh..
| er, about how Putin got to where he is today. I really recommend
| watching it.
|
| After these 4-5 days, it has 74M views. The view count is at the
| moment _still_ growing at ~0.7M views _per hour_ - I just had to
| edit that view count. 70% of those views are from russian IPs, as
| per the Navalny people. Makes sense to me.
|
| Russia has a population of 144M people.
|
| I think it's only a matter of time until Putin/Russia bans
| Youtube.
| hntrader wrote:
| Off topic and I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive,
| but I'd love to see some kind of AI dubbing applied to YouTube
| vids (similar to AI subs) so I can watch videos that aren't in
| my native language while doing other tasks or while drifting
| off to sleep. Would also help blind people w/ accessibility.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sergeykish wrote:
| I would have searched "read subtitles aloud". Youtube
| specific "read subtitles aloud youtube" gives
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subtitles-
| player-t... (I have not checked yet)
| tpmx wrote:
| > Off topic and I hope this doesn't come across as
| insensitive,
|
| Especially since your brand new account plugged some
| particular startup 30 minutes ago using your account.
|
| Look, I get it, you feel you have to "hustle". In this case
| using your brand new throwaway HN account. I do feel pretty
| strongly that _this thread_ is not the thread for that
| though.
| hntrader wrote:
| This is a false accusation made in incredibly bad faith. I
| don't know whether you're suffering paranoid ideation or
| what's going on, but someone sharing links to a tech
| they're discussing (which I edited out after your
| accusation in order to keep the peace) is hardly evidence
| that I'm a founder of said company engaged in underhanded
| promotion. The mods can check my IP address and see I'm in
| a different country to the founders if they really wish
| (not that that would put your mind to rest, you'll probably
| just think I'm using a VPN).
| petre wrote:
| Even if all Internet based video is banned, movies will still
| circulate on USB flash drives. It happened before with
| _Roadside Picnic_ and other books that the regime wouldn 't
| print because of foul language or subversive ideas. Do not
| underestimate the creativity of citizens from the former
| Eastern block.
| tpmx wrote:
| Sure, but the spread will slow down. Discovery is everything,
| distribution is commodity.
|
| Edit: And when Putin does shut down access to Youtube, I bet
| he'll reference how US tech companies shut down "hostiles"
| after the Capitol Building incident. And it will seem like he
| has a has a reason for shutting down Youtube in Russia, to
| his dwindling group of supporters.
| disabled wrote:
| Just FYI: As a Croatian speaker (not native, 20-30% mutual
| intelligibility with Russian), whose native language is
| English, I would say that the English captions work
| effectively, but a professional translation from Russian to
| English would be so much better. It does not capture the
| grammatical cases or context all that well, based on what is
| being spoken.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, I kinda got that reading the subtitles - it's clear
| that the English translation/subtitling is done by a semi-
| amateur. Still, as, you say, it is _effective_.
| sand_castles wrote:
| please get parlar online.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I could easily imagine the Russian government shutting down
| internet usage for a few hours until they had a better handle on
| the situation. But, I have to ask, how possible is it that this
| was instead a lot more people than usual trying to use the
| internet in that area, because they were all on their smartphones
| trying to coordinate their activities in bandwidth-hungry ways?
|
| Not saying it's likely, I don't know enough about the tech and
| infrastructure to evaluate that. Just asking the question in case
| somebody on HN does know.
| stopChanging wrote:
| I'm wondering the same thing.
|
| The article only says this:
|
| "Purposeful internet outages generally have a distinct network
| pattern used by NetBlocks to determine and attribute the root
| cause of an outage, a process known as attribution which
| follows detection and classification stages."
|
| To me they just drop some silly terms and fail to actually
| explain anything.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| So begins another attempted colour revolution...
| alexryndin wrote:
| Hello. I'm in Russia, Moscow now and actually internet works
| fine. :)
| dualthro wrote:
| You can verify that cell/mobile internet works fine at the site
| of the protests?
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| According to the link, it was restored around 11am PST (10pm
| MSK)
| jseliger wrote:
| I wonder whether SpaceX will allow Starlink service
| (https://www.starlink.com/) to the open Internet even in
| repressive countries. Obviously there are many barriers, ranging
| from the states's security apparatuses to getting payment for
| service to Starlink to smuggling the dishes into the repressive
| countries, but it's not impossible to imagine a future in which
| open Internet access is much harder to block in many places.
| walrus01 wrote:
| two problems there:
|
| a) the present starlink architecture is bent pipe from each
| satellite. meaning that a satellite (for uninterrupted service,
| two or more satellites at the same time), in its moving LEO
| orbit needs to be simultaneously in view of the customer
| premises small terminal, and also a starlink earth station
| which is a link into terrestrial fiber networks. spacex is
| working on satellite-to-satellite trunk link connectivity but
| to the best of everyone's knowledge outside of the company,
| none of those have launched yet. because of that, you can't
| presently have a starlink terminal for an ordinary customer
| without a spacex-operated earth station geographically located
| in the same region.
|
| b) an adversarial high tech nation like russia (or iran,
| whatever) would have absolutely no problems with operating
| portable spectrum analyzers on the ground to identify and
| confiscate starlink terminals. it needs to be on a roof or
| other place with a clear view of the sky, isn't very small, and
| it needs to transmit. if it transmits in known bands, from the
| ground towards space, it can be identified from the ground and
| confiscated. training relatively unskilled law enforcement to
| use a portable spectrum analyzer and a ku band horn antenna
| would be at most a one day, eight hour training course. see
| what happens if you try to operate an unauthorized two-way VSAT
| link, 1.2 to 2.4m dish size, in the C or Ku bands in Ethiopia
| today, for example. Men with a pickup truck and firearms will
| show up to take your equipment and arrest you.
|
| all of that said, I think that there is still a lot of
| possibilities for circumvention of government censorship and
| filtering, even in an aggressive environment such as behind the
| great firewall of china. I highly encourage any interested
| persons with linux/networking software development expertise,
| and network engineering expertise to put some thought into how
| they might assist open source projects related to censorship,
| obfuscation/stego, and traffic-blockage circumvention. Except
| in an environment where the government literally orders
| EVERYTHING to be shut off (Kashmir, recently!), there will
| likely always remain some paths for traffic, because a country
| can only cripple its own internet for so long without causing
| significant economic impacts domestically.
| alicorn wrote:
| It is already all but illegal to use Starlink in Russia, and
| given modern surveillance technologies, setting up an access
| point against the will of authorities might be practically
| impossible.
| pietor wrote:
| Everybody in Teheran has satellite dishes on their roof to
| watch illegal tv programming. You might be overestimating the
| efficiency of repressive authorities
| modeless wrote:
| Satellite TV dishes don't transmit and don't require the
| service provider to know your location.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yeah but if SpaceX has no actual corporate entity in
| Russia, Russia has no real way to force SpaceX to
| disclose the data.
|
| (short of threatening to shoot down satellites, which
| would normally be a viable threat, but honestly now
| SpaceX can launch a StarLink satellite for less than it
| costs to shoot one down)
| tristanj wrote:
| This is not the grandparent comment's point. SpaceX is
| not the weakest link here, the user on the ground
| transmitting radio signals is. Satellite communications
| are easily identifiable, and can be rapidly triangulated.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Hmm is it true that the dishes can be triangulated? I was
| under the impression that they were motorized and
| directional (not like a cell phone that's
| omnidirectional).
|
| Obviously they're a bit bulky for now, but I suspect they
| will shrink considerably over time.
| et-al wrote:
| Repressive authorities probably don't view _Better Call
| Saul_ as a threat to their authority as much as citizens
| actively sharing difficult truths, organizing protests, and
| communicating with the outside world.
|
| (I'm aware of Radio Free Europe role's as soft power, but
| skeptical of today's sitcoms providing a strong critique
| against these regimes.)
| modeless wrote:
| The chance of this is about zero unfortunately. Space is very
| heavily regulated and I don't see SpaceX trying to rock the
| boat at the expense of any possibility of eventually providing
| service in those countries. They don't have plausible
| deniability about where terminals are located. Knowledge of
| location is required for the system to work.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It may not go well for the car business.
|
| If I recall correctly, Musk himself said that he will respect
| countries laws.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Then again, all criminals say that.
| rasz wrote:
| Not the space faring ones for sure.
| eznzt wrote:
| Internet access over satellite has been around since forever.
| It's a big thing in Cuba for example. Evidently, possession of
| the necessary equipment is illegal, and smuggling it in is
| extremely expensive.
| trillic wrote:
| At some point in the near future there may open source antenna
| designs that could run SpaceX's closed source software on
| commodity equipment with service paid for by Bitcoin.
| ducktective wrote:
| yeah, good luck with hiding the actual physical
| electromagnetic waves...heard those could be easily tracked.
| drdaeman wrote:
| TIL that Starlink uses phased arrays in their terminals,
| but I wonder if - for discretion's sake - it can be also
| made to work with parabolic dish antennas. Or do those
| phased arrays those days have small sidelobes?
|
| Either way, still should be possible to catch those in
| denser areas by wardriving, I think.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The satellites are continuously moving so they use the
| phased array to track the motion of the satellites in
| real time (I believe). You could make a dish on a movable
| mount, but from an RF perspective that would be no less
| detectable than a dish. The point is that Starlink is a
| two way link, so someone flying overhead in an airplane
| could detect the transmitted signal. TV dishes are harder
| to detect because they don't transmit when receiving TV,
| not because they are a dish.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Yeah, I get it's bidirectional and was thinking about a
| movable mount exactly. Flying over felt costly which is
| why I thought about wardriving and relying on transmitter
| antenna sidelobes for detection - as I believe they're
| smaller for parabolic antennas. From what I've heard,
| this is the most common approach - just a van roaming the
| city and comparing what they see to list of licensed
| radios.
|
| Although, now, thinking about the costs I feel that maybe
| I was wrong in that assumption, and flying drones is
| cheap enough for this purpose.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Same headline could have been in America a few weeks ago.
| "Internet disrupted in United States amid opposition protests"
| Except private companies disrupted the internet over central
| governments.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| That was very different kind of disruption though, wasn't it?
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| No
| dTal wrote:
| Some differences:
|
| web services != internet: Nobody was pulling a lever and
| blanket shutting down WhatsApp.
|
| government != private: You touch on this, but it' a significant
| difference that there was no abuse of political power at play;
| you simply had independent entities coming to the same
| conclusion, and acting within their rights.
|
| tactical != strategic: The revocation of service by various
| American web services was not time sensitive, calculated to
| disrupt an ongoing protest; it was a refusal to continue
| providing service _after_ the heat had died down.
| Udik wrote:
| > Nobody was pulling a lever and blanket shutting down
| WhatsApp
|
| You don't need to if you can intervene at the specific
| application and user level. Which is what happened with
| Twitter and Facebook, Youtube and Parler.
|
| > there was no abuse of political power at play; you simply
| had independent entities
|
| Which happen to be companies from the same nation, after the
| political entity their actions are directed against has lost
| the elections and is well on its way out and its opponents
| are coming in. Russia doesn't have the luxury of having its
| own Facebook and Youtube.
|
| > The revocation of service by various American web services
| was not time sensitive, calculated to disrupt an ongoing
| protest;
|
| Yet it was motivated with the danger of further incitements-
| which means that the heat had not died down at all- the
| actions were explicitly aimed at preventing more protest.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| "Internet disrupted in US amid protests except the internet
| works fine and its just a few accounts being banned from social
| media and its not protest but a violent mob intend on publicly
| executing members of parliament and its not the opposition
| because the current president send them"
|
| (... not sure if the headline fits any style guide)
| mhh__ wrote:
| By that same logic every single act of moderation is disrupting
| the internet?
| ducktective wrote:
| aah...by that logic, "de-platforming" (newspeak for
| censoring) is moderation.
| zepto wrote:
| That's exactly what people claim it is.
| [deleted]
| trentnix wrote:
| If it moderates the same political speech simultaneously
| across multiple, supposedly "independent" networks, then
| yeah.
| mhh__ wrote:
| What is "it"? If you punched the mayor in a bar would you
| be surprised all the local establishments kick you out as
| well?
| trentnix wrote:
| Well I guess that depends. Is the mayor a "Nazi"? Because
| they decided that was okay a few years back before they
| started calling everyone they don't like a "Nazi".
| mhh__ wrote:
| If I'm being honest I don't contest that the word nazi is
| being thrown around too much, but if Donald Trump isn't
| (even accidently, I don't believe he could formulate a
| view himself) a fascist I don't know who is - economic
| protectionist, social conservative, consistently praises
| "strong" leaders e.g. Putin and Kim, has been caught on
| tape trying to illegally override a democratic result in
| Georgia, the list goes on and on and these are excluding
| the more blatant offenses during 2015
| trentnix wrote:
| How about people who scheme to deny the speech of others?
| That's pretty fascist.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| This is Hacker News, not Facebook.
|
| Arguably, the internet ends at the network level (TCP).
| Everything above it is just the payload. Application layer
| disruptions are not internet disruptions.
| trentnix wrote:
| That's just a different weapon that can be aimed at the
| same enemy.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| Yes, but application layer "weapons" are very democratic.
| Everyone can have one.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| In case you're looking for background, this concerns the arrest
| of Alexei Navalny, a Putin political opponent. He was recently
| poisoned (almost certainly by the Russian state), treated in
| [EDIT: Germany], and immediately arrested upon return to Russia.
| Now his wife and other associates have also been detained. There
| are widespread protests as a result.
|
| See
| https://ground.news/article/7bdfdb69-fbf5-4fb5-be1b-43c8d8b3...
| for articles related to the protest from different news media
| with various biases.
| NLips wrote:
| Treated in Germany, not the UK
| [deleted]
| RobertoG wrote:
| Treated in Germany, I think.
| rdiddly wrote:
| In America they leave the internet connected through the protest,
| the better to gather evidence.
| 10000truths wrote:
| They can do that because the social media websites that a vast
| majority of people use all fall under US jurisdiction, so
| obtaining evidence is just a subpoena away. I guarantee you
| that the US government would more strongly push for Internet
| censorship if the US protests in the past four years were
| organized over, say, Vkontakte.
| rdiddly wrote:
| You can bet that anything happening on Vkontakte gets
| vacuumed up by the NSA and can be used as evidence too. The
| real reason blackouts don't happen is probably because it
| would be too disruptive to business.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Protestors really need to find a more censorship-resistant means
| of communication.
|
| In the heat of the moment, when protests are organized and
| coordinated over the internet, internet censorship can be very
| effective, and countries have become adept at controlling it.
|
| John Gilmour's quip about the internet interpreting censorship as
| damage and routing around is far from true for mainstream
| internet users, if it ever was.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| They just shut of the internet in Russia. In its entirety. What
| new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up
| with, and why wouldn't anyone else come up with those,
| considering any means of mass communication independent of the
| internet would probably be useful for a lot more than just
| protesting?
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed
| to come up with_
|
| Did protests not exist and revolutions not occur before the
| Internet? If anything, the Internet appears to have tilted
| the table in favour of rulers.
| dmix wrote:
| You could always start an underground pamphlet printing
| press!
|
| ... although the pro-censorship crowd have an exploit for
| that as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas
| jcpenny1 wrote:
| Please be very careful of pasting Netblocks links here. They
| have no documented methodology and put users at risk by
| scanning for websites without any consent.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Another option is to make Internet itself more censorship
| resistant.
|
| Remember, cable is actually way more physically resistant to
| adversary interference in comparison to radio, satellite, or
| microwave towers.
|
| You need to destroy cables, and equipment physically, unlike
| anything of above, and you can repair it quickly using
| omnipresent, off the shelf hardware. In other words, you can
| expend a great amount of resources sending goons to wreck
| thousands of DCs, and exchanges to little effect.
|
| Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will
| work.
|
| Same with cell networks. Easy to jam locally, but even a big
| city is practically impossible without massive expense to
| physically take down cell towers. Idlib in Syria is a good
| example how a cutoff segment of cell network managed to stay
| online for a remarkable amount of time under military
| aggression.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges
| will work.
|
| I'm not sure this works with Russia. The police there don't
| mess around, are very violent and have been practicing their
| tactics for at least a century.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I myself is an unfortunate owner of a russian passport, and
| my spend childhood there.
|
| > The police there don't mess around, are very violent
|
| Of course! That's rather obvious. You will not be able to
| resist any much bigger force than just police with puny
| handguns you can buy on the black market, but that's the
| point!
|
| Have that militarised special police busy! Have them
| expending resources, have them running armour around cities
| at a great material cost. Not to say disruption of everyday
| life, and seeing armour on the streets will contribute
| greatly to galvanising the population, and demoralising the
| ordinary police.
|
| Simple math tells that 1 million men strong police force
| will quickly exhaust itself being either split on 100+
| major cities, or being constantly relocated from one city,
| to another.
|
| The ratio of military age men, to police force in Russia is
| 21 to 1, and you very much expect that a bigger portion of
| population has to be counted, and not all mancount of
| police, and 3 letter services account for military like
| units.
| zksmk wrote:
| That's what projects like the https://briarproject.org/ are
| for.
|
| It's peer2peer in the truest sense, it can connect to other
| peers via Bluetooth or WiFi. It also uses Tor when it goes over
| the internet.
|
| The fact the info spreads like corona when in person, means it
| takes a while for the info to spread, but once it explodes it
| goes big, and is hard to stop.
|
| My favorite anti-censorship app.
| cheschire wrote:
| Well it depends on how you define mainstream internet.
|
| If you define it in the same way that it was when that quote
| was originally stated, then protestors can still just as easily
| interconnect networks as they could back then. It might even be
| easier than back then if you consider using mesh wireless
| technology.
|
| Smartphones aren't the internet. They're regulated endpoints
| within a restricted network which is itself connected to the
| internet. Just because these extremely limited little devices
| we carry in our pockets had their access cut off, and just
| because a lot of home users can't just open a browser and start
| browsing without talking to their neighbors, doesn't mean the
| internet can't successfully route around it. It just takes time
| and effort.
|
| I still believe the quote to be true.
| nelgaard wrote:
| Freifunk works:
| https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/
| toast0 wrote:
| It's hard to have realtime communications be censorship
| resistant if there is defacto authority to block them.
|
| Terrestrial wired and wireless telecom is out; government can
| order them to turn off.
|
| Broadcast RF is hard, because jamming and locating the source
| are relatively simple. And taking actions to stop jammers is
| probably more illegal than the protest.
|
| Line of sight optical signaling is probably easy to locate the
| source of, but could work; otoh, easy to disrupt with smoke,
| etc.
|
| If you can do something with peer to peer radio, that could
| work, but wifi or bluetooth frequencies are jammable.
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(page generated 2021-01-23 23:01 UTC)