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Comment by renholder | Hacker News Reader

>It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure.

The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure. Doesn't really seem all that worthwhile, unless you create recovery points to ensure that you have records to recover with; otherwise, what's the point...?

(Of course, I could be entirely misunderstanding the premise of the law because it's not referenced in the article and I can't speak/read Russian for feck-all...)

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I think the answer to the question what's the point is to notice that there's a bit of a rhetorical trick going on. Notice how they say (in passive voice) proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure. So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet. The Russian government has an interest of its own in cutting itself off from the internet to control its own citizens' speech on the internet, it's just that it's a little bit cynical to imagine it and it wouldn't be balanced to mention it explicitly in a news article.

The U.S. did cut Russia off during midterms last year didn’t we? It’s not a what if.

We haven't noticed it here in Russia :)

Citation? I am unaware of even a single Russian ISP that has been cut off from a traffic exchange point in Western Europe.

This would make news in the internet infrastructure community if it occurred.

This is what he is referring to:

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/431614-us-cyber-ope...

Saying the US, "cut Russia off" is a massive overstatement, but something did happen.

"So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet."

Well, Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT. At about the same time several Russian banks has been cut off from VISA and MC and after that Russia has built nation payment processing and forced VISA and MC use it for intra-Russia payments.

Being cut off from the internet is more far fetched but given the increased role of the internet in Russian economy and state services it is something that cannot be completely ignored.

Another possibility is that Russia cuts off itself after the multitude of crippling Stuxnet-like attacks via internet on targets of significant economical and industrial value.

> Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT

Do you have a link for this claim? All I get when googling "russia cut off from swift" is a bunch of rt/zerohedge/tass stuff (wtf is TruNews?), followed by some clear denials in ft/bloomberg. Is there more to this than just the Russian government saying stuff?

I most certainly do.

13. Recalls that the restrictive measures taken by the EU are directly linked to the Russian Federation’s violation of international law with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine, while the trade measures taken by the Russian Federation, including those against Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership countries which have recently concluded Association Agreements with the EU, are unjustified; calls for the EU to consider excluding Russia from civil nuclear cooperation and the Swift system;

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

Was this seriously considered, or is it just the European Parliament saying things? When I google this stuff, I can't find anything to support it like an actual plan or something.

Around the time when politicians were discussing the ban, a Russian banker joined SWIFT board. This was not a political move but a purely technical one, board members are selected based on the number of messages sent over the last year.

Still funny that media did not report it at the time although this was made public.

Not a true Scotsman?

According to Bloomberg, the U.K. plans to propose blocking Russia from the SWIFT banking transaction system, a move analysts say would effectively cut off Russian businesses from the rest of the world's financial system. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will put forward the proposal during a meeting with E.U. leaders in Brussels on Saturday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-29/u-k-wants...

A quick google search reveals they apparently have their own SWIFT now.¹ It is ran side by side with SWIFT, not as a competitor, so the claim that it is from fear of sanctions or other actions from the US seems accurate.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/russias-central-bank-governo...

Every country with an independent financial system has a so called RTGS,a real-time gross settlement system. It happens that Russian RTGS is similar to SWIFT as far as data structures are concerned. This makes it easier to extend RTGS to other kinds of uses.

Network engineer perspective: It looks to me like the Russian government wants to be able to cut itself off from the ICANN DNS roots, not because there's any actual threat of western european nation-states or ISPs cutting off its transport links to places like the DE-CIX, but because the Russian government wants the ability to cut things off in an emergency situation.

Theoretically, an "emergency" that might be something like a civil uprising against autocratic rule.

If you were to look at the top 50 largest ASes in Russia and their IP space, and IX presences, they already peer with each other over IXes and PNIs extensively entirely within Russia. Things that are truly hosted entirely within Russia like servers for vkontakte and others would probably continue to function.

Take a look at the Russian ISPs which are members of the DE-CIX for a decent overview of which ASes are big enough to have established major POPs in Western Europe.

The .ru government does know where all of the long distance terrestrial fiber cables are, going in and out of Russia, and licenses each international link for various telecoms and ISPs.

US has waged several wars recently and Russia is in top 3 list of USA enemies - right after ISIS and ebola as far as I remember. It makes Russian government to worry about things...

The US has gone to war with poor desert nomads. Its totally ridiculous to think the #1 nuclear power would fathom... what, a land invasion? of the #2 nuclear power.

Russia and the US have been antagonistic of one another ever since the Bolsheviks deposed the US backed monarchy. That doesn't mean either are delusional enough to end the human race in total nuclear annihilation trying to go to war with one another. That's completely obscene fearmongering.

> The US has gone to war with poor desert nomads.

Okay, so... The "But iraq has WMD lies" that were used to justify the 2003 invasion resulted in a ground war, but not with poor desert nomads.

Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party were the urban elite of the country. In terms of positions of power, financial resources and such, they were the 1% of Iraq.

The insurgencies that formed from "poor desert nomads" came afterwards, after they had defeated the Iraqi army and the paychecks stopped coming for the majority of the Iraqi army and police forces.

The US defeated the Iraqi military in three weeks. While an incredibly costly endeavor to begin with, the ~15 years of occupation and guerilla warfare since have immensely eclipsed the formal war against Sadam's government.

The stated purpose has little to do with real intent, which is information control over Russian subjects. Russia will eventually corral ordinary citizens off the real net into its small OK/VK heaven.

I've been following Russian news on the matter pretty closely for the last couple of years (I do speak Russian). Most of these laws are absurdly nonsensical, people who are responsible for them (Yarovaya and co) have very vague understanding of technology and I don't think it's about technology in the end.

US has Yarovaya style system for ages in NSA.

> The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure.

Not only that, you don't need a separate DNS for this. Presumably the .ru TLD is already controlled by Russia. All they would need is to operate their own root server, which wouldn't even need to return invalid data for other TLDs, just not return invalid data for the .ru TLD.

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