Russia's parliament votes to unplug internet from world | Hacker News Reader

Russia's parliament votes to unplug internet from world

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64 pointshal9000xp22 comments

The title does not match the article:

> The law will create an independent infrastructure for the Russian internet, or "Runet," which will essentially allow Russia to pull up its virtual drawbridges in case of attack.

The law will not create an independent infrastructure though. It will give power to Roskomnadzor to control the flow of internet traffic in Russia between ISPs.

If there's technical capability, there's no doubt they will do it, with or without an "attack" (a fake orchestrated attack can always be used as pretext). It's obvious to everyone this will be another Great Firewall.

Sure, but more importantly, in the event of war it would grant them a strategic advantage to be able to use the Internet exclusively within their own territory. The Internet as this wild west style free-for-all was never going to survive nation-state conflicts. All countries will eventually do what Russia is doing now, then link together based on treaties and economic agreements. Any country that opts to remain on an open, global Internet is asking for extreme levels of instability and risk.

Wouldn't that be like saying any nation-state who engages in foreign trade is at a massive disadvantage in conflict? Sure there may be some vulnerabilities but what they get from it likely outweigh it massively. Not to mention implicit allies of interlinked relationships - mess with them and their trading partners won't be happy.

Nation-states also fight with their economies - especially in conflicts protracted enough that production capacity becomes significant.

Yes, the Internet is part of foreign trade, that is my point. The same way that we restrict foreign trade in certain instances in order to protect our own interests will be reflected in restrictions on Internet connectivity in general. That starts with being able to control the connectivity, so eventually every industrialized country will have a system like what Russia is building.

Yeah any talk of a "drawbridge" or "emergency shutdown button" has always been either sheer ignorance or a pretext for censorship. Since if you want security you don't shut it down for everyone but either disconnect everything of infastructural importance.

If your power plants are at risk of hacking you don't prepare by planning to shutdown the internet - you prepare by making sure it can work when unplugged them from insecure networks. Because if loss of said connectivity would cause problems shutting it down is no help and if it doesn't there is no need to boost collateral damage - unleas that is the /real/ goal.

Be charitable here,

Its much easier to disconnect the international connections than to simultaneously disconnect every piece of critical infrastructure at once during an attack. While I believe this is probably a pretext for further censorship, the underlying rationale does have merit.

International disconnects also have the benefit of your internal communications mostly keep working.

The rationale has more merit for a regime that considers facts illegitimate tools of western degeneracy and aggression while waging its own cyber war than for one that wants to work for cyber peace.

Absolutely. It just has not happened yet.

I wonder if this will be the future of the internet. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if the EU tried doing the same.

Not the same at all.

EU is just settings rules for the internal EU market.

Couldn’t one argue that Russia is just setting rules for its internal market?

I suppose this will make a world much easier place for everyone. Both the US and Russia will get a clear enemy, they will keep trying to fight for years, dozen of years, without any achievable success, because any fail you can easily transform in temporary lost in a long run game. If I were the US president or EU, I'd definitely helped them for build this a new internet iron curtains, because it will definitely limit their progress and stuck a new mallow of "replace everything from the west". It's a just basic economy theory of Adam Smith: bigger taxes, bigger obstacles for intonational trade, hurt in the first time your own economy. So I'm definitely support this, lets make russia weak!

The thing is that after USSR has disappeared Russia is not on par with US anymore, neither economically nor technically. So "will keep trying to fight" will end much earlier than anticipated by many.

Not quite an iron curtain, maybe silicon curtain?

So the Russian Firewall?

As someone who knows very little about the Internet backbone and networking in general, would this even be technically feasible to do?

We know that in certain countries there exist "single points" where a majority of internet traffic flows [0], but if those points get cut off, couldn't you reroute the traffic? Isn't that the point of decentralization in the first place?

And if it's technically feasible, would encryption tools like VPNs, DNS encryption or even Tor help in a situation like this?

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-business/wp/2014...

From what I can read in that article, the law will simply mandate that Roskomnadzor gets to control the internet access points, and it's also hinted that services will be required to host their data in Russia, to some extent. That would give them the ability to shut down most of the Internet traffic to and from the rest of the world, while still allowing important services to run without disruptions.

That's the theory anyway. In practice, I assume Russian web services are just as dependant on third-party providers as the rest of us are.

This bill builds on a different one (iirc) where local ISPs are mandated to use channels of a few big backbone providers—basically Rostelecom and Transtelecom. On top of that, satellite connections were also forbidden without going through an on-ground station (not sure what the path is, in that case).

All in all, every connection to outside will be under the control of RKN and the gov, so no matter how you route, you're going through these points. Pretty much the Chinese model—afaik there's not much choice if you're trying to do about the same thing.

If they can control all outgoing points they can control ISP access completely. VPNs wouldn't help as they would still need an out of country connection.

However satellite or other wireless internet not under their control would work unless enforced ad bacculum or through jammers. Anything which depends upon external international IP addresses would break.

VPNs and related would only come into play with unauthorized international connections and the forwarder so it appears traffic is to another domestic address.

This is perfectly understandable, given US hostility to Russia.

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