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Comment by gbuk2013 | Hacker News Reader

gbuk2013

Wonderful. What better way to drive home the message that the Russian government’s strategy of control over internet and Great Firewall makes total sense from the POV of national security.

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The Russian new law which would be effective on Nov 1st would handle the operation of routing (you read correctly, patching ISP's BGP tables) of over-the-border links to a state-running body (in case of emergency which is basically whenever they'd want) so it's not a firewall, I'd like to call it the Red Internet Plug.

Should be called the Brown Internet Plug for what it brings.

>strategy of control over internet and Great Firewall makes total sense from the POV of national security

How do those contribute to national security? "control over internet"/gfw aka censorship isn't going to prevent any cyberattacks.

It makes it a lot easier for the Russian gov to sell "control over the internet" to the public.

Yes, and this. It’s a lot easier to sell the idea of defence against a common enemy when the enemy is actually real.

It's more of a back up system (for now?) than anything, so when things go south for them they can rely on something else. Just like gps has many alternatives by other super powers, so when American military decided to turn it off, things would still work.

The same way that it helps prevent them in a corporate environment. I work for a security company and control over ingress and egress is absolutely a fundamental part of our network security.

Same as having a centralised firewall on a corporate ISP, having a firewall on a country level can prevent / monitor traffic to whole segments of IT infrastructure.

wonder how much more sales the russian firewall will generate to cisco et al

Not much - there is now a law for this sort of equipment to be manufactured in Russia, with an increasing requirement of using locally manufactured components (as they gradually become available).

Currently a lot of the microelectronics is still manufactured in Asia but there has been a steady progress in acquiring capabilities to manufacture them within Russia. The costs are usually much higher due to much lower volumes, but since these mainly go to military and government infrastructure, cost is not a concern.

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