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Comment by klingonopera | Hacker News Reader

If worst comes to worst, I hope there's satellite connectivity to HK. Or landlines not under Chinese jurisdiction.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm concerned about what could happen if China cuts HK off from the Internet.

China can't cut HK off from the internet. Almost all Chinese internet traffic is routed through Hong Kong, not the other way around.

so then HK could do...to china Hmm I think someone is in jeopardy but neither side has realized exactly who yet.

They still can cut off the consumers ISP and leave commercial untouched.

Let's take it a step further, and imagine a complete Internet blackout in HK, both consumer and commercial, even if just for a day or a week.

I'm thinking up scenarios of how China can do a modern Tianamen and get away with it.

I'd be happy to conclude that it isn't possible, but I'm not sure if I might be forgetting something...

forcing someone to obey you rather than just destroying them for defiance suggest you need them around for something. Im wondering just what a tyrant would have left to occupy thier time when all of the tyrannized are deceased.

Satellite comms would still work. But you raise an important point, as it's a strategic issue in the region: https://www.asiasentinel.com/econ-business/taiwan-fears-chin...

I don’t think China would care about cutting themselves off from the global internet.

Maybe the Chinese government wouldn't, but the people would care, a lot. The Chinese government is perpetually afraid of revolution and rebellion.

Do mainland Chinese really use that much of the global Internet?

Yes, an enormous amount of data crosses the border from HK into China

Foreign trade is ~37% of China's GDP so probably at least 1/3 of the country depends on it directly or indirectly. For context that's equivalent to the entire population of the US even if only a small fraction of those people are conducting the actual communications, negotiations, and transactions of international commerce.

Wait, so if I in Europe send an email to a Chinese server, it gets routed across the Atlantic, Pacific and via HK into China? There's no direct land link?

Depends on your ISP. There are cables from Europe and the Americas to China but they are very expensive and congested. HK is also congested but there is much more bandwidth and it's a lot cheaper.

Satellite phones are extremely easy to determine point of origin, give or take 20m. That's enough to dispatch police or worse, launch an airstrike.

That's exactly how Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed: using two laser guided missiles while he spoke on sat phone. The signal was interceped by a Russian reconaissance aircraft.

This tactic has been used a number of times that I'm aware of, in Eastern Europe, South America and the Middle East.

...and not just with satellite phones, a normal phone suffices.

A drone will act as a receiver/relay for the phone signal, and then triangulate the phone's location.

Surprising given how easily defeatable it is for anyone sufficiently motivated.

The only "easily defeatable" method that I'm aware of is to make your call from somewhere you don't mind being bombed, make it from a place with multiple egress points, and to stay on the call for at most 90 seconds.

Or put an optical repeater at your target (bombable) site and install a long run of fiber to your safe location, which you then have to abandon. Doesn't seem very practical to me.

Optical repeater? You're overthinking it. You don't need minimal latency or perfect signal quality to make voice calls worthwhile, crap quality is fine. And if you have to abandon a satellite phone because your comms station got blown up...so what? That's just a cost of doing business. They're maybe a couple thousand on the black market, probably the same or less than a MANPAD.

I doubt China is planning to airstrile individual protestor.

Like people doubted they'd run over a protester with a tank, right?

There is a decent amount of JP/SG connectivity, iirc.

Seeing how well it’s working for Indoa in Kashmir, I”m surprised China hasn’t done it by now.

Kashmir isn't as highly networked in the global world like HK is, which is probably why the Indian government can get away with it... it is a chilling lesson to any region that doesn't have the luxury of being a financial hub, which safeguards from sudden blackouts...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/28/india-restore-kashmirs-i...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/internet-mobile-blackou...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/this-is-wha...

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