Hacker News Reader

Comment by caleb-allen | Hacker News Reader

I have coworkers in Belarus who have been cut off from our (US based) company since the weekend. I've been able to hear from one of them intermittently, but it's a scary thing, I can't imagine what they're going through.

View on HN

FYI - we have been able to get regular SMS and voice calls through (using Google Fi as our carrier). It was great to go from "absolute zero communication" to "we know you're currently OK"

Folks I've been in contact with cannot be reached by WhatsApp and email, but SMS seems to work. "We go from home to work and then straight home. Afraid to go out after dark so as not to get picked up by accident. Otherwise, everything is OK." is the message I got.

Not sure if I'd want to be using SMS without a one-time-pad right now. And even then, that could appear too suspicious.

Surely if there are telephone communications then someone can modem out? Or are they scanning for non-human communication over telephony?

The number of people with the hardware and know how to send data over a telephone line is probably very small.

Slightly ironic since this was once the only way. Brb investing in a modem.

Not with Google Fi, at least. Cellular networks are optimized for human voice and the compression will typically break the protocols originally designed to transfer data over landlines.

I wonder if cellular predictive encoding or whatever would break absolutely all of these modulation schemes.

https://kb.iu.edu/d/aand

Bell 201A, for example. Loading modern webpages over 2400bps would be hell but IRC might still work. Or maybe time to break out the old UUCP.

Time to break out the 56K modems!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com