Belarus turned off the internet – citizens hot-wired it
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Based on the title, I was expecting to read about internet shutdowns and peer to peer networks. Instead, it's just a story about DPI and VPNs.
Nothing here is being "hot-wired". Blocking social media isn't "shutting down the internet" in any technical sense. Turning off cell networks because of protests is, but those actions aren't being circumvented here. Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.
I do wonder if the general population would claim the internet is turned off just because Google, Facebook and Twitter aren't available. By these definitions, does China have internet access? It's interesting to me to see how years of internet access and growing up around smart devices has taught people so little about the actual workings of the internet.
Only using the 2 or 3 major websites, in car speak, would likely more look like "only know the road to the mall, the job, and the daycare and doesn't even realize there are other places one might conceivably go" which is... not fine in my book, and yes, I'm frustrated about that.
People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet. So they have all this crazy equipment with functions they never even imagined, and only use it to browse a few websites. So I actually think the issue is even worse than what you describe and I'm frustrated about it too.
I see that a lot of my fellow nerds have this feeling and I'm honestly, non-trolly curious about why this is. People have wants and needs (get email from boss, watch video, lookup a recipe) and they learn how to do that specific task. Most people don't know what the internet is, or what a even what computer is beyond a simple mental model that allows them to do what they think they want to do.
For most things, this is exactly how you I and everyone else lives their lives too. Like everyone else I'm sure there are systems that you use on a daily basis which you don't understand beyond the specific steps that you need to know in order to accomplish your task. I don't have anything beyond the most basic pharmacological understanding of how the prescription drugs I take work, and I probably never will yet I depend on them daily.
Most people will never understand most things. I see that as utterly normal.
In that vein, I was pretty impressed the other day by the Wikipedia article on traffic lights.
It's actually a cool project, but never got really big.
To an extent I'm sure that dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is tiring
On the other hand dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is lucrative
So the public being clueless about the Internet is more like being clueless about basic law and finance, or in more extreme cases something like telling apart the fiction and non-fiction programs on TV. On the other hand, you should be fine thinking of your car as just a means of transportation.
People will always apply the duck test to their technical experiences: what is the Internet for a 15 year old? Most likely it's something along the lines of the web, and a few mobile applications. As long as "what you use" goes down, the "Internet", for a normal user, is down.
Just like there was a point to educating people about it in the late 90s, there's a point in educating people about it now: what you see and use on a daily basis is not "the Internet".
It's still the correct phrase. There are two meanings of the word 'internet' - one is the infrastructure, and the other is the websites and services people access using the infrastructure. You're assuming the first meaning while the article is talking about the second meaning.
what if a colleague told you "network down" and you had to ask
" can you ping google.com? how about 8.8.8.8? can you ping gateway? can you tracepath with port? how about telnet? " ?
another version is "what does tcpdump say?"
yet another version(when the complaint is "website down" instead of "network down") is "whats the http response?"
But if Twitter were off the air for a week, IMO the world would be measurably better and people would fight to keep it down.
I've never had an account on any FB property - avoid it like the Spyware plague that it is. Yet others find FB, Instagram, etc. very useful, even tho if I had to remove one thing to improve the internet, FB would be at the top of my list.
OTOH, Twitter, which I used to formally deride like you, I've found to be immensely useful, as I can directly link to & occasionally converse with top leaders and experts in many fields, and get direct links to the source papers/articles, without filtering, delays, & distortions of the regular media (but ya, one needs to heavily use the Block function in political discussions to maintain civility/sanity). It's also clear that Twitter is used a lot by all news orgs, it's often the 1st place news breaks, and every journo is active on it.
So, seems that it really is about each individual users' needs.
If these were removed from the internet, replacements would be active almost immediately. Would they be better/worse? Who knows?
Their chronic corporate irresponsibility and disregard of abuse is unconscionable. Entities controlling fake or bot accounts, combined the amplification effect on the platform basically have turned it into disinformation as a service.
It so trivial to manipulate institutions and tastemakers that Twitter can be used to undermine them. Check out local public officials or B-list corporate types and what they follow. At that scale, you as a guy with a credit card can trivially insert a narrative into that persons feed to manipulate their perspectives or actions. There are entities doing this at scale to influence policy.
Facebook is pretty malevolent as well. But I don't think that it undermines institutions like Twitter. It targets the broader public. They are more like TV brand marketing without editorial standards and with more focused targeting. Nazis couldn't get ads on your local TV station in 1990, but they can on Facebook.
Part of the problem is the technical/feature sets of each platform, and a lot of it is the corp management or failure of management.
While the bot/troll hordes on Twitter are a serious problem disrupting many conversations, I'm almost thinking FB is more of a problem because the desinformatsiya can be more specifically targeted, and spread with less visibility outside the particular set of connections.
So, I fully agree, from the POV of preserving democracy, I'd have zero hesitation in fully & finally terminating either/both today, if there were remotely more responsible replacements.
But Telegram is just part of the same old centralized server approach.
But it's just alternative messengers and VPNs.
On the other hand this is probably a good thing. During the Arab Spring Egypt cut its internet lines and activist like Telecomix provided dial-in internet access. Nowadays even a dictator can't cut the internet access without causing massive damages.
There’s no reason twitter or whatsapp couldn’t be usable on the bps that ax25 documents describe, but using 9600bps or evening less to try to load a modern webpage sounds a recipe for disaster
The problem the regime has is that anyone with a clue and IT skills is monetizing those skills in that sector as government jobs, including those in its vast security forces, don't pay a lot. So, they don't necessarily have a lot of in house competence implementing any kind of sophisticated blocking strategies. Anyone capable of implementing that could quadruple their salaries by jumping ship. The state telco company gets most of its revenues from the IT sector as well. So they don't have any incentive to shut down their core business. I'm guessing it's mostly Russia that helps them with the technical parts of that. Of course Russia and Putin are currently mildly annoyed with Lukashenko and are looking to grow their influence in Belarus a bit by letting him flail desperately for a while. So, they are a bit hands off right now and not in a mood to help him out.
The second problem is that group #1 is basically tapping into the wealth generated by group #2. So shutting down the internet is a spectacularly bad idea for #2 for obvious reasons and therefore not a popular notion for #1 either. The people who would be at all capable of effecting such a change are mostly working in the IT sector already and the elite in group #1 kind of needs them to keep on doing their thing so the money keeps flowing. Besides, rich people need their internet fix and Lukashenko is considered a bit of an old relic by both groups. A convenient stooge at best.
Hence internet shutdowns tend to be short lived, ineffective, and largely symbolic. Telegram is important for both groups and completely outside of the control of Belarusian authorities. It's the same reason the Russians have failed to shut that down. They can't do it without cutting off the IT sector and the financial gains coming from that sector and none of the billionaires that make up the elite like it when their shiny iphones stop working.
Oh wait, they can fake election results, kill anybody they please and are backed by Russia. I guess all is well regardless if they can block the internet or not.
It has the ability to use evasion strategies, but doing that doesn’t make the software decentralized.
Point is I don't see anything decentralised in MTProto. Unless I'm mistaken Durov announced that he wants to make something p2p, but right now it's not. [https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/tree/master/Tele...]
If an ISP were to really block MTProto, then the P2P functionalities would stop working as well.
Note: 4G mobile internet is still BANNED in Kashmir for "maintaining the national integrity and sovereignty of india" and other bs
But the news is never about that :-/ Just "someone shut down the facebook" - boring
Besides, the antenna itself is rather small, and can be hidden inside just about any structure transparent to RF in the relevant frequency bands - say, a seemingly innocuous water cistern on the roof, for instance.
Brown trucks with gobs of antennas are the guys who are tracking them down, some Chinese 3 letter service.
2. It is possible to build verious kinds of covert antennas. Radio amateurs do that all the time. Just google the term "stealth ham radio"
But if you shine a powerful laser beam into the sky it is visible from pretty far away. It's highly focused, but also gets scattered a lot by the atmosphere.
That's actually how spies send data back over the satellites:
>Unlike with SW signals, a radio signal to a satellite is very difficult to intercept and trace, as the waves are 'beamed' straight up rather than all around.
A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them and even pointing out the approximate location (eg. a building) where they're located. If the antenna was inside a huge apartment building, it would be hard to find the right apartment, if the transmitter was turned off, but with single family buildings, it would be easy.
Ham radio operators hide and then look for hidden transmitters for fun, so it's not that hard, especially with a budget that is given to the police.
You are very wrong sir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-millimeter_band
>A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them.
That is not true. Helicopter would need to fly RIGHT into such directional and tiny beam. Which is nearly impossible to do in huge city. Even when flying 2m next to it, you would likely not detect it.
That is the reason why CIA had so much problem with pinpointing Iridium satellite phones back in Colombia in the 90's.
and yes, even with a laser (nanometer wavelengths) it's hard to produce a 2mm wide beam at a helicopter distance.
"Yeah, that's my 'compost bin'"
Even in the US, constitutional rights have been waved on a mass scale for 20 years. People only take up arms to defend te right to oppress downtrodden minorities.
It is probably cheaper to launch a StarLink bird than it is to blow it out of orbit. Think of it as a DoS attack on the launch batteries!
As for the second? I find that approach much more likely to succeed. Sigh.
First, it's one of extremely few actions actually likely to get you nuked or "liberated" - you just threatened one of the most valuable strategic advantages (even if it's just a civilian satellite, it wasn't yours, and militaries will consider their satellites under threat).
Second, in case you're not aware, the remains of the satellite now are a danger to any other object in that orbital plane, and this can trigger a cascade reaction and take lots of them down, making new launches impossible for many years. Look for Kessler Syndrome.
Nobody is nuking anybody else over satellites. Nukes will only be used in case of regime / home territory threat (eg if Russia were losing a conventional war, and NATO were pushing toward Moscow, Russia could throw down the nuke threat card and say stop or else), or in response to the use of a nuke.
If North Korea starts shooting down US satellites at some point, it would prompt a conventional military bombing response (which would attempt to neutralize their ability to launch rockets at US satellites), and possible full-scale war. It would not prompt a nuclear retaliation. There is zero interest - anywhere - in seeing millions of people die over some satellites.
They have some propellant to make adjustments and stay in orbit a bit longer but if you blow them up you just make the decay process quicker.
The plan for Starlink is to have 12,000 satellites eventually. You'd need to shoot down quite lot a of them to block access to an entire country.
It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. It evolved into a Internetwork of trusted hosts to facilitate rapid information dissemination. It took a bunch of advertisers to turn it into surveillance nirvana by realizing that you could use http requests and your own portable sensor platform and in-house OS to rake in profit overwhelming.
At least early on, the latter had the excuse of lack of foresight regarding the dystopia they were building, but for decades now it's been more than obvious to everyone and most of them are continuing to cobble together their own prisons and ours.
That's a nice myth. But it wasn't so.
As https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... explains, the idea of packet switching was invented twice. The Internet came out of the invention by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Separately Paul Baran and others at RAND had demonstrated that packet switching could be used to build a network to survive a nuclear attack.
Even though the Internet came out of military research, it was not designed to withstand nuclear attack. As can be verified by the fact that the early network had no redundancy, and neither computers nor the network were shielded from the EMP that a nuclear bomb could be expected to emit.
That's not to say there weren't earlier efforts to leverage networks for security purposes. I'm reminded of a tale of connecting FBI branches in the southern U.S. to facilitate case information sharing to close a series of cases involving a multi-state child and human trafficking ring in the Southern U.S. as well. Again though, that wasn't something bearing the character of "Hey! Let's 1984 these disgusting subhumans!" It was more, "Hey, seeing as our entire reason for existence is to work on crimes that cross State boundaries, doesn't it make sense that we should be able to keep the entire organization connected enough so that all our distributed branches can be kept up-to-date on what we've all found?"
Nothing controversial there. At all. Where things started getting controversial is where we started to take Lincoln's "tap the telegraph lines", an extreme wartime measure, and make it matter of fact through the establishment of the NSA/DIA. Where we started seeing the privatized Palantir's pop up, and seeing government agencies exercise or otherwise excuse investigative techniques they could not justifiably engage in themselves through delegation or voluntary action by private organizations.
It's these private businesses building datasets that never should gave existed that have outright corrupted things, and the at the time far more reasonable Third Party Doctrine that have driven things off the rails. Not the Internet itself.
So on the one hand a random internet stranger claims to have known someone important who said something.
On the other hand we have a history written by people including the author of the first paper on packet switching, the program manager at DARPA who authorized the project, the inventor of TCP/IP and so on and so forth.
I'll believe the paper that I cited.
Packet switching can be used to build networks that are resilient in the face of disruptions, whether natural or manmade. That is where the myth of "designed to survive a nuclear war" comes from. But the original Internet was designed using packet switching to allow computers to freely talk to each other without having an insane number of dedicated circuits kept open.
That said, I agree with you that it was not designed for surveillance. But I disagree on the timeline. While the response to 9/11 certainly stepped up the level of surveillance to an insane level, all evidence is that ECHELON had been tapping the Internet long before that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.
Pretty much same thing as complaining about bad leaders when the sheeple putting in the bad votes is the actual problem.
Who really is the loser here.
This was a very disjoint cultural shift in from the research I've done, and it was really pushed by only a handful of big names.
You: Camping, in the mountains, sorry boss, no signal there, I won't be accessible.
Boss: No problem.... here's a portable starlink antenna,... just in case... you know... if there is a bug in your code... or if we have a skype call with the clients... or if we need a bug fixed... haha.. you know, fixing bugs in the forest hehe.. well yeah... just have it connected during normal business hours, just in case... and check your emails while you're connected.. and slack... and CI logs... but otherwise, have a nice vacation, I hope you get some rest!
I hope we will find a way to peacefully wind down the democracy in the West before it completely destroys our economy and society.
Democracy isn't a panacea to the world's problems. It needs an informed population in order to function, which directly and without discrimination means government transparency. The process of opinion building needs to be taught in schools, and journalists need to be protected from interference.
Without these pieces and more in place there is no democracy. Very few countries actually are democratic in practice. The fight for freedom and democracy is ongoing, and those who get in its way are misanthropes who deserve a bitter end to their efforts.
Have that, and democratic society with freedom of speech, and you get a self-eating monster machine that will destroy itself in less than a generation. Why does someone who has no chances to be self-reliant, vote responsibly? Especially if he is well-educated and well-informed, so he realises it.
Is that what they really want? If they are patriots, they should hold on to Lukashenka for as long as he is alive, and pray that power transition will happen smoothly so Russia has no reason to intervene when he dies - or it will be the end of their nation as such.
Want to stay as far away from that dynamic as possible. It's garbage and always will be.
Your notion of "democracies funded by global elite" and a "siphoning global middle class" sound more of conspiracy theory babble than anything rational. And by the way you have concluded that there are only two paths for Western societies, I'd say your judgment has become heavily biased.
Isn't Telegram based in Russia? I'm surprised Russia didn't try to get them to bock Putilo, or at the minimum that Russia would cooperate with a Belarusian internet block.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-telegram-...
https://decrypt.co/32837/russia-lifts-ban-on-telegram-after-...
You are actively detracting from real issues today by posting this nonsense.
An attempt to shut down CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and AP would result in an immediate court order prohibiting the shutdown.
Trump is annoying enough, you don't have to make up imaginary things about him.
Trump lets the States exercise their Constitutional authority[2]
TDS Sufferer: "Trump is a disappointingly-WEAK dictator!"[3]
It really is bizarre. As you say, there are things he's legitimately punting into the stands, such as his ham-fisted counter to the rise of China (great concept, abysmal execution).[4]
[1]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-covid-19-coronavirus-di...
[2]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/03/31/commentary/w...
[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/yet-anothe...
They want to politice the "truth": https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0
But it clearly exists. This is an insane thing to think. It's so far out beyond anything that could happen, that deranged is a reasonable word for it.
Log off, buddy. Take a walk, heck take a day. The Internet will still be there when you get back.