Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests | Hacker News Reader

Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests

netblocks.org

Protestors really need to find a more censorship-resistant means of communication.

In the heat of the moment, when protests are organized and coordinated over the internet, internet censorship can be very effective, and countries have become adept at controlling it.

John Gilmour's quip about the internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around is far from true for mainstream internet users, if it ever was.

They just shut of the internet in Russia. In its entirety. What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with, and why wouldn't anyone else come up with those, considering any means of mass communication independent of the internet would probably be useful for a lot more than just protesting?

> What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with

Did protests not exist and revolutions not occur before the Internet? If anything, the Internet appears to have tilted the table in favour of rulers.

You could always start an underground pamphlet printing press!

... although the pro-censorship crowd have an exploit for that as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas

Another option is to make Internet itself more censorship resistant.

Remember, cable is actually way more physically resistant to adversary interference in comparison to radio, satellite, or microwave towers.

You need to destroy cables, and equipment physically, unlike anything of above, and you can repair it quickly using omnipresent, off the shelf hardware. In other words, you can expend a great amount of resources sending goons to wreck thousands of DCs, and exchanges to little effect.

Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work.

Same with cell networks. Easy to jam locally, but even a big city is practically impossible without massive expense to physically take down cell towers. Idlib in Syria is a good example how a cutoff segment of cell network managed to stay online for a remarkable amount of time under military aggression.

> Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work.

I’m not sure this works with Russia. The police there don’t mess around, are very violent and have been practicing their tactics for at least a century.

I myself is an unfortunate owner of a russian passport, and my spend childhood there.

> The police there don’t mess around, are very violent

Of course! That's rather obvious. You will not be able to resist any much bigger force than just police with puny handguns you can buy on the black market, but that's the point!

Have that militarised special police busy! Have them expending resources, have them running armour around cities at a great material cost. Not to say disruption of everyday life, and seeing armour on the streets will contribute greatly to galvanising the population, and demoralising the ordinary police.

Simple math tells that 1 million men strong police force will quickly exhaust itself being either split on 100+ major cities, or being constantly relocated from one city, to another.

The ratio of military age men, to police force in Russia is 21 to 1, and you very much expect that a bigger portion of population has to be counted, and not all mancount of police, and 3 letter services account for military like units.

Well it depends on how you define mainstream internet.

If you define it in the same way that it was when that quote was originally stated, then protestors can still just as easily interconnect networks as they could back then. It might even be easier than back then if you consider using mesh wireless technology.

Smartphones aren't the internet. They're regulated endpoints within a restricted network which is itself connected to the internet. Just because these extremely limited little devices we carry in our pockets had their access cut off, and just because a lot of home users can't just open a browser and start browsing without talking to their neighbors, doesn't mean the internet can't successfully route around it. It just takes time and effort.

I still believe the quote to be true.

That's what projects like the https://briarproject.org/ are for.

It's peer2peer in the truest sense, it can connect to other peers via Bluetooth or WiFi. It also uses Tor when it goes over the internet.

The fact the info spreads like corona when in person, means it takes a while for the info to spread, but once it explodes it goes big, and is hard to stop.

My favorite anti-censorship app.

It's hard to have realtime communications be censorship resistant if there is defacto authority to block them.

Terrestrial wired and wireless telecom is out; government can order them to turn off.

Broadcast RF is hard, because jamming and locating the source are relatively simple. And taking actions to stop jammers is probably more illegal than the protest.

Line of sight optical signaling is probably easy to locate the source of, but could work; otoh, easy to disrupt with smoke, etc.

If you can do something with peer to peer radio, that could work, but wifi or bluetooth frequencies are jammable.

Radio with phased parabolic arrays? I wonder how StarLink will upset the balance in this sort of context. I know Russia has already said they’ll fine people for using it.

Freifunk works: https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/

According to Russia these guys are rioters and mobs and so cutting off internet is justified. It is reported in English news as 'protesters' getting their communication cut off. However, about two weeks ago the US president himself and any site or program where 'protesters' also known as 'rioters' or 'mobs' were able to communicate had their communication cut off, even with access to the internet. Besides websites, social media, video hosting sites, web hosting providers, ISPs, domain holders, payment processors, all of the above used censorship in the U.S. The effect of cutting off communication was the same and even these protests are essentially the same reason people in the U.S. were 'protesting.' So really it is how you define or even how a protest is depicted that determines whether people are for censorship resistant communication.

I’m not sure what you are referring to. As far as I know internet connectivity was never intentionally disrupted on Jan 6th, and of course people could and did communicate. We have a whole cache of videos that were livestreamed from that event.

I'm talking about the intent behind cutting off communication was the same in both instances. The intent is to eliminate the ability for people to organize. You do that literally removing every post that includes a mention of election fraud. Notice how no articles in the U.S. mentioned the reason behind the U.S. capitol? They specifically wanted to hide the message of the 'protest' or 'riot.' Russia is using an axe to perform surgery since they don't have association or control of most of the U.S. companies which also are accessed in Russia. But the U.S. was able to use a scalpel and focus just on the part they wanted to cut.

Did the US government remove those posts or ordered those articles to be written in a specific way? Not quite sure what you’re asserting.

Not to mention that Jan 6th and the current situation in Russia have approximately 0 things in common.

I think he means the aftermath of the 6th and what happened to Parler and that Trump was blocked by Twitter etc. But I also think this doesn’t relate at all since Twitter, Google, Apple and Amazon acted on their own.

I believe Youtube was asked by a few US Senators to take down(censor) election fraud related videos. They did not act from policy.

Thank you, wasn’t aware of this before. But still, a strongly worded letter from the legislative is a far cry from immediate enforcement by the executive.

Right. However, the FBI actually has a very close relationship with all of the tech mega-cap companies. America scolds China for having their companies majority owned by the Chinese government but the effect of the pressure of the FBI is essentially the same. They get access to all information they want and if they don't they call and put pressure. These companies are often essentially forced to comply with FBI orders or requests to halt communication. If it was one company it wouldn't be a big deal but there is huge cooperation between all the mega-cap companies and whether the FBI actually orders it or not, them working together results in mass censorship on a scale that covers 99% of internet traffic.

I wonder whether SpaceX will allow Starlink service (https://www.starlink.com/) to the open Internet even in repressive countries. Obviously there are many barriers, ranging from the states's security apparatuses to getting payment for service to Starlink to smuggling the dishes into the repressive countries, but it's not impossible to imagine a future in which open Internet access is much harder to block in many places.

At some point in the near future there may open source antenna designs that could run SpaceX's closed source software on commodity equipment with service paid for by Bitcoin.

yeah, good luck with hiding the actual physical electromagnetic waves...heard those could be easily tracked.

TIL that Starlink uses phased arrays in their terminals, but I wonder if - for discretion's sake - it can be also made to work with parabolic dish antennas. Or do those phased arrays those days have small sidelobes?

Either way, still should be possible to catch those in denser areas by wardriving, I think.

The satellites are continuously moving so they use the phased array to track the motion of the satellites in real time (I believe). You could make a dish on a movable mount, but from an RF perspective that would be no less detectable than a dish. The point is that Starlink is a two way link, so someone flying overhead in an airplane could detect the transmitted signal. TV dishes are harder to detect because they don’t transmit when receiving TV, not because they are a dish.

Yeah, I get it's bidirectional and was thinking about a movable mount exactly. Flying over felt costly which is why I thought about wardriving and relying on transmitter antenna sidelobes for detection - as I believe they're smaller for parabolic antennas. From what I've heard, this is the most common approach - just a van roaming the city and comparing what they see to list of licensed radios.

Although, now, thinking about the costs I feel that maybe I was wrong in that assumption, and flying drones is cheap enough for this purpose.

Ah yes that makes sense. I am not familiar with the differences in emission patterns.

two problems there:

a) the present starlink architecture is bent pipe from each satellite. meaning that a satellite (for uninterrupted service, two or more satellites at the same time), in its moving LEO orbit needs to be simultaneously in view of the customer premises small terminal, and also a starlink earth station which is a link into terrestrial fiber networks. spacex is working on satellite-to-satellite trunk link connectivity but to the best of everyone's knowledge outside of the company, none of those have launched yet. because of that, you can't presently have a starlink terminal for an ordinary customer without a spacex-operated earth station geographically located in the same region.

b) an adversarial high tech nation like russia (or iran, whatever) would have absolutely no problems with operating portable spectrum analyzers on the ground to identify and confiscate starlink terminals. it needs to be on a roof or other place with a clear view of the sky, isn't very small, and it needs to transmit. if it transmits in known bands, from the ground towards space, it can be identified from the ground and confiscated. training relatively unskilled law enforcement to use a portable spectrum analyzer and a ku band horn antenna would be at most a one day, eight hour training course. see what happens if you try to operate an unauthorized two-way VSAT link, 1.2 to 2.4m dish size, in the C or Ku bands in Ethiopia today, for example. Men with a pickup truck and firearms will show up to take your equipment and arrest you.

all of that said, I think that there is still a lot of possibilities for circumvention of government censorship and filtering, even in an aggressive environment such as behind the great firewall of china. I highly encourage any interested persons with linux/networking software development expertise, and network engineering expertise to put some thought into how they might assist open source projects related to censorship, obfuscation/stego, and traffic-blockage circumvention. Except in an environment where the government literally orders EVERYTHING to be shut off (Kashmir, recently!), there will likely always remain some paths for traffic, because a country can only cripple its own internet for so long without causing significant economic impacts domestically.

I believe data transmission between the satellites is planned, or at least it was, maybe they dropped those plans entirely.

It is already all but illegal to use Starlink in Russia, and given modern surveillance technologies, setting up an access point against the will of authorities might be practically impossible.

Everybody in Teheran has satellite dishes on their roof to watch illegal tv programming. You might be overestimating the efficiency of repressive authorities

Satellite TV dishes don't transmit and don't require the service provider to know your location.

Yeah but if SpaceX has no actual corporate entity in Russia, Russia has no real way to force SpaceX to disclose the data.

(short of threatening to shoot down satellites, which would normally be a viable threat, but honestly now SpaceX can launch a StarLink satellite for less than it costs to shoot one down)

This is not the grandparent comment's point. SpaceX is not the weakest link here, the user on the ground transmitting radio signals is. Satellite communications are easily identifiable, and can be rapidly triangulated.

Hmm is it true that the dishes can be triangulated? I was under the impression that they were motorized and directional (not like a cell phone that's omnidirectional).

Obviously they're a bit bulky for now, but I suspect they will shrink considerably over time.

I used a satellite phone in Tibet without applying for the relevant permits etc. They had no detection gear, the thing looked like a normal phone and payment was pay as you go via Dubai or somewhere like that. (Thuraya - this kind of thing https://www.ebay.com/itm/Thuraya-XT-Satellite/174501734312?h... the aerial slides back in when not in use.)

Repressive authorities probably don't view Better Call Saul as a threat to their authority as much as citizens actively sharing difficult truths, organizing protests, and communicating with the outside world.

(I'm aware of Radio Free Europe role's as soft power, but skeptical of today's sitcoms providing a strong critique against these regimes.)

The chance of this is about zero unfortunately. Space is very heavily regulated and I don't see SpaceX trying to rock the boat at the expense of any possibility of eventually providing service in those countries. They don't have plausible deniability about where terminals are located. Knowledge of location is required for the system to work.

It may not go well for the car business.

If I recall correctly, Musk himself said that he will respect countries laws.

Then again, all criminals say that.

Internet access over satellite has been around since forever. It's a big thing in Cuba for example. Evidently, possession of the necessary equipment is illegal, and smuggling it in is extremely expensive.

Not the space faring ones for sure.

In America they leave the internet connected through the protest, the better to gather evidence.

They can do that because the social media websites that a vast majority of people use all fall under US jurisdiction, so obtaining evidence is just a subpoena away. I guarantee you that the US government would more strongly push for Internet censorship if the US protests in the past four years were organized over, say, Vkontakte.

You can bet that anything happening on Vkontakte gets vacuumed up by the NSA and can be used as evidence too. The real reason blackouts don't happen is probably because it would be too disruptive to business.

vk is a bad example, some e2e encrypted anonymous service would have not effect

So,

Navalny produced this 1h52m Russian-language video that was published on Youtube 4-5 days ago, just after he returned to Russia and was arrested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI (it has English subtitles)

Putin's palace. History of world's largest bribe

It's very well produced. I saw all of it and it helped me understand a lot of the history of how the current gang of eh.. er, about how Putin got to where he is today. I really recommend watching it.

After these 4-5 days, it has 74M views. The view count is at the moment still growing at ~0.7M views per hour - I just had to edit that view count. 70% of those views are from russian IPs, as per the Navalny people. Makes sense to me.

Russia has a population of 144M people.

I think it's only a matter of time until Putin/Russia bans Youtube.

Even if all Internet based video is banned, movies will still circulate on USB flash drives. It happened before with Roadside Picnic and other books that the regime wouldn't print because of foul language or subversive ideas. Do not underestimate the creativity of citizens from the former Eastern block.

Sure, but the spread will slow down. Discovery is everything, distribution is commodity.

Edit: And when Putin does shut down access to Youtube, I bet he'll reference how US tech companies shut down "hostiles" after the Capitol Building incident. And it will seem like he has a has a reason for shutting down Youtube in Russia, to his dwindling group of supporters.

That's like shooting flies with an artilery cannon, but Putin could probably do it none the less. No offense to Russians, but the late senator John McCain's comments spring back to mind when I read news like this. He was critical of Putin, not of Russia, although depicted otherwise by the state's media.

US companies deplatformed certain users and groups insead of shutting down the service. That alone was a controversial move which drew comments from other heads of state.

Off topic and I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive, but I'd love to see some kind of AI dubbing applied to YouTube vids (similar to AI subs) so I can watch videos that aren't in my native language while doing other tasks or while drifting off to sleep. Would also help blind people w/ accessibility.

I would have searched "read subtitles aloud". Youtube specific "read subtitles aloud youtube" gives

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subtitles-player-t... (I have not checked yet)

> Off topic and I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive,

Especially since your brand new account plugged some particular startup 30 minutes ago using your account.

Look, I get it, you feel you have to "hustle". In this case using your brand new throwaway HN account. I do feel pretty strongly that this thread is not the thread for that though.

This is a false accusation made in incredibly bad faith. I don't know whether you're suffering paranoid ideation or what's going on, but someone sharing links to a tech they're discussing (which I edited out after your previous accusation that you deleted, in a failed attempt to keep the peace) is hardly evidence that I'm a founder of said company engaged in underhanded promotion. The mods can check my IP address and see I'm in a different country to the founders if they really wish (not that that would put your mind to rest, you'll probably just think I'm using a VPN).

It's a rather elaborate scheme that you're accusing me of: make a HN account, spend hours writing 20 posts, all to plug my startup in some comment that nobody will read. Think through the plausibility of that one.

Just FYI: As a Croatian speaker (not native, 20-30% mutual intelligibility with Russian), whose native language is English, I would say that the English captions work effectively, but a professional translation from Russian to English would be so much better. It does not capture the grammatical cases or context all that well, based on what is being spoken.

Yeah, I kinda got that reading the subtitles - it's clear that the English translation/subtitling is done by a semi-amateur. Still, as, you say, it is effective. Hopefully it will be replaced by a professional translation soon.

Hello. I'm in Russia, Moscow now and actually internet works fine. :)

You can verify that cell/mobile internet works fine at the site of the protests?

According to the link, it was restored around 11am PST (10pm MSK)

I could easily imagine the Russian government shutting down internet usage for a few hours until they had a better handle on the situation. But, I have to ask, how possible is it that this was instead a lot more people than usual trying to use the internet in that area, because they were all on their smartphones trying to coordinate their activities in bandwidth-hungry ways?

Not saying it's likely, I don't know enough about the tech and infrastructure to evaluate that. Just asking the question in case somebody on HN does know.

I'm wondering the same thing.

The article only says this:

"Purposeful internet outages generally have a distinct network pattern used by NetBlocks to determine and attribute the root cause of an outage, a process known as attribution which follows detection and classification stages."

To me they just drop some silly terms and fail to actually explain anything.

Unlikely. My fixed internet provider in Moscow suburb went down citing "upstream network failure", came up around 11pm.

Today's load is probably less than a pre-pandemic football game and definitely less than new year, and our networks handle that just fine.

In case you’re looking for background, this concerns the arrest of Alexei Navalny, a Putin political opponent. He was recently poisoned (almost certainly by the Russian state), treated in [EDIT: Germany], and immediately arrested upon return to Russia. Now his wife and other associates have also been detained. There are widespread protests as a result.

See https://ground.news/article/7bdfdb69-fbf5-4fb5-be1b-43c8d8b3... for articles related to the protest from different news media with various biases.

Treated in Germany, I think.

Treated in Germany, not the UK

So begins another attempted colour revolution...

Same headline could have been in America a few weeks ago. "Internet disrupted in United States amid opposition protests" Except private companies disrupted the internet over central governments.

By that same logic every single act of moderation is disrupting the internet?

If it moderates the same political speech simultaneously across multiple, supposedly "independent" networks, then yeah.

This is Hacker News, not Facebook.

Arguably, the internet ends at the network level (TCP). Everything above it is just the payload. Application layer disruptions are not internet disruptions.

That's just a different weapon that can be aimed at the same enemy.

Yes, but application layer "weapons" are very democratic. Everyone can have one.

What is "it"? If you punched the mayor in a bar would you be surprised all the local establishments kick you out as well?

Well I guess that depends. Is the mayor a “Nazi”? Because they decided that was okay a few years back before they started calling everyone they don’t like a “Nazi”.

If I'm being honest I don't contest that the word nazi is being thrown around too much, but if Donald Trump isn't (even accidently, I don't believe he could formulate a view himself) a fascist I don't know who is - economic protectionist, social conservative, consistently praises "strong" leaders e.g. Putin and Kim, has been caught on tape trying to illegally override a democratic result in Georgia, the list goes on and on and these are excluding the more blatant offenses during 2015

How about people who scheme to deny the speech of others? That’s pretty fascist.

aah...by that logic, "de-platforming" (newspeak for censoring) is moderation.

That’s exactly what people claim it is.

This was implied by my post...

Typically when I see people use the phrase ‘by that logic’, it is used to suggest that someone’s logic produces an absurd or unintended consequence, which if examined might lead to a reevaluation of the logic itself.

That was very different kind of disruption though, wasn't it?

Some differences:

web services != internet: Nobody was pulling a lever and blanket shutting down WhatsApp.

government != private: You touch on this, but it' a significant difference that there was no abuse of political power at play; you simply had independent entities coming to the same conclusion, and acting within their rights.

tactical != strategic: The revocation of service by various American web services was not time sensitive, calculated to disrupt an ongoing protest; it was a refusal to continue providing service after the heat had died down.

> Nobody was pulling a lever and blanket shutting down WhatsApp

You don't need to if you can intervene at the specific application and user level. Which is what happened with Twitter and Facebook, Youtube and Parler.

> there was no abuse of political power at play; you simply had independent entities

Which happen to be companies from the same nation, after the political entity their actions are directed against has lost the elections and is well on its way out and its opponents are coming in. Russia doesn't have the luxury of having its own Facebook and Youtube.

> The revocation of service by various American web services was not time sensitive, calculated to disrupt an ongoing protest;

Yet it was motivated with the danger of further incitements- which means that the heat had not died down at all- the actions were explicitly aimed at preventing more protest.

"Internet disrupted in US amid protests except the internet works fine and its just a few accounts being banned from social media and its not protest but a violent mob intend on publicly executing members of parliament and its not the opposition because the current president send them"

(... not sure if the headline fits any style guide)

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