>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized.
How subversive.
Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
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Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#12The beauty of the network and hyperconnection. It's like you can try and maintain a hierarchical structure with all the energy and resources you have. But the more the nodes within your hierarchy are connected to external networks the less chance you ever have of maintaining the integrity of the hierarchy. There is a threshold of contentedness above which it doesn't matter one bit what the hierarchy does to maintain…
You highly underestimate power of totalitarian state
There aren't any models from history of what happens to totalitarian states when their population is connected to a much larger external network.
This is the first generation of totalitarian leaders that has to figure out how to handle the "connectedness". They will do the obvious thing and try to disconnect. There is nothing to suggest it will result in anything but a loss to the state and to them.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#13The unfortunate part about this is that there's a lot of really talented network engineers who are from Russia (or Ukraine, or Belarus, or other former soviet states). The high quality of math education is part of it, totally subjective personal theory of course...
A lot of the most talented Russian network engineers don't want to work for an autocratic regime. I've met at least a half dozen that now work for international ISPs you would see on a top-30 list for CAIDA ASRank, none of which are Russian ISPs. They're living outside Russia, enjoying actual free speech and human rights, and making a better salary.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#14>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized. How subversive.
I don't know where you live, but is it not the same (i.e. you need official approbation to plan a protest) in most countries?
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#15> It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure. The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS…
Network engineer perspective: It looks to me like the Russian government wants to be able to cut itself off from the ICANN DNS roots, not because there's any actual threat of western european nation-states or ISPs cutting off its transport links to places like the DE-CIX, but because the Russian government wants the ability to cut things off in an emergency situation.
Theoretically, an "emergency" that might be something like a civil uprising against autocratic rule.
If you were to look at the top 50 largest ASes in Russia and their IP space, and IX presences, they already peer with each other over IXes and PNIs extensively entirely within Russia. Things that are truly hosted entirely within Russia like servers for vkontakte and others would probably continue to function.
Take a look at the Russian ISPs which are members of the DE-CIX for a decent overview of which ASes are big enough to have established major POPs in Western Europe.
The .ru government does know where all of the long distance terrestrial fiber cables are, going in and out of Russia, and licenses each international link for various telecoms and ISPs.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#16I just took a 30 second look at the English language websites of TASS, RT and Sputnik.
Unsurprisingly, there is no mention whatsoever of these protests.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#17>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized. How subversive.
Prior authorisation is actually required in many westerm democracies if you're going to block roads and the like.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#18> It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure. The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS…
I think the answer to the question what's the point is to notice that there's a bit of a rhetorical trick going on. Notice how they say (in passive voice) proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure . So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet. The Russia…
The U.S. did cut Russia off during midterms last year didn’t we? It’s not a what if.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#19> It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure. The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS…
I think the answer to the question what's the point is to notice that there's a bit of a rhetorical trick going on. Notice how they say (in passive voice) proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure . So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet. The Russia…
"So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet."
Well, Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT. At about the same time several Russian banks has been cut off from VISA and MC and after that Russia has built nation payment processing and forced VISA and MC use it for intra-Russia payments.
Being cut off from the internet is more far fetched but given the increased role of the internet in Russian economy and state services it is something that cannot be completely ignored.
Another possibility is that Russia cuts off itself after the multitude of crippling Stuxnet-like attacks via internet on targets of significant economical and industrial value.
Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
#20Ruler needs to give his subjects bread and circuses. The circus part is increasingly happening in the Internet. If I was Putin, I would make sure that you can stream or torrent movies and have good access to game servers, cat videos and mindless entertainment like my life depends on it.
> The circus part is increasingly happening in the Internet.
In case you were wondering, this is also why Donald tweets so much and also says fun things like "covfefe". Gotta keep that circus going, it's actually really important!