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Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

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Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#201

Post by YarickR2 »

petre wrote: post #124
gpm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* International treaties and national laws prohibit sending radio signals into the country if the countries government doesn't give you permission. Space ISPs are very unlikely to do so without permission except at the behest of their home government.

Yeah, like that stopped Radio Free Europe delivering real news into the Eastern block. They can imprison people with terminals but they can't radio shield their airspace.

Now we're calling state-sponsored propaganda outlet "real news"

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#202

Post by sergeykish »

marvin wrote: post #181
sergeykish wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few hits would provide enough junk for runaway process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I don't think a country with space capability is seriously considering making orbit useless over censorship. That'd be like shooting yourself in the foot right after you've trained for a marathon, in order to ingratiate yourself with firearms manufacturers.

And private company would not consider such risk either. Like with nuclear weapon ability to shoot is enough. Funny how it works with

s/country/private company/

s/space/nuclear/, s/orbit/land/

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#203

Post by Enginerrrd »

est31 wrote: post #111
throw1234651234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this becomes a thing, they will put a laser on a satellite and call it a day. All of the big 3 (military, not economically, you know who I am talking about) can do this easily. edit: In response to below - they are putting SHORAD lasers on Strykers soon. Things have become a lot more compact.

High powered lasers on an aircraft carrier work because it has a nuclear power plant onboard. How will you launch a nuclear power plant into space? Note that the response to star wars contributed to the Soviet Union's bankruptcy :).

Depends on duty cycle. It may only need enough power for a couple of big bursts. Chemical lasers might work quite well here if you can address temperature fluctuation issues. The power output can be sufficiently massive with a relatively compact storage of that power. The downside is just that they can't be easily recharged.

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#204

Post by pydry »

dmix wrote: post #104

I've noticed this in other countries where there are accusations of rigging the results that the ratios always super high, in this case 80%. If you're going to fake an election result that had some legitimate measurable opposition, why make it so extremely high? Does that mean nearly every vote counting place is rigged and it's so bad they don't even bother hiding it? Just like when Crimea voted to join Russia it was…

>Just like when Crimea voted to join Russia it was 97% [1].

In Crimea's case the majority of the population being ethnically russian, the neglect from Ukraine, anger over the maidan, russia promising pension payments and infrastructure investment and the opposition boycotting the vote probably all contributed to this result.

As far as I know the main thrust of the argument against this vote from the EU and Ukraine was that having the vote was illegal and/or unconstitutional and thus null and void.

All Russia cared about was maintaining access to warm water ports.

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#205

Post by gpm »

liability wrote: post #184
steve_musk wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot down the satellites?

For a constellation as large as starlink, that would probably require a lot of missiles, even accounting for Kessler effects. Also, doings such a thing to an American corporation that's only one or two degrees of separation from the USDoD may prove to be a costly mistake. I think Belarus would need to depend on the strength of their relationship with Russia to avoid retaliation. That hasn't protected Syria though, so…

I doubt Belarus has the infrastructure to shoot them down, them asking Russia to and giving Russia the excuse that the US violated the Outer Space Treaty first might do the trick though. Depends on how much of a war monger Russia wants to be at the relevant point in time.

They are spread out with many satellites over a small number of orbits, pretty ideal for Kessler, or pretty ideal for another satellite to pass by a whole line of them and stick a bullet (small detachable impactor) in each.

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#206

Post by dan-robertson »

petre wrote: post #124
gpm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* International treaties and national laws prohibit sending radio signals into the country if the countries government doesn't give you permission. Space ISPs are very unlikely to do so without permission except at the behest of their home government.

Yeah, like that stopped Radio Free Europe delivering real news into the Eastern block. They can imprison people with terminals but they can't radio shield their airspace.

Indeed Radio free Europe recently (in the last few days) turned on their medium wave broadcasts in Belorussian. I don’t know when they last sent them out.

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#209

Post by yabones »

mehrdadn wrote: post #198
yabones wrote: post #190

I have some close acquaintances in BY, so this has been hard. We saw that (at least as of 8 PM UTC) outbound connections to HTTP servers wasn't really a problem. A fresh ec2 box with a basic web server wasn't effected. So, early yesterday I set up an OpenVPN server on ec2 (eu-west-1) to try to get some slow but functional internet access. What we saw was that about 15-30 seconds after the TLS handshake the connection…

I don't get how XOR helps here? Isn't this stuff based on timing + length information?

Well, it does more than just XOR but the goal is to just scramble the traffic enough that it looks like a bunch of nonsense rather than a TLS handshake. The actual VPN provides the encryption, this layer adds a socket on top that garbles up the data.

Re: Belarus has shut down the internet amid a controversial election

#210

Post by tylermenezes »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #140
tapvt wrote: post #21

A case where I feel amateur (ham) radio would be a potential lifeline to the outside world.

By international treaty, hams cannot discuss politics (like chaos following dubious elections) over the air. In fact, in many countries it is the custom for hams to avoid any topics that might be seen as "serious", instead they limit their remarks to general technical matters or the weather.

I'm not really sure where you've gotten that from. Can you post an actual citation?

Here in the US, communications just need to be "of a personal nature." Part 97 prohibits (with some exceptions) commercial communications, encrypted communications, music, and things which are otherwise illegal. It's also not the licensing test.

It's not unusual for the US to ignore a treaty, of course, but I can't find anything about this online either.

I've always heard "don't discuss politics" as a sort of unspoken agreement.

(KG7TUJ)

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