Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

I used to work for a Belarusian company (outside of Belarus). From what my ex-colleagues told me, they have very little contact with the people in Minsk. There's the occasional email or connected people on MS Teams. Not sure if that's caused by people protesting or internet shutdown/filtering for offices as well.

I also asked some Belarusian friends how they keep getting information from there. They said they have intermittent access to Telegram but it works better by using proxies. Some of the news channels on Telegram are managed by people outside the country who receive the information via text message. Not sure what type of block was in place (cellular data?).

Edit: Another Belarusian friend said he's able to communicate again with people back home after 3 days of quasi constant blackout.

I have no idea how it would work out in practise given the requirement of physical distribution, but I've always thought of plain pencil and paper among the most democratic of media. It could work for organising people, but maybe not as well for casual banter (which – now that I think about it – might be the more important part.)

Agreed. They should only be low latency within a dense community, like say at a rally or in an urban neighborhood and even then, latency on the order of seconds is fine. As it is almost always more important to o communicate with those socially proximate to you than those further away.

I think the level of indirection and timelyness can be used as a filter, in that it ought to be modeled after the sneaker nets and human crowds/socialization. For example individual clients can ignore messages more than a configurable signed time/distance and configure their clients to only repeat at a certain rate. That way the network is robust to spam, because it relies on the movement and consensus of people to move messages long range.

Are there any documents describing the actual user experiences of using Bridgefy or Briar in a real life scenario. They seem like cool tools using interesting technology but I am not convinced that they work well in practice and it is difficult to find much information about where they have been used successfully.

I think it depends on what exactly you need before, during and/or after the protest.

Generally, I think Briar is your best bet for the organisers of the protest, since it's meant to communicate a group of people, but not broadcast data to anyone (inc. strangers). It can help you before, during and after the protest. However, you'll need a connection to the Internet to synchronise over what you describe as mid- and long-ranges (it'd use Tor in that case).

One thing to note is that when a repressive regime cuts off the Internet, it never gets to 100% of the affected population. At a minimum, certain government institutions will remain connected, but often also international organisations and hotels. Of course, in practice, finding which places remain connected to the Internet will be hard, but these are some of the places you could try. Also, if you have a land border and a SIM from the neighbour country, you'll generally get mobile access near the border.

During the protest, I think the Qual.net project is worth considering, although I must admit I haven't tried it myself.

Please, do not use FireChat or Bridgefy. They're pretty insecure: Data is neither encrypted or signed.

Shameless plug:

I'm leading the Relaynet project (https://relaynet.network/), a technology to restore connectivity when the Internet is totally cut off. Relaynet-compatible apps will use the Internet seamlessly when it's available, but they'll switch to a fallback medium (such as a sneakernet) when the Internet is cut off. No additional hardware required.

Relaynet's proof of concept made it possible to post and receive tweets without the Internet and we're currently funded by the Open Technology Fund. The protocol suite has been independently audited. The Android implementation will be ready by the end of the summer (and it'll also be audited).

Although we're focusing on connecting the general public, the security and privacy guarantees it offers should also be adequate for protesters (subject to the security/privacy guarantees of the Relaynet apps they use). Consequently, the initial version of Relaynet should come in handy before and after protests, and once we add support for Bluetooth-based meshnets (aka "scatternets"), it should also support protesters during a protest.