NK folks are doing it via smuggled flash drives, and phones hitched to China's cell towers along the border. I think that could work in Russia too. EU could finance a few hundred Russia-facing cell towers with free unlimited data, sort of a new version of VOA/Radio Liberty/Free Europe. Quite easy to jam though, but Russia might be sufficiently bankrupt to not be able to do that.
However it being Russia, there would be firewall exceptions made for government officials and other bourgeoisie, then those special passwords would end up with "business people" who would make money for the whole scheme by redistributing netflix, steam, etc, and eventually leak wider. Ultimately this could be a more likely vector than any technological workarounds with or without West's help.
Topic: Russia going offline? - page 2. (Read 684 times)
Why does "Market Rebellion" know anything about this? My instinct is that this rumor will turn out to be false. But assuming it's true:
Bitcointalk.org has long been on Russia's block list, so all current Russian users are using VPNs, etc. If Russia bans all non-Russian IP, then that would make it much more difficult for Russian users to access the rest of the Internet, though there's not much that we can do about that. For example, creating a Tor hidden service wouldn't help them at all.
For Russians to access the Internet, they'll have to personally have some non-wired connection to the regular Internet via Starlink, cross-border laser/radio communication, etc.; or they'll have to proxy their connection via multi-homed devices which have both one of those non-wired connections as well as a Russian IP. Those latter multi-homed devices could act as Tor bridges or VPNs, but keeping these online for long may become difficult because devices with Russian IPs are presumably located in Russia and can easily be shut down by Russian authorities once discovered. The architecture of Tor bridges was not set up for this "cut off an entire country" threat model, and probably won't work well long-term.
A more resilient way of bypassing this kind of censorship is a distributed database like Freenet. These systems function based on an entirely different premise from the normal Internet, so they can't be used to access the normal Internet, but they would allow for more robustly communicating through Russia's firewall. One multi-homed Freenet node could anonymously transfer data from the outside world into Russia, and then this data would be replicated among many Russian-only nodes.
Freenet and similar systems can probably be pretty easily blocked by detecting and blocking all of their traffic, so an even better way of bypassing censorship would be a wireless mesh network combined with a Freenet-like distributed database. I don't know of any well-established software for doing this, though.
In all of the many years I've been admin, I don't think that anything has touched/disturbed me more than knowing that there are many veteran forum members whose countries are currently at war. It's insane that we have several people here who are literally under artillery bombardment and are being forced to defend their homes from soldiers. How is humanity so messed up that an entire bureaucracy and chain of command filled with hundreds of thousands of people are helping to commit this atrocity? And while Ukrainians are the biggest victims of this war, of course, the average Russian person is a victim too: economic cannon fodder in Putin's war.
The Russian section was the first non-English section created (created when Satoshi was the forum's head administrator), and Russian-speakers, including many Ukrainians, were some of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin. This war is a tragedy in many more important ways, but it's specifically a tragedy for the Bitcoin community. My greatest hope is that applied cryptography (of which Bitcoin is probably the most successful example) will enable Russians to resist and eventually overthrow their authoritarian government in ways that give them some chance of continuing their lives. It's not reasonable to expect Russians to resist in ways that lead to almost-certain death or imprisonment.
Bitcointalk.org has long been on Russia's block list, so all current Russian users are using VPNs, etc. If Russia bans all non-Russian IP, then that would make it much more difficult for Russian users to access the rest of the Internet, though there's not much that we can do about that. For example, creating a Tor hidden service wouldn't help them at all.
For Russians to access the Internet, they'll have to personally have some non-wired connection to the regular Internet via Starlink, cross-border laser/radio communication, etc.; or they'll have to proxy their connection via multi-homed devices which have both one of those non-wired connections as well as a Russian IP. Those latter multi-homed devices could act as Tor bridges or VPNs, but keeping these online for long may become difficult because devices with Russian IPs are presumably located in Russia and can easily be shut down by Russian authorities once discovered. The architecture of Tor bridges was not set up for this "cut off an entire country" threat model, and probably won't work well long-term.
A more resilient way of bypassing this kind of censorship is a distributed database like Freenet. These systems function based on an entirely different premise from the normal Internet, so they can't be used to access the normal Internet, but they would allow for more robustly communicating through Russia's firewall. One multi-homed Freenet node could anonymously transfer data from the outside world into Russia, and then this data would be replicated among many Russian-only nodes.
Freenet and similar systems can probably be pretty easily blocked by detecting and blocking all of their traffic, so an even better way of bypassing censorship would be a wireless mesh network combined with a Freenet-like distributed database. I don't know of any well-established software for doing this, though.
In all of the many years I've been admin, I don't think that anything has touched/disturbed me more than knowing that there are many veteran forum members whose countries are currently at war. It's insane that we have several people here who are literally under artillery bombardment and are being forced to defend their homes from soldiers. How is humanity so messed up that an entire bureaucracy and chain of command filled with hundreds of thousands of people are helping to commit this atrocity? And while Ukrainians are the biggest victims of this war, of course, the average Russian person is a victim too: economic cannon fodder in Putin's war.
The Russian section was the first non-English section created (created when Satoshi was the forum's head administrator), and Russian-speakers, including many Ukrainians, were some of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin. This war is a tragedy in many more important ways, but it's specifically a tragedy for the Bitcoin community. My greatest hope is that applied cryptography (of which Bitcoin is probably the most successful example) will enable Russians to resist and eventually overthrow their authoritarian government in ways that give them some chance of continuing their lives. It's not reasonable to expect Russians to resist in ways that lead to almost-certain death or imprisonment.
If anyone cares and has about 700GB of free space on a drive & a lot of bandwidth and reads Russia there is a dump of a lot of data from Roskomnadzor available here:
https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Roskomnadzor
Figure I'll have to move some blockchain backups to make space for it.
But it's not like the Russians did not have a heavily filtered internet anyway.
-Dave
https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Roskomnadzor
Figure I'll have to move some blockchain backups to make space for it.
But it's not like the Russians did not have a heavily filtered internet anyway.
-Dave
Btw, I'm quite intrigued how some random Twitter guy knows exactly when Russia will do this, especially looking at that Twitter account.... and name.
With the recent roskomnadzor crackdowns reaching insane levels (using the word "вoйнa" in a certain context can get your site banned), total "cheburnet" isn't that far fetched anymore... because those damn foreigners don't comply with Putin's laws. But as to "when", that's probably BS, just throwing shit at the wall and one of those days one of those twitter accounts may turn out to have correctly predicted it.
How is this going to work?
You turn the internet into the intranet.
Ask all ISP to block any connection to the outside, then use your own DNS, in theory is pretty simple, but rather than completely blocking it successfully I rather see their own internal network malfunction.
What are we going to do about this?
Nothing, a complete blockade like Putin wants will be impossible to circumvent, this is not the Great Firewall of China that filters stuff, this is essential cutting all connections you won't be able to use any foreign VPN because you won't be able to reach those servers in the first place.
So, the most we can do is what we have done to date for NK, which is..zero?
Btw, I'm quite intrigued how some random Twitter guy knows exactly when Russia will do this, especially looking at that Twitter account.... and name.
Outside of the tweet is there any other mention of this anywhere?
I know a lot of providers are pulling out since they are not getting paid. Some pulled out as a statement. Others are just not getting paid and pulling out.
Or is it being cut internally?
-Dave
I know a lot of providers are pulling out since they are not getting paid. Some pulled out as a statement. Others are just not getting paid and pulling out.
Or is it being cut internally?
-Dave
There's no solution for that from the outside if the decision comes from them, their leaders, only the russian people can do about it, with protests and make putin go down as they are the most affected.
And how is it possible? VPN can do something about it unless people cant connect the internet there.
And how is it possible? VPN can do something about it unless people cant connect the internet there.
What are we going to do about this?
What can we do ?Didn't they also threaten to cut off internet cables under the oceans and shut the whole internet worldwide ? (Link)
There is nothing Meta about your thread or the threads about Ukraine here in Meta either, but mods disagree so what do I know.
E-mail uncle Elon, maybe he's got a solution. Other than that, if they're completely cut off and can't even use VPN there's fuck all we can do. Attach TCP packets to ICBMs once those start regular trips across the border? Latency would be awful though.
E-mail uncle Elon, maybe he's got a solution. Other than that, if they're completely cut off and can't even use VPN there's fuck all we can do. Attach TCP packets to ICBMs once those start regular trips across the border? Latency would be awful though.
pick a number 1 through 50
How is this going to work?
Isn’t Russian the 2nd biggest board here other than English?
We need to support the free speech of Russians..
What they have to say matters a lot..
What are we going to do about this?
Bitcoin is all about the free speech of all.. The free transfer of information..
We need to come up with a solution of inclusivity..
P.S. the 2 Ukrainian threads in meta.. You don’t matter more than them..
Stop calling for censorship immediately..
TY..
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