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Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

250 points by rumcajz 8y ago

sobi392 8y ago
The 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 integrity. China will stay separate for longer because they disconnected much earlier, but their anxiety over the trade deal just shows how hard it is. Britain too is going to pay a price. Putin is waking up too late. The Network will assimilate all. The thresholds have been crossed long ago.
- qaq 8y ago
  You highly underestimate power of totalitarian state
  - homerfk 8y ago
    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.
    - qaq 8y ago
      In case of Russia those in power don't care about that loss they need enough people to do resource extraction and to serve in military and that's about it. Their families live in London and Miami and don't have to contend with whatever crap this will result in.
- everdev 8y ago
  > There is a threshold of contentedness above which it doesn't matter one bit what the hierarchy does to maintain integrity. If that's true, then the threshold for suffering is dramatically high. I don't think we need to list all of the oppressive states that have existed or still do exist where millions have died. Unfortunately, it's getting easier for fewer people to monitor and control more.
renholder 8y ago
>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 servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure. Doesn't really seem all that worthwhile, unless you create recovery points to ensure that you have records to recover with; otherwise, what's the point...? (Of course, I could be entirely misunderstanding the premise of the law because it's not referenced in the article and I can't speak/read Russian for feck-all...)
- selune 8y ago
  I've been following Russian news on the matter pretty closely for the last couple of years (I do speak Russian). Most of these laws are absurdly nonsensical, people who are responsible for them (Yarovaya and co) have very vague understanding of technology and I don't think it's about technology in the end.
  - egao1980 8y ago
    US has Yarovaya style system for ages in NSA.
- varjag 8y ago
  The stated purpose has little to do with real intent, which is information control over Russian subjects. Russia will eventually corral ordinary citizens off the real net into its small OK/VK heaven.
- conistonwater 8y ago
  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 Russian government has an interest of its own in cutting itself off from the internet to control its own citizens' speech on the internet, it's just that it's a little bit cynical to imagine it and it wouldn't be balanced to mention it explicitly in a news article.
nabla9 8y ago
Ruler 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.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > 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!
- selune 8y ago
  You overestimate tech literacy of the majority of Russian population. Very small percentage is engaged with playing videogames or knows how to use torrents. People are given lots of distractions though - so many controversial, absolutely absurd laws have been introduced in the past few years everybody talks about (about fighting homosexual propaganda, forbidding adoption for foreigners, blasphemy laws and so on). Internet restrictions are like a drop in the sea of craziness and not even the most relevant one for the majority, or controversial, or loud.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    The real power in Russia is within two cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's the urban and relatively highly educated population in these two cities that decides the fate of Russia, not the majority.
    - selune 8y ago
      I might be pessimistic because I am in close contact with that demographic (lots of my friends are young, educated, comparatively well-off guys from Moscow working in tech) and, pardon my French, they decide shit. Oligarchs decide the fate of Russia.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
blakejustblake 8y ago
>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized. How subversive.
- ethelward 8y ago
  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?
  - PeterZhizhin 8y ago
    Yes. Except that in Russia this works a little bit different. You need a permission (not approbation) from the authorities for any political gatherings. Otherwise, everyone gathering risks spending 15 days in jail (or $500 fines, median monthly salary after tax $300) for gathering illegally. Usually they forbid them, so that was an exception.
    - egao1980 8y ago
      That's not how it works. You don't need permission to rally. You notify local government about the date and preferred place and number of people. If the place is available - you rally there if not you're given an alternative place.
      - lambdadmitry 8y ago
        First, you don't always get an alternative place, lately local authorities started just denying the permission. Second, even if they propose an alternative, it's somewhere on the outskirts and/or at extremely inconvenient time. You can find a big bunch of examples of both at [1] (in Russian). [1]: https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-akciy-nam-ne-car https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-ak...
    - ktjfi 8y ago
      So like in any other country? Except for the forbidding, of course.
walrus01 8y ago
The 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.
walrus01 8y ago
I 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.
- PeterZhizhin 8y ago
  These websites are controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Russian government. They usually don't mention opposition meetings. I think that they don't want anyone to know even about their existence.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    Can you reference any significant 'opposition' meeting (such as this) that was not covered by RT for less than justifiable reason? E.g. - in this event the organizers prohibited RT from covering the event, which is a pretty decent reason for the lack of coverage!
    - woodandsteel 8y ago
      What you say may be correct, but is it your position that these news sites are not Russian government propaganda machines, that they give good, objective coverage of what is right and wrong with the country and its government? And what is your own view of the Russian government?
      - rjf72 8y ago
        First as a little update it turns out they did try to provide English language coverage of the protests, so much as possible [0]. As for your question, I think that's clearly a false dichotomy. I do think the issue of propaganda is important, especially in today's times. So let's consider an incident. Some weeks ago you probably read about Maduro's government, in Venezuela, setting one of the US aid trucks on fire. This was covered extensively. CNN stated that "a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks" [1] while describing the images of the trucks as sickening and repeating numerous calls for stronger action as a result of such things. If that page should change in the near future, the internet archive [2] is your friend. This was repeated by most other media sources as well. The problem is that it was a lie. The aid truck was undoubtedly set on fire by anti-government forces. This is now being covered by the NYTimes [3] citing "unpublished video" and dutifully pondering 'how we got here'. The Intercept has also done a phenomenal piece on this event, here - showing how it was played out as propaganda and the entities that pushed it hardest. [4] Of course I haven't mentioned RT once yet, so what gives? This [5] gives. That's an article from RT. What you might notice is that they have an embedded video, literally the "unpublished video" from the NYTimes demonstrating that it was an anti-government protester setting the truck on fire. And it was published weeks ago, as soon as the information came to light while most western media continued to simply beat the war drums. ------------- This is also not an isolated incident. I point this out not to claim that RT is amazing. If the roles were reversed and it was a very serious event such as Russia trying to foment a coup in another nation, I certainly would not expect RT to run timely articles indicating that actions being used as propaganda were, in fact, not the fault of the targeted government. You're not going to find any single source that provides "good, objective coverage" when it comes to issues that align with, or run against, their interests. So I find it important to expose yourself to a wide array of media and particularly to sources that are more like to challenge your viewpoints than affirm them. Nietzche might not approve, but in the end we're surrounded by nothing but abysses. [0] - https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-moscow/ https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-mosc... [1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.c... [3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-aid-fire-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-... [4] - https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-... [5] - https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protesters/ https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protes...
telaport 8y ago
The proper US response to the 2016 meddling would have been a NATSEC law that said no US based social media company could allow for 5 years any Russian IP address to connect to their services, or they would suffer massive fines. Facebook and Twitter for their role in the attack would be fined $5 Billion Dollars each and forced to provide policies within 1 year to prevent this from happening again, or face the threat of becoming regulated by the US government. All user accounts that belonged to Russian citizens as well as the Russian oligarchs and politicians were to be frozen for 5 years. US and EU Banks would be required to sanction Russians Oligarchs and Putin's interests. Basically you would have instantly made Russian life a living digital hellscape for 5 years, at which point things could be lifted provided there were signed binding treaties and assurances that the type of attack in 2016 would never happen again. If attacks resumed the next round would last 10 years and be twice as severe. If we're going to destroy net neutrality and impart government fascism, or have bizzaro government rulings that get throw out in court, this is how we should have done it, and this is the cause we should have done it for.
- simion314 8y ago
  Is this possible technically? The story is about trying to block Telegram and finding out that is impossible because of VPNs, IP changes(tech details) why do you think you can prevent Russian trolls to post on social media with a law? You block eh innocent people that are not technically sophisticated at best
PeterZhizhin 8y ago
Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.
- comboy 8y ago
  So what exactly are they doing? Just cutting off random IPs? The actual IP was blocked or is it only DNS based? How about tor traffic?
  - PeterZhizhin 8y ago
    Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was banned here but it still works. I guess that they frequently change IP addresses and use multiple cloud providers. When Roscomnadzor tried to ban the messenger, they added significant number of IP subnetworks (I think that the largest blocked subnet was 52.192.0.0/11 used by AWS). This lead to all sorts of different problems because it turned out that some banks and large companies were paralysed for months as their websites were blocked. After a year of of trying to block the messenger, they just decided to pass this law. All ISPs that handle inter-counties exchange must install a government backdoor that could shut down all outgoing and incoming connections outside from Russia. Also, some websites now are blocked by their DNS record, not by their IP. This lead to other problems. Imagine there was a website X that was blocked in Russia. The X company decides to change the domain and abandon X. Now, someone else buys the banned domain and adds any IP addresses to the DNS (like, government authorities websites). Whoala! These websites are banned in Russia as well. This happened multiple times and lead to Google, YouTube and other websites being inaccessible here. The legislation proposes a separate national DNS system that differs from the ICANN one. Similarly to how North Korea does this in their country. This way no-one could buy an abandoned blocked website and add a bunch of valuable and valid IPs there. They claim that this will increase the stability of the Russian Internet. People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. They also believe that they could shut down the Internet in any country at this point of time. They say that this has already happened in Syria once and we need to prepare for this. They don't actually explain that the thing that happened to Syria was possible only because they had a single ISP. And their centralised system was hacked. I believe that if we decide to install a backdoor to all of our ISPs, then someone else from the outside could pull the switch.
shmerl 8y ago
That's really just a symptom, while the disease is the dictatorship which can do whatever it wants disregarding the people.
- stebann 8y ago
  Russian Dictatorship? Don't make me laugh boy! Maybe I am wrong but Russia isn't promoting the falling of governments around the world, that's something that US does.
  - stebann 8y ago
    Why down-voting? Did you know that the US attacked Venezuela's Power Grid. Is that "Freedom" and "Democracy"?
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    What's flameable here? It's all factual and not the matter of dispute. And the point is that fixing symptoms won't help until the root of the problem is fixed. And I'm not saying protesters are wrong or anything. It's just that the problem is a lot deeper.
    - dang 8y ago
      It was far from "all factual", and clearly in dispute since someone immediately disputed it. If you post strong political claims using pejorative language like "disease", "dictatorship", and "disregarding the people" (which in fact is almost all of what you said), you're going to take threads like this further into flamewar whether you mean to or not. That's bad for thoughtful discussion and therefore off topic here. Most of us are living in contexts where our strongly held political/national views feel obvious and unobjectionable. But the minute you open up to a much broader context, such as a highly international forum like HN, it becomes painfully clear that this is not the case.
DocG 8y ago
Intresting fallout from our bigger client. They have been slowly migrating to aws over the last year but because russia started bloking whole blocks of aws IPs, they now stopped migration and are going to keep their own infrastructure up. I havent heard yet but I am sure they are considering moving away from cloud providers, we'll see what they decide, because Russia is huge market.
- coderintherye 8y ago
  Huge market for what goods/services? What is your client selling / providing?
- LeanderK 8y ago
  couldn't they just maintain a separate proxy indipendent of aws?
Tsubasachan 8y ago
And things like this make the educated and ambitious young move abroad. Good for the economies of Western Europe but not so good for Russia.
- gdy 8y ago
  And bigger salary and bigger projects have nothing to do with it.
  - amai 8y ago
    No, Russians do love their country very much. Just their government doesn't love them back.
    - gdy 8y ago
      Aww, that's so romantic :)
  - kikimora 8y ago
    As a software developer you can get salary in range of $3000 - $5000 per month on the top level. You can make even more if you are good and work remotely/contracting. With this salary moving to Europe won't give you a rise, you are likely to make less in most EU countries. Moving to US will give you a rise in salary but not radical. People I know moving to EU/US not because of money, they move because of health care, education, crime, corruption and perceived lack of a better future.
    - gdy 8y ago
      >Moving to US will give you a rise in salary but not radical. My colleagues working in SV and particularly at Google would disagree. >they move because of health care, education, crime, corruption and perceived lack of a better future Okey, replace salary with quality of life. I doubt that intangible political motives alone would've been enough.
egao1980 8y ago
Russian here. Few points: - Root DNS and most of the cloud providers are in US jurisdiction. US declared Russia as top 3 enemy and applies random 'sanctions'; - Russian (and EU) laws require companies to store citizen's personal information locally; - many lazy developers and service providers relied on AWS/GCP thus breaking the law. Telegram blocking attempt has shown that even some government resources are hosted outside Russia. In case of severe confrontation escalation US/NATO will cut DNS or will engage in cyberwarfare operations against Russia. So Russian government wants to make sure that Russian infrastructure will continue to function properly. This is not PRIZM or Great Firewall of China type of system or regulation. There are no plans to cut off internet. There's a group of people that spread FUD and hype around this initiative.
- stebann 8y ago
  I agree, Russian Government is doing this because US and its allies are threatening all legitimate governments around the world. They want to impose their puppets. Look at what's happening in Venezuela. People in Venezuela is suffering beacuse of US sanctions and war threats, but the news are always that "the Dictatorship don't let people eat".
  - kikimora 8y ago
    I love comment rating systems because they limit effect of paid comments like this one.
    - mrmuagi 8y ago
      Comment rating systems are purposefully gamed by "paid" actors -- fake accounts, likes, etc. They aren't foolproof for preventing misinformation as such. Also, it's rather also disingenuous to write off an entire comment as a "paid actor". That poster just makes the claim (which I believe you contest), that Venezuela is a "legitimate government"? Just say you disagree with the claim and explain why. It's something that would promote meaningful discussion. Cause really, although I'm a bit of a novice in Central/South American history -- the USA has indeed done some shady stuff in the recent past.

250 points by rumcajz 8y ago

The 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 integrity. China will stay separate for longer because they disconnected much earlier, but their anxiety over the trade deal just shows how hard it is. Britain too is going to pay a price. Putin is waking up too late. The Network will assimilate all. The thresholds have been crossed long ago.

qaq 8y ago
You highly underestimate power of totalitarian state
- homerfk 8y ago
  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.
  - qaq 8y ago
    In case of Russia those in power don't care about that loss they need enough people to do resource extraction and to serve in military and that's about it. Their families live in London and Miami and don't have to contend with whatever crap this will result in.
everdev 8y ago
> There is a threshold of contentedness above which it doesn't matter one bit what the hierarchy does to maintain integrity. If that's true, then the threshold for suffering is dramatically high. I don't think we need to list all of the oppressive states that have existed or still do exist where millions have died. Unfortunately, it's getting easier for fewer people to monitor and control more.

renholder 8y ago

>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 servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure. Doesn't really seem all that worthwhile, unless you create recovery points to ensure that you have records to recover with; otherwise, what's the point...? (Of course, I could be entirely misunderstanding the premise of the law because it's not referenced in the article and I can't speak/read Russian for feck-all...)

selune 8y ago
I've been following Russian news on the matter pretty closely for the last couple of years (I do speak Russian). Most of these laws are absurdly nonsensical, people who are responsible for them (Yarovaya and co) have very vague understanding of technology and I don't think it's about technology in the end.
- egao1980 8y ago
  US has Yarovaya style system for ages in NSA.
varjag 8y ago
The stated purpose has little to do with real intent, which is information control over Russian subjects. Russia will eventually corral ordinary citizens off the real net into its small OK/VK heaven.
conistonwater 8y ago
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 Russian government has an interest of its own in cutting itself off from the internet to control its own citizens' speech on the internet, it's just that it's a little bit cynical to imagine it and it wouldn't be balanced to mention it explicitly in a news article.

nabla9 8y ago

Ruler 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.

0815test 8y ago
> 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!
selune 8y ago
You overestimate tech literacy of the majority of Russian population. Very small percentage is engaged with playing videogames or knows how to use torrents. People are given lots of distractions though - so many controversial, absolutely absurd laws have been introduced in the past few years everybody talks about (about fighting homosexual propaganda, forbidding adoption for foreigners, blasphemy laws and so on). Internet restrictions are like a drop in the sea of craziness and not even the most relevant one for the majority, or controversial, or loud.
- nabla9 8y ago
  The real power in Russia is within two cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's the urban and relatively highly educated population in these two cities that decides the fate of Russia, not the majority.
  - selune 8y ago
    I might be pessimistic because I am in close contact with that demographic (lots of my friends are young, educated, comparatively well-off guys from Moscow working in tech) and, pardon my French, they decide shit. Oligarchs decide the fate of Russia.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

blakejustblake 8y ago

>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized. How subversive.

ethelward 8y ago
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?
- PeterZhizhin 8y ago
  Yes. Except that in Russia this works a little bit different. You need a permission (not approbation) from the authorities for any political gatherings. Otherwise, everyone gathering risks spending 15 days in jail (or $500 fines, median monthly salary after tax $300) for gathering illegally. Usually they forbid them, so that was an exception.
  - egao1980 8y ago
    That's not how it works. You don't need permission to rally. You notify local government about the date and preferred place and number of people. If the place is available - you rally there if not you're given an alternative place.
    - lambdadmitry 8y ago
      First, you don't always get an alternative place, lately local authorities started just denying the permission. Second, even if they propose an alternative, it's somewhere on the outskirts and/or at extremely inconvenient time. You can find a big bunch of examples of both at [1] (in Russian). [1]: https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-akciy-nam-ne-car https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-ak...
  - ktjfi 8y ago
    So like in any other country? Except for the forbidding, of course.

walrus01 8y ago

The 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.

walrus01 8y ago

I 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.

PeterZhizhin 8y ago
These websites are controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Russian government. They usually don't mention opposition meetings. I think that they don't want anyone to know even about their existence.
- rjf72 8y ago
  Can you reference any significant 'opposition' meeting (such as this) that was not covered by RT for less than justifiable reason? E.g. - in this event the organizers prohibited RT from covering the event, which is a pretty decent reason for the lack of coverage!
  - woodandsteel 8y ago
    What you say may be correct, but is it your position that these news sites are not Russian government propaganda machines, that they give good, objective coverage of what is right and wrong with the country and its government? And what is your own view of the Russian government?
    - rjf72 8y ago
      First as a little update it turns out they did try to provide English language coverage of the protests, so much as possible [0]. As for your question, I think that's clearly a false dichotomy. I do think the issue of propaganda is important, especially in today's times. So let's consider an incident. Some weeks ago you probably read about Maduro's government, in Venezuela, setting one of the US aid trucks on fire. This was covered extensively. CNN stated that "a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks" [1] while describing the images of the trucks as sickening and repeating numerous calls for stronger action as a result of such things. If that page should change in the near future, the internet archive [2] is your friend. This was repeated by most other media sources as well. The problem is that it was a lie. The aid truck was undoubtedly set on fire by anti-government forces. This is now being covered by the NYTimes [3] citing "unpublished video" and dutifully pondering 'how we got here'. The Intercept has also done a phenomenal piece on this event, here - showing how it was played out as propaganda and the entities that pushed it hardest. [4] Of course I haven't mentioned RT once yet, so what gives? This [5] gives. That's an article from RT. What you might notice is that they have an embedded video, literally the "unpublished video" from the NYTimes demonstrating that it was an anti-government protester setting the truck on fire. And it was published weeks ago, as soon as the information came to light while most western media continued to simply beat the war drums. ------------- This is also not an isolated incident. I point this out not to claim that RT is amazing. If the roles were reversed and it was a very serious event such as Russia trying to foment a coup in another nation, I certainly would not expect RT to run timely articles indicating that actions being used as propaganda were, in fact, not the fault of the targeted government. You're not going to find any single source that provides "good, objective coverage" when it comes to issues that align with, or run against, their interests. So I find it important to expose yourself to a wide array of media and particularly to sources that are more like to challenge your viewpoints than affirm them. Nietzche might not approve, but in the end we're surrounded by nothing but abysses. [0] - https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-moscow/ https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-mosc... [1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.c... [3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-aid-fire-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-... [4] - https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-... [5] - https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protesters/ https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protes...

telaport 8y ago

The proper US response to the 2016 meddling would have been a NATSEC law that said no US based social media company could allow for 5 years any Russian IP address to connect to their services, or they would suffer massive fines. Facebook and Twitter for their role in the attack would be fined $5 Billion Dollars each and forced to provide policies within 1 year to prevent this from happening again, or face the threat of becoming regulated by the US government. All user accounts that belonged to Russian citizens as well as the Russian oligarchs and politicians were to be frozen for 5 years. US and EU Banks would be required to sanction Russians Oligarchs and Putin's interests. Basically you would have instantly made Russian life a living digital hellscape for 5 years, at which point things could be lifted provided there were signed binding treaties and assurances that the type of attack in 2016 would never happen again. If attacks resumed the next round would last 10 years and be twice as severe. If we're going to destroy net neutrality and impart government fascism, or have bizzaro government rulings that get throw out in court, this is how we should have done it, and this is the cause we should have done it for.

simion314 8y ago
Is this possible technically? The story is about trying to block Telegram and finding out that is impossible because of VPNs, IP changes(tech details) why do you think you can prevent Russian trolls to post on social media with a law? You block eh innocent people that are not technically sophisticated at best

PeterZhizhin 8y ago

Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.

comboy 8y ago
So what exactly are they doing? Just cutting off random IPs? The actual IP was blocked or is it only DNS based? How about tor traffic?
- PeterZhizhin 8y ago
  Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was banned here but it still works. I guess that they frequently change IP addresses and use multiple cloud providers. When Roscomnadzor tried to ban the messenger, they added significant number of IP subnetworks (I think that the largest blocked subnet was 52.192.0.0/11 used by AWS). This lead to all sorts of different problems because it turned out that some banks and large companies were paralysed for months as their websites were blocked. After a year of of trying to block the messenger, they just decided to pass this law. All ISPs that handle inter-counties exchange must install a government backdoor that could shut down all outgoing and incoming connections outside from Russia. Also, some websites now are blocked by their DNS record, not by their IP. This lead to other problems. Imagine there was a website X that was blocked in Russia. The X company decides to change the domain and abandon X. Now, someone else buys the banned domain and adds any IP addresses to the DNS (like, government authorities websites). Whoala! These websites are banned in Russia as well. This happened multiple times and lead to Google, YouTube and other websites being inaccessible here. The legislation proposes a separate national DNS system that differs from the ICANN one. Similarly to how North Korea does this in their country. This way no-one could buy an abandoned blocked website and add a bunch of valuable and valid IPs there. They claim that this will increase the stability of the Russian Internet. People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. They also believe that they could shut down the Internet in any country at this point of time. They say that this has already happened in Syria once and we need to prepare for this. They don't actually explain that the thing that happened to Syria was possible only because they had a single ISP. And their centralised system was hacked. I believe that if we decide to install a backdoor to all of our ISPs, then someone else from the outside could pull the switch.

shmerl 8y ago

That's really just a symptom, while the disease is the dictatorship which can do whatever it wants disregarding the people.

stebann 8y ago
Russian Dictatorship? Don't make me laugh boy! Maybe I am wrong but Russia isn't promoting the falling of governments around the world, that's something that US does.
- stebann 8y ago
  Why down-voting? Did you know that the US attacked Venezuela's Power Grid. Is that "Freedom" and "Democracy"?
dang 8y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar.
- shmerl 8y ago
  What's flameable here? It's all factual and not the matter of dispute. And the point is that fixing symptoms won't help until the root of the problem is fixed. And I'm not saying protesters are wrong or anything. It's just that the problem is a lot deeper.
  - dang 8y ago
    It was far from "all factual", and clearly in dispute since someone immediately disputed it. If you post strong political claims using pejorative language like "disease", "dictatorship", and "disregarding the people" (which in fact is almost all of what you said), you're going to take threads like this further into flamewar whether you mean to or not. That's bad for thoughtful discussion and therefore off topic here. Most of us are living in contexts where our strongly held political/national views feel obvious and unobjectionable. But the minute you open up to a much broader context, such as a highly international forum like HN, it becomes painfully clear that this is not the case.

DocG 8y ago

Intresting fallout from our bigger client. They have been slowly migrating to aws over the last year but because russia started bloking whole blocks of aws IPs, they now stopped migration and are going to keep their own infrastructure up. I havent heard yet but I am sure they are considering moving away from cloud providers, we'll see what they decide, because Russia is huge market.

coderintherye 8y ago
Huge market for what goods/services? What is your client selling / providing?
LeanderK 8y ago
couldn't they just maintain a separate proxy indipendent of aws?

Tsubasachan 8y ago

And things like this make the educated and ambitious young move abroad. Good for the economies of Western Europe but not so good for Russia.

gdy 8y ago
And bigger salary and bigger projects have nothing to do with it.
- amai 8y ago
  No, Russians do love their country very much. Just their government doesn't love them back.
  - gdy 8y ago
    Aww, that's so romantic :)
- kikimora 8y ago
  As a software developer you can get salary in range of $3000 - $5000 per month on the top level. You can make even more if you are good and work remotely/contracting. With this salary moving to Europe won't give you a rise, you are likely to make less in most EU countries. Moving to US will give you a rise in salary but not radical. People I know moving to EU/US not because of money, they move because of health care, education, crime, corruption and perceived lack of a better future.
  - gdy 8y ago
    >Moving to US will give you a rise in salary but not radical. My colleagues working in SV and particularly at Google would disagree. >they move because of health care, education, crime, corruption and perceived lack of a better future Okey, replace salary with quality of life. I doubt that intangible political motives alone would've been enough.

egao1980 8y ago

Russian here. Few points: - Root DNS and most of the cloud providers are in US jurisdiction. US declared Russia as top 3 enemy and applies random 'sanctions'; - Russian (and EU) laws require companies to store citizen's personal information locally; - many lazy developers and service providers relied on AWS/GCP thus breaking the law. Telegram blocking attempt has shown that even some government resources are hosted outside Russia. In case of severe confrontation escalation US/NATO will cut DNS or will engage in cyberwarfare operations against Russia. So Russian government wants to make sure that Russian infrastructure will continue to function properly. This is not PRIZM or Great Firewall of China type of system or regulation. There are no plans to cut off internet. There's a group of people that spread FUD and hype around this initiative.

stebann 8y ago
I agree, Russian Government is doing this because US and its allies are threatening all legitimate governments around the world. They want to impose their puppets. Look at what's happening in Venezuela. People in Venezuela is suffering beacuse of US sanctions and war threats, but the news are always that "the Dictatorship don't let people eat".
- kikimora 8y ago
  I love comment rating systems because they limit effect of paid comments like this one.
  - mrmuagi 8y ago
    Comment rating systems are purposefully gamed by "paid" actors -- fake accounts, likes, etc. They aren't foolproof for preventing misinformation as such. Also, it's rather also disingenuous to write off an entire comment as a "paid actor". That poster just makes the claim (which I believe you contest), that Venezuela is a "legitimate government"? Just say you disagree with the claim and explain why. It's something that would promote meaningful discussion. Cause really, although I'm a bit of a novice in Central/South American history -- the USA has indeed done some shady stuff in the recent past.