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Protestors really need to find a more censorship-resistant means of communication. In the heat of the moment, when protests are organized and coordinated over

Protestors really need to find a more censorship-resistant means of communication. In the heat of the moment, when protests are organized and coordinated over the internet, internet censorship can be very effective, and countries have become adept at controlling it. John Gilmour's quip about the internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around is far from true for mainstream internet users, if it ever was.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
They just shut of the internet in Russia. In its entirety. What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with, and why wouldn't anyone else come up with those, considering any means of mass communication independent of the internet would probably be useful for a lot more than just protesting?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with Did protests not exist and revolutions not occur before the Internet? If anything, the Internet appears to have tilted the table in favour of rulers.
  - dmix 6y ago
    You could always start an underground pamphlet printing press! ... although the pro-censorship crowd have an exploit for that as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
baybal2 6y ago
Another option is to make Internet itself more censorship resistant. Remember, cable is actually way more physically resistant to adversary interference in comparison to radio, satellite, or microwave towers. You need to destroy cables, and equipment physically, unlike anything of above, and you can repair it quickly using omnipresent, off the shelf hardware. In other words, you can expend a great amount of resources sending goons to wreck thousands of DCs, and exchanges to little effect. Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work. Same with cell networks. Easy to jam locally, but even a big city is practically impossible without massive expense to physically take down cell towers. Idlib in Syria is a good example how a cutoff segment of cell network managed to stay online for a remarkable amount of time under military aggression.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work. I’m not sure this works with Russia. The police there don’t mess around, are very violent and have been practicing their tactics for at least a century.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    I myself is an unfortunate owner of a russian passport, and my spend childhood there. > The police there don’t mess around, are very violent Of course! That's rather obvious. You will not be able to resist any much bigger force than just police with puny handguns you can buy on the black market, but that's the point! Have that militarised special police busy! Have them expending resources, have them running armour around cities at a great material cost. Not to say disruption of everyday life, and seeing armour on the streets will contribute greatly to galvanising the population, and demoralising the ordinary police. Simple math tells that 1 million men strong police force will quickly exhaust itself being either split on 100+ major cities, or being constantly relocated from one city, to another. The ratio of military age men, to police force in Russia is 21 to 1, and you very much expect that a bigger portion of population has to be counted, and not all mancount of police, and 3 letter services account for military like units.
cheschire 6y ago
Well it depends on how you define mainstream internet. If you define it in the same way that it was when that quote was originally stated, then protestors can still just as easily interconnect networks as they could back then. It might even be easier than back then if you consider using mesh wireless technology. Smartphones aren't the internet. They're regulated endpoints within a restricted network which is itself connected to the internet. Just because these extremely limited little devices we carry in our pockets had their access cut off, and just because a lot of home users can't just open a browser and start browsing without talking to their neighbors, doesn't mean the internet can't successfully route around it. It just takes time and effort. I still believe the quote to be true.
jcpenny1 6y ago
Please be very careful of pasting Netblocks links here. They have no documented methodology and put users at risk by scanning for websites without any consent.
zksmk 6y ago
That's what projects like the https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/ are for. It's peer2peer in the truest sense, it can connect to other peers via Bluetooth or WiFi. It also uses Tor when it goes over the internet. The fact the info spreads like corona when in person, means it takes a while for the info to spread, but once it explodes it goes big, and is hard to stop. My favorite anti-censorship app.
toast0 6y ago
It's hard to have realtime communications be censorship resistant if there is defacto authority to block them. Terrestrial wired and wireless telecom is out; government can order them to turn off. Broadcast RF is hard, because jamming and locating the source are relatively simple. And taking actions to stop jammers is probably more illegal than the protest. Line of sight optical signaling is probably easy to locate the source of, but could work; otoh, easy to disrupt with smoke, etc. If you can do something with peer to peer radio, that could work, but wifi or bluetooth frequencies are jammable.
- stuntkite 6y ago
  Radio with phased parabolic arrays? I wonder how StarLink will upset the balance in this sort of context. I know Russia has already said they’ll fine people for using it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
nelgaard 6y ago
Freifunk works: https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/ https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/
berryjerry 6y ago
According to Russia these guys are rioters and mobs and so cutting off internet is justified. It is reported in English news as 'protesters' getting their communication cut off. However, about two weeks ago the US president himself and any site or program where 'protesters' also known as 'rioters' or 'mobs' were able to communicate had their communication cut off, even with access to the internet. Besides websites, social media, video hosting sites, web hosting providers, ISPs, domain holders, payment processors, all of the above used censorship in the U.S. The effect of cutting off communication was the same and even these protests are essentially the same reason people in the U.S. were 'protesting.' So really it is how you define or even how a protest is depicted that determines whether people are for censorship resistant communication.
- lovecg 6y ago
  I’m not sure what you are referring to. As far as I know internet connectivity was never intentionally disrupted on Jan 6th, and of course people could and did communicate. We have a whole cache of videos that were livestreamed from that event.
  - berryjerry 6y ago
    I'm talking about the intent behind cutting off communication was the same in both instances. The intent is to eliminate the ability for people to organize. You do that literally removing every post that includes a mention of election fraud. Notice how no articles in the U.S. mentioned the reason behind the U.S. capitol? They specifically wanted to hide the message of the 'protest' or 'riot.' Russia is using an axe to perform surgery since they don't have association or control of most of the U.S. companies which also are accessed in Russia. But the U.S. was able to use a scalpel and focus just on the part they wanted to cut.
    - lovecg 6y ago
      Did the US government remove those posts or ordered those articles to be written in a specific way? Not quite sure what you’re asserting. Not to mention that Jan 6th and the current situation in Russia have approximately 0 things in common.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

They just shut of the internet in Russia. In its entirety. What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with, and why wouldn't anyone else come up with those, considering any means of mass communication independent of the internet would probably be useful for a lot more than just protesting?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> What new "means of communication" are protesters supposed to come up with Did protests not exist and revolutions not occur before the Internet? If anything, the Internet appears to have tilted the table in favour of rulers.
- dmix 6y ago
  You could always start an underground pamphlet printing press! ... although the pro-censorship crowd have an exploit for that as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

baybal2 6y ago

Another option is to make Internet itself more censorship resistant. Remember, cable is actually way more physically resistant to adversary interference in comparison to radio, satellite, or microwave towers. You need to destroy cables, and equipment physically, unlike anything of above, and you can repair it quickly using omnipresent, off the shelf hardware. In other words, you can expend a great amount of resources sending goons to wreck thousands of DCs, and exchanges to little effect. Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work. Same with cell networks. Easy to jam locally, but even a big city is practically impossible without massive expense to physically take down cell towers. Idlib in Syria is a good example how a cutoff segment of cell network managed to stay online for a remarkable amount of time under military aggression.

lostlogin 6y ago
> Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work. I’m not sure this works with Russia. The police there don’t mess around, are very violent and have been practicing their tactics for at least a century.
- baybal2 6y ago
  I myself is an unfortunate owner of a russian passport, and my spend childhood there. > The police there don’t mess around, are very violent Of course! That's rather obvious. You will not be able to resist any much bigger force than just police with puny handguns you can buy on the black market, but that's the point! Have that militarised special police busy! Have them expending resources, have them running armour around cities at a great material cost. Not to say disruption of everyday life, and seeing armour on the streets will contribute greatly to galvanising the population, and demoralising the ordinary police. Simple math tells that 1 million men strong police force will quickly exhaust itself being either split on 100+ major cities, or being constantly relocated from one city, to another. The ratio of military age men, to police force in Russia is 21 to 1, and you very much expect that a bigger portion of population has to be counted, and not all mancount of police, and 3 letter services account for military like units.

cheschire 6y ago

Well it depends on how you define mainstream internet. If you define it in the same way that it was when that quote was originally stated, then protestors can still just as easily interconnect networks as they could back then. It might even be easier than back then if you consider using mesh wireless technology. Smartphones aren't the internet. They're regulated endpoints within a restricted network which is itself connected to the internet. Just because these extremely limited little devices we carry in our pockets had their access cut off, and just because a lot of home users can't just open a browser and start browsing without talking to their neighbors, doesn't mean the internet can't successfully route around it. It just takes time and effort. I still believe the quote to be true.

jcpenny1 6y ago

Please be very careful of pasting Netblocks links here. They have no documented methodology and put users at risk by scanning for websites without any consent.

zksmk 6y ago

That's what projects like the https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/ are for. It's peer2peer in the truest sense, it can connect to other peers via Bluetooth or WiFi. It also uses Tor when it goes over the internet. The fact the info spreads like corona when in person, means it takes a while for the info to spread, but once it explodes it goes big, and is hard to stop. My favorite anti-censorship app.

toast0 6y ago

It's hard to have realtime communications be censorship resistant if there is defacto authority to block them. Terrestrial wired and wireless telecom is out; government can order them to turn off. Broadcast RF is hard, because jamming and locating the source are relatively simple. And taking actions to stop jammers is probably more illegal than the protest. Line of sight optical signaling is probably easy to locate the source of, but could work; otoh, easy to disrupt with smoke, etc. If you can do something with peer to peer radio, that could work, but wifi or bluetooth frequencies are jammable.

stuntkite 6y ago
Radio with phased parabolic arrays? I wonder how StarLink will upset the balance in this sort of context. I know Russia has already said they’ll fine people for using it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

nelgaard 6y ago

Freifunk works: https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/ https://freifunk.net/en/https://freifunk.net/en/

berryjerry 6y ago

According to Russia these guys are rioters and mobs and so cutting off internet is justified. It is reported in English news as 'protesters' getting their communication cut off. However, about two weeks ago the US president himself and any site or program where 'protesters' also known as 'rioters' or 'mobs' were able to communicate had their communication cut off, even with access to the internet. Besides websites, social media, video hosting sites, web hosting providers, ISPs, domain holders, payment processors, all of the above used censorship in the U.S. The effect of cutting off communication was the same and even these protests are essentially the same reason people in the U.S. were 'protesting.' So really it is how you define or even how a protest is depicted that determines whether people are for censorship resistant communication.

lovecg 6y ago
I’m not sure what you are referring to. As far as I know internet connectivity was never intentionally disrupted on Jan 6th, and of course people could and did communicate. We have a whole cache of videos that were livestreamed from that event.
- berryjerry 6y ago
  I'm talking about the intent behind cutting off communication was the same in both instances. The intent is to eliminate the ability for people to organize. You do that literally removing every post that includes a mention of election fraud. Notice how no articles in the U.S. mentioned the reason behind the U.S. capitol? They specifically wanted to hide the message of the 'protest' or 'riot.' Russia is using an axe to perform surgery since they don't have association or control of most of the U.S. companies which also are accessed in Russia. But the U.S. was able to use a scalpel and focus just on the part they wanted to cut.
  - lovecg 6y ago
    Did the US government remove those posts or ordered those articles to be written in a specific way? Not quite sure what you’re asserting. Not to mention that Jan 6th and the current situation in Russia have approximately 0 things in common.