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Would this be useful to people in countries like Iran, where the internet is restricted and completely cut out whenever the government needs to shut people up?
by buzzwords 5y ago
Would this be useful to people in countries like Iran, where the internet is restricted and completely cut out whenever the government needs to shut people up?
- dymk 5y agoLet's assume this is a perfect technical solution to a government that wants to censor your speech - that doesn't help much if the government has ball-pein hammers and rubber hoses, and is willing to use them on people living in houses broadcasting wifi.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> houses broadcasting wifi Cell phones are popular with drug dealers in south america because they're impossible to shut down - if the government can't shut down drug dealers, they definitely can't shut down people sharing offensive memes.
- dymk 5y agoIt may not be possible to target specific uses of cellphone data channels, but this isn't much of a roadblock for the Iranian government. They'll just shut down every cell tower within their borders. Iran is already willing to impose full internet blackouts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Internet_blackout_in_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Internet_blackout_in_Iran).
- zinekeller 5y agoYeah, this is the difference. Drug dealers are an annoyance but they aren't a direct threat to any government (as long as you let them be in peace). If it's a direct threat to you, then you do anything, even if the benefits outweigh the risks.
- roywiggins 5y agoIn 2019 India shut down both the internet and regular voice networks in Kashmir: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/after-two-month-blackout-cellphones-start-to-ring-again-in-kashmir/2019/10/14/a7b163e0-ee51-11e9-bb7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/after-two-...
- hwbehrens 5y ago> they're impossible to shut down They're impossible to shut down without (potentially) affecting innocent bystanders. If they don't care, they absolutely can and do shut down towers. In this case, if they judge anyone broadcasting or using this network as subversive, then there are no bystanders, only accomplices. And, thanks to the tyranny of the inverse square law, it becomes much easier to sniff out broadcasters/uplinks as well. The easiest way to mitigate this is to do both -- rebroadcast a cell connection over WiFi, and do so intermittently and in varying locations to complicate triangulation.
- goodpoint 5y agoNo. That's what Tor is for.
- buzzwords 5y agoNo, they cut out the internet entirely.
- msla 5y agoNo. This is useful against assholes, not fanatics. Assholes will opportunistically shit on anything that isn't too difficult for them to worm their way into. Crapping up DNS by making all unknown domains resolve to an ad server? Sure. Making unencrypted HTTP unusable by inserting ads and blocking keywords? On it. Blocking any port they haven't heard of? Hey, who needs ports 70 or 23 anyway, am I right? Assholes can be state actors in a state which doesn't go to extremes censoring the Internet, or they can be companies or other institutions with assholes dictating IT policy. Fanatics will poison BGP to blackhole YouTube and, if it knocks out YouTube for a couple neighboring countries, well, those countries either agree with them or are kiddie-porn-hacker-atheist-terrorists who need to be put in their place by Morally Righteous Leaders anyway. Fanatics will kill anyone who sends or receives encrypted messages the authorities can't read, just on general principles. HTTPS and maybe some tricks with DNS will protect you from assholes. You need legitimate tradecraft to thwart fanatics, and even then you're rather likely to be killed by a government that really doesn't care enough to even stage a convincing accident.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoYou do it the same way it works in most of these politically-motivated-censorship countries: the sneakernet. Black market smugglers smuggle along USB sticks or preloaded laptops. But, yes, with a motivated despotic government aimed against a single individual, it's going to be mostly impossible.
- glenstein 5y agoI think you're right as a big picture point. But how exploitable is IPv6? And/or how exploitable are the critical pieces of Yggdrasil infrastructure?
- zakki 5y agoIf they have Great Firewall like China, eventually they can shut this down. They will analyze the traffic and make a fingerprint of this traffic.