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Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? I have two friends there, and I've been talking to about

Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? I have two friends there, and I've been talking to about a dozen others. Not one of them have disappeared, or said "My internet might be spotty; there's a war here after all." I don't know how long it can last, but this feels like a modern miracle. Who are the unsung heroes keeping the internet up? There must be some sysadmins somewhere that are really taking care of business, even though tanks are almost literally rolling down their street.

mrvenkman 5y ago
I pondered the exact same question. My thought process settled on… keeping the data network alive makes it easier for the Russian military to communicate and maybe infiltrate. Shutting everything down removes attack vectors.
Sebb767 5y ago
My Ukrainian colleagues were actually back to work yesterday. It's surreal how things can be so normal and yet so different.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I noticed that too! In livestreams on tiktok, air raid sirens are going off 24/7, explosions aren't unheard of, and yet the cities seem... normal? The streets are full of cars, and if not for the sirens, it would seem to be just another day at the office. WW2, Vietnam, and Iraq apparently biased our understanding of what a war is like. I told my Ukrainian buddy that as long as he doesn't get drafted, he'll be okay, and to stay put. I thought that every combatant was going to become either unalive or a prisoner. Their leader is a badass. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/t1pr8o/ukrainian_president_zelenskyy_after_kyiv_survived/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/t1pr8... I told my friend, "If I were him, I'd be scared shitless." His response appears to be showing me that I'm empirically a lot more cowardly than I care to admit. They're managing to hold. Against Russia! Ukraine has internet, water, food, and their air force is intact. It's just incredible. Hats off to everyone in (or near) Ukraine who are resisting.
  - vmception 5y ago
    It was the same during those other conflicts People aren’t just huddled in a subway station for 5 years Everyone has stuff to do, and react when necessary
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The streets of Iraq were full of cars during the invasion and subsequent occupation, which caused a lot of incidents when skittish coalition forces shot at them for driving suspiciously, especially near checkpoints. https://www.channel4.com/news/iraq-war-files-death-at-checkpoint https://www.channel4.com/news/iraq-war-files-death-at-checkp... WW2 and Vietnam featured absolutely huge levels of mass area bombing that cannot be achieved now. The entire Russian air force is only about 1,000 aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_Air_Force_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_Air_For... ; difficult to get figures for the buildup, but this https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-air-force-is-joining-military-forces-massing-around-ukraine-2022-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-air-force-is-joining... suggests that a few hundred are within range of Ukraine (makes sense, they're not going to leave the rest of the country undefended) By comparison in WW2: > On the morning of March 18, 1,329 bombers and 733 fighters of the US Eighth Air Force formed up over England and set a course for northern Germany. The target for 1,221 of the bombers was Berlin > More than half of the bombers, 714 planes, sustained damage from German anti-aircraft fire. 16 suffered hits so severe that they had to crash land behind Soviet lines. In total, 24 bombers and six fighters were lost on the mission. 178 Americans were killed, wounded, or captured in the raid. The German Luftwaffe lost just three pilots. Also, it's like day 3 of the war, there simply hasn't been time for attrition against civilian vehicles and fuel supplies to empty the streets.
1_player 5y ago
That and possibly the Western intelligence/military has been training and providing hardware to the Ukrainians to set up redundancy in their network. The threat of invasion has been there since 2014. Which made me wonder whether an open-source kit to create an inexpensive 4G connection tower with an ethernet plug at the other end exists? Such a project would be _invaluable_ in areas hit by war or other disasters in the modern age of information. I'm thinking something as cheap as possible with an open-source firmware that can be flashed onto cheap hardware such as a Raspberry Pi: build it, flash it, plug it in. Is anybody working on this already?
- emteycz 5y ago
  https://bellard.org/lte/ https://bellard.org/lte/
  - seszett 5y ago
    That's not open source, and probably not inexpensive either.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Most probably considerably less expensive than any other commercial option, though. And, as opposed to other commercial solutions - it runs on a PC with a SDR, and nothing else is needed.
- aliher1911 5y ago
  There's OpenBTS, but it is GSM only afaik.
terminalcommand 5y ago
I heard a rumor that Russia cannot disconnect Ukraine's internet infrastructure, because it is somehow interconnected with Poland, which is a NATO member. Disrupting Poland's internet could be seen as an act of agression against a NATO ally and would require NATO to respond. Again, this is only a rumor that I have heard, don't have any sources to back it up. Maybe someone here knows more?
- k0k0r0 5y ago
  Oh, yeah thats is quite something important I would like to have disproved or verified.
- noAnswer 5y ago
  Targeted attacks on water- , civilian energy-supply or civilian communications infrastructure is a war crime.
- iso1210 5y ago
  One of my 2 routers in Kyiv is on AS16007 'UKRAINIAN-AMERICAN-SWISS LIMITED LIABILITY PARTNERSHIP "KANCOM"' Tracerouting to it from London shows traffic going from London onto AS8359 MTS (Russian ISP), seemingly to Frankfurt then Moscow, then to AS21497 PrJSC VF UKRAINE The other router is on AS1820 WNET. Traceroute dies at London going to Ukraine, coming back the other way the ISP uses 100.64 ranges, so no idea where it routes. RTT via Russia is 70ms and via unknown is 40ms so I suspect it's direct. Clearly Moscow could stop advertising Ukraine traffic out to the west, but then I guess traffic would be harder to intercept.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I do remember yesterday or the day before, NATO confirmed that cyberattacks fall into the category of attacks that require an Article 5 response. That is, Russia taking out Poland's internet would be considered an attack on NATO. If Poland and Ukraine have intertwined backbones, that may have been the reason NATO felt compelled to make the announcement.
- lodovic 5y ago
  On the other hand, there were reports that the Russian navy has damaged parts of the internet cable between Norway and the Arctic. Norway is a NATO member, too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903777
traceroute66 5y ago
> Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? Not really. I mean, its clear they have good reason for a deep-seated mistrust of their Russian neighbours. So clearly when establishing international IP transit links they have opted time and time again to connect in a Western direction, and evidently this has paid off. Achieving in-country resilience is then not particularly difficult as long as you have geographically dispersed datacentres and nobody starts cutting fibres or toppling 4G masts. I think it speaks more of what the Russian goal here is. Its clear the Russians planned this as a "shock & awe" blitzkrieg, basically hoping for a rapid "victory". So their priority has evidently been to capture as many high-value targets as possible in the shortest period of time. Let's face it, the Russians are not stupid, if they wanted to make the Ukranians suffer they would have targeted all their resources at Odessa (70% of Ukraine's imports and exports) and they would have disrupted communications. Indeed, the Russians could have disrupted communications early on if they wanted to. No bombs required, just a few special forces types. Edit to add: To support the above, take a look at the Arelion (a.k.a Telia Carrier) network map[1]. Shows two international connections to Kyiv from Hamburg and Vienna (and nothing in an Eastern direction). No doubt the map story would be similar with other Tier 1 carriers. [1] https://www.arelion.com/our-network.html https://www.arelion.com/our-network.html
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Just wanted to note it’s “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    Thanks. Noted and corrected.
    - eru 5y ago
      Don't beat yourself up over it, though. 'The Ukraine' used to be perfectly acceptable English. It's a bit like Burma vs Myanmar.
VictorPath 5y ago
_Algernon_ 5y ago
>There must be some sysadmins somewhere that are really taking care of business, even though tanks are almost literally rolling down their street. https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/
- buzzwordninja 5y ago
  Is there a course to go from SRE to SERE?
perryizgr8 5y ago
Russia is focusing exclusively on military infrastructure. They are actively avoiding civilian damage. So it is not a surprise that internet is up.
- artem247 5y ago
jmyeet 5y ago
> Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? The only reason Ukraine continues to have Internet access is because the Russian Army hasn't chosen to cut it. That's literally it. Internet infrastructure is incredibly fragile. A couple of well-placed missiles is all it would take. There's no excuse for Putin's invasion. None. There are underlying reasons but they are in absolutely no way a justification. We can and should ask how we could've avoided this. It may well inform how we end it. That being said, Russia is clearly pursuing a strategy of minimizing civilian casualties (for now at least). Targets have been military installations, key geographic points, bridges, airports and command-and-control infrastructure. I suspect that if Russian casulaties continue (and it seems like they've been reasonably high) then images and video of downed Russian aircraft and helicopters and the remains of Russian convoys may well cause Russia to cut off that Internet. It could get much, much worse.
- BiosElement 5y ago
  And apartment building, hospitals and ambulances... I originally would have agreed with you, mind, but it would seem our shared optimism for minimized civilian targets was mistaken. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/26/kyiv-residential-tower-hit-by-missile-as-fighting-rages-mayor https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/26/kyiv-residential-to... https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/25/ukraine-russian-cluster-munition-hits-hospital https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/25/ukraine-russian-cluster-...
  - jmyeet 5y ago
    All of those things have happened. Straight up. And again there's no excuse for it. But it could also be much, much worse, particularly if the Russians decided to actually bomb civilians and target things like water treatment plants, utilities and so forth.
    - BiosElement 5y ago
      I concur, and to be clear I'm only noting that to counter disinformation that only military targets were hit, not as a criticism of your post. It seems reasonable Russia wants to keep infrastructure intact, not just for minimizing outrage, but also a county reduced to rubble isn't very useful. Not to mention I doubt the average Russian soldier is terribly keen on doing more than necessary damage as well.

mrvenkman 5y ago

I pondered the exact same question. My thought process settled on… keeping the data network alive makes it easier for the Russian military to communicate and maybe infiltrate. Shutting everything down removes attack vectors.

Sebb767 5y ago

My Ukrainian colleagues were actually back to work yesterday. It's surreal how things can be so normal and yet so different.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I noticed that too! In livestreams on tiktok, air raid sirens are going off 24/7, explosions aren't unheard of, and yet the cities seem... normal? The streets are full of cars, and if not for the sirens, it would seem to be just another day at the office. WW2, Vietnam, and Iraq apparently biased our understanding of what a war is like. I told my Ukrainian buddy that as long as he doesn't get drafted, he'll be okay, and to stay put. I thought that every combatant was going to become either unalive or a prisoner. Their leader is a badass. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/t1pr8o/ukrainian_president_zelenskyy_after_kyiv_survived/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/t1pr8... I told my friend, "If I were him, I'd be scared shitless." His response appears to be showing me that I'm empirically a lot more cowardly than I care to admit. They're managing to hold. Against Russia! Ukraine has internet, water, food, and their air force is intact. It's just incredible. Hats off to everyone in (or near) Ukraine who are resisting.
- vmception 5y ago
  It was the same during those other conflicts People aren’t just huddled in a subway station for 5 years Everyone has stuff to do, and react when necessary
- pjc50 5y ago
  The streets of Iraq were full of cars during the invasion and subsequent occupation, which caused a lot of incidents when skittish coalition forces shot at them for driving suspiciously, especially near checkpoints. https://www.channel4.com/news/iraq-war-files-death-at-checkpoint https://www.channel4.com/news/iraq-war-files-death-at-checkp... WW2 and Vietnam featured absolutely huge levels of mass area bombing that cannot be achieved now. The entire Russian air force is only about 1,000 aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_Air_Force_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_Air_For... ; difficult to get figures for the buildup, but this https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-air-force-is-joining-military-forces-massing-around-ukraine-2022-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-air-force-is-joining... suggests that a few hundred are within range of Ukraine (makes sense, they're not going to leave the rest of the country undefended) By comparison in WW2: > On the morning of March 18, 1,329 bombers and 733 fighters of the US Eighth Air Force formed up over England and set a course for northern Germany. The target for 1,221 of the bombers was Berlin > More than half of the bombers, 714 planes, sustained damage from German anti-aircraft fire. 16 suffered hits so severe that they had to crash land behind Soviet lines. In total, 24 bombers and six fighters were lost on the mission. 178 Americans were killed, wounded, or captured in the raid. The German Luftwaffe lost just three pilots. Also, it's like day 3 of the war, there simply hasn't been time for attrition against civilian vehicles and fuel supplies to empty the streets.

1_player 5y ago

That and possibly the Western intelligence/military has been training and providing hardware to the Ukrainians to set up redundancy in their network. The threat of invasion has been there since 2014. Which made me wonder whether an open-source kit to create an inexpensive 4G connection tower with an ethernet plug at the other end exists? Such a project would be _invaluable_ in areas hit by war or other disasters in the modern age of information. I'm thinking something as cheap as possible with an open-source firmware that can be flashed onto cheap hardware such as a Raspberry Pi: build it, flash it, plug it in. Is anybody working on this already?

emteycz 5y ago
https://bellard.org/lte/ https://bellard.org/lte/
- seszett 5y ago
  That's not open source, and probably not inexpensive either.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Most probably considerably less expensive than any other commercial option, though. And, as opposed to other commercial solutions - it runs on a PC with a SDR, and nothing else is needed.
aliher1911 5y ago
There's OpenBTS, but it is GSM only afaik.

terminalcommand 5y ago

I heard a rumor that Russia cannot disconnect Ukraine's internet infrastructure, because it is somehow interconnected with Poland, which is a NATO member. Disrupting Poland's internet could be seen as an act of agression against a NATO ally and would require NATO to respond. Again, this is only a rumor that I have heard, don't have any sources to back it up. Maybe someone here knows more?

k0k0r0 5y ago
Oh, yeah thats is quite something important I would like to have disproved or verified.
noAnswer 5y ago
Targeted attacks on water- , civilian energy-supply or civilian communications infrastructure is a war crime.
iso1210 5y ago
One of my 2 routers in Kyiv is on AS16007 'UKRAINIAN-AMERICAN-SWISS LIMITED LIABILITY PARTNERSHIP "KANCOM"' Tracerouting to it from London shows traffic going from London onto AS8359 MTS (Russian ISP), seemingly to Frankfurt then Moscow, then to AS21497 PrJSC VF UKRAINE The other router is on AS1820 WNET. Traceroute dies at London going to Ukraine, coming back the other way the ISP uses 100.64 ranges, so no idea where it routes. RTT via Russia is 70ms and via unknown is 40ms so I suspect it's direct. Clearly Moscow could stop advertising Ukraine traffic out to the west, but then I guess traffic would be harder to intercept.
HWR_14 5y ago
I do remember yesterday or the day before, NATO confirmed that cyberattacks fall into the category of attacks that require an Article 5 response. That is, Russia taking out Poland's internet would be considered an attack on NATO. If Poland and Ukraine have intertwined backbones, that may have been the reason NATO felt compelled to make the announcement.
lodovic 5y ago
On the other hand, there were reports that the Russian navy has damaged parts of the internet cable between Norway and the Arctic. Norway is a NATO member, too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903777

traceroute66 5y ago

> Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? Not really. I mean, its clear they have good reason for a deep-seated mistrust of their Russian neighbours. So clearly when establishing international IP transit links they have opted time and time again to connect in a Western direction, and evidently this has paid off. Achieving in-country resilience is then not particularly difficult as long as you have geographically dispersed datacentres and nobody starts cutting fibres or toppling 4G masts. I think it speaks more of what the Russian goal here is. Its clear the Russians planned this as a "shock & awe" blitzkrieg, basically hoping for a rapid "victory". So their priority has evidently been to capture as many high-value targets as possible in the shortest period of time. Let's face it, the Russians are not stupid, if they wanted to make the Ukranians suffer they would have targeted all their resources at Odessa (70% of Ukraine's imports and exports) and they would have disrupted communications. Indeed, the Russians could have disrupted communications early on if they wanted to. No bombs required, just a few special forces types. Edit to add: To support the above, take a look at the Arelion (a.k.a Telia Carrier) network map[1]. Shows two international connections to Kyiv from Hamburg and Vienna (and nothing in an Eastern direction). No doubt the map story would be similar with other Tier 1 carriers. [1] https://www.arelion.com/our-network.html https://www.arelion.com/our-network.html

IAmGraydon 5y ago
Just wanted to note it’s “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  Thanks. Noted and corrected.
  - eru 5y ago
    Don't beat yourself up over it, though. 'The Ukraine' used to be perfectly acceptable English. It's a bit like Burma vs Myanmar.

VictorPath 5y ago

_Algernon_ 5y ago

>There must be some sysadmins somewhere that are really taking care of business, even though tanks are almost literally rolling down their street. https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/

buzzwordninja 5y ago
Is there a course to go from SRE to SERE?

perryizgr8 5y ago

Russia is focusing exclusively on military infrastructure. They are actively avoiding civilian damage. So it is not a surprise that internet is up.

artem247 5y ago

jmyeet 5y ago

> Is anyone else completely shocked that our Ukrainian friends seem to have stable high speed internet? The only reason Ukraine continues to have Internet access is because the Russian Army hasn't chosen to cut it. That's literally it. Internet infrastructure is incredibly fragile. A couple of well-placed missiles is all it would take. There's no excuse for Putin's invasion. None. There are underlying reasons but they are in absolutely no way a justification. We can and should ask how we could've avoided this. It may well inform how we end it. That being said, Russia is clearly pursuing a strategy of minimizing civilian casualties (for now at least). Targets have been military installations, key geographic points, bridges, airports and command-and-control infrastructure. I suspect that if Russian casulaties continue (and it seems like they've been reasonably high) then images and video of downed Russian aircraft and helicopters and the remains of Russian convoys may well cause Russia to cut off that Internet. It could get much, much worse.

BiosElement 5y ago
And apartment building, hospitals and ambulances... I originally would have agreed with you, mind, but it would seem our shared optimism for minimized civilian targets was mistaken. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/26/kyiv-residential-tower-hit-by-missile-as-fighting-rages-mayor https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/26/kyiv-residential-to... https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/25/ukraine-russian-cluster-munition-hits-hospital https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/25/ukraine-russian-cluster-...
- jmyeet 5y ago
  All of those things have happened. Straight up. And again there's no excuse for it. But it could also be much, much worse, particularly if the Russians decided to actually bomb civilians and target things like water treatment plants, utilities and so forth.
  - BiosElement 5y ago
    I concur, and to be clear I'm only noting that to counter disinformation that only military targets were hit, not as a criticism of your post. It seems reasonable Russia wants to keep infrastructure intact, not just for minimizing outrage, but also a county reduced to rubble isn't very useful. Not to mention I doubt the average Russian soldier is terribly keen on doing more than necessary damage as well.