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U.S. firm Cogent cutting internet service to Russia
- jl6 5y agoHorrible decision. We should be beaming free internet service down on Russia so there are as many opportunities as possible for Russian citizens to route around censorship, shine light on propaganda, and organize.
- azinman2 5y agoThis was the perspective with Arab spring, etc. It’s easy to get into, assuming your perspective and ideology is what’s being shared. However we’ve seen in the last half decade that often isn’t the case, and in fact, it makes misinformation become a dominant thought and ideology. It’s not so clear cut.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y agoCogent doing the Roskamnadzor’s job for them?
- thinkcontext 5y agoRussia has prepared for this. Russia Takes a Big Step Toward Internet Isolation (Jan '20) https://www.wired.com/story/russia-internet-control-disconnect-censorship/ https://www.wired.com/story/russia-internet-control-disconne...
- thecompilr 5y agoThis is what Putin wants, don't do this! Please!
- croes 5y agoUkraine wants the same. Isn't it strange that both wants the same?
- thecompilr 5y agoUkraine want to punish Russia in whatever way it can, which is totally understandable, but it will leave Russians with only internal propaganda, which will make them even easier to control for the regime. Not sure how is it strange?
- croes 5y agoThe strange part is that Ukraine thinks it would punish but the Russian government wants the same to keep up their propaganda. When you want the same as your enemy that is strange.
- 323 5y ago
- lisnake 5y agoAh, yes, surely cutting access to independent information will help russians in their fight with Putin
- kelnos 5y agoThis sort of thing is just a terrible idea. The main people who will suffer are just regular Russian citizens, many of whom have been protesting the war. I know it's hard to target only the government and leadership with many of these punitive measures, but this broad-based measures that have a lot of collateral damage are pretty awful.
- givemeethekeys 5y agoI think the overall idea here is to piss off ordinary Russians enough to incentivize grassroots change.
- paganel 5y agoThis also risks convincing the Russian population still on the fence about the whole thing that Putin is indeed right and the West does indeed have something against Russia and against ordinary Russians, this being an excellent example.
- arcticbull 5y agoI'm completely in support of those types of measures - especially sanctions - but cutting off the internet means the only information many Russians will have is domestic propaganda. The Russians have already cut off most non-state-TV stations and are instituting 15 year prison terms for derogatory remarks about the army. The young folks in Russia are using TikTok et al to find out what's really going on. These are the ones who will most be hurt. Those seeking the truth. We need those folks to have information so they can push back. This is why the BBC has a Tor service. [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50150981 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50150981
- earleybird 5y agoThe BBC also have shortwave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553243
- bogomipz 5y ago
- Denatonium 5y agoThis seems like a questionable idea at best, and I wonder how effective this will really be at keeping Russia offline. Unless the internet backbone within Russia is also disturbed, what's to stop another neighboring country like China from supplying Russia with connectivity? Sure, they may have less bandwidth, but this could be mitigated by kicking ordinary Russian citizens offline to reserve bandwidth for the disinformation and hacking campaigns.
- nickphx 5y agoMaybe routing will improve.. It's been my experience that cogent circuits are oversubscribed.
- bmmayer1 5y agoBad. Bad. Bad. Let's not make the free and open internet a political casualty. Please.
- biohax2015 5y agoRussia has already done that..
- newguynewphone 5y ago
- supreme_berry 5y agoIt's near WW3, not political.
- FpUser 5y agoRussian Internet Censorship sends flowers in response.
- unsignednoop 5y agoCitizens will only be able to view russia approved information now. Not sure how this will help anything or if it has even been thought out properly. Internet access should be a human right and any attempts to limit it should be decried regardless of context.
- zahllos 5y agoThis is a terrible idea, or one might say, not at all cogent thinking. I deplore what Putin is doing in Ukraine. This is a war of aggression undertaken because he is scared of the democracy in Ukraine making its way to Moscow (i.e. Russians wanting democracy too). But. Ensuring Russians can see a view of the world not provided to them by Putin is critical to stopping him and those like him. It gives them access to news on what is happening in Ukraine and gives us news on what is happening in Russia. Cutting off the internet makes his life a lot easier. I can only imagine people from the State Department to newsrooms to the CIA are hitting their foreheads repeatedly on their respective desks.
- splix 5y agoThat makes exactly opposite effect. The problem with current Russia that people don't have access to the information alternative to the official government version. Putin's supporters don't know much about the war, they told it's a peaceful operation and so on. Meanwhile others trying to show them reality about the war, sometimes by pointing them to websites outside of the government control. And of course government wants those websites to be slow or blocked. It's exactly what Cogent does, so everything looks like the 1984's doublespeak, and in reality it's a big favor to Putin.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoMOB: Cut off Russia from Internet! ISP: *cuts off Russia from Internet* MOB: ¿¿¿why Russians don't know what is happening outside off Russia???
- throw_m239339 5y agoYou forgot that one: the Kremlin: Cuts off Russia from Internet.
- gigel82 5y agoMakes me wonder if this wasn't Putin's goal all along. Completely breaking the Russian population off of the free internet means they'll be fed only propaganda. The whole "prison terms for disagreeing with the official media" and "it's not war, it's peace" feels very 1984 to me; worth a reread in case Putin is actually using it as a manual (alongside Dugin's book)
- arbitrage 5y agoThis is just a commercial entity making their own market driven choices. I see no problems, here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stuckinhell 5y agoI don't get it, do they have actual infrastructure in Russia ?
- encryptluks2 5y agoFrom my understanding, the goal here is to prevent routing to Cogent which is a backbone provider. You can see a map here: https://www.cogentco.com/en/network/network-map https://www.cogentco.com/en/network/network-map
- tpmx 5y agoNote: They are not a tier 1 network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_...
- paganel 5y agoStupid question here, what stops Russia re-routing their traffic through, let's say India or Turkey, and then to the outer world? That is in case the West decides to stop "providing" network links directly to Russia itself.
- zamadatix 5y agoNothing, that's exactly what is happening here. It's also possible for countries to block Russia even if they transit through other countries on the way but that's something completely different.
- megous 5y agoWhat's happening is that Russia will want to cut themselves off the internet anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30580456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30580456
- zamadatix 5y ago
- exizt88 5y agoDon't be confused: this is pure virtue signalling by Cogent. If you think that limiting a population's access to imported goods can lead to regime change via "grassroots change", just look at the myriad of counterexamples: Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea. The sanctions imposed by the governments against Russia make sense: they aim at crippling the state economy to prevent Russia from waging war and dismantling the power structure by pitting elites against each other. But limiting access to information for ordinary people is a completely empty gesture that brings no value into the world.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoOn some level, losing things you already had hurts a lot more than preventing it from taking root.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoRussia limits information themselves - they’ve blocked facebook and twitter mere just a day ago.
- fluidcruft 5y agoHow is Cogent supposed to be paid or fund operations in Russia? Starlink seems a better fit for routing around state censorship anyway.
- mechagodzilla 5y agoI really doing think 'virtue signaling' is the right term here - The NYT coverage of this explicitly states that Cogent was motivated by a significant increase in bot traffic coming out of Russia, and they basically said 'we don't want to support Russia's cyber-attacks'. They aren't trying to overthrow the government in Russia. This is meant to prevent them from waging cyber war using Cogent's infrastructure, and Cogent was a significant carrier of Russian internet traffic. It's both expensive for Cogent to do this, and significantly impacts Russia.
- exizt88 5y agoYou've made me reconsider my position and I think you're actually right.
- croes 5y agoSo US company cutting access from Russia good Russia cutting access to US company bad. Weird
- dsr_ 5y agoI've been an on-and-off Cogent customer for two decades now. Getting into peering wars used to be one of their major recreational sports.
- tatersolid 5y agoCogent still doesn’t carry a full IPv6 table due to years-long peering disputes. Most significantly they black hole all Google IPv6 traffic. So you can’t use IPv6 on Cogent singly-homed; you need a second ISP and two expensive routers that can each take a full BGP table. Source: am an irritated Cogent customer with no other options in our office building.
- analogdreams 5y agoThese are not moves to celebrate. Not even the "just build your own!" cries we heard when people like the Orange Man Bad was deplatformed from Twitter apply here.
- ziml77 5y agoWhile I don't think a company should ever be forced to operate in countries they are unwilling to, I believe that it would be far more responsible to keep these people connected. The Internet is their chance to see things that aren't pure propaganda.
- tehjoker 5y agoMan they are really trying to create a western vs eastern block conflict. So many cold-warriors still in the nat sec community. If Russia gets attacked by the west, China will not be aligning with the west because we're also attacking them. So much potential for a nuclear ww3.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sokz 5y agoCounterproductive IMO. Blocking ordinary Russians from the world would be akin to creating a Russia sized analogue to N. Korea with much better weapons and industrial capacity. Virtue signalling by banning anything that carries the name "Russian" is a childish response when there are citizens of Russia protesting against the invasion and risking arrest and violence thanks to the state and economic ruin due to the sanctions from Europe and the US.
- treeman79 5y agoHow does this affect hacking attempts from Russia to/from US.
- sega_sai 5y agoI guess the only possible explanation I can come up with is that they don't want to send their staff to a place with murderous regime, where neither twitter nor facebook works and where you can get 15 years for the "disinformation" about the war. (oh I've forgot you can't call it war, it must be called 'special operation' according to the russian ministry of truth (Roskomandzor))
- joiguru 5y agoThere are two primary criticisms of this move in this thread: C1) This is just hurting ordinary Russian citizens and serves no other purpose. I empathize strongly with the Russians. But I also empathize with the Ukrainians. Since Russia has nuclear weapons, the only thing rest of the world can do is impose sanctions. Sanctions work in the long run, but they take a long time to show effects. Ukrainians do not have a long time. All of these moves will cumulatively amplify the unrest among common Russian people, giving Putin less time to sit back and let his plan go to work. Will these be enough? Only time can tell. But ignoring the impact of secondary and tertiary effects for the primary negative effects is short sighted. C2) This is just virtue signaling. Virtue signaling may be a component of this move, but this is business for Cogent. They make money moving data, and Russian money has lost a lot of its value. So I am not convinced this is just virtue signaling, there is definitely a business component.
- stefan_ 5y agoIt's crazy I had to scroll all the way to here for someone to mention that Cogent sells interconnects and well Russian clients can't pay them now. If you don't pay, you don't get peering.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoA third option would be that the firewall requirements are pretty severe and they don't want to contribute to that ( just mentioning)
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoA lot of discussion here is focused on "suffering". There's ample demonstration that increasing the suffering of a population doesn't lead to uprising. North Korea, Iran, even the Soviet Union are examples. What leads to revolution are ideas and belief of success. Cutting off the internet seems counter productive.
- matvonder 5y ago[flagged]
- matvonder 5y ago[flagged]
- trhway 5y agoI applaud Cogent and anybody taking stand like this. Anybody still working with Russia has the blood on their hands. As a Russian myself i'm ashamed and disgusted by all the Russian whining. Russia is at war, the genocidal war that is criminally started and is being criminally conducted by Russia, and instead of whining the Russians should grace the God that they have plummeting rouble instead of falling bombs like Ukrainians have gotten. You need to completely lose any shame to expect any quality of life while your country is genociding a neighbor. Wrt. the myth of "regular Russians" - it is regular Russians and their children who shoots in Ukraine, not Putin. In the years leading to that the whole society was ostracizing anybody who have voiced even minor disagreement with Putin's fascist regime. The FSB and police supposedly oppressing Russians consist of those regular Russians and their children, not some aliens from Alfa Centauri. It is pretty clear that the reality still hasn't set on Russians, and until that happens the pressure should grow, the faster the better. The only way of dealing with a nuclear country is to put so much stress on it that it breaks from inside.
- rvz 5y ago> Schaeffer said Cogent took the step at least partially because the company did not want to be used for "outbound cyber attacks or disinformation." Here we go again with this nonsense. I wonder why they didn’t cut off their internet service off in the 2020 US election if they didn’t want their service to be used for disinformation or cyber attacks? Maybe Cogent should learn how it is done in Uganda [0] and the Republic of Congo [1] then? At this point with any service, the ‘disinformation’ reason is becoming an excuse to execute such unnecessarily extreme actions guaranteed to always backfire and it is exactly what Putin wants as it doesn’t stop ‘disinformation’. Mission Accomplished. /s [0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210118-uganda-eases-internet-shutdown-imposed-over-election https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210118-uganda-eases-... [1] https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-shutdown-in-the-republic-of-the-congo-on-election-day-xAGR398z https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-shutdown-in-the-repub...
- tiahura 5y agoGood. Hopefully other providers follow suit, and hopefully China is next.