I’m almost positive we’ll see similar actions taken by the current US administration as we get closer to November. Basically shut everything but Fox/OANN down, so they can be the single source of “truth” and declare victory. Ready for your downvotes.
Happy to oblige with the downvote. The US isn't Belarus, even if Trump thinks it is. Shutting down everyone but Fox/OANN is beyond his power and authority, whether he knows it or not, and whether he likes it or not.
An attempt to shut down CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and AP would result in an immediate court order prohibiting the shutdown.
He has enough key people in every single government institution that are very happy to ignore the courts. And I agree that the US isn't Belarus - but the people in power are working very hard to make it more like Belarus every single day.
The government here simply doesn’t have the power to shut down the media/internet unless it wants to impose martial law and/or forcibly nationalize massive corporations like Comcast.
Trump lets the States exercise their Constitutional authority[2]
TDS Sufferer: "Trump is a disappointingly-WEAK dictator!"[3]
It really is bizarre. As you say, there are things he's legitimately punting into the stands, such as his ham-fisted counter to the rise of China (great concept, abysmal execution).[4]
Not that it will matter by then. The effects of your spreading FUD about imaginary realities aren't going to just be reversed by you acknowledging you were wrong in a couple months.
You are actively detracting from real issues today by posting this nonsense.
> Putilo is “wanted” in both Belarus and Russia and facing up to 15 years imprisonment
Isn't Telegram based in Russia? I'm surprised Russia didn't try to get them to bock Putilo, or at the minimum that Russia would cooperate with a Belarusian internet block.
The Russian ban on Telegram was lifted recently. They couldn't enforce it, because Telegram was very good at proxies, so the people used it anyway. Heck, even govt officials used it.
For those who do not aware how this story began. After the ban was introduced, Russian Internet Monitoring Agency (Роскомнадзор) tried to enforce it, blocking whole subnets where Telegram proxies were spotted. It led to massive shutdown of many Russian IT companies' services, relying on AWS and DO infrastructure, with resulting multimillion dollar losses. However, Telegram remained afloat, ashaming Russian officials responsible for censorship. After several years of numerous attempts, they still could not enforce the ban (honestly, their expertise visibly worse than, let's say, those who designed Great Chinese Firewall), and had to officially lift it.
If "at odds" is "give us your social network or we would put you in a prison", then you're right. Work on Telegram started before that situation in the same office of Vkontakte, by now it's being operated by expats.
They will have to turn it off over countries that don't fancy free communication and are capable to get a projectile in LEO or have a market for electric cars.
-Given the cost of a StarLink satellite (I've no idea, but seeing as they will be launched in the tens of thousands, they can hardly be a gigabuck a piece), the solution to the first problem is simply to launch more of them.
It is probably cheaper to launch a StarLink bird than it is to blow it out of orbit. Think of it as a DoS attack on the launch batteries!
As for the second? I find that approach much more likely to succeed. Sigh.
Think of Kessler syndrome. One can imagine that blowing (small) N of them would create a cloud of shrapnel posing danger for the whole network. Birds are on really low orbits, so it would clear after some time, but network might not survive this.
Shooting down another country's satellites is an incredibly bad idea.
First, it's one of extremely few actions actually likely to get you nuked or "liberated" - you just threatened one of the most valuable strategic advantages (even if it's just a civilian satellite, it wasn't yours, and militaries will consider their satellites under threat).
Second, in case you're not aware, the remains of the satellite now are a danger to any other object in that orbital plane, and this can trigger a cascade reaction and take lots of them down, making new launches impossible for many years. Look for Kessler Syndrome.
> Shooting down another country's satellites is an incredibly bad idea. First, it's one of extremely few actions actually likely to get you nuked or "liberated"
Nobody is nuking anybody else over satellites. Nukes will only be used in case of regime / home territory threat (eg if Russia were losing a conventional war, and NATO were pushing toward Moscow, Russia could throw down the nuke threat card and say stop or else), or in response to the use of a nuke.
If North Korea starts shooting down US satellites at some point, it would prompt a conventional military bombing response (which would attempt to neutralize their ability to launch rockets at US satellites), and possible full-scale war. It would not prompt a nuclear retaliation. There is zero interest - anywhere - in seeing millions of people die over some satellites.
The internet is a massive network created by the military with the objective of surveillance baked in from its earliest origins. The LEO systems being built now will extend that network to every last corner of the globe, and the companies building them will do the bidding of the governments at whose behest they're allowed to function.
Starlink has no impact on this nor do any other internet provider. The first spy satellites launched in 1959. Don't carry electronics with you and you can be as dark as any spot on earth has been in the last five decades.
While you probably could carry a starlink antenna on a backpack, nobody forces you to (And it would be very inconvenient). They are much to big to be incorporated into smartphones or notebooks.
You: Camping, in the mountains, sorry boss, no signal there, I won't be accessible.
Boss: No problem.... here's a portable starlink antenna,... just in case... you know... if there is a bug in your code... or if we have a skype call with the clients... or if we need a bug fixed... haha.. you know, fixing bugs in the forest hehe.. well yeah... just have it connected during normal business hours, just in case... and check your emails while you're connected.. and slack... and CI logs... but otherwise, have a nice vacation, I hope you get some rest!
It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. It evolved into a Internetwork of trusted hosts to facilitate rapid information dissemination. It took a bunch of advertisers to turn it into surveillance nirvana by realizing that you could use http requests and your own portable sensor platform and in-house OS to rake in profit overwhelming.
Advertisers might have funded a lot of it and set the direction, but they couldn't have done it without armies of technology folk.
At least early on, the latter had the excuse of lack of foresight regarding the dystopia they were building, but for decades now it's been more than obvious to everyone and most of them are continuing to cobble together their own prisons and ours.
Those who don't plaster their personal information also do the same. However, most cannot help but fall for the bait and switch of giving up info they never even knew was collected. Most people aren't even aware of EXIF, the difference between a User and a User-Agent, the multiple layers of attempts by organizations to assign unique identifiers to every entity they interact with, or the fact that society at one point pulled a total 180 on the idea of discretion in business whereby it became okay and commonplace to plaster information about your customers to other entities.
This was a very disjoint cultural shift in from the research I've done, and it was really pushed by only a handful of big names.
It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack.
That's a nice myth. But it wasn't so.
As https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... explains, the idea of packet switching was invented twice. The Internet came out of the invention by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Separately Paul Baran and others at RAND had demonstrated that packet switching could be used to build a network to survive a nuclear attack.
Even though the Internet came out of military research, it was not designed to withstand nuclear attack. As can be verified by the fact that the early network had no redundancy, and neither computers nor the network were shielded from the EMP that a nuclear bomb could be expected to emit.
That's cute, but I've got primary sources who indicate otherwise. I'll take the word of someone who at one point maintained a list of every addressed machine on ARPANet and the proto-Internet once it went beyond a strictly DoD effort, over a blatant attempt at trying to rewrite history to fit their own narrative, thank you. It may not have succeeded at being what they set out to make, like most things in life, but it most certainly started out in that vein. The utility as a surveillance facilitator only came much later near the Oughts, particularly after a rather notorious event in mid September when the attempt to utilize the practice of intelligence fusion and total information awareness for law enforcement and national defense purpose got a huge boost in national popular support.
That's not to say there weren't earlier efforts to leverage networks for security purposes. I'm reminded of a tale of connecting FBI branches in the southern U.S. to facilitate case information sharing to close a series of cases involving a multi-state child and human trafficking ring in the Southern U.S. as well. Again though, that wasn't something bearing the character of "Hey! Let's 1984 these disgusting subhumans!" It was more, "Hey, seeing as our entire reason for existence is to work on crimes that cross State boundaries, doesn't it make sense that we should be able to keep the entire organization connected enough so that all our distributed branches can be kept up-to-date on what we've all found?"
Nothing controversial there. At all. Where things started getting controversial is where we started to take Lincoln's "tap the telegraph lines", an extreme wartime measure, and make it matter of fact through the establishment of the NSA/DIA. Where we started seeing the privatized Palantir's pop up, and seeing government agencies exercise or otherwise excuse investigative techniques they could not justifiably engage in themselves through delegation or voluntary action by private organizations.
It's these private businesses building datasets that never should gave existed that have outright corrupted things, and the at the time far more reasonable Third Party Doctrine that have driven things off the rails. Not the Internet itself.
That's cute, but I've got primary sources who indicate otherwise. I'll take the word of someone who at one point maintained a list of every addressed machine on ARPANet and the proto-Internet once it went beyond a strictly DoD effort, over a blatant attempt at trying to rewrite history to fit their own narrative, thank you.
So on the one hand a random internet stranger claims to have known someone important who said something.
On the other hand we have a history written by people including the author of the first paper on packet switching, the program manager at DARPA who authorized the project, the inventor of TCP/IP and so on and so forth.
I'll believe the paper that I cited.
Packet switching can be used to build networks that are resilient in the face of disruptions, whether natural or manmade. That is where the myth of "designed to survive a nuclear war" comes from. But the original Internet was designed using packet switching to allow computers to freely talk to each other without having an insane number of dedicated circuits kept open.
That said, I agree with you that it was not designed for surveillance. But I disagree on the timeline. While the response to 9/11 certainly stepped up the level of surveillance to an insane level, all evidence is that ECHELON had been tapping the Internet long before that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.
While a transmitter is indeed to a first approximation a beacon screaming 'I'm here!', do keep in mind that these antennas are highly directional, and while there will be side lobes, you basically need to be in the beam path to even detect it's there - complicating matters significantly.
Besides, the antenna itself is rather small, and can be hidden inside just about any structure transparent to RF in the relevant frequency bands - say, a seemingly innocuous water cistern on the roof, for instance.
1. Narrow beam antenna (such as satellite antenna) does NOT propagate signal arround it (OMNIdirectional antennas does that). It's almost impossible to detect it unless you fly directly over the beam. Think about it as laser beam.
2. It is possible to build verious kinds of covert antennas. Radio amateurs do that all the time. Just google the term "stealth ham radio"
1. Is it expensive for TLAs to deploy drones for exactly that if the practice becomes popular? They won't even need many actual detecting drones: if they look the same as regular surveillance drones, which are already up in the sky in times of unrest, people will probably hesitate to use their transmitters.
But if you shine a powerful laser beam into the sky it is visible from pretty far away. It's highly focused, but also gets scattered a lot by the atmosphere.
Think about it as inivisible laser beam in terms of beam width. We are talking here 2mm wave with very directional antennas - its very hard to detect it.
That's actually how spies send data back over the satellites:
>Unlike with SW signals, a radio signal to a satellite is very difficult to intercept and trace, as the waves are 'beamed' straight up rather than all around.
What? There's no way to send a 2mm (width) wave. Yes, parabolic antennas have very high gains in one direction, but they're far from '2mm' and far from 'invisible'.
A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them and even pointing out the approximate location (eg. a building) where they're located. If the antenna was inside a huge apartment building, it would be hard to find the right apartment, if the transmitter was turned off, but with single family buildings, it would be easy.
Ham radio operators hide and then look for hidden transmitters for fun, so it's not that hard, especially with a budget that is given to the police.
>A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them.
That is not true. Helicopter would need to fly RIGHT into such directional and tiny beam. Which is nearly impossible to do in huge city. Even when flying 2m next to it, you would likely not detect it.
That is the reason why CIA had so much problem with pinpointing Iridium satellite phones back in Colombia in the 90's.
That's a nice visual disguise but it doesn't do much to help when someone with radio direction finding gear starts looking for unauthorized transmitters on the frequency it operates on.
Setting aside the US rhetoric, many counties already ban unlicesend satelite transmitters and people don’t “take up arms”
Even in the US, constitutional rights have been waved on a mass scale for 20 years. People only take up arms to defend te right to oppress downtrodden minorities.
I don't see any evidence of hot wiring. In my book, hot wiring would be decentralized access over unconventional transport like long range radio or plain old telephones or a relay of wifis or satellites in a way that can't be easily restricted by a government.
But Telegram is just part of the same old centralized server approach.
If peers communicate directly, then it doesn't seem to be that clear. I am not sure if they do, though, some people claim it does and some that it does not.
I was in Belarus earlier this year. The thing to understand about how that country works is that there are only two interdependent groups of people that hold wealth: 1) the ruling elite that acquires their riches through nepotism, corruption, etc. Belarus is basically a kleptocracy. 2) the booming IT sector, which is now the primary export product of Belarus and employs a lot of people working in the vast outsourcing industry that serves big western companies. People doing that work earn pretty good salaries by Belarusian standards. There are hundreds of thousands of them and the sector tends to hover up anyone with relevant college degrees as there's little else to do. E.g. dentists or doctors earn comparatively little compared to that.
The problem the regime has is that anyone with a clue and IT skills is monetizing those skills in that sector as government jobs, including those in its vast security forces, don't pay a lot. So, they don't necessarily have a lot of in house competence implementing any kind of sophisticated blocking strategies. Anyone capable of implementing that could quadruple their salaries by jumping ship. The state telco company gets most of its revenues from the IT sector as well. So they don't have any incentive to shut down their core business. I'm guessing it's mostly Russia that helps them with the technical parts of that. Of course Russia and Putin are currently mildly annoyed with Lukashenko and are looking to grow their influence in Belarus a bit by letting him flail desperately for a while. So, they are a bit hands off right now and not in a mood to help him out.
The second problem is that group #1 is basically tapping into the wealth generated by group #2. So shutting down the internet is a spectacularly bad idea for #2 for obvious reasons and therefore not a popular notion for #1 either. The people who would be at all capable of effecting such a change are mostly working in the IT sector already and the elite in group #1 kind of needs them to keep on doing their thing so the money keeps flowing. Besides, rich people need their internet fix and Lukashenko is considered a bit of an old relic by both groups. A convenient stooge at best.
Hence internet shutdowns tend to be short lived, ineffective, and largely symbolic. Telegram is important for both groups and completely outside of the control of Belarusian authorities. It's the same reason the Russians have failed to shut that down. They can't do it without cutting off the IT sector and the financial gains coming from that sector and none of the billionaires that make up the elite like it when their shiny iphones stop working.
Thanks, that was much more informative and better explanation of situation in Belarus than I have read anywhere else. Also shorter. I wonder if that is related to the fact that you are not trying to show ads together with that.
I'm sure the IT sector employees wouldn't vote for Lukashenko anyway; if they can block the internet for the rest of the population, all is well.
Oh wait, they can fake election results, kill anybody they please and are backed by Russia. I guess all is well regardless if they can block the internet or not.
Back when I compiled my own kernel, options like packet radio always evoked a feeling of wonder.
There’s no reason twitter or whatsapp couldn’t be usable on the bps that ax25 documents describe, but using 9600bps or evening less to try to load a modern webpage sounds a recipe for disaster
Yep, before my inner eye I saw ethernet cables hanging over the streets. Businesses opening their networks and starting own DNS servers. Printed flyers how to change ones phone settings are thrown out of windows and driving cars.
But it's just alternative messengers and VPNs.
On the other hand this is probably a good thing. During the Arab Spring Egypt cut its internet lines and activist like Telecomix provided dial-in internet access. Nowadays even a dictator can't cut the internet access without causing massive damages.
Aside from the horrible moves by the dictatorship, the wording in this article does pose a point about the centralisation of the internet.
Based on the title, I was expecting to read about internet shutdowns and peer to peer networks. Instead, it's just a story about DPI and VPNs.
Nothing here is being "hot-wired". Blocking social media isn't "shutting down the internet" in any technical sense. Turning off cell networks because of protests is, but those actions aren't being circumvented here. Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.
I do wonder if the general population would claim the internet is turned off just because Google, Facebook and Twitter aren't available. By these definitions, does China have internet access? It's interesting to me to see how years of internet access and growing up around smart devices has taught people so little about the actual workings of the internet.
I think car mechanics are also upset that years of driving cars have taught people so little on how a car works. For many people turning off Facebook and Amazon is turning off the Internet because its the only sites they visit.
I think equating "only using F, A, and G" with "don't know how cars work" is plain wrong in this metaphor. Not knowing how cars work would equate more to "don't know what a router/switch does" which is... fine I guess, for most users who just plug a plastic box into an outlet.
Only using the 2 or 3 major websites, in car speak, would likely more look like "only know the road to the mall, the job, and the daycare and doesn't even realize there are other places one might conceivably go" which is... not fine in my book, and yes, I'm frustrated about that.
People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet. So they have all this crazy equipment with functions they never even imagined, and only use it to browse a few websites. So I actually think the issue is even worse than what you describe and I'm frustrated about it too.
>People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet
I see that a lot of my fellow nerds have this feeling and I'm honestly, non-trolly curious about why this is. People have wants and needs (get email from boss, watch video, lookup a recipe) and they learn how to do that specific task. Most people don't know what the internet is, or what a even what computer is beyond a simple mental model that allows them to do what they think they want to do.
For most things, this is exactly how you I and everyone else lives their lives too. Like everyone else I'm sure there are systems that you use on a daily basis which you don't understand beyond the specific steps that you need to know in order to accomplish your task. I don't have anything beyond the most basic pharmacological understanding of how the prescription drugs I take work, and I probably never will yet I depend on them daily.
Most people will never understand most things. I see that as utterly normal.
To me, the unusual part is that there are people who live with and use systems on a daily basis without ever becoming curious about them. I mean, hours and hours of every day, dependent on the internet and people never stop and ask, “What is this thing? How does it work?”
In that vein, I was pretty impressed the other day by the Wikipedia article on traffic lights.
What kind of functionality are you referring to? Ad blocking at the network level? Local network of files? Wouldn't mind a weekend project for something cool.
Yes all of those things. One thing about this network illiteracy that I actually like, is that I can go on craigslist and pick up some pretty kickass hardware for 10-20$, because no one knows what it is, its true power, what its worth.
It's not a bad metaphor to consider, but computer networks are tools of open-ended interaction with wider society, entering contracts, getting (and nowadays often giving up) information.
So the public being clueless about the Internet is more like being clueless about basic law and finance, or in more extreme cases something like telling apart the fiction and non-fiction programs on TV. On the other hand, you should be fine thinking of your car as just a means of transportation.
This misunderstanding by "normal" users is nothing new, I remember in the late 90s hearing phrases similar to "remember that the web isn't the Internet" all the time. Funnily enough, this is how my mom got introduced to IRC -- she used it for several years in the early 2000's and even flew abroad to meet people she talked to.
People will always apply the duck test to their technical experiences: what is the Internet for a 15 year old? Most likely it's something along the lines of the web, and a few mobile applications. As long as "what you use" goes down, the "Internet", for a normal user, is down.
Just like there was a point to educating people about it in the late 90s, there's a point in educating people about it now: what you see and use on a daily basis is not "the Internet".
A 15 year old is usually able to draw a clear distinction between service not being available, the network connection to their device not working, the ISP being down and the Internet at large being dysfunctional.
Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.
It's still the correct phrase. There are two meanings of the word 'internet' - one is the infrastructure, and the other is the websites and services people access using the infrastructure. You're assuming the first meaning while the article is talking about the second meaning.
I've never had an account on any FB property - avoid it like the Spyware plague that it is. Yet others find FB, Instagram, etc. very useful, even tho if I had to remove one thing to improve the internet, FB would be at the top of my list.
OTOH, Twitter, which I used to formally deride like you, I've found to be immensely useful, as I can directly link to & occasionally converse with top leaders and experts in many fields, and get direct links to the source papers/articles, without filtering, delays, & distortions of the regular media (but ya, one needs to heavily use the Block function in political discussions to maintain civility/sanity). It's also clear that Twitter is used a lot by all news orgs, it's often the 1st place news breaks, and every journo is active on it.
So, seems that it really is about each individual users' needs.
If these were removed from the internet, replacements would be active almost immediately. Would they be better/worse? Who knows?
Twitter can be useful and I use it in a manner that benefits me. But it's impact on society is so awful it defeats the utility.
Their chronic corporate irresponsibility and disregard of abuse is unconscionable. Entities controlling fake or bot accounts, combined the amplification effect on the platform basically have turned it into disinformation as a service.
It so trivial to manipulate institutions and tastemakers that Twitter can be used to undermine them. Check out local public officials or B-list corporate types and what they follow. At that scale, you as a guy with a credit card can trivially insert a narrative into that persons feed to manipulate their perspectives or actions. There are entities doing this at scale to influence policy.
Facebook is pretty malevolent as well. But I don't think that it undermines institutions like Twitter. It targets the broader public. They are more like TV brand marketing without editorial standards and with more focused targeting. Nazis couldn't get ads on your local TV station in 1990, but they can on Facebook.
Ah, from that perspective - vulnerability to exploitation on societal scale by bad actors - both are a severe problem.
Part of the problem is the technical/feature sets of each platform, and a lot of it is the corp management or failure of management.
While the bot/troll hordes on Twitter are a serious problem disrupting many conversations, I'm almost thinking FB is more of a problem because the desinformatsiya can be more specifically targeted, and spread with less visibility outside the particular set of connections.
So, I fully agree, from the POV of preserving democracy, I'd have zero hesitation in fully & finally terminating either/both today, if there were remotely more responsible replacements.
Twitter can be very noisy and obnoxious, but it does a pretty good job of surfacing real time updates on a global scale. Facebook tends to be closed groups, with limited opportunity to challenge the veracity, allowing for mistruth and hatred to spread unchecked.
A few weeks ago Cloudflare(?) had an outage and I felt very limited. It felt like the internet was down for me. Say GCP, AWS had outages, you won't even be able to order a Lyft to take you home.
Coming from Kashmir which is STILL under an internet clampdown, this is trivial.
What they did was something previously unheard of. Indian government essentially whitelisted some websites and blocked the rest. I did experiments when amazon.in domain was whitelisted but all images were blanks. Turns out they had not allowed aws.amazon.com. some time later they allowed the URL and that is when I spun up a $300 credit small instance vps using Streisand. It worked. For some time. Then they got greedy and started blocking all "ports" so this was out of question. I ended up with a stupid simple idea. No vpn, no nonsense. The VPS server running had a ipv4 address and I did simple SSH tunnel over port 80. That was what did the trick for me. There were attempts to use URL tricks, I forgot what its called.
So if anyone needs my "expert" firsthand experience can just buzz me.
Note: 4G mobile internet is still BANNED in Kashmir for "maintaining the national integrity and sovereignty of india" and other bs
Whole Belarus protests story just exposes flaws of democracy - probably to the point of it no longer being viable in a post-industrial world: let people really vote and they inevitably vote against their own interest, just because any sort of reality possible for the masses can't be accepted by them for being too grim: real voting can only be won by blatantly lying.
I hope we will find a way to peacefully wind down the democracy in the West before it completely destroys our economy and society.
Not necessarily. I see Western societies of the future as a two-tier system: most countries turning to some form of Putinism - manipulative "democracies" inhabited largely by populace so dependent on the government handouts they can't even think of expressing any dissident opinion (plus low-scale, targeted repressions against those few who dare), and some islands of real democracy, inhabited and funded by money of global elite and even sort of a global middle class, who has multiple passports and siphons off the cash from countries of the first group.
That's ridiculously black and white. Putinism is not a stable state for any country by any means, and Russia has been hemorrhaging talent and companies left and right because of it.
Your notion of "democracies funded by global elite" and a "siphoning global middle class" sound more of conspiracy theory babble than anything rational. And by the way you have concluded that there are only two paths for Western societies, I'd say your judgment has become heavily biased.
Well, there's a third choice: police state, just accept that people will go crazy and be prepared to counter it with brute force. But this is too close to what Lukashenka does.
I really wonder what interests you represent to voice such an opinion.
Democracy isn't a panacea to the world's problems. It needs an informed population in order to function, which directly and without discrimination means government transparency. The process of opinion building needs to be taught in schools, and journalists need to be protected from interference.
Without these pieces and more in place there is no democracy. Very few countries actually are democratic in practice. The fight for freedom and democracy is ongoing, and those who get in its way are misanthropes who deserve a bitter end to their efforts.
First and foremost democracy needs government which is funded by the people, not other way around. In today's Belarus, this is not the case; in the near future, it will not be the case in most or all large Western societies simply due to technological reasons: automation will make most people unemployable and dependent on government handouts - either direct, in form of basic income guarantee, on concealed, through public of private "bullshit jobs", that create no economic value but exists just so these people can consume and keep the wheels of economy rolling.
Have that, and democratic society with freedom of speech, and you get a self-eating monster machine that will destroy itself in less than a generation. Why does someone who has no chances to be self-reliant, vote responsibly? Especially if he is well-educated and well-informed, so he realises it.
And in this particular case, these people, calling themselves Belarusian patriots, are destroying the country: if things start look like they are succeeding, of course the country will be invaded and occupied by Putin, and will just be dissolved, joining Russia as 6 regions plus the city of Minsk. The very Belarusian ethnicity will cease to exist within a generation.
Is that what they really want? If they are patriots, they should hold on to Lukashenka for as long as he is alive, and pray that power transition will happen smoothly so Russia has no reason to intervene when he dies - or it will be the end of their nation as such.
Belarus isn't a democratic country. It has elections, which the incumbent always wins, via cheating if required. In this instance, the cheating was a bit obvious, leading to a public backlash.
My point is that this is how it should be, and people who try to protest, are not right, for very practical reason which i have explained below, and it is a very good example displaying democracy being an outdated thing bringing disaster
At least one Putin cried reading "...Belarus, sometimes called Europe’s last dictatorship". Of course, unless you consider Russia as a Chinese posession already, technically making it one of Asian dictatorships.
One takeaway from this article is that condemning fascism was too much for American tech companies... pathetic. Have companies always been this spineless?
I always click such news because i know of some "Self-organizing Mobile Ad-hoc Networks based on Delay Tolerant Networking" (MANET-DTN) technology experimentations at german universities in the last years that use wireless and broadband chips in cellphones (with an app) to relay public service announcements and calls for emergency responders in situations like for example if the cell-tower is destroyed by an earth-quake. See: ftp://ftp.kom.tu-darmstadt.de/papers/LAG+17.pdf (not the whole thing, just a pointer towards more pointers. the apps named in III all seem abandoned)
But the news is never about that :-/ Just "someone shut down the facebook" - boring
We have the same problem here in Serbia, and no, he is not the last dictator in Europe. Vucic is another one, Orban is another one...Milo Djukanovic is the greatest of them all...
It seems to me that Starlink will become, in the near future, an essential tool to fight oppression as it will serve as a secondary solution to citizens. That is unless the government uses something like an EMP to deny service.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadAn attempt to shut down CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and AP would result in an immediate court order prohibiting the shutdown.
Trump is annoying enough, you don't have to make up imaginary things about him.
Trump lets the States exercise their Constitutional authority[2]
TDS Sufferer: "Trump is a disappointingly-WEAK dictator!"[3]
It really is bizarre. As you say, there are things he's legitimately punting into the stands, such as his ham-fisted counter to the rise of China (great concept, abysmal execution).[4]
[1]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-covid-19-coronavirus-di...
[2]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/03/31/commentary/w...
[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/yet-anothe...
[4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhMAt3BluAU
You are actively detracting from real issues today by posting this nonsense.
But it clearly exists. This is an insane thing to think. It's so far out beyond anything that could happen, that deranged is a reasonable word for it.
Log off, buddy. Take a walk, heck take a day. The Internet will still be there when you get back.
They want to politice the "truth": https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0
Isn't Telegram based in Russia? I'm surprised Russia didn't try to get them to bock Putilo, or at the minimum that Russia would cooperate with a Belarusian internet block.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-telegram-...
https://decrypt.co/32837/russia-lifts-ban-on-telegram-after-...
It is probably cheaper to launch a StarLink bird than it is to blow it out of orbit. Think of it as a DoS attack on the launch batteries!
As for the second? I find that approach much more likely to succeed. Sigh.
They have some propellant to make adjustments and stay in orbit a bit longer but if you blow them up you just make the decay process quicker.
First, it's one of extremely few actions actually likely to get you nuked or "liberated" - you just threatened one of the most valuable strategic advantages (even if it's just a civilian satellite, it wasn't yours, and militaries will consider their satellites under threat).
Second, in case you're not aware, the remains of the satellite now are a danger to any other object in that orbital plane, and this can trigger a cascade reaction and take lots of them down, making new launches impossible for many years. Look for Kessler Syndrome.
Nobody is nuking anybody else over satellites. Nukes will only be used in case of regime / home territory threat (eg if Russia were losing a conventional war, and NATO were pushing toward Moscow, Russia could throw down the nuke threat card and say stop or else), or in response to the use of a nuke.
If North Korea starts shooting down US satellites at some point, it would prompt a conventional military bombing response (which would attempt to neutralize their ability to launch rockets at US satellites), and possible full-scale war. It would not prompt a nuclear retaliation. There is zero interest - anywhere - in seeing millions of people die over some satellites.
The plan for Starlink is to have 12,000 satellites eventually. You'd need to shoot down quite lot a of them to block access to an entire country.
You: Camping, in the mountains, sorry boss, no signal there, I won't be accessible.
Boss: No problem.... here's a portable starlink antenna,... just in case... you know... if there is a bug in your code... or if we have a skype call with the clients... or if we need a bug fixed... haha.. you know, fixing bugs in the forest hehe.. well yeah... just have it connected during normal business hours, just in case... and check your emails while you're connected.. and slack... and CI logs... but otherwise, have a nice vacation, I hope you get some rest!
It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. It evolved into a Internetwork of trusted hosts to facilitate rapid information dissemination. It took a bunch of advertisers to turn it into surveillance nirvana by realizing that you could use http requests and your own portable sensor platform and in-house OS to rake in profit overwhelming.
At least early on, the latter had the excuse of lack of foresight regarding the dystopia they were building, but for decades now it's been more than obvious to everyone and most of them are continuing to cobble together their own prisons and ours.
Pretty much same thing as complaining about bad leaders when the sheeple putting in the bad votes is the actual problem.
Who really is the loser here.
This was a very disjoint cultural shift in from the research I've done, and it was really pushed by only a handful of big names.
That's a nice myth. But it wasn't so.
As https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... explains, the idea of packet switching was invented twice. The Internet came out of the invention by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Separately Paul Baran and others at RAND had demonstrated that packet switching could be used to build a network to survive a nuclear attack.
Even though the Internet came out of military research, it was not designed to withstand nuclear attack. As can be verified by the fact that the early network had no redundancy, and neither computers nor the network were shielded from the EMP that a nuclear bomb could be expected to emit.
That's not to say there weren't earlier efforts to leverage networks for security purposes. I'm reminded of a tale of connecting FBI branches in the southern U.S. to facilitate case information sharing to close a series of cases involving a multi-state child and human trafficking ring in the Southern U.S. as well. Again though, that wasn't something bearing the character of "Hey! Let's 1984 these disgusting subhumans!" It was more, "Hey, seeing as our entire reason for existence is to work on crimes that cross State boundaries, doesn't it make sense that we should be able to keep the entire organization connected enough so that all our distributed branches can be kept up-to-date on what we've all found?"
Nothing controversial there. At all. Where things started getting controversial is where we started to take Lincoln's "tap the telegraph lines", an extreme wartime measure, and make it matter of fact through the establishment of the NSA/DIA. Where we started seeing the privatized Palantir's pop up, and seeing government agencies exercise or otherwise excuse investigative techniques they could not justifiably engage in themselves through delegation or voluntary action by private organizations.
It's these private businesses building datasets that never should gave existed that have outright corrupted things, and the at the time far more reasonable Third Party Doctrine that have driven things off the rails. Not the Internet itself.
So on the one hand a random internet stranger claims to have known someone important who said something.
On the other hand we have a history written by people including the author of the first paper on packet switching, the program manager at DARPA who authorized the project, the inventor of TCP/IP and so on and so forth.
I'll believe the paper that I cited.
Packet switching can be used to build networks that are resilient in the face of disruptions, whether natural or manmade. That is where the myth of "designed to survive a nuclear war" comes from. But the original Internet was designed using packet switching to allow computers to freely talk to each other without having an insane number of dedicated circuits kept open.
That said, I agree with you that it was not designed for surveillance. But I disagree on the timeline. While the response to 9/11 certainly stepped up the level of surveillance to an insane level, all evidence is that ECHELON had been tapping the Internet long before that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.
Brown trucks with gobs of antennas are the guys who are tracking them down, some Chinese 3 letter service.
Besides, the antenna itself is rather small, and can be hidden inside just about any structure transparent to RF in the relevant frequency bands - say, a seemingly innocuous water cistern on the roof, for instance.
2. It is possible to build verious kinds of covert antennas. Radio amateurs do that all the time. Just google the term "stealth ham radio"
But if you shine a powerful laser beam into the sky it is visible from pretty far away. It's highly focused, but also gets scattered a lot by the atmosphere.
That's actually how spies send data back over the satellites:
>Unlike with SW signals, a radio signal to a satellite is very difficult to intercept and trace, as the waves are 'beamed' straight up rather than all around.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/rs804/index.htm
A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them and even pointing out the approximate location (eg. a building) where they're located. If the antenna was inside a huge apartment building, it would be hard to find the right apartment, if the transmitter was turned off, but with single family buildings, it would be easy.
Ham radio operators hide and then look for hidden transmitters for fun, so it's not that hard, especially with a budget that is given to the police.
You are very wrong sir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-millimeter_band
>A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them.
That is not true. Helicopter would need to fly RIGHT into such directional and tiny beam. Which is nearly impossible to do in huge city. Even when flying 2m next to it, you would likely not detect it.
That is the reason why CIA had so much problem with pinpointing Iridium satellite phones back in Colombia in the 90's.
and yes, even with a laser (nanometer wavelengths) it's hard to produce a 2mm wide beam at a helicopter distance.
"Yeah, that's my 'compost bin'"
Even in the US, constitutional rights have been waved on a mass scale for 20 years. People only take up arms to defend te right to oppress downtrodden minorities.
But Telegram is just part of the same old centralized server approach.
It has the ability to use evasion strategies, but doing that doesn’t make the software decentralized.
Point is I don't see anything decentralised in MTProto. Unless I'm mistaken Durov announced that he wants to make something p2p, but right now it's not. [https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/tree/master/Tele...]
See: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto#transport
If an ISP were to really block MTProto, then the P2P functionalities would stop working as well.
The problem the regime has is that anyone with a clue and IT skills is monetizing those skills in that sector as government jobs, including those in its vast security forces, don't pay a lot. So, they don't necessarily have a lot of in house competence implementing any kind of sophisticated blocking strategies. Anyone capable of implementing that could quadruple their salaries by jumping ship. The state telco company gets most of its revenues from the IT sector as well. So they don't have any incentive to shut down their core business. I'm guessing it's mostly Russia that helps them with the technical parts of that. Of course Russia and Putin are currently mildly annoyed with Lukashenko and are looking to grow their influence in Belarus a bit by letting him flail desperately for a while. So, they are a bit hands off right now and not in a mood to help him out.
The second problem is that group #1 is basically tapping into the wealth generated by group #2. So shutting down the internet is a spectacularly bad idea for #2 for obvious reasons and therefore not a popular notion for #1 either. The people who would be at all capable of effecting such a change are mostly working in the IT sector already and the elite in group #1 kind of needs them to keep on doing their thing so the money keeps flowing. Besides, rich people need their internet fix and Lukashenko is considered a bit of an old relic by both groups. A convenient stooge at best.
Hence internet shutdowns tend to be short lived, ineffective, and largely symbolic. Telegram is important for both groups and completely outside of the control of Belarusian authorities. It's the same reason the Russians have failed to shut that down. They can't do it without cutting off the IT sector and the financial gains coming from that sector and none of the billionaires that make up the elite like it when their shiny iphones stop working.
Oh wait, they can fake election results, kill anybody they please and are backed by Russia. I guess all is well regardless if they can block the internet or not.
There’s no reason twitter or whatsapp couldn’t be usable on the bps that ax25 documents describe, but using 9600bps or evening less to try to load a modern webpage sounds a recipe for disaster
But it's just alternative messengers and VPNs.
On the other hand this is probably a good thing. During the Arab Spring Egypt cut its internet lines and activist like Telecomix provided dial-in internet access. Nowadays even a dictator can't cut the internet access without causing massive damages.
Based on the title, I was expecting to read about internet shutdowns and peer to peer networks. Instead, it's just a story about DPI and VPNs.
Nothing here is being "hot-wired". Blocking social media isn't "shutting down the internet" in any technical sense. Turning off cell networks because of protests is, but those actions aren't being circumvented here. Yet still the term "internet shutdown" is being circulated a lot.
I do wonder if the general population would claim the internet is turned off just because Google, Facebook and Twitter aren't available. By these definitions, does China have internet access? It's interesting to me to see how years of internet access and growing up around smart devices has taught people so little about the actual workings of the internet.
Only using the 2 or 3 major websites, in car speak, would likely more look like "only know the road to the mall, the job, and the daycare and doesn't even realize there are other places one might conceivably go" which is... not fine in my book, and yes, I'm frustrated about that.
People don't use their network equipment to its full potential, because they think the web == internet. So they have all this crazy equipment with functions they never even imagined, and only use it to browse a few websites. So I actually think the issue is even worse than what you describe and I'm frustrated about it too.
I see that a lot of my fellow nerds have this feeling and I'm honestly, non-trolly curious about why this is. People have wants and needs (get email from boss, watch video, lookup a recipe) and they learn how to do that specific task. Most people don't know what the internet is, or what a even what computer is beyond a simple mental model that allows them to do what they think they want to do.
For most things, this is exactly how you I and everyone else lives their lives too. Like everyone else I'm sure there are systems that you use on a daily basis which you don't understand beyond the specific steps that you need to know in order to accomplish your task. I don't have anything beyond the most basic pharmacological understanding of how the prescription drugs I take work, and I probably never will yet I depend on them daily.
Most people will never understand most things. I see that as utterly normal.
In that vein, I was pretty impressed the other day by the Wikipedia article on traffic lights.
It's actually a cool project, but never got really big.
To an extent I'm sure that dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is tiring
On the other hand dealing with customers that don't know their engine needs oil is lucrative
So the public being clueless about the Internet is more like being clueless about basic law and finance, or in more extreme cases something like telling apart the fiction and non-fiction programs on TV. On the other hand, you should be fine thinking of your car as just a means of transportation.
People will always apply the duck test to their technical experiences: what is the Internet for a 15 year old? Most likely it's something along the lines of the web, and a few mobile applications. As long as "what you use" goes down, the "Internet", for a normal user, is down.
Just like there was a point to educating people about it in the late 90s, there's a point in educating people about it now: what you see and use on a daily basis is not "the Internet".
It's still the correct phrase. There are two meanings of the word 'internet' - one is the infrastructure, and the other is the websites and services people access using the infrastructure. You're assuming the first meaning while the article is talking about the second meaning.
But if Twitter were off the air for a week, IMO the world would be measurably better and people would fight to keep it down.
I've never had an account on any FB property - avoid it like the Spyware plague that it is. Yet others find FB, Instagram, etc. very useful, even tho if I had to remove one thing to improve the internet, FB would be at the top of my list.
OTOH, Twitter, which I used to formally deride like you, I've found to be immensely useful, as I can directly link to & occasionally converse with top leaders and experts in many fields, and get direct links to the source papers/articles, without filtering, delays, & distortions of the regular media (but ya, one needs to heavily use the Block function in political discussions to maintain civility/sanity). It's also clear that Twitter is used a lot by all news orgs, it's often the 1st place news breaks, and every journo is active on it.
So, seems that it really is about each individual users' needs.
If these were removed from the internet, replacements would be active almost immediately. Would they be better/worse? Who knows?
Their chronic corporate irresponsibility and disregard of abuse is unconscionable. Entities controlling fake or bot accounts, combined the amplification effect on the platform basically have turned it into disinformation as a service.
It so trivial to manipulate institutions and tastemakers that Twitter can be used to undermine them. Check out local public officials or B-list corporate types and what they follow. At that scale, you as a guy with a credit card can trivially insert a narrative into that persons feed to manipulate their perspectives or actions. There are entities doing this at scale to influence policy.
Facebook is pretty malevolent as well. But I don't think that it undermines institutions like Twitter. It targets the broader public. They are more like TV brand marketing without editorial standards and with more focused targeting. Nazis couldn't get ads on your local TV station in 1990, but they can on Facebook.
Part of the problem is the technical/feature sets of each platform, and a lot of it is the corp management or failure of management.
While the bot/troll hordes on Twitter are a serious problem disrupting many conversations, I'm almost thinking FB is more of a problem because the desinformatsiya can be more specifically targeted, and spread with less visibility outside the particular set of connections.
So, I fully agree, from the POV of preserving democracy, I'd have zero hesitation in fully & finally terminating either/both today, if there were remotely more responsible replacements.
what if a colleague told you "network down" and you had to ask
" can you ping google.com? how about 8.8.8.8? can you ping gateway? can you tracepath with port? how about telnet? " ?
another version is "what does tcpdump say?"
yet another version(when the complaint is "website down" instead of "network down") is "whats the http response?"
Note: 4G mobile internet is still BANNED in Kashmir for "maintaining the national integrity and sovereignty of india" and other bs
I hope we will find a way to peacefully wind down the democracy in the West before it completely destroys our economy and society.
Want to stay as far away from that dynamic as possible. It's garbage and always will be.
Your notion of "democracies funded by global elite" and a "siphoning global middle class" sound more of conspiracy theory babble than anything rational. And by the way you have concluded that there are only two paths for Western societies, I'd say your judgment has become heavily biased.
Democracy isn't a panacea to the world's problems. It needs an informed population in order to function, which directly and without discrimination means government transparency. The process of opinion building needs to be taught in schools, and journalists need to be protected from interference.
Without these pieces and more in place there is no democracy. Very few countries actually are democratic in practice. The fight for freedom and democracy is ongoing, and those who get in its way are misanthropes who deserve a bitter end to their efforts.
Have that, and democratic society with freedom of speech, and you get a self-eating monster machine that will destroy itself in less than a generation. Why does someone who has no chances to be self-reliant, vote responsibly? Especially if he is well-educated and well-informed, so he realises it.
Is that what they really want? If they are patriots, they should hold on to Lukashenka for as long as he is alive, and pray that power transition will happen smoothly so Russia has no reason to intervene when he dies - or it will be the end of their nation as such.
But the news is never about that :-/ Just "someone shut down the facebook" - boring