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Ask HN: As someone living in Russia, how can I prepare for Internet shutdowns?

36 points by exizt88 ↗ HN
I'm currently living in Moscow. It looks like the government will soon very heavily crack down on any uncontrolled ways to get information. This might include blocking of websites, shutdowns of VPNs and outright Internet shutdown.

What can I do to prepare for this and still have access to the Internet? If you have any relevant experience from similar situations, please share!

17 comments

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gostsamo
Satellite internet maybe? Also, you can try to create a private vpn server on a cloud resource in Europe or elsewhere outside of Russia. Private VPNs might not be affected. Alternatively, it could be only a proxy with encripted connection that will block curious scans.

Finally, check the anti-censorship tech of Tor. They have something for places like Iran an China that have heavy firewalls and that helps circumvent them.

RegnisGnaw
Satellite internet is very easy to crack down. The dish is very visible to the naked eye.

China has been helping Russia with the GFW technology, which it is a leader in.

gostsamo
It matters only if they care that much. Usually 95% coverage does the job and the user might be undisturbed.
35mm
VPN over DNS?
VladimirGolovin
Pay for a year of VPN while your VISA / MC cards still work.

Make a local copy of everything you have on the cloud (GMail, Google Docs, Google Photos, etc.)

If you store passwords in a cloud-based password manager, make a secure local copy.

Switch your sync solution from anything cloud-based to Syncthing.

Make sure you don't have anything critical stored on the phone (they may brick it).

If you rely on critical medical drugs, stockpile some (export restrictions are likely).

exizt88
This is great, thank you. I haven't though about many of these things.
perihelions
This is entirely personal, but from my past experiences, my #1 priority would be to binge-buy a large number of e-books. It's better to have a vast pool of interesting reading distractions, and not need them, then to need them but not have them.

It's possible you find a technical solution that works, but that's degraded and has very low bandwidth. Most of the WWW stops working in this scenario -- you hit serverside network timeouts and stuff. It might be worth figuring out in advance which websites are accessible under low-bandwidth conditions. Here's examples of the goal:

https://lite.cnn.com/en (7 kB -- with CSS and images blocked clientside)

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ (2.7 kB landing page; 6 kB result page)

pcdoodle
CNN? Gross at times of peace.
0cVlTeIATBs
I had had success (elsewhere in the world) using cellular service from a foreign provider. The data connection will be proxied through the foreign provider, and this might be overlooked by censors, though maybe not.
exizt88
How likely is it that I wouldn't be access MullvadVPN for example? Should I roll out my own private VPN server via DigitalOcean or smth?
sobriquet9
Install Kiwix, preferably on an airgapped device, and download the data you may need now.
Friday_
Ofcourse you are from Moscow.

If internet cracks in two, there will be "El Paquete Semanal" on both sides.

toast0
Is satellite tv common in Moscow? IIRC, there's some people broadcasting data on free to air channels. Things like https://othernet.is/ Of course, that doesn't get you interactive data.