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Russia Is ‘Ready’ to Disconnect from Global Internet (themoscowtimes.com)
18 points by vinceleo on Feb 1, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


Disconnecting from the Global Internet to limit the spread of information is futile unless they seize control of all local servers and begin to aggressively jam radio signals.

It sort of works in North Korea because internet has never been there. On the other hand Russia has been connected to the Global Internet for 30 years.

I would see the emergence of a parallel uncensored network made up of computers connected wirelessly through data ham radio and/or satellite phones.


You overestimate how effective Radio Free Twitter will be in real life.

You don’t need to jam anything there will be only a relatively small number of places where you could put your RF infrastructure since for internet you’ll have to do RX/TX your transmitters don’t have to be jammed since they can be easily located and an example can be made off you.

While there might be a small scale RF based network for technocrats to use for 99% of the population KremlinNet is all they’ll see, and even that won’t last long...

You’ll learn rather quickly how easy it to say that you’ll build a free internet using LORA and actually doing so when the risk of being caught and facing life in prison or a shooting squad is not only real but highly likely.

It would be quite easy to disconnect the country from the internet if the majority of the services are local which they already are the rest can be proxied on a case by case basis.

The US can easily disconnect from the global internet tomorrow too and most people won’t notice, Twitter will still be up just with fewer French, German and Aussies...


If this is the response to mass protests I wonder which kind of protests will happen in response to this.

This is not just another great firewall of China, this is more like a nation-wide intranet. I do not believe that the Russians are as indoctrinated to this as the Chinese are.


This is the milder of the Russian Internet stories lately:

- Gotta stop social media from promoting the protest

- Gotta stop certain videos

- Gotta end anonymity


Considering the risks of cyber warfare and attacks that are possible these days I think that it's sensible for a country, any country to be able to disconnect from the internet at the flick of the switch if needed. Russia has just implemented sensible 'cyber defenses', which I hope we also have in the West.


I'd rather run the risk of cyber warfare attacks than letting the Government turn off access to the global Internet at will.


You and Medvedev claim this is defensive, but the capability has existed for two years. Are you expecting Russia to need to defend its Internet at the same coincidental time as these protests?




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