Russia going offline?

[eddie13]

pick a number 1 through 50


How is this going to work?
Isn’t Russian the 2nd biggest board here other than English?


We need to support the free speech of Russians..
What they have to say matters a lot..

What are we going to do about this?

Bitcoin is all about the free speech of all.. The free transfer of information..

We need to come up with a solution of inclusivity..


P.S. the 2 Ukrainian threads in meta.. You don’t matter more than them..
Stop calling for censorship immediately..
TY..

[suchmoon]

There is nothing Meta about your thread or the threads about Ukraine here in Meta either, but mods disagree so what do I know.

E-mail uncle Elon, maybe he's got a solution. Other than that, if they're completely cut off and can't even use VPN there's fuck all we can do. Attach TCP packets to ICBMs once those start regular trips across the border? Latency would be awful though.

[martha1]

What are we going to do about this?

What can we do ?

Didn't they also threaten to cut off internet cables under the oceans and shut the whole internet worldwide ? (Link)

[PX-Z]

There's no solution for that from the outside if the decision comes from them, their leaders, only the russian people can do about it, with protests and make putin go down as they are the most affected.

And how is it possible? VPN can do something about it unless people cant connect the internet there.

[DaveF]

Outside of the tweet is there any other mention of this anywhere?
I know a lot of providers are pulling out since they are not getting paid. Some pulled out as a statement. Others are just not getting paid and pulling out.
Or is it being cut internally?

-Dave

[stompix]

How is this going to work?

You turn the internet into the intranet.
Ask all ISP to block any connection to the outside, then use your own DNS, in theory is pretty simple, but rather than completely blocking it successfully I rather see their own internal network malfunction.

What are we going to do about this?

Nothing, a complete blockade like Putin wants will be impossible to circumvent, this is not the Great Firewall of China that filters stuff, this is essential cutting all connections you won't be able to use any foreign VPN because you won't be able to reach those servers in the first place.
So, the most we can do is what we have done to date for NK, which is..zero?

Btw, I'm quite intrigued how some random Twitter guy knows exactly when Russia will do this, especially looking at that Twitter account.... and name.

[suchmoon]

Btw, I'm quite intrigued how some random Twitter guy knows exactly when Russia will do this, especially looking at that Twitter account.... and name.

With the recent roskomnadzor crackdowns reaching insane levels (using the word "вoйнa" in a certain context can get your site banned), total "cheburnet" isn't that far fetched anymore... because those damn foreigners don't comply with Putin's laws. But as to "when", that's probably BS, just throwing shit at the wall and one of those days one of those twitter accounts may turn out to have correctly predicted it.

[DaveF]

If anyone cares and has about 700GB of free space on a drive & a lot of bandwidth and reads Russia there is a dump of a lot of data from Roskomnadzor available here:

https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Roskomnadzor

Figure I'll have to move some blockchain backups to make space for it.
But it's not like the Russians did not have a heavily filtered internet anyway.

-Dave

[theymos]

Why does "Market Rebellion" know anything about this? My instinct is that this rumor will turn out to be false. But assuming it's true:

Bitcointalk.org has long been on Russia's block list, so all current Russian users are using VPNs, etc. If Russia bans all non-Russian IP, then that would make it much more difficult for Russian users to access the rest of the Internet, though there's not much that we can do about that. For example, creating a Tor hidden service wouldn't help them at all.

For Russians to access the Internet, they'll have to personally have some non-wired connection to the regular Internet via Starlink, cross-border laser/radio communication, etc.; or they'll have to proxy their connection via multi-homed devices which have both one of those non-wired connections as well as a Russian IP. Those latter multi-homed devices could act as Tor bridges or VPNs, but keeping these online for long may become difficult because devices with Russian IPs are presumably located in Russia and can easily be shut down by Russian authorities once discovered. The architecture of Tor bridges was not set up for this "cut off an entire country" threat model, and probably won't work well long-term.

A more resilient way of bypassing this kind of censorship is a distributed database like Freenet. These systems function based on an entirely different premise from the normal Internet, so they can't be used to access the normal Internet, but they would allow for more robustly communicating through Russia's firewall. One multi-homed Freenet node could anonymously transfer data from the outside world into Russia, and then this data would be replicated among many Russian-only nodes.

Freenet and similar systems can probably be pretty easily blocked by detecting and blocking all of their traffic, so an even better way of bypassing censorship would be a wireless mesh network combined with a Freenet-like distributed database. I don't know of any well-established software for doing this, though.


In all of the many years I've been admin, I don't think that anything has touched/disturbed me more than knowing that there are many veteran forum members whose countries are currently at war. It's insane that we have several people here who are literally under artillery bombardment and are being forced to defend their homes from soldiers. How is humanity so messed up that an entire bureaucracy and chain of command filled with hundreds of thousands of people are helping to commit this atrocity? And while Ukrainians are the biggest victims of this war, of course, the average Russian person is a victim too: economic cannon fodder in Putin's war.

The Russian section was the first non-English section created (created when Satoshi was the forum's head administrator), and Russian-speakers, including many Ukrainians, were some of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin. This war is a tragedy in many more important ways, but it's specifically a tragedy for the Bitcoin community. My greatest hope is that applied cryptography (of which Bitcoin is probably the most successful example) will enable Russians to resist and eventually overthrow their authoritarian government in ways that give them some chance of continuing their lives. It's not reasonable to expect Russians to resist in ways that lead to almost-certain death or imprisonment.

[suchmoon]

NK folks are doing it via smuggled flash drives, and phones hitched to China's cell towers along the border. I think that could work in Russia too. EU could finance a few hundred Russia-facing cell towers with free unlimited data, sort of a new version of VOA/Radio Liberty/Free Europe. Quite easy to jam though, but Russia might be sufficiently bankrupt to not be able to do that.

However it being Russia, there would be firewall exceptions made for government officials and other bourgeoisie, then those special passwords would end up with "business people" who would make money for the whole scheme by redistributing netflix, steam, etc, and eventually leak wider. Ultimately this could be a more likely vector than any technological workarounds with or without West's help.

[KingsDen]

Immediately I read the twitter news, I was almost certain that Russia cannot be successfully disconnected from www, not at this age of internet revolution. But when I followed up some replies, it looked like it can actually happen.
But after reading Theymos reply, I was reassured that there must be a way out. Greater problems will bring about greater discoveries. Since Russia first sanction on bitcointalk was maneuvered, I think this if truth can be handled.
May I know why Russia placed bitcointalk on blacklist according to Theymos.

[NotATether]

March 11 now, afternoon in Russian time. No, I am not in Russia, but in another country with the same timezone as Russia.

Did suddenly all Russian media and business websites go down today? Didn't think so.

This is why people should not pay attention to random "verified" twitter accounts that get several hundred likes/reposts on its tweets.

[DdmrDdmr]

It seems that the rumours about Runet going live soon might have been originated due to this:

There’s a Russian government document doing the rounds that has led some to suggest the country is preparing to disconnect from the global internet.
The letter appears to be an order from Andrei Chernenko, Russia’s deputy digital minister, demanding that Russian state-owned websites and online portals beef up their security by Friday this week.

It tells them to move their hosting to Russian services if they are currently using foreign hosting services, and to scrub their web pages of all JavaScript code that has been downloaded from foreign sources; JavaScript is one of the main web programming languages, and the document cites banners and visit counters as examples of the sort of page elements that might need to be removed.

It includes one instruction that particularly raises eyebrows: Russian state-owned web services must by Friday make sure they have switched to domain name system (DNS) servers located on Russian soil. The global DNS is what the internet uses to translate web addresses like “fortune.com” into the alphanumerical internet protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to communicate (which, in Fortune’s case, is “2a02:8109:b6bf:45c0:10:18ff:fe41:4794.”)
In other words, the DNS is what lets humans use the web easily, around the world. So the document raises the question of whether Russia intends to cut itself off from this system—and effectively the global internet, too.

See: https://fortune.com/2022/03/07/russia-runet-disconnect-ukraine-dns-chernenko-letter/

From there on, some people have picked-up on the above, and tweeted the date as a done deal. Local’s should be able to elaborate more on what truth and extent the quoted text and alleged document implies:
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1500553480548892679/photo/1

The Fortune article suggest that they really aren’t 100% ready to make the move yet, and that it’s might be more of a contingency plan scenario.

[DaveF]

It seems that the rumours about Runet going live soon might have been originated due to this:

There’s a Russian government document doing the rounds that has led some to suggest the country is preparing to disconnect from the global internet.
The letter appears to be an order from Andrei Chernenko, Russia’s deputy digital minister, demanding that Russian state-owned websites and online portals beef up their security by Friday this week.

It tells them to move their hosting to Russian services if they are currently using foreign hosting services, and to scrub their web pages of all JavaScript code that has been downloaded from foreign sources; JavaScript is one of the main web programming languages, and the document cites banners and visit counters as examples of the sort of page elements that might need to be removed.

It includes one instruction that particularly raises eyebrows: Russian state-owned web services must by Friday make sure they have switched to domain name system (DNS) servers located on Russian soil. The global DNS is what the internet uses to translate web addresses like “fortune.com” into the alphanumerical internet protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to communicate (which, in Fortune’s case, is “2a02:8109:b6bf:45c0:10:18ff:fe41:4794.”)
In other words, the DNS is what lets humans use the web easily, around the world. So the document raises the question of whether Russia intends to cut itself off from this system—and effectively the global internet, too.

See: https://fortune.com/2022/03/07/russia-runet-disconnect-ukraine-dns-chernenko-letter/

From there on, some people have picked-up on the above, and tweeted the date as a done deal. Local’s should be able to elaborate more on what truth and extent the quoted text and alleged document implies:
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1500553480548892679/photo/1

The Fortune article suggest that they really aren’t 100% ready to make the move yet, and that it’s might be more of a contingency plan scenario.

That sounds a bit more logical. But, as I posted above it may become moot over the next few day / weeks anyway. There are several backbone providers getting ready to cut them off from the internet. Not for any political reasons but for the fact that they can't pay to keep their equipment in Russian locations and on the other side the Russian providers can't pay them.

There is nothing from the tech side making them take it down, but from the business side they kind of have to.

edit to add: Remember there is a REAL cost to data interconnection at fiber speeds. I don't care if you can't pay me, I have to pay the next hop where my data transverses and so on. The cost of moving data is probably under $0.01 a gig. BUT in real world terms over millions of internet users that can easily become in the 10s of thousands of dollars a day. As providers like Cogent leave, that adds data costs to the other ones that stay. So even if you had the best 'we are neutral' intentions and want to say up how long can you justify that much of a cash outflow till you have to walk away?

-Dave

 

[stompix]

But after reading Theymos reply, I was reassured that there must be a way out.

What part of "not much that we can do about that",  "won't work well long-term" and "I don't know of any" did you miss?

NK folks are doing it via smuggled flash drives, and phones hitched to China's cell towers along the border. I think that could work in Russia too. EU could finance a few hundred Russia-facing cell towers with free unlimited data, sort of a new version of VOA/Radio Liberty/Free Europe. Quite easy to jam though, but Russia might be sufficiently bankrupt to not be able to do that.

A few tens at most since most of the Russian border in Europe is with the disputed territory in Ukraine and Belarus and I doubt they will let you place those, also not sure if any cell tower will be able to broadcast a signal to reach at least St Peterburg from either Estonia or Finland.
Anyhow, 6 PM in Moscow and the internet is still running, somebody got their insider information wrong.

From there on, some people have picked-up on the above, and tweeted the date as a done deal. Local’s should be able to elaborate more on what truth and extent the quoted text and alleged document implies:
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1500553480548892679/photo/1

Didn't they issue a similar order when they started asking foreign companies operating in Russia to also have their data hosted in Russia? Probably nobody actually did anything and they've just realized they wasted a few more millions on somebody's yacht so now it's time to act again. It will be done by 2030.

[Lucius]

It is quite clear to me that Russia is moving in the direction of more or less isolating itself from the EU, UK, US, and countries it considers hostile - but doesn't a complete internet outage do incalculable damage to their economy, far greater harm than any benefits of such insane isolation?

Not even China has ever gone that far despite its censorship, because that would mean shooting yourself in both knees and eventually playing Russian roulette to swallow a bullet. Nothing can surprise me anymore, this madness is getting bigger day by day...

Today I thought my neighbors were joking about someone attacking our country by a drone or racket flying in from the direction of Ukraine and falling on our capital after flying more than 500 km - but it actually happened, fortunately no one was injured.

[LTU_btc]

When I saw this topic, I wanted to say that Bitcointalk is already blocked in Russia for long time already, but theymos was faster than me. To be precise, it happned in March 2020:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5235976.0
That tweet in OP was fake news, so far they aren't going to disconnect from global internet. So far they are just making big scale censorship. First they blocked all opposition websites and TV.  Then they started to block foreign websites, social networks like Facebook, Twitter. On Monday they'll block Instagram and most likely Youtube next week. But wouldn't be surprised if Cheburnet soon would turn into reality, considering in what direction Russia is going. They're turning into huge North Korea.
Many Russians is looking for VPN's now, problem that with not working Visa/MasterCard they can't pay for it. Bitcoin is one of few alternatives available.

It is quite clear to me that Russia is moving in the direction of more or less isolating itself from the EU, UK, US, and countries it considers hostile - but doesn't a complete internet outage do incalculable damage to their economy, far greater harm than any benefits of such insane isolation?

Offcourse it makes more damages than gives benefits. Actually, it's difficult to find benefits in complete isolation besides censorship. But it's difficult to find much logic in Russia actions now which is simply killing their economy.

[Botnake]

That's not possible as some businesses are relying online and they could not sustain their operation without the internet. I'm not sure, but I think the source is unreliable unless we read and hear this kind of information from mainstream media since this is big news, Russia going offline is just like separating from the world.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

That's not possible as some businesses are relying online and they could not sustain their operation without the internet. I'm not sure, but I think the source is unreliable unless we read and hear this kind of information from mainstream media since this is big news, Russia going offline is just like separating from the world.

You think the deluded Dictator in Russia gives a fuck about the businesses relying on Internet? You are very wrong if you believe so. I am not from Russia, but based on the news I have watched about how the Country is being run, I would not be surprised if it happened.

If someone can send his army to another country to bomb the shit out of Kindergartens, civilian apartments, Hospitals and then claim they did bomb anything, then what else is he not capable of doing?

[examplens]

It seems that the rumours about Runet going live soon might have been originated due to this:
..

The Fortune article suggest that they really aren’t 100% ready to make the move yet, and that it’s might be more of a contingency plan scenario.

I think at the moment they just have a desire to disconnect from the global internet. I would say they are quite surprised by the intensity of the sanctions now they have accepted it as a kind of war and strive to respond in their own manner "instantly and uncompromisingly". since they did not have a clear plan, in this case, they still do not have a concrete solution.
for now, everything is just standard Russian forced propaganda but I believe they are working in that direction.

That's not possible as some businesses are relying online and they could not sustain their operation without the internet. I'm not sure, but I think the source is unreliable unless we read and hear this kind of information from mainstream media since this is big news, Russia going offline is just like separating from the world.

You think the deluded Dictator in Russia gives a fuck about the businesses relying on Internet? You are very wrong if you believe so. I am not from Russia, but based on the news I have watched about how the Country is being run, I would not be surprised if it happened.

If someone can send his army to another country to bomb the shit out of Kindergartens, civilian apartments, Hospitals and then claim they did bomb anything, then what else is he not capable of doing?

yes, he obviously went crazy. I think the only ones who can do something in solving the problem like "offline Russia" is the Russian people. they must say no to Putin and take away his power.
Unfortunately for those conscious Russians, I don't believe it will happen soon. As long as they think on this way Putin doesn't have to worry.

I would definitely agree with eddie13, too much madness has been instituted against every Russian. many innocent people are suffering.