
When the Internet Stopped in Belarus - exolymph
https://vicki.substack.com/p/when-the-internet-stopped-in-belarus
======
ignoramous
So, Psiphon, Lantern, and Tor were the only functioning VPNs during the
blockade.

And if these VPNs were indeed working, how were WhatsApp et al down? What is
Telegram doing that these others apps don't?

~~~
ffpip
Telegram is routing traffic through external servers. Google and Apple's
servers. So to stop telegram you have to stop the entire OS and thousands of
apps (imagine blocking google.com or so)

Russia failed too -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia)

A good read on why Russia failed -
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200630075731/https://www.washi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200630075731/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-
telegram-kremlin-pavel-
durov/2020/06/27/4928ddd4-b161-11ea-98b5-279a6479a1e4_story.html)

~~~
ignoramous
Thanks. So, according to WaPo, Telegram uses something akin to domain fronting
[0]. Then again, VPNs tunnel encrypted traffic (Tor esp makes it difficult to
trace source and destination), how were WhatsApp and other apps not unblocked?

[0] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/def-con-new-tool-brings-
back-d...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/def-con-new-tool-brings-back-domain-
fronting-as-domain-hiding/)

~~~
ffpip
Am not well informed on these topics, but I think they were shut down. So
Whatsapp, facebook, etc maybe refused traffic from Belarus numbers to comply
with government orders?

Or maybe they just don't accept TOR traffic for security purposes

~~~
ignoramous
Yeah, that's likely, thanks.

I stumbled upon another article which confirmed VPNs (like Psiphon and
Lantern) effectively bypass Chinese and Iranian censorship, whilst Telegram
(as a standalone app) can't [0]. So, by extension, other apps like WhatsApp
should have worked too with VPNs unless of course WhatsApp (and others)
disallow VPN traffic.

Among other things, it looks like telegram, on its own (without VPNs) was able
to evade the Russian censorship apparatus owing to sheer number of Russian
volunteers running proxy servers to relay telegram traffic [1].

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/telegram-anti-
censorship-c...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/telegram-anti-censorship-
china-iran/)

[1] [https://t.me/durov/77](https://t.me/durov/77)

------
BrandoElFollito
The article is really bad : a mixture of almost-technical information with
some condescending analogies.

TL;DR: internet is made of data flowing from your device to the service you
want to reach.

In BL it goes through infrastructure controlled by the state.

The state shut down the infrastructure and BL did not have internet.

The article forgot to mention GSM data on borders from neighboring countries
(one way some images were exfiltred) and satellite communications available to
some (including some foreign companies that use it as a backup)

