
Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions - rumcajz
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-internet-protests/thousands-of-russians-protest-against-internet-restrictions-idUSKBN1QR0HI
======
PeterZhizhin
Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned
at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was
blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here.
Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global
network. AMA.

~~~
comboy
So what exactly are they doing? Just cutting off random IPs? The actual IP was
blocked or is it only DNS based? How about tor traffic?

~~~
PeterZhizhin
Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires
to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority
called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines.
Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use
VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch
IP addresses. Telegram messenger was banned here but it still works. I guess
that they frequently change IP addresses and use multiple cloud providers.
When Roscomnadzor tried to ban the messenger, they added significant number of
IP subnetworks (I think that the largest blocked subnet was 52.192.0.0/11 used
by AWS). This lead to all sorts of different problems because it turned out
that some banks and large companies were paralysed for months as their
websites were blocked.

After a year of of trying to block the messenger, they just decided to pass
this law. All ISPs that handle inter-counties exchange must install a
government backdoor that could shut down all outgoing and incoming connections
outside from Russia.

Also, some websites now are blocked by their DNS record, not by their IP. This
lead to other problems. Imagine there was a website X that was blocked in
Russia. The X company decides to change the domain and abandon X. Now, someone
else buys the banned domain and adds any IP addresses to the DNS (like,
government authorities websites). Whoala! These websites are banned in Russia
as well. This happened multiple times and lead to Google, YouTube and other
websites being inaccessible here.

The legislation proposes a separate national DNS system that differs from the
ICANN one. Similarly to how North Korea does this in their country. This way
no-one could buy an abandoned blocked website and add a bunch of valuable and
valid IPs there.

They claim that this will increase the stability of the Russian Internet.
People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to
control the world. They also believe that they could shut down the Internet in
any country at this point of time. They say that this has already happened in
Syria once and we need to prepare for this.

They don't actually explain that the thing that happened to Syria was possible
only because they had a single ISP. And their centralised system was hacked.

I believe that if we decide to install a backdoor to all of our ISPs, then
someone else from the outside could pull the switch.

~~~
anticodon
> People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to
> control the world.

Maybe it wasn't designed with this objective in mind, but it is definitely
used this way. And the fact that Google and Facebook are de-facto monopolies
doesn't help.

And I'm not from the government. I'm just another little guy that sees tons of
that propaganda every day.

For example, I watch mostly videos from conferences on YouTube. Why YT
displays rusophobic videos in the recommendations list instead of more videos
related to the conference? Even after I clicked hide button on them multiple
times?

And all those rusophobic comments under every video about Russia? Who writes
them? Sometimes I see exactly the same comment from different nicknames. I
even made a screenshots of such instances, only to find out that nobody cares.

~~~
anticodon
Another example: on one of facebook groups I regularly see posts from a person
regularly bashing Russia. Under every post he leaves derogatory comments.
Sometimes he posts derogatory posts although the facebook group is not about
Russia at all.

Just recently he had shared a meme picture from some of the "opposition"
groups (Alexei Navalny or his friends) stating that Russia has the highest
suicides rate in the world (of course, because we're poor and doomed and Putin
eats our children for breakfast).

I didn't believe it and went to several official sources (including
international) to verify. Of course, we're very far from the first place in
the list of suicide rates. I've commented this on the post and received zero
reaction. Moreover, the post was liked and shared further by several members
of the group.

This is all you need to know about our "opposition".

And there're many persons like this disseminating fake news in facebook groups
and other communities. I have no evidence, but I strongly believe that they're
on a payroll from some non-Russian agency or NGO.

~~~
ativzzz
> they're on a payroll from some non-Russian agency or NGO.

At this point, I would be incredibly surprised if any country in the world
wasn't engaged in some sort of online trolling/fake news dissemination on
either the global (e.g. Russia vs US vs China) or local (internal politics)
scale. It's the best way to spread propaganda while making it seem as real as
possible.

~~~
liberte82
And once you propagandize the population successfully enough, they'll carry on
without you

------
walrus01
The unfortunate part about this is that there's a lot of really talented
network engineers who are from Russia (or Ukraine, or Belarus, or other former
soviet states). The high quality of math education is part of it, totally
subjective personal theory of course...

A lot of the most talented Russian network engineers don't want to work for an
autocratic regime. I've met at least a half dozen that now work for
international ISPs you would see on a top-30 list for CAIDA ASRank, none of
which are Russian ISPs. They're living outside Russia, enjoying actual free
speech and human rights, and making a better salary.

------
egao1980
Russian here. Few points:

\- Root DNS and most of the cloud providers are in US jurisdiction. US
declared Russia as top 3 enemy and applies random 'sanctions'; \- Russian (and
EU) laws require companies to store citizen's personal information locally; \-
many lazy developers and service providers relied on AWS/GCP thus breaking the
law.

Telegram blocking attempt has shown that even some government resources are
hosted outside Russia. In case of severe confrontation escalation US/NATO will
cut DNS or will engage in cyberwarfare operations against Russia. So Russian
government wants to make sure that Russian infrastructure will continue to
function properly.

This is not PRIZM or Great Firewall of China type of system or regulation.
There are no plans to cut off internet. There's a group of people that spread
FUD and hype around this initiative.

~~~
amai
No plans to cut off from the internet? This was in the news a few days ago:

"Russia plans to test a kill switch that disconnects the country from the
internet" [https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/russia-internet-turn-
off-d...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/russia-internet-turn-off-digital-
economy-national-program/)

~~~
rstuart4133
To be fair that article says pretty much what the OP says. They want to ensure
the country keeps functioning if it is cut off from the internet.

On one level I sort of understand. My own country would stuffed for a short
while if DNS in particular went down. It's not just the internet - the phone
system, a lot of TV and god knows what else would be in real trouble.

But on the another level, fixing it would just require DNAT'ing a bunch of
IP's. If it happened (and it seems like a big if) it would be mostly over
after 24 hours of mad scrambling. If you were paranoid enough to want to have
everything in place you could try doing the DNAT on small sections, see what
broke and what it didn't effect because packets will still flying out, and fix
it without inflicting a worse case cyber war outcome on the entire country.

From a western perspective, the cost / benefit of what they are proposing
seems way out of kilter. Maybe it is politicly reasonable thing to do in
Russia, but in the west a whole sections of society (business, sporting
associations, professions) would be willing to put in a few dollars to ensure
whosever idea it was would never hold the reigns of power again.

------
DocG
Intresting fallout from our bigger client. They have been slowly migrating to
aws over the last year but because russia started bloking whole blocks of aws
IPs, they now stopped migration and are going to keep their own infrastructure
up. I havent heard yet but I am sure they are considering moving away from
cloud providers, we'll see what they decide, because Russia is huge market.

~~~
coderintherye
Huge market for what goods/services? What is your client selling / providing?

------
Tsubasachan
And things like this make the educated and ambitious young move abroad.

Good for the economies of Western Europe but not so good for Russia.

~~~
gdy
And bigger salary and bigger projects have nothing to do with it.

~~~
amai
No, Russians do love their country very much. Just their government doesn't
love them back.

~~~
gdy
Aww, that's so romantic :)

------
renholder
> _It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by
> the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the
> internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign
> infrastructure._

The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes
_some_ sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the
assumption that the DNS servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before
they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure. Doesn't really seem all that
worthwhile, unless you create recovery points to ensure that you have records
to recover with; otherwise, what's the point...?

(Of course, I could be entirely misunderstanding the premise of the law
because it's not referenced in the article _and_ I can't speak/read Russian
for feck-all...)

~~~
conistonwater
I think the answer to the question _what 's the point_ is to notice that
there's a bit of a rhetorical trick going on. Notice how they say (in passive
voice) _proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet
to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign
infrastructure_. So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country
tries to cut Russia off from the internet. The Russian government has an
interest of its own in cutting itself off from the internet to control its own
citizens' speech on the internet, it's just that it's a little bit cynical to
imagine it and it wouldn't be balanced to mention it explicitly in a news
article.

~~~
erikpukinskis
The U.S. did cut Russia off during midterms last year didn’t we? It’s not a
what if.

~~~
walrus01
Citation? I am unaware of even a single Russian ISP that has been cut off from
a traffic exchange point in Western Europe.

This would make news in the internet infrastructure community if it occurred.

~~~
WillPostForFood
This is what he is referring to:

[https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/431614-us-cyber-
ope...](https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/431614-us-cyber-operation-
blocked-internet-for-russian-troll-farm-on-election)

Saying the US, "cut Russia off" is a massive overstatement, but something did
happen.

------
walrus01
I just took a 30 second look at the English language websites of TASS, RT and
Sputnik.

Unsurprisingly, there is no mention whatsoever of these protests.

~~~
PeterZhizhin
These websites are controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Russian
government. They usually don't mention opposition meetings. I think that they
don't want anyone to know even about their existence.

~~~
rjf72
Can you reference any significant 'opposition' meeting (such as this) that was
not covered by RT for less than justifiable reason? E.g. - in this event the
organizers prohibited RT from covering the event, which is a pretty decent
reason for the lack of coverage!

~~~
woodandsteel
What you say may be correct, but is it your position that these news sites are
not Russian government propaganda machines, that they give good, objective
coverage of what is right and wrong with the country and its government?

And what is your own view of the Russian government?

~~~
rjf72
First as a little update it turns out they did try to provide English language
coverage of the protests, so much as possible [0].

As for your question, I think that's clearly a false dichotomy. I do think the
issue of propaganda is important, especially in today's times. So let's
consider an incident. Some weeks ago you probably read about Maduro's
government, in Venezuela, setting one of the US aid trucks on fire. This was
covered extensively. CNN stated that "a CNN team saw incendiary devices from
police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks" [1] while
describing the images of the trucks as sickening and repeating numerous calls
for stronger action as a result of such things. If that page should change in
the near future, the internet archive [2] is your friend. This was repeated by
most other media sources as well.

The problem is that it was a lie. The aid truck was undoubtedly set on fire by
anti-government forces. This is now being covered by the NYTimes [3] citing
"unpublished video" and dutifully pondering 'how we got here'. The Intercept
has also done a phenomenal piece on this event, here - showing how it was
played out as propaganda and the entities that pushed it hardest. [4] Of
course I haven't mentioned RT once yet, so what gives? This [5] gives. That's
an article from RT. What you might notice is that they have an embedded video,
literally the "unpublished video" from the NYTimes demonstrating that it was
an anti-government protester setting the truck on fire. And it was published
weeks ago, as soon as the information came to light while most western media
continued to simply beat the war drums.

\-------------

This is also not an isolated incident. I point this out not to claim that RT
is amazing. If the roles were reversed and it was a very serious event such as
Russia trying to foment a coup in another nation, I certainly would not expect
RT to run timely articles indicating that actions being used as propaganda
were, in fact, not the fault of the targeted government. You're not going to
find any single source that provides "good, objective coverage" when it comes
to issues that align with, or run against, their interests. So I find it
important to expose yourself to a wide array of media and particularly to
sources that are more like to challenge your viewpoints than affirm them.
Nietzche might not approve, but in the end we're surrounded by nothing but
abysses.

[0] - [https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-
mosc...](https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-moscow/)

[1] - [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-
pompeo...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-
maduro-colombia/index.html)

[2] -
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-
pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html)

[3] -
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-
aid-fire-video.html)

[4] - [https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-
lies-...](https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-
burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-
fake-news/)

[5] - [https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-
protes...](https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protesters/)

------
nabla9
Ruler needs to give his subjects bread and circuses. The circus part is
increasingly happening in the Internet.

If I was Putin, I would make sure that you can stream or torrent movies and
have good access to game servers, cat videos and mindless entertainment like
my life depends on it.

~~~
selune
You overestimate tech literacy of the majority of Russian population. Very
small percentage is engaged with playing videogames or knows how to use
torrents.

People are given lots of distractions though - so many controversial,
absolutely absurd laws have been introduced in the past few years everybody
talks about (about fighting homosexual propaganda, forbidding adoption for
foreigners, blasphemy laws and so on). Internet restrictions are like a drop
in the sea of craziness and not even the most relevant one for the majority,
or controversial, or loud.

~~~
nabla9
The real power in Russia is within two cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's
the urban and relatively highly educated population in these two cities that
decides the fate of Russia, not the majority.

~~~
selune
I might be pessimistic because I am in close contact with that demographic
(lots of my friends are young, educated, comparatively well-off guys from
Moscow working in tech) and, pardon my French, they decide shit. Oligarchs
decide the fate of Russia.

~~~
dmix
Yet the oligarch’s power plays and Russia’s tough posturing seems popular
among the population. Or at least tolerable to the average person.

How do you account for that?

~~~
woodandsteel
For one thing, Putin controls the media so they have been propagandized.
That's why he is so afraid of the internet.

Beyond that, due to Russia's sad history, the population has pretty low
standards and expectations for its leaders.

------
shmerl
That's really just a symptom, while the disease is the dictatorship which can
do whatever it wants disregarding the people.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar.

~~~
shmerl
What's flameable here? It's all factual and not the matter of dispute. And the
point is that fixing symptoms won't help until the root of the problem is
fixed. And I'm not saying protesters are wrong or anything. It's just that the
problem is a lot deeper.

~~~
dang
It was far from "all factual", and clearly in dispute since someone
immediately disputed it.

If you post strong political claims using pejorative language like "disease",
"dictatorship", and "disregarding the people" (which in fact is almost all of
what you said), you're going to take threads like this further into flamewar
whether you mean to or not. That's bad for thoughtful discussion and therefore
off topic here.

Most of us are living in contexts where our strongly held political/national
views feel obvious and unobjectionable. But the minute you open up to a much
broader context, such as a highly international forum like HN, it becomes
painfully clear that this is not the case.

~~~
shmerl
Who disputed it? The only ones who "dispute" the autocratic nature of power in
Russia are government backed trolls. That's not considered dispute by any
means.

And trying to be neutral or "soft" about these kind of things ends up in
whitewashing it. It sounds strong, because the problem is serious.

~~~
dang
The commenter who replied to you disputed it. Jumping to "government backed
trolls" is exactly the mentality I was just trying to describe. That's just a
form of assuming your conclusion, you have no evidence for saying it, and in
fact it explicitly breaks the site guidelines to insinuate it. (Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.))

The range of legit opinion is much wider than most people think. That has
become very obvious to us, looking at the data left by millions of readers,
voters, and commenters.

------
sobi392
The beauty of the network and hyperconnection. It's like you can try and
maintain a hierarchical structure with all the energy and resources you have.
But the more the nodes within your hierarchy are connected to external
networks the less chance you ever have of maintaining the integrity of the
hierarchy.

There is a threshold of contentedness above which it doesn't matter one bit
what the hierarchy does to maintain integrity. China will stay separate for
longer because they disconnected much earlier, but their anxiety over the
trade deal just shows how hard it is. Britain too is going to pay a price.
Putin is waking up too late. The Network will assimilate all. The thresholds
have been crossed long ago.

~~~
qaq
You highly underestimate power of totalitarian state

~~~
homerfk
There aren't any models from history of what happens to totalitarian states
when their population is connected to a much larger external network.

This is the first generation of totalitarian leaders that has to figure out
how to handle the "connectedness". They will do the obvious thing and try to
disconnect. There is nothing to suggest it will result in anything but a loss
to the state and to them.

~~~
qaq
In case of Russia those in power don't care about that loss they need enough
people to do resource extraction and to serve in military and that's about it.
Their families live in London and Miami and don't have to contend with
whatever crap this will result in.

------
blakejustblake
_> The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the
far east had all been officially authorized._

How subversive.

~~~
ethelward
I don't know where you live, but is it not the same (i.e. you need official
approbation to plan a protest) in most countries?

~~~
PeterZhizhin
Yes. Except that in Russia this works a little bit different. You need a
permission (not approbation) from the authorities for any political
gatherings. Otherwise, everyone gathering risks spending 15 days in jail (or
$500 fines, median monthly salary after tax $300) for gathering illegally.
Usually they forbid them, so that was an exception.

~~~
egao1980
That's not how it works. You don't need permission to rally. You notify local
government about the date and preferred place and number of people. If the
place is available - you rally there if not you're given an alternative place.

~~~
lambdadmitry
First, you don't always get an alternative place, lately local authorities
started just denying the permission. Second, even if they propose an
alternative, it's somewhere on the outskirts and/or at extremely inconvenient
time. You can find a big bunch of examples of both at [1] (in Russian).

[1]: [https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-
ak...](https://ovdinfo.org/news/2018/04/25/otkazy-v-soglasovanii-akciy-nam-ne-
car)

------
telaport
The proper US response to the 2016 meddling would have been a NATSEC law that
said no US based social media company could allow for 5 years any Russian IP
address to connect to their services, or they would suffer massive fines.
Facebook and Twitter for their role in the attack would be fined $5 Billion
Dollars each and forced to provide policies within 1 year to prevent this from
happening again, or face the threat of becoming regulated by the US
government. All user accounts that belonged to Russian citizens as well as the
Russian oligarchs and politicians were to be frozen for 5 years. US and EU
Banks would be required to sanction Russians Oligarchs and Putin's interests.

Basically you would have instantly made Russian life a living digital
hellscape for 5 years, at which point things could be lifted provided there
were signed binding treaties and assurances that the type of attack in 2016
would never happen again. If attacks resumed the next round would last 10
years and be twice as severe.

If we're going to destroy net neutrality and impart government fascism, or
have bizzaro government rulings that get throw out in court, this is how we
should have done it, and this is the cause we should have done it for.

~~~
simion314
Is this possible technically? The story is about trying to block Telegram and
finding out that is impossible because of VPNs, IP changes(tech details) why
do you think you can prevent Russian trolls to post on social media with a
law? You block eh innocent people that are not technically sophisticated at
best

