NYT piece worth reading on what’s happening with Russia’s internet right now: Article
Quick background: Since early March, Moscow and St. Petersburg have experienced widespread mobile internet blackouts — not just blocked apps, but full mobile data shutdowns. Telegram is reportedly being blocked entirely starting in April.
The government regulator Roskomnadzor now has authority to disconnect Russia from the global internet entirely. Some regions are on “whitelist” mode — meaning everything is blocked except state-approved services like Yandex and government portals.
This article accompanied a longer piece about the impact of the outages. It’s scary.
I’m interested in whether or not there’s a way around this government censorship which could expand to Europe and North America under the right circumstances.
Russia is moving to a whitelist-only Internet, so any bypass will no longer work. That being said, Russian netizens have started using Meshstatic, a decentralised network that doesn’t use Internet. Article
For now, they use it to communicate with friends and family, for up to 100 km 10-50km. But it would technically be possible to set up clandestine networks where someone get access to normal internet.
They can try banning it but they can’t confiscate existing devices. Also, the cost of banning those is superior to the benefits, for now. (To be fair, that’s also the case of Russian internet whitelisting ).
I don’t think they will bother unless the Russian meshstatic community can figure out a way to create an actual internet (at minimum a public text platform/forum) with the tech.
The Tor threads are interesting. Thanks for posting them.
After reading them it seems like the most effective “solution” is social and legal, not technology. And, so far, at least from my limited outsider view, it’s a cat and mouse game with the Russian government marshaling unlimited resources.
Will organized political resistance, international pressure, and the economic self-harm Russia imposes on itself by cutting off its technical class from the global internet end this censorship nonsense?
A full whitelist accelerates brain drain among exactly the people Russia needs to maintain the infrastructure. So, maybe there are cracks in that infrastructure that can be exploited. But, this seems like a return to Soviet style censorship.
I wonder if Russia will be the next China GFW. I got an old grandfathered Yandex account from back when they do mailhosting for custom domain for free. Back then they allowed upto 1000 mailbox of 5gb each for $0, now gimped to just 5 mailbox due to the sanction and whatnot but its still works and actual somewhat nice with ipv6, caldav, caldav etc. Can’t send nor receive mail to Proton due to blockage at their isp level though.
China still operates on a extensive blacklist and heuristic-based system, as to keep those who really want to connected. Russia has moved well pass that in a very short period. Russia is now an hybrid between China model and North Korea’s
I read an article in the FT (IIRC) a few months ago that said the Russian’s are investing heavily in developing their own tech’ mainly because western sanctions have exposed some serious vulnerabilities caused by dependencies on western companies for both hardware and software maintenance by the big tech giants. TBH I don’t blame them because the internet has been hijacked by the western tech’ giants such that it has now become a billboard for western commerce and government propaganda with the US taking the lion’s share as you would expect.
Expect to see two internets in the not too distant future, intereast and interwest. North America and maybe Europe in one, with China and Russia along with the global south in the other. All depends upon who is resident in the Whitehouse, but wouldn’t surprise me though if the EU decided to go it alone too.
Bandwidth on Meshtastic pretty much limits it to messaging and other low bandwidth applications. The “radio preset” with the highest bandwidth maxes out at just under 22 kpbs, not much faster than old analog telephone dial up modems. See: Radio Settings | Meshtastic
Meshtastic is nonexistent right now, size wise. Tor’s bridges infrastructure is working though and stable enough considering the circumstances. I guess DW/I2P is the only way to go. Get ready friends, no matter where you are, they learn from each other eagerly and fast.
In an ideal world, this would be enough for everything that doesn’t need video and images. But I am not even sure this forum could load with under a MB
Yeah, and to add a few points, Meshtastic is actually just not a viable replacement for basically anything except for unencrypted text sent over very short distances where anyone can see what you sent. Actual range is about 1km in actual use cases in my testing with a wide range of devices. (Unless you set up a network of broadcast antennas, but this makes it even less likely your messages get delivered due to how they do routing.) Even over very short distances there’s no guarantee your message gets delivered due to the way they do routing. Enabling encryption makes setting up the network vastly more janky and basically makes it very hard to add new members, let alone anything “public". It’s barely a viable solution for sending small amounts of text, definitely not for internet.
Before the problem with Ukraine became militarised the Russian’s had already taken a majority stake holding in the Finnish company Jolla, better known for the development of Sailfish OS. Using Sailfish OS as a base they have now released their own mobile OS ‘Aurora’ initially only for governmental and military purposes but the plan it would seem is to release it to the public later this year.
It’s native linux (no Android) although it most likely could run Waydroid in a container same as Sailfish can. If you are a FOSS fan you will be impressed as it has desktop capabilities built in too. The screenshots in post 357 onward are eye candy for sure. Chinese hardware as you would expect as the Chinese are buying so much oil and gas off them they need to balance the books somehow, so exporting consumer goods into Russia to replace the previous but now sanctioned European manufacturers is top priority for the Chinese, particularly so in the automotive sector.
Here’s a rutube video of someone installing an aarch64 version of the aurora OS demo’ build on to a QEMU supported VM. Looking closer you can see that ARM and X86_64 versions are also available to download.
Got it. To be fair, I didn’t think a real modern Internet could be achieved. But a lowkey, slow but working Internet could be achieved. I guess the better term is local intranets.
Hopefully Meshtatic work on the max range, so cross-border ‘Internet smuggling’ becomes possible.
