Putin To Discuss Plans For Disconnecting Russia From the Internet 241
New submitter GlowingCat writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin and several high-ranking officials will discuss the security of the Russian segment of the Internet at the meeting of the Russian Security Council next week. According to various reports, the officials will make a number of decisions about regulating the use of the Internet in Russia. This includes the ability to cut off the Russian Internet, known as Runet, from the outside world, in case of emergency.
Dibs! (Score:5, Funny)
I call dibs on their IP blocks!
eternal June (Score:5, Interesting)
From chernenko@kremvax.UUCP Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
Relay-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site mcvax.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 4/1/84 (SU840401); site kremvax.UUCP
Path: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
From: chernenko@kremvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.general,eunet.general,net.politics,eunet.politics
Subject: USSR on Usenet
Message-ID:
Date: Sun, 1-Apr-84 15:02:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: kremvax.0001
Posted: Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Apr-84 12:26:02 GMT
Organization: MIIA, Moscow
Lines: 41
Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody.
One reason for us to join this network has been to have a means of having an open discussion forum with the American and European people and making clear to them our strong efforts towards attaining peaceful coexistence between the people of the Soviet Union and those of the United States and Europe.
We have been informed that on this network many people have given strong anti-Russian opinions, but we believe they have been misguided by their leaders, especially the American administration, who is seeking for war and domination of the world. By well informing those people from our side we hope to have a possibility to make clear to them our intentions and ideas.
Some of those in the Western world, who believe in the truth of what we say have made possible our entry on this network; to them we are very grateful. We hereby invite you to freely give your comments and opinions.
Here are the data for our backbone site:
Name: moskvax
Organization: Moscow Institute for International Affairs
Contact: K. Chernenko
Phone: +7 095 840401
Postal-Address: Moscow, Soviet Union
Electronic-Address: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
News: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
Mail: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on this network. So:
NA ZDAROVJE!
-- K. Chernenko, Moscow, USSR
Modpoints (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The historical posting from April 1 and a phone number to match the date? It's entertaining at least.
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Erm, this was posted on April 1st... and the phone number has 840401 as the last 6 digits....denoting april 1st, and it also appears in the Posting-Version in two formats.
Nice one AC.
Re:eternal June (Score:5, Funny)
Remember, McCain has clearly stated that he knows how to recognize a moderate Syrian rebel from a terrorist, even though he can't distinguish a crazy person from a reasonable vice presidential choice.
PLEASE! (Score:5, Funny)
Please disconnect .RU from the internet. Spam and hacking down %25 in one whack
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I wasn't aware that I had a problem until my Joomla and Wordpress websites became unstable several months ago. The webhosting company claimed that the problem wasn't on their end. So I had to investigate what was going on. Low and behold, I found log files with all the failed login attempts. The various security hardening guides recommended changing the name of the default admin accounts and using strong passwords. That alone reduced the number of attacks by half since the hackers will have to guess both th
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I wasn't aware that I had a problem until my Joomla and Wordpress websites became unstable several months ago.
What? You were not aware that Joomla and Wordpress are being cracked wide open on a regular basis?
It's almost the same as:
U: "Hi, I am running windows."
A: "And?"
U: "I have a problem..."
A: "You already said that."
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Yes please disconnect yourselves or we can do it for you! Where's my cable cutters?
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What are you waiting for?
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Re:PLEASE! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, in my experience, it's pretty much far too high.
~80% of brute force attacks against SSH and curious attempts at hitting my Postfix servers come from China.
Russia's somewhere in the other 20%, of course, but not really standing clear above the US (fuck you, AWS), Georgia (the country, not the state), India, and various eastern European nations.
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I'm around the same. The attacks come from where there are unsecured IPs, not where the bad guys live. For a while, IP ranges which consisted of DSL or cable modem clients were on the top of the attack source list. On average, nations coming up to speed tend to have average people who are not up to speed on security. This is why in China, malware from pirated app stores is a major problem while it is relatively rare in the US and Western Europe.
Of course, it can't hurt to block by IP ranges in the first
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Most of my SSH attempts come from Brazil
Imagine how... (Score:2, Insightful)
... every multiplayer game experience would improve overnight if they did this.
Captcha: Repress
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
Internet disconnects YOU!
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
it's your retarted, idiot.
Please go ahead and di it Mr. Putin (Score:3, Insightful)
He would be doing the world a favor by removing a very large number of hackers, phishers and virus kiddies from the net.
Please cut them off as soon as possible!!
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In Soviet times (Score:2)
they would've simply set up their own version of the internet, the Cosmonet. All of the iron curtain countries would be connected.
Gosh I miss the old days.
Re:In Soviet times (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The Iron Curtain countries have moved on. Some of the Soviet Socialist Republics have moved on as well, some have not and one (in particular) moved on but was then dragged back.
OH NOES! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OH NOES! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well - when they figure out that the income channels that the internet provides suddenly stops they will probably take action.
oh noes (Score:5, Funny)
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haha yeah, that's the one thing we'll miss if Russia goes offline.
The US already had this power for a long time (Score:3, Informative)
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Except they don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
Not all root servers are in the US. Not all root servers are controlled by US companies/government agencies. And there is nothing preventing a cut of potion of the Internet/group of ISPs to route any or all of the these IPs to their own DNS servers.
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Except they don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
Not all root servers are in the US. Not all root servers are controlled by US companies/government agencies. And there is nothing preventing a cut of potion of the Internet/group of ISPs to route any or all of the these IPs to their own DNS servers.
The still control the majority of the routing. They can cripple the internet any time they want and they can get their loyal partners in europe to follow suit.
Re:The US already had this power for a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
Not all root servers are in the US. Not all root servers are controlled by US companies/government agencies. And there is nothing preventing a cut of potion of the Internet/group of ISPs to route any or all of the these IPs to their own DNS servers.
The still control the majority of the routing. They can cripple the internet any time they want and they can get their loyal partners in europe to follow suit.
This is the kind of control that exists by consensus though.
The reason that half of Europe and Asia go along with the US, is that at some level most US policies around things like the Internet tend to make sense. I don't care for the intrusive surveillance, but when you look at it at a national level the US comes along, installs a bunch of gear, and likely shares all the data obtained from it with the country that gave them access (I doubt they give them access to everything internationally, but I wouldn't be surprised if a small country could get more data on what is on their own networks by collaborating with the US than trying to do it themselves, and for the most part their interests are aligned with the US on the sort of stuff they'd be looking for anyway).
The US can't just arbitrarily enact some kind of lasting blockade on the internet, because they wouldn't have the support on the ground to do that.
Now, the US could exercise control over data travelling through undersea cables that cross its territories, and when it comes to the Pacific I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of those (as a result of WWII). Land routes from Europe to Asia, however, are probably fairly free from US direct control.
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You're being naive. As we saw from the leaks last year, if the *hardware* is American, then it's controlled by the US govt. The NSA forces US companies to include hardware modifications into the products they sell, to enable spying and control even through an airgap.
So yeah, maybe that root server isn't physically in the US, but it's obviously critical strategic infrastructure, and you can ass
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They control all of the root traffic across the internet so they could not only shut down the entire internet
This is a silly concept. I mean "the internet" is a bunch of lines (I know some are wireless) that connect in some way. And in this way, each country has their own internet, and they, so far, all agree to connect their figurative LAN to the figurative WAN. If the U.S. decided to cut off it's connection to the rest of the world, that wouldn't stop France from still communicating with Africa, or any other country besides the U.S. I'm not sure that is true for Canada, and/or Mexico (even all of South Ameri
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So this planning by Russia is a logical move. How to selectively cut off foreign regional areas from local national internet, whilst maintaining local national internet and select international connections. This is something that every country capable of doing so should do so. The internet is an essential part of modern communications infrastructure and method should be established to ensure the local national infrastructure continues to operate regardless of government or corporate machinations in foreign
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Possible but unlikely. The main reason why SOPA and PIPA were not passed wasn't the protests and website shutdowns, but the fact that Russia and China made it firm that cutting their websites from the Internet would be viewed as the same thing as a naval blockade... an act of war. With Congress afraid of their own shadow, it is no wonder why they backed down, saying it was the will of the people.
No way the entire Internet will be shut down by the US. First thing that will happen is that the UN would get
boondock saints... (Score:4, Funny)
as soon as i heard this I thought of that geenie joke from the boondock saints...
...IT guy goes, "You mean to tell me Russia is off the Internet?"
Genie goes, "Yeah."
He says, "Well, um, I'll have a Coke, then."
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Why don't we help him out? (Score:2)
In case of emergency (Score:4, Insightful)
In case of emergency
Emergency for Putin or Russian citizens? I can't think of any possible scenario which can be called an emergency where I personally would benefit from having _less_ information.
I'm disgusted that people like Putin are actually of the same species as myself.
Re:In case of emergency (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you think of a scenario which can be called an emergency where you would benefit from protection from malicious misinformation?
Think hard.
Re:In case of emergency (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you think of a scenario which can be called an emergency where you would benefit from protection from malicious misinformation?
Think hard.
No.
I can think of situations where providing accurate information from a more trusted source would protect me from "misinformation," but I can't think of any emergency or security situation where I would benefit from being cut off from [alleged] misinformation.
Just because people disagree with you, doesn't mean they didn't think "hard" enough. I always wonder though, what sort of people think that thinking is like lifting weights, where you can do it "harder." I mean, an intelligent person just thinks. It just happens. Trying to think "harder" means being distracted by some goal, and that doesn't improve the thinking process. If I think about the most difficult chess tournaments I competed in, my best wins against stronger opponents, I wasn't thinking "harder." I was thinking more easily.
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You're so caught up in your desire to defend your ridiculous "free expression" ideology that you won't acknowledge that facts exist, or that lies exist. There's a huge blind spot that you can't see past because you've decided that your ideology is beyond critical examination.
That pedantic crap about "thinking hard" just reinforces that for all your cleverness, you're just another idiot who has been crippled by his preconceptions.
You should probably stick to the contrived world of the chessboard and leave t
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I'd like to leave any and all real world problems to others too. Any takers?
Re:In case of emergency (Score:5, Insightful)
In case of war. Cut access to the internet and cyber attacks from enemy nations becomes harder.
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My advice to you is to read the links before posting them. They do not describe anything like what Russia is proposing.
I only clicked the "you" link. First I'd like to thank you for noticing the similarity between myself and President Obama, though I am not actually Mr. Obama.
Second, I'd like to point out that these are very different situations. The power that the Senate Committee voted to give to the President is the power to order companies to shut down networks during cyber-attacks capable of causing m
bitcoin (Score:2)
What happens to the block chain if the network is split, as in this case?
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People who thought a virtual item could be unique and valuable find out the hard way what anyone with common sense knew all along?
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That or they take the USB key carrying their wallet with them to a visit outside the country.
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Others can grab the IPv4 addresses that Russia is using today. Of course - Russia can start using the rest of the IP addresses that the world uses too.
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The answer is different in theory than it is in reality, but lets start with the theory first.
The network ca never practically be slit perfectly evenly, even if it is as more computing power is added to the problem one side will "win out" and the blockchain, by definition, is officially the longest (most complex) chain yet mined. So eventually the losing side would be undone, as if it never happened (within the scope of the blockchain... goods or services would still have been exchanged).
That assumes that a
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Double spends for anyone who can connect to both sides of the network. Essentially, there will be two ledgers, an International ledger and a Russian one. If you spend on the Russian ledger, the International ledger will still have your money. When the network rejoins, whatever ledger has the most hashing power behind it will be chosen as the correct one, and all the transactions from the other one will be retried on the new global ledger. If the network saw a new transaction spending a previous transaction's outputs, it would be rejected, as well as any spends referencing that transaction, and so on.
Thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to know.
This happened already.
I guess I've missed the news, any links for my lazy ass?
Bitcoin sounds like a nice investment for dictators willing to further screw their populaces.
Go ahead, turn it off! See if I care! (Score:2)
While I'd love to imagine the hilarity that would ensue if Russia were to attempt to completely disconnect the internet in order to run their own entirely isolated private one, I doubt this is in reality what would happen. Even if they managed to keep most or all of their population from getting traffic from international social/news networks in, I have the sneaking suspicion that somehow the SPAM would still find its way out.
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China more or less manages that, only they still allow limited access to the outside. You'd be surprised what an entire nation can do, if it puts it mind to it.
Not New (Score:2)
We have talked about this before for the US [slashdot.org].
Cut Russia off in an 'Emergency' (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking out there at other countries use of this sort of power, the only thing it's ever been used for is to crush political opposition including peaceful protests, and to hide government abuse at the time it's happening.
Ah... (Score:2)
So I guess Russias enemies have never had the idea to simply have compromised servers/equipment inside the Russian border... Oh No! I just gave it away! Russia's doomed!
Russian software (Score:2)
In case of emergency... (Score:2)
... like the Russian populace becoming too educated to put up with him any more.
"Obama has a cutoff switch!" (Score:2)
"I want one too!" - Putin
Hey, anyone think these world leaders got the sudden urge to have these things after seeing the first episode of Black Mirror? XD
What could possibly go wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
People forget how much we depend on the internet for basic things. (Writing from a USA perspective).
Without the internet, suddenly all the Cisco phones can't check in daily. The windows computers freeze up during windows update (imagine if he flips the switch *during* an update), cash registers can't authenticate credit cards, most iPhone apps fail (maps!)...
Is Russia as internet-dependent as we are?
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Fart apps and Windows updates could fail?! NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!
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Is Russia as internet-dependent as we are?
Russia is independent of the USA part of the Internet to a degree you can hardly imagine. They have their own Facebook (vk), their own Google (yandex), two DNS root-server anycast instances, and even for credit cards they'll not be very sorry as Russians prefer debit cards from their own banks over Master/VISA credit cards.
Sure it'd be noticeable and some stuff would stop working, but it is certainly feasable.
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Russia knows most of its spending on Western tech was useful but the reality of phone home or back doors, trap doors, poor quality crypto or other access cannot be totally understood network wide.
The ability to turn the net off to bulk external chatter would be a safe option for Russia to have fully explored over time. Russia can then just let its air gapped internal networks function and Russians would underst
Sounds like a plan! (Score:2)
If they want to have their own internet with hookers and blackjack... have at it!
I've seen the preliminary network architecture. (Score:2)
Their DNS root and primary router will be KREMVAX. [wikipedia.org]
Cool! (Score:2)
A lot of the child pornography we see comes from servers in Russia. Most of the spam we get comes from servers in Russia. Now, wouldn't it be nice if Russia cuts itself off the internet?
What would we lose if... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like Texas (Score:3)
The Republic of Texas has its own power grid. I've heard rumors in the distance past that they have the ability to isolate their phone lines. I see no reason to doubt that they kept up with the times when it comes to the Internet.
Of course... it's just a rumor.
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For some of us, both seem to be places where demagogs whip up political frenzy to manipulate the masses, mindless violence becomes normal (hello open carry), citizens loose their rights (reproductive rights, for one) and oligarchs warp the system to grab even more power and money (home of the Bushes). Then there's the macho culture, cult of alcoh
Disconnecting (Score:2)
Well, that would runet...
Is this a promise?!? (Score:2)
Imagine how much less spamming and hacking we'll have! No more Russian brides. Yeah!
BUT BUT BUT!!! (Score:2)
Where will we get the endless stream of videos of people hurting themselves doing foolish things? That's a pretty big share of the internet right there!
Re:"Emergency" (Score:5, Informative)
US Communications Act of 1934
“Upon proclamation by the President that there exists war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States, the President, if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense, may suspend or amend, for such time as he may see fit, the rules and regulations applicable to any or all stations or devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations within the jurisdiction of the United States”
Then, of course, there is Standard Operating Procedure 303 [rt.com]
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"devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations"
Does this mean they'll confiscate the alternator on my car? And what about my brain?!
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"devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations"
Does this mean they'll confiscate the alternator on my car? And what about my brain?!
No, it means they "can" not that they 'will".
They're unlikely to expend the effort only capable of broadcasting gibberish or noise so both your alternator and brain are probably safe.
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No, it means they "can" not that they 'will".
No... it means they say they can. They cannot legally confiscate property without due process contrary to the 5th amendment.
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In what country?
In my country, that bastion of freedom known as the USA, they simply take your fucking money and your property whenever they want, just by saying you got it from drugs. It doesn't matter if it's illegal, or contrary to the 5th amendment, because that's just a stupid old piece of paper. And besides, they get to decide what words mean.
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PBS article [pbs.org]
Re:"Emergency" (Score:5, Funny)
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I think "Russia is acting like it is 1934" is fairly accurate.
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Indeed. All countries have regulations and laws in order to control cirtually EVERYTHING during a war. From a curfew to kill people or modify laws.
Russia would not be different. This is not news
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So instead of attacking the message, or even the popular attack the messenger, you are attacking the envelope the message was in.
Now that I think about it, brilliant!. But I'm not sure it is as effective as you might think.
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A Russian Internet disconnection would seriously alter the power balance/politics in EVE Online too...
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Not to mention that most of the EU Warcraft servers won't be able to put together a decent raid guild anymore.
Re:Sure why not (Score:5, Funny)
I think you're confusing VPN (virtual private network) with VMN (virtual magical network). The difference is one requires a connection to the internet outside russia to work, the other is magic.
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VPN doesn't work when you physically disconnect.
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Nope, it most certainly is not.
All I can see here is the Soviet Union rising again. I grew up around the fringes (outside) and somehow it seems worse this time around.
Want a laugh? The Scottish Referendum and the Soviet observers [theguardian.com] are mouthing off that the whole affair was not "free and fair", that it had been manipulated.
This Vlad is sick of this garbage. Oh, and I was in the Ukraine a couple of months back. They have a right-wing lunatic fringe running at around 5% but most of them do not deserve this
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All I can see here is the Soviet Union rising again.
I'd say this is more like the rise of Imperial Russia again than the USSR. Russia has always had a chip on its shoulder concerning the rest of Europe. Not that the USSR was that much different from Imperial Russia.
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I am ZMundo, Prince of the 52 States of Nigeria! I have an expiring inheritance I would like to share with you if you will provide me with your credit card information!
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