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Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?
307 points by izik on Aug 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 144 comments
Hello hackers. What would be your advice for Belarus protesters to keep connected to each other and the rest of the world.There are some solutions for short-range communication (e.g. https://briarproject.org/), but what are the solutions for the mid-range (e.g. city) and long-range (hundreds of kilometers) communication? I suppose the HAM radio could be used for that or AMPRNet. Any ideas how to provide low-cost, decentralized, communication infrastructure for the time when internet is cut off?



There is no plausible solution for multitude of reasons listed in other comments.

What I suggest, perhaps as last ditch effort, is look in the opposite direction: attacking the remaining Beltelecom and mobile layer2/3 connectivity in the country.

The only reason the limited networking is still up and running is not some residual generosity of the regime. It is because traditional PSTN and long range special comms services are all routed via IP trunking these days. Disrupting these will also disrupt operations level communication between KGB, police and presidential security units that are squashing the protests.

(Жыве Беларусь!)


> There is no plausible solution for multitude of reasons listed in other comments. > What I suggest, perhaps as last ditch effort, is look in the opposite direction: attacking the remaining Beltelecom and mobile layer2/3 connectivity in the country.

Is that really plausible though? I'm sure it's technically doable, but I'm not sure it's realistic or even a good idea if you could pull it off.

Who has the ability _and_ incentive to carry out such an attack? You could hire someone to do a DDoS attack, for example, but who would pay for that?

Let's say you've pulled it off. Have you considered the collateral damage?

Can we be certain that whoever has the capacity to do this will only ever use it "for good"? What's "for good" anyway?

Have you even considered that not all the people who remained connected in the country may be government officials? I don't know about this specific Internet blackout, but quite often other organisations (e.g., international NGOs, consulates/embassies, hotels) remain connected (see this for example: https://qz.com/africa/1884387/ethiopia-internet-is-back-on-b...).


> Is that really plausible though? I'm sure it's technically doable, but I'm not sure it's realistic or even a good idea if you could pull it off.

I'd say a blackout may well pull more people to the street, and open more opportunities for spontaneous openings. The same was in USSR in 1991.

People are actually being attracted by the sound of gunfire, fire, and smoke, if all other decision making inputs are cut off.

Sounds of intense gunfire in a city often result in people being inadvertently "herded" into big crowds, and formation of street-to-street fronts, which result in assailants being surrounded.

Then, when people see enemies surrounded, and trembling in fear, human primal instincts kick in, and crazy things happen. Moscow 1991, Bishkek 2010, Kyiv 2014, Istanbul 2016 all demonstrated that effect.

How powerful can it be? There were historical precedents when such spontaneous crowds went on offensive again fully armed military forces, and won, with Istanbul, and Bishkek events being the most vivid.

In Bishkek, a column of smoke rising from a key government building, along with a comms blackout, was enough to instantaneously gather a crowd of 5000-6000 bystanders, and onlookers who in just 3-4 hours turned into am unstoppable human wave.

It were these complete randoms who then marched against an elite SF battalion, 10+ snipers, fire from 12.7mm, took 5 RPG shots (!!!), and, in the end, still managed to steamroll that battalion to the last man. Even the relatively tame footage that managed to escape Youtube censorship if still horrifying.

I cannot find the original Euronews footage on the net now, but here is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3zUSe2peRE&t=30s (quite intense, be prepared.) Take a look at the footage starting at 0:30, and give attention to what happens after 1:05.


From the "Kyrgyz Revolution" wikipedia page. "the Eurasian Daily Monitor reported on 1 April that, for two weeks, the Kremlin had used the Russian mass media to run a negative campaign against Bakiyev.[20] Russia controls much of the media in Kyrgyzstan.[20] The campaign sought to associate Bakiyev and his son, Maxim Bakiyev, with an allegedly corrupt businessman whose company had worked in a government project. "


Yes, not to say that Russia was a beneficiary of all of that was more than an understatement. The end result of that was the closure of USA base there, at a laughable cost for the Kremlin.

It does not still negate the fact that Bakiyev totally deserved that outcome, as an amoral, corrupt, and incompetent president, regardless of whom capitalised on the outcome of his ousting.

USA has a terrible talent betting on political leaders who are almost certain to lose power.


In fact I don't think you can do that with DDoS attack easily. What I had in mind is more like a physical attack on switching equipment at a handful of branch exchange or backbone stations. That would require getting the network layout documentation, but IT sector in Belarus is enormous and well connected.

Yes there will be collateral of course, the most serious is to emergency response services who use the same network.

I realise it sounds a bit like that Death Star vent attack, but it is still more realistic than a Bluetooth mesh network that doesn't fold with more than a handful users.


It might be much more plausible than you think. A single rogue engineer can put it down so well that it would take days to detangle in even normal circumstances.


"...will also disrupt operations level communication between KGB, police and presidential security units..." Unless they have dedicated, completely separate communication lines for the security, army and the president...


The military uses it's own relay network, and will of course be largely unaffected. The military was also least involved in the crackdown, with an attempt to involve paratroops in Brest two nights ago. The response was apathetic and they didn't leave their trucks.

Police and KGB use packet switching network at levels beyond tactical, and it piggybacks on civilian infrastructure.


Moscow built an entirely second subway deep under the first for government use only so this isn’t at all out of the ordinary.


Isn't the D6 system a myth made up for Metro 2033? Or at least never really confirmed?


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2


Tell me, if it is true they do not exist, how can it be that I have eaten one?

Alleged photos of D6: https://web.archive.org/web/20150609013409/http://vk.com/alb...


Which I doubt. It'll all be done by the lowest bidder the easiest way... Which is insecure VoIP over the public internet.


I'm surprised Scuttlebutt [1][2] hasn't gotten a mention.

It allows you to create your own social media feed with messages, responses and media completely offline. You then gossip that feed to anyone you want, for example via the local (WiFi) network or even by USB stick. Long range communication is done by car or by train.

There are servers (pubs) that can be used for more real-time communication. Or to make the information available on the internet after it has been sneaked out of Belarus. The main pubs have a dedicated, friendly and active community. [3]

[1] https://scuttlebutt.nz

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xjphvcd8Sw

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbzGpKffQuM


One really dangerous thing about it is that once you send something it just won't disappear.

What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet and all that, but no reason to write everything in stone - especially in times and places where governments thinks it is a good idea to cut Internet.


>One really dangerous thing about it is that once you send something it just won't disappear.

That thing is called Internet..Information never goes away, not even in the real world.


It's not that black and white. Some communicators for example delete messages after a specified time and don't archive by default. It's not perfect, and it's not supposed to be. But it still raises the bar a bit - if your peer is not compromised, you can at least hope the history goes away.

Same could be done with "permanent" message by rotating shared encryption keys and discarding old ones for example, so you can build something with better privacy on top.


>It's not that black and white. Some communicators for example delete messages after a specified time and don't archive by default. It's not perfect, and it's not supposed to be

If something is not secure you can forget it by default, there is NO information system than can securely delete and protect it's delivered end user information, no DRM no Snapchat nothing, the consumed and delivered message can always be seen.


Scrub the information and rotate encryption keys with enforced deletion.

Sure, this would not get around a dedicated attacker, or screenshotting, but that's the same as printed information, or information transfer over radio. Someone can always listen in if they have enough resources and time. Even closed networks can be infiltrated with enough persistence.


First, that's why I wrote "hope" and mentioned it's not perfect. But "the consumed and delivered message can always be seen" is just incorrect. IF both sides destroy either the message or the encryption keys for it, then no, it can't be seen. (Just the metadata about it being sent)


> is just incorrect.

Your thinking is too narrow, i just make a screenshot of your message, or filming your Video from the Screen, that's what i mean by 'consumed', but yes if both party's delete the message normal encryption is enough even 'just' with forward secrecy, but the metadata is often much more interesting (even the NSA said that).


Isn’t deleting expired encryption keys how Snapchats are ‘disappeared’?


All of these censorship resistant communication projects tend to assume that the network needs to be low latency, always connected, etc. It’s far easier to build a robust network if you relax that assumption, and cheap hard drives + e2e encryption mean you ought to be able to route a large volume of private p2p messaging / email in addition to any curated content that’s distributed more widely.

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/03/inside-cubas-massive-weekl... https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal


scuttlebutt, mentioned elsewhere in these comments works entirely offline, and many of its users have absolutely terrible internet connections. It's designed fro that situation and works just fine.


Fidonet comes to mind, though it worked over the landline phone network.


Agreed 100%. That's precisely how Relaynet works (hence the name): https://relaynet.network/


I read the whole page and didn't find any information how it is supposed to actually work. The page compares Relaynet with Starlink and Ballons, but then it doesn't say how Relaynet work.


Hey Urza. There's a page and a corresponding video for each type of stakeholder: end users, service providers and couriers (who step in to restore connectivity with a secure sneakernet). Those are quite high-level on purpose.

If you're interested in the cryptographic and networking details, the specs is probably what you want. At least the introduction to the core spec: https://specs.relaynet.network/RS-000


Hi, unfortunately I am not much wiser from the specs. It describes higher level network/app protocols, no mention on the underlying mechanism of communication. Can you give me example of the hardware on which it is supposed to run and how it would work in Belarus?


Hi Urza,

(Apologies for the late reply. I'm new around here and I didn't remember that HN won't send me an email notifications for replies to my comments.)

Before getting into Relaynet, let's consider how Internet apps work: They have a client and a server, and the client is responsible for producing and delivering its own data. That means that the server must be reachable and ready to respond to each request, at the exact time each takes place. This architecture (called Remote Procedure Call, RPC) is fine when the Internet is available, but it breaks when the Internet is cut off and it's also incompatible with alternative transports because they add a significant latency.

By contrast, Relaynet apps use a radically different architecture: Asynchronous messaging. Instead of clients/servers, apps have "endpoints"; and instead of requests/responses, endpoints exchange "messages". Endpoints delegate the delivery of such messages to one or more brokers, which we call "gateways" in Relaynet. This way, the sender and receiver don't have to be reachable and ready at the same time, because the gateways will keep a copy of each message until it reaches its final destination. Consequently, when the Internet is available, gateways will use it and messages would be delivered instantly, but when the Internet is cut off, gateways will switch to a secure sneakernet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet). Additionally, endpoint messages (called "parcels" in Relaynet) are end-to-end encrypted and signed, so gateways can't tamper with them or see what's inside.

Behind the scenes, Relaynet apps communicate over the Internet/sneakernets via two gateways: A private gateway (a standalone app on the user's device) and a public gateway (a server-side app). Say Twitter supports Relaynet and exposes an endpoint at https://api.twitter.com/relaynet: When you post a tweet, your Twitter app will encapsulate it in a parcel bound for https://api.twitter.com/relaynet, but instead of delivering the parcel by itself, it'd send it to its local private gateway, which will in turn send it to its public gateway, and which will finally deliver it to Twitter's endpoint. Now consider the case where the Twitter server wants to send you data: It'd post the data to your public gateway (e.g., https://eu.relaycorp.tech), which would in turn send to your private gateway, which will finally send it to the endpoint in your local Twitter app; in this direction, the parcel is bound for an opaque address derived from the public key of the endpoint (analogous to Bitcoin addresses).

Now, when the Internet is cut off, your two gateways get disconnected. That's when couriers (https://relaynet.network/couriers) would step in and provide a secure sneakernet. Couriers will physically transport parcels between a place disconnected from the Internet and one connected to it. However, since parcels contain the address of the recipient, and that address would identify the service when it's bound for an Internet host (e.g., https://api.twitter.com/relaynet), gateways will encapsulate those parcels in a new layer of end-to-end encryption -- You can think of it as an "offline TLS". So couriers (or anyone who intercepts them) won't be able to see or change the parcels being transported.

As you may have anticipated by now, for a preexisting, Internet-based service to work on Relaynet, its developer has to make client- and server-side changes to their software. Alternatively, if the service offers an API, a third party could build a Relaynet integration (that's what I did in the Relaynet proof of concept with Twitter: https://twitter.com/relaynet_/status/1089211336171679745). Also, if you're building a service from scratch, you could build a fully decentralised one that doesn't need any servers (see: https://relaynet.network/service-providers)

Relaynet won't need any new/special hardware: Private gateways will support Android 5+/Windows/Linux (macOS and iOS support is on the roadmap), so you can use Relaynet as long as your device runs on one of those platforms.

I highly recommend watching this 12-minute video to learn more about how couriers establish this connectivity and also to see a demo of the software couriers will use: https://youtu.be/UXuLz3q_6bo.

How could this have worked in Belarus? Let's first assume that the implementation of Relaynet is complete and at least one service (e.g., Twitter) is now compatible with it. Based on what I know about the situation (https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-disruption-hits-belar...), this could've been done:

- First of all, people should've ideally installed Relaynet and the Relaynet-compatible app(s) they wish to use before the election (whilst the Internet is available). Generally, people living under repressive regimes should aim to have Relaynet installed before contentious events like elections. Starting to use Relaynet without the Internet is possible but fiddly (https://github.com/relaycorp/relayverse/issues/1).

- Similarly, couriers should've (ideally) planned their routes in advance, especially if they'll be collaborating with other couriers or if they plan to use Latvian/Lithuanian/Polish mobile Internet operators near their borders (without actually crossing the border necessarily). Russian and Ukrainian operators could potentially work too. Couriers would've also identified places likely to remain connected to the Internet in the big cities (Minsk and Barysaw seem to have been remained connected to some extend, although a lot of that would've been government agencies: https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1293522490355064839).

- When the Internet was cut off, couriers would've stepped in by doing their route: Stopping at one or more locations without access to the Internet, and eventually getting to the nearest place with access to the Internet (somewhere in Minsk/Barysaw or near the border with another country).

- Each courier is free to charge their users if they want to (which would be reasonable, considering the risk and work they have to do), but we're not supporting that in any way in the software. That would be entirely between the courier and the user.

PS: All of this complexity is abstracted away from the end user. As far as they're concerned, all they need to do is install the private gateway and it'll default to a public gateway behind the scenes. Also, we won't be using this terminology with end users: The private gateway will simply be called the "Relaynet app".


Nice. Thanks. Sounds like it is built on similar principles to scuttlebutt.

When would relay-net be ready?


Agreed. They should only be low latency within a dense community, like say at a rally or in an urban neighborhood and even then, latency on the order of seconds is fine. As it is almost always more important to o communicate with those socially proximate to you than those further away.

I think the level of indirection and timelyness can be used as a filter, in that it ought to be modeled after the sneaker nets and human crowds/socialization. For example individual clients can ignore messages more than a configurable signed time/distance and configure their clients to only repeat at a certain rate. That way the network is robust to spam, because it relies on the movement and consensus of people to move messages long range.


During the arab spring, people in Tunisia managed to communicate with outside world thanks to proxies set by outside crackers on tunisian governement's servers. Turns out that when tyrants want to cut their people out of the internet, they still want access themselves.

If crackers around the world want to actually be useful, now is the time.


This duscussion is cute, but but situation in belarus is deteriorating and people are being beaten and tortured in jail. Open this with google translate yo get an idea: https://news.tut.by/society/696375.html

I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus. It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.


No offense but I think this is wrong. We’re trained by society and upbringing to think that only “appeals to management” can effect change- and that “doing it yourself” is amateurish.

There is some truth to this- but the world is entirely run by people who believe they can personally effect change through their actions, everyone else be damned.


Would you not agree that government ministers who can impose economic sanctions on the Lukashenko regime have more power than regular voters since they sit at the top of the power hierarchy?


They might, or they might not at all. Who knows what government can truly influence that man. Examples plenty of countries being sanctioned that simply ignore the sanctions and do their business elsewhere, or not at all, even if that means their people suffer the consequences.

I definitely support asking our governments to pressure their government. But I wouldn't ignore the fact that people in Belarus are be the ones that might be able to affect real change in Belarus.


Economic sanctions will severely hurt individual Belarusians, who are the ultimate consumers of those trade products. It is hard to imagine sanctions improving the quality of life and ability of protestors to communicate with the outside world.

Separately, I would expect American sanctions to push the country towards increased trade with Russia and China -- who are both allies of Lukashenko.


You are right, but then you should suggest what you believe we should be doing.

on individual level the best actuon I can think of is donating to help folks that lost and eye or were beaten withing an inch of their life.

Otherwise i am not sure what you could do, perhaps we could send equipment like radios, first aid and body protection / armor? Depending on your views you coupd even post crossbows. Would they arrive through customs, assuming you know who to post them to?

Lastly, you could travel there to join the protests, but realisticaly are you going to do that?


As a single person your options are to join with others, or buy an army. Not everyone can afford the latter.


It's funny because I thought your reply was cute.

>I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus.

Bahahaha. The US already has its hands full, there's no way on earth this gains traction when there's actual strategic priorities at the moment for them. Let the EU do something useful for once, they love talking about how much they help the world.

>Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

Again, bahahaha. This is going to end up like when everyone and their brother was a "Syrian Refugee" because they knew it'd get them into Europe. You may as well send some of the money to the prince of Nigeria while you're at it.


>Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

What about this one? https://www.facebook.com/donate/1123543824684874/ https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8rjj4ZxCNs


>It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

You just said how to evade the pressure.


I cant make sence of your post. Could you elaborate?


> It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.

Don’t they mostly depend on Putin money? Here in Europe we’ve had sanctions and been working for change for quite a while.

Doesn’t matter much when their dictator is backed by Russia.


> the free world

Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where protesting can cost you an eye (at least 20 people lost an eye last year in France's Gillets Jaunes protests).

Yes we still have it better than the Belorussians but free our world is certainly not.


Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.


We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed.

Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.


Well, there's freedom and there's liberty. We often use the former to include the latter, but they're completely different. We only have the freedom to do the right thing. We are not free to do evil things. We may have the liberty to do them, of course. Now in a liberal society like the US, we are at liberty to do many things we ought not which is partly motivated by either skepticism on the one hand and a wish to maintain the peace on the other because enforcing certain behaviors would actually result in an even worse status quo (there's a hint: make it uneconomical to suppress certain freedoms). So no perfect liberality exists nor could it. The question of which liberties ought to be tolerated is answered by our constitutions, but even those are bounded in practice. You have blasphemy laws and you have hate speech laws, both of which constrain speech. Now, I don't think which are in force is arbitrary or that it's all the same or relative--tyranny has an objective standard and not suppression of what I happen to want to do--but the fact that we always have had them is proof that freedom (liberty) of speech is always limited.

To your point, the proper way to characterize the current status quo is that a certain kind of leftist orthodoxy or ethos has come to dominate institutions, organizations, and corporations that otherwise pretend to some kind of "neutrality" in ways that don't actually obtain. So what you have is a religious war of sorts and this leftist religion currently has the upper hand. As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms. What irks me most is the mendacity. At least confessional states give you the courtesy of telling you they're confessional. You can work with that even if the confession is wrong and at least everyone's clear about the circumstances you're in instead of living in a fog of lies. But lying about ideological orientation, also while knowing fully well others disagree with it, is dishonest. But people are noticing. (As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services. Of course, that doesn't quite extend as nicely to laws. We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.)


I think it's very interesting that you delineate a line between freedom (you can say nazi stuff in the usa without going to jail) from liberty (that doesn't mean you won't get kicked out of walmart for saying nazi stuff inside the store), but then you turn around and say

> As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms.

I have no idea what "traditional lines" could mean here. Cause I could take it, for example, the traditional values of women and black people being less-than and thus their liberty to vote being illegal, has been "eliminated." Is that what you mean? What "traditional constraints" are being eliminated, and why do I get the sense from your post that this is bad? Furthermore, what new laws are being passed that "constrain liberties" along "leftist norms?" For focus, maybe we can stay on-topic in the USA, where I can only think of the removal of restrictive laws across the board: gay people can get married, more states have laws explicitly allowing open-carry, for a brief period women's bodily autonomy was being restored (though this is being restricted again) (I'm talking about abortion here), etc.

> As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services.

Do you mean services like Voat? I mean... I guess if that's the ideological standard you want to align yourself with, go for it lol.


It's a long time since I've met someone lucid about what's going on, thank you !

> We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.

Do you think we already have lost ?

Frankly I don't want to live in this Communist 2.0 world, I know I won't be able to shut my mouth and go with the flow : I already lost all hope of career evolution at work because of my sharp tongue and that was for things much less polarizing than politics.

I guess I'll probably be in the firsts to try the new gulags.

Or should I expatriate while it's time ? But where to go ? It seems I can either choose between a "traditional" 3rd world dictatorship or the new Communism 2.0


Interesting - let's take a look:

Absence of social class structure. Absence of currency. Public ownership of the means of production. Absence of state.

Which of those values are compatible with what you appear to fear? We know that the traditional conservative Monsters such as China and the Soviet Union weren't Communist - they had social classes, currency, and a state, after all, so that's obvious. Are you operating on the Bad Faith interpretation? In that case, let's be lucid: You fear Authoritarianism and Fascism, not Communism. It doesn't make sense to use the wrong words to describe things.

> I already lost all hope of career evolution at work because of my sharp tongue

This brings us back to liberty. Right now the USA is capitalist. Therefore companies have rights and liberties, just like people. If you have a relationship with a person, and they call you a subhuman, do you believe it's ethical to use law to enforce that the insulted person must remain in that relationship? No? Then clearly there's no issue with companies firing people for, say, dropping n-word bombs and the like. There's some differences, in that we at least don't legally allow companies to be racist or sexist in their policy anymore.

To be frank, whenever I get in conversations with people that bemoan their loss of freedom of speech, talk about having a "sharp tongue" and losing hopes about career progression because of it, I find myself talking to a person that wants to be allowed to demean and bully at work. I find myself talking to a Linus Torvalds type at best, and at worst a sexist, racist, or homophobe (or all 3 combined! :D). So it's very, very hard to engage in good faith, because I can't imagine what you could be saying at a US company that's preventing your career progression, that isn't despicable and causing you to get exactly what you deserve.


Would you be content with calling it 'somewhat democratic world'?


Depends what you mean by democratic. If you mean people can vote, then yes. But if it means ruled by the people then I only see elites at the top.

I'm disillusioned with the western narrative about freedom. We can and should do much better than the oligarchies we actually live in.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the rest of the world has it better than us, but we're certainly not the paradise we pretend to be.


I'll take a mostly democratic world over an openly despotic one a la the CCP.


Me too. But the fact that our prison is shinier than the neighbors isn't enough to make me proud living in it.


[flagged]


First : except a YouTube account that I use to manage my videos playlists I don't use social medias at all. I still see what's going there and I find it appalling.

Second : you don't know me. So don't assume who I am and why I lament the loss of freedom on the web.

Lastly there are plenty of reasonable topics that are censored : you can't even emit any doubt about the COVID "religion" for crying out loud.


The Covid.. religion..?


See comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762363


For large gatherings you can have Bluetooth connected mesh networks. There are apps that already implement this out of the box like Bridgefy or Briar.

You can have a network of consumer radio walkie talkies with privacy codes, each node spread with a range of about 20km, depending on the weather and terrain. But this is would need dedicated hardware which I assume is not easily sourced in the current restricted environment.

Edit: Maybe if you setup a network of walkie talkies on rooftops you could probably maximize the node spread if are able to keep line of sight across each node.


Are there any documents describing the actual user experiences of using Bridgefy or Briar in a real life scenario. They seem like cool tools using interesting technology but I am not convinced that they work well in practice and it is difficult to find much information about where they have been used successfully.


Not a document but Hong Kong protesters use it https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49565587


This article only states that the app had been downloaded more during the protests. Reviews in the app store suggest it doesn't work reliably.


For full-disclosure I have no first hand experience with Bridgefy or Briar, I suggested the former because it seemed like an alternative to _Firechat_ (which apparently is no longer available).

Having said that, irrespective of the Application layer, all BT based mesh networks are inherently fragile.

There are large performance variations accross BT chipsets (old/new and different manufacturers) and externals like BT firmware, OS variations, battery level, RF blocking/reflecting structures nearby, Law enforcement jammers, the number of nodes available (the more nodes in a narrow area the more fault tolerant it is), all of these factors affect the performance of such a network.

The point is, OP is asking for help to scope out what are the options. None of them are great, but the best we can do is to bring forward the known options and hope that those struggling in this situation are able to implement whatever they need to remain safe.


If you can dial up, Dutch ISP XS4all has setup a free gateway: https://twitter.com/xs4all/status/1293153863030243328


https://disaster.radio/

disaster.radio is an off-grid, solar-powered, long-range mesh network built on free, open source software and affordable, open hardware.

Designed to be open, distributed, and decentralized, disaster.radio is currently in the prototype/development phase.


this is only for short messages via Lora, 40 chars at a time last time I tried.


Still good for shorthand, locations, coordinating communication by other means, and the like.


What counts as a character? 1 ASCII or 1 Unicode? If Unicode then just use Chinese and you can express a lot in the span of 40 characters.


I think it depends on what exactly you need before, during and/or after the protest.

Generally, I think Briar is your best bet for the organisers of the protest, since it's meant to communicate a group of people, but not broadcast data to anyone (inc. strangers). It can help you before, during and after the protest. However, you'll need a connection to the Internet to synchronise over what you describe as mid- and long-ranges (it'd use Tor in that case).

One thing to note is that when a repressive regime cuts off the Internet, it never gets to 100% of the affected population. At a minimum, certain government institutions will remain connected, but often also international organisations and hotels. Of course, in practice, finding which places remain connected to the Internet will be hard, but these are some of the places you could try. Also, if you have a land border and a SIM from the neighbour country, you'll generally get mobile access near the border.

During the protest, I think the Qual.net project is worth considering, although I must admit I haven't tried it myself.

Please, do not use FireChat or Bridgefy. They're pretty insecure: Data is neither encrypted or signed.

Shameless plug:

I'm leading the Relaynet project (https://relaynet.network/), a technology to restore connectivity when the Internet is totally cut off. Relaynet-compatible apps will use the Internet seamlessly when it's available, but they'll switch to a fallback medium (such as a sneakernet) when the Internet is cut off. No additional hardware required.

Relaynet's proof of concept made it possible to post and receive tweets without the Internet and we're currently funded by the Open Technology Fund. The protocol suite has been independently audited. The Android implementation will be ready by the end of the summer (and it'll also be audited).

Although we're focusing on connecting the general public, the security and privacy guarantees it offers should also be adequate for protesters (subject to the security/privacy guarantees of the Relaynet apps they use). Consequently, the initial version of Relaynet should come in handy before and after protests, and once we add support for Bluetooth-based meshnets (aka "scatternets"), it should also support protesters during a protest.


During China's Xinjiang crackdown people use old fashioned dialup modems and 56kbps is better than 0kbps.

I think if you can still make cross border International phone calls you can setup modem on both sides and create a end-to-end network.


I imagine it would be relatively easy to detect that kind of activity.

Maybe some kind of ad hoc mobile/mesh network stands a better chance, though that too is detectable and jammable.


You need to be careful with long range radio solutions. Radio waves sources are very easy to locate with cheap equipment. Wifi/Bluetooth is perhaps better since it's already everywhere, but the range isn't good.


Watch out, Wifi and Bluetooth and any radio source can be located (with direction finding, Time Difference on Arrival, ...).

It's sometime a bit more difficult: with spread spectrum technologies for example, widely used wireless technologies that work well in dense usage. It works also on cellular networks (2G, 3G, 4G, 5G).

Just so people don't get a false sense of security with some solutions.


Thanks, I'm aware of that - that is why I was thinking about low cost (say cost of Raspberry Pi) and distributed. When it is low cost - there is grater chance that large number of nodes can be deployed and single point of failure can be avoided.


Psiphon (disclosure: where I work) largely kept Belarusians online: https://psix.ca/d/nyi8gE6Zk/regional-overview?orgId=2&var-re... (Note that the 0 values before the blocking aren't really zero -- they're just below the threshold that we publicize. And connections aren't users, but... it's still a lot of people.)

There's a smattering of third parties confirming this, like: https://beincrypto.com/psiphon-connects-beincrypto-journalis...


Thank you for your work for us. The app behaves really well these days here!


Two-way satellite modems were banned long ago in Belarus, so there is not much equipment on hands.

Mesh / opportunistic network solutions are great in theory, but require the installation of special software, which is difficult to coordinate on large scale. Also, this is an adversarial environment. We need to assume that every new network will be infiltrated by pro-government forces.

Only mobile internet was affected so far, so for now the most effective response was encouraging people to remove their WiFi passwords.


For everyone talking about solutions that involve short-range mesh networking: Belarus is about 600km across and the capital Minsk is about 130km from the border with the nearest free country, Lithuania.

For everyone talking about solutions that involve deploying additional hardware: who's going to pay for it and how are you going to get it into Belarus?


A large part of the reason for the blackout is to prevent people from organising protests. Mesh networks are perfect for that kind of thing, as generally you only need to communicate with people in the same city.


I think your input is really defeatist and non-constructive. There are plenty of comments that address long range communication with (e.g. storage devices).

It also underestimates the resourcefulness and motivation of those struggling in this situation.

It wouldn't be inconceivable that additional resources/hardware could be introduced either via smuggling or diplomatic staff. There is also a large and supportive diaspora of Belarusians in Lithuania and Poland that I assume would be willing to source and finance additional resources if it could tip the scale.


On the other hand, Brest is right on the border with Poland so point to point links would be very possible. The country is generally quite flat so you might even have success connecting other cities with a few hops.


In addition to short-range bluetooth app like Briar.

There exist long range communication : Meshtastic, with $20 devices you can send messages with kilometers range.

What would be ideal is for Briar to embrace the "Bluetooth to LoRa node".

We can extend Briar Bluetooth network by adding Bluetooth to LoRa node that can connect multiple bluetooth mesh networks together.


Meshtastic (and the LoRa tech underneath it in general) has a lot lower bandwidth than some people expect.

It's a reasonable solution for "a few dozen nodes up to 8-10km apart under ideal conditions", and enables SMS-style messaging across the mesh - but it's not "an internet replacement" by a long shot...

Think more "30people in an irc channel - without pics/video" rather than "Stream your protests to Instagram or Facebook Live"...


LoRa cannot handle much data at all. At the lowest data rate you're talking 51 bytes taking 400ms to transmit. Its also far better at uplink traffic than downlink, meaning 2 way communication is very, very, very limited.


Yeah. Meshtastic in default (very long range) config has practical limits of ~30 nodes/users on a channel and can only broadcast old-school SMS style messages across the mesh.

It's super fun to play with. But it isn't gonna "save democracy by circumventing nations-state internet shutdowns"


> $20 devices

I couldn't find anything less than $100, where can you buy them from?


Meshtastic runs on these:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000897355282.html

And if you don't need GPS (they'll use the GPS in an Android phone), these too:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000329729312.html

You could save a buck or two more by getting ones without screens, but it makes Bluetooth pairing more complex (you need to read the pairing code off the serial console over the USB port. But yo only need to do it once. It's not _awful_ if your plan is always to pair each device with the same (Android) phone)


This is an important area in which I feel development has been disappointing, mainly because the commercial value isn't there. There are a few off-grid mesh dongle products that have been released in the past few years. Unfortunately, they're all crazy expensive.

Examples: https://gotenna.com/

https://beartooth.com/

https://www.gotoky.com/

https://fogo.io/

They all rely on your phone and themselves cost more than a whole low-end phone! I am really confused as to why meshing requires much additional hardware that isn't already in a phone.


Because we have no access or control over the actual phoone part of the phone - the 4G/ cellular transmitter.


But you do have control over the wifi and bluetooth radios, which should be fine in an urban setting or a protest.


the https://gotenna.com/ map shows two devices in Minsk.


I used to work for a Belarusian company (outside of Belarus). From what my ex-colleagues told me, they have very little contact with the people in Minsk. There's the occasional email or connected people on MS Teams. Not sure if that's caused by people protesting or internet shutdown/filtering for offices as well.

I also asked some Belarusian friends how they keep getting information from there. They said they have intermittent access to Telegram but it works better by using proxies. Some of the news channels on Telegram are managed by people outside the country who receive the information via text message. Not sure what type of block was in place (cellular data?).

Edit: Another Belarusian friend said he's able to communicate again with people back home after 3 days of quasi constant blackout.


I have contacts in Belarus. They were completely offline for 3 days since Sunday. Only today (12-Aug-2020 08:00 UTC approx) it seems the situation got back to normal and I've heard from them.

People are just terrified now and all they want is peace. They know that continuing protests is likely to result in a bloodbath and are understandably afraid of that.


I would disagree with your last statement.

I have a lot of friends from Belarus, and at least from IT sector, they are really eager to continue protests simply cause they are scarred what can happen if current government will stay


At this point, it's very difficult to know if the people who want protests to stop (even if they hate their government) are more numerous than the people who want the protests to continue and grow until the government can be replaced (with, from what I know in Belarus, is extremely unlikely - given that there's zero opposition prepared to take over the Government). But at least for now, things seem to be calming down instead of escalating.


Russia will take over or get involved. Do not kid yourself that they won't. Belarus has a direct border to Russia. They'll probably use protests to install a pro Kremlin government just like they did in Ukraine before Euromaidan sent him fleeing to Russia.


They are effectively one country already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_State


A YC company is (was?) working on creating mesh communication network from just mobile devices (not sure if they can be deployed right away independent of Internet connectivity): https://volkfi.com/

There are companies that sell software-defined radio products to help deploy volunteer-run radio networks, but those may be easy to jam and/or illegal: https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/

Not sure how far srsLTE (https://www.srslte.com/) can go here without requiring special equipment and Internet connectivity (someone well-versed can perhaps comment on its feasibility as a standalone backhaul): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569961

Walkie-talkies work nicely for comms but not secure, should work well enough for coded messages; however.

I stumbled upon now-defunct https://opentech.fund backed https://www.qaul.net a few days back, developed in response to censorship in MENA, that I personally like: They maintain a mapping of devices (similar to BitTorrent) over Wifi P2P and/or Bluetooth to create a decentralised secure routing network. No extra hardware needed.


A bit late to hop on flea-bay and get the relevant parts but certainly an interesting trick posted a while back on HN entitled "Brazilian satellite hackers use high-performance antennas and homebrew gear to turn U.S. Navy satellites into their personal CB radios." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932997 (Original Wired link https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/ )

A bit earlier today there was also a HN post about a re-play attack on VoLTE encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129977

For information distribution look in to I2P as a means of caching popular News sites. Local password free wi-fi access points (but obviously only for those that can can risk a knock on the door). Power-Over-Ethernet Access Points are useful.

Good luck to all.


Seems like we need starlink wifi hotspots ... Imagine dropping those in instead of leaflets.


It would be probably easily trackable by army and police. Unless you propose setting them in random places anonymously or move often (setup the antenna on the car)


How about [1] "Power-line Networking". It's basically the act of using A/C power-lines for a computer network.

They work okay in home networks, but due to the noise of the active A/C power-line they don't scale that far.

Perhaps they could work in long distances at low bit-rates with high redundancy error-correction to account for the noise. Sending email and text messages...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication


In Hongkong everyone with an iPhone enabled airdrop and shared “posters” with information: https://qz.com/1660460/hong-kong-protesters-use-airdrop-to-b...

Everyone should have an app like Canva, to easily add+edit text on images. This way people can communicate without any new technology.


Maybe with Bridgefy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861948


Berty Tech is working on an offline first protocol, to provide privacy, censorship resistance with an resilient mesh network. Full open source of course, by a dedicated NGO based in France. Using BLE, gomobile, ipfs...

Feel free to join the community, and contribute, www.berty.tech https://github.com/berty

Cheers peers!


To get videos and articles to the media, put redundant copies on USB thumb drives and hide them in different places in the city. Tell different reporters different locations to pick up the drives. Do not tell any single news agency more than one location in the event they are compromised. Ensure you are not seen hiding them. Thumb USB drives are very cheap and disposable.

To stay connected to each other, set up your own self hosted email servers. Email is old but is well designed for this. It is also easier to set up than IRC and does not depend on real time communication. Mail servers will queue messages and retry periodically. Look for "HOW-TO: Dovecot Postfix". Set up self hosted mail servers inside your country and configure them to relay to external sites using HAM, Satellite, whatever you can get your hands on. Even better, see if you can find obscure forms of internet that have not been blocked. Dial-up for example. It isn't fast, but will relay emails and small attachments just fine. Mail servers will queue messages and retry periodically. Adjust attachment limits on your email servers and let your friends know what that limit is. Use your own domains. Ensure that you configure your mail servers to enforce TLS, or at least enforce it for domains that you know use TLS. Most important, increase the retention time of the mail spool so that the server will keep trying to send messages for a month instead of a week. Get multiple accounts on mail servers hosted in other countries that your mail server can authenticated and relay through. This eliminates the need for things like FCrDNS, DMARC, etc... on your server. A dial-up will do just fine. Read up on how to use postfix header checks to sanitized email headers so that your users IP addresses are not exposed.

One advantage of self hosted email servers is that anyone inside your country that can reach the server can communicate directly to each other through that server. Nothing has to leave the country and can not be censored. Be sure to encrypt the mail and spool folders.

For trusted circles of friends, especially those responsible for maintaining servers, ensure they create and share PGP keys. There are how-to's for this as well. Create code phrases that mean different things, so that you can tell others if you have been compromised.


Obviously there is a lot of P2P technology out there, for instance Freenet, Bittorrent, Bitcoin and GPG as well as solutions for the lower network layers like HAM radio based communication. Maybe everybody should start using it also for normal matters because that's what these technologies have actually been invented for and not just for politically controversial or actually illegal things. As a nice side-effect it's kind of fun to dive into new technologies and new things can be built that are easier to use, like Signal or Telegram


Am i right in understanding that people can still oing each-other in the country, they just cant reach the outside world? Do p2p applications like torrents work in this environment?


I have no idea how it would work out in practise given the requirement of physical distribution, but I've always thought of plain pencil and paper among the most democratic of media. It could work for organising people, but maybe not as well for casual banter (which – now that I think about it – might be the more important part.)


Lots of revolutions come with "zines" or pamphlets, it's a very traditional technique, but it's also very risky when the police are in the streets to physically intercept your physical messages.


Why not get some RG 6 or RG59 and use it to deploy MoCa networks to wireless transmitters? Illicit coax would be difficult to distinguish from legit coax and you could do runs of several hundred feet between buildings. If someone knows what they’re looking for they’ll be on to you but the equipment is not very big.


The LibreRouter.org is an open source software and hardware wireless router for geek-free mesh community networks, that can be used by the whole population to deploy any size of telecom infrastructure for their own use, and that can't be interrupted by anyone in particular.


https://twitter.com/delta_chat/status/1293456217248079872?s=...


Satellite internet options would seem to be the most effective solution long term...short term though? I have no idea.


This is possibly going to be another Ukraine - a civil war. Who wants that? Certainly not the Belarusian people.


> Certainly not the Belarusian people.

How certain are you?


Loon flight systems create a network in the stratosphere similar to terrestrial based cell towers. The difference is on the ground, cell towers are fixed and transmit their signals to moving cell phones. With Loon’s solution, both the cell towers and the people are moving... More here: https://loon.com


But Loon requires the authorisation of the local government.


The penny has just dropped with me. This scenario is exactly where Starlink[1] can shine (no pun intended). Find a way to get uplink routers into the locked down country and it would be impossible for totalitarian governments to block internet access completely.

--

[1] https://www.starlink.com/


SpaceX specifically said that this system isn’t designed to be a way to get unrestricted internet access in censorship-ridden states. Outside of the US, terminals will be sold by resellers that comply with local laws (for example, in China traffic will be routed through the GFW).

Sure you could smuggle a American terminal in, but SpaceX won’t help you.


Is that because they want to reach e.g. the Chinese market? It would be the perfect showcase. Starlink could (and imho should) create a "dissenter backpack" with a starlink kit (Terminal and wifi hotspot) plus batteries for a few hours of unplugged operation. Unfortunately the size of the dish and the power requirements make it pretty inconvenient and risky for the user.


A lot of countries beyond the most strong authoritarian have speech laws much more restrictive than America's. Even beyond censorship, there are also basic spectrum regulations and so on per country that are genuinely very important and have significant international treaties around. SpaceX isn't trying to be some rogue player here, that'd be an absolutely enormous briar patch to step into particularly at such an early stage.

Furthermore there is sheer practical considerations: ground terminals won't be stealthy at all, and in fact it's not clear to what extent they could be stealthy against a serious state actor. By definition, they are active EM emitters in very specific bands and must be detectable hundreds of km up. With their phased arrays the emissions should be reasonably focused, but even so it's not like it's a tight beam optical link or even a covert wired tap. Use of them would probably be readily detectable if authorities cared to do so, they're literally broadcasting themselves. Military gear tries to avoid this with techniques like massive pseudo-random frequency hopping at low energies but that's not really an option here. And of course, operating at quite low energies and known frequencies, Starlink may be quite susceptible to even fairly primitive active jamming.

I hope it does serve some small democratizing purpose, but I suspect any of that for the foreseeable future will be primarily in the form of disrupting de facto cozy hookups, not going against explicit law by nation-states. Ie., in some places monopoly infrastructure players might choose to censor stuff they don't have to per se on their own volition for their own profits, or take under the table payments/coercion to give intel agencies access beyond what they're formally entitled too etc. Starlink might in principle force some of that out into the open, a given nation would at least have to formally put a law on the books (which might itself cause protests, changes in government if there is still some level of democracy, and international expense). But SpaceX isn't just going to flat out actively try to circumvent law around the world.


It's funny how people jump to spacex for this sort of thing. For a number of reasons I don't think that they will have very much interest at all in providing connectivity in politically difficult situations. To me, companies like https://lynk.world/ are more interesting for this use case.


What did I say wrong? Care to explain the down-votes?


Because it doesn't work yet? Maybe it's useful in the future in other places.


Ah good point. My bad.


Just curious, is there a way governments could somehow block access to those satellites or force the companies behind them to deny access for people of their country?


See above - two-way satellite equipment is illegal in belarus. There will be no legal way to buy an access point, and owning it risks you jail time. So most people wont have one.

Maybe some lone dude in the remote are can smuggle it in and keep it hidden, but if we are talking about mass movements, that terminal won't be mich use


Not sure, but I think the idea of SpaceX intervening with political protests in a foreign country is a little naive.

The controversy they would stir up, is likely not worth the risk for the company's public image. Also I don't think the technology isn even released yet...


There are national laws and international treaties that regulate usage of the radio spectrum. Without international cooperation, many radio applications would be impossible.

Article 18 of the ITU Radio Regulations was mentioned in the comments on another post. It basically states that nobody can use radio in any country without permission from that country.


Maybe scuttlebutt could work, if the gossiping works across mesh wifis.


Satellite internet, ham radio, exfiltration from Belarus


Cuba does it with flash drives passed around.


I've seen ham radio network AREDN


Indian government shutsdown internet after removal of article 370

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-int...


(1) This is not related to current discussion.

(2) 2G internet was available

(3) 4G service is restored now. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/4g-internet-to-be-allowed-on...


Why and how is the internet cut off?

You could send an email/tweet to SpaceX and ask to be part of the Starlink beta program. They'd have to be granted a license for your country first, however.


Why - I suppose that government want to get tactical advantage over protesters by limiting information flow and making protest coordination more difficult.

How - both deep packet inspection + filtering and primitive solution - making communication services (mobile and broadband) stop functioning. Such things happen already in the past in Turkey, Egipt, Iran.


Depending on the type of filtering you could try to tunnel data across UDP (DNS?) or ICMP packets or configure hosts on both ends to ignore TCP RESET packets.


https://www.wired.com/story/belarus-internet-outage-election...


https://www.wired.com/story/belarus-internet-outage-election...


My advice to Belarus protesters would be : don't protest. You are the useful idiots of some foreign powers that want to weaken Russia by making Belarus the same failed state as Ukraine.

Look at what happened to Ukraine a few years ago and look at the state where it's at now. Do you really want that for your country ?




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