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The Russian parliament has approved a law creating a separate, domestic network, separate from the Internet. This Russian network of networks will be fully isolatable and will mean that the country's communications will become autonomous and able to continue functioning even when the plug is pulled on Russia's connections to the Internet at large. Concerns increase that this move will be used more for control of content and even just plain censorship, and make any attempts at circumventing restrictions much more difficult. The law is expected to take effect November 1st. Russia has already banned certain programs, such as Telegram.
One of the law's goals is to keep as much of the data exchanged between Russian internet users within the country's borders as possible. This aim may sound like a move to protect Russian users from external threats, but rights groups have warned that the new measures could ultimately be directed at Kremlin critics rather than international adversaries.
The idea of increasing the government's control over the internet is part of a more long-term national policy trend. In 2017, officials said they wanted 95% of internet traffic to be routed locally by 2020. Since 2016, a law has required social networks to store data about Russian users on servers within the country. The law was officially presented as an anti-terrorism measure — but many criticized it as an attempt to control online platforms that can be used to organize anti-government demonstrations.
Also at Silicon: Russian Parliament Passes Bill To Isolate Internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:16PM (4 children)
I hope this provides more incentive to develop new circumvention technologies!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:24PM (3 children)
There's no special technologies to circumvent this. It requires the hard work and diligence of physically setting up new link layers.
The "decentralized" nature of the internet is something of a lie. The big, fundamental communication infrastructure: underwater cables, fiberoptic backbones, satellites, radio towers, to a lesser extent DNS servers, they're all owned by a few corporations and governments.
The basic software of routing is freely available and anyone can implement, but the actual guts of the internet require land and hard work to set up.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
Subspace communication is *just around the corner*, any day now, could show up yesterday, or before.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @04:37PM
I hear it will be delivered in the year of the Linux Desktop. Perhaps even as a desktop environment to rival KDE or GNOME or MATE or Cinnamon or one of the others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @01:35PM
I'm not sure it's all that hard. The "regular" internet will still exist in Russia. This is described as a separate network that is disconnected from the "regular" internet within the country. Anyone with access to both could create an interconnect using a computer with two interfaces. Using wifi for one interface you don't even have to be in physical contact with both networks.
As proof of concept, I have an example from a company I worked at previously. We had a "network outage" due to a security event, and our internal network was cut off from the general Internet. Of course we still had to get our jobs done during this "outage". We needed internal resources (wiki, source control, build tools, etc.) as well as external resources (api definitions, etc.). It was really easy to set up a Cellular based access point to the internet and connect wifi to that, and a physical ethernet connection to the internal network. many people did it using their phones... And did it before security realized they should tell everyone NOT to do that.
Separating any network from the Internet when both networks are available in near proximity is really difficult.