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Zello rose to fame in August 2017 when the 'walkie-talkie' app was used by relief effort volunteers and those stranded in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Russian government, however, wants to take the app down and this week it was revealed that the country's telecoms regulator told ISPs to prepare to block 15 million IP addresses, most belonging to Amazon, in order to do so.
If reports coming out this week hold true, extremely far indeed.
The controversy centers around an app called Zello, which acts as a kind of ‘walkie-talkie’, assisting communication between close friends or in groups of up to a thousand people.
[...] But while the app clearly has some fantastic uses, Zello seems to represent a challenge to the authority of the Russian government.
Under the so-called ‘Yarovaya law‘, services like Zello, ISPs, and other telecoms companies, are required to register with Russian telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor. Amendments to come into force this year also require them to store the actual content of user communications for six months and metadata (such as who communicated with who, when, and for how long) for three years.
Encrypted services are also required to share keys which allow law enforcement bodies so that they can decrypt messages sent and received by users, something which has communications and VPN companies extremely concerned.
[...] Neither Rozkomnadzor nor Amazon have commented publicly on the news and Russia’s Ministry of Communications has refused to comment. Fortunately, at the time of writing there have been no reports of ISPs mass-blocking IP addresses connected to Zello.
Whether Russia would really flex its muscles so broadly and aggressively just to prove a point is unknown but with the growing war on privacy the way it is, almost anything seems possible.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Monday April 02 2018, @03:03AM (3 children)
If they want to keep their business, they should probably start using distributed routing, client side encryption.
They claim they don't store or record your voice, but they do store your username, encrypted password, contact list and email address.
http://zello.com/privacy/ [zello.com]
The way it works is explained in three linked blog posts: http://blog.zello.com/ad-hoc-channels-for-impromptu-connections-0 [zello.com]
However, its not at all clear how this company makes money on individual users, so you have to suspect YOU might be the product some how.
(They do have something called ZelloWork which is aimed at the workplace and costs $6/user/month for all networks).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday April 02 2018, @03:21AM (2 children)
So Amazon sits on 13.5M IP addresses, just to run apps and shit. I guess this is why we had to change to ipv6.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday April 02 2018, @03:26AM
Yeah, so they can sit on a few quintillion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday April 02 2018, @10:24AM
Looking around -
They bought a couple of chunks of Dupont's /8 block (4.2 Million) as detailed here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2tc4ss/looks_like_amazon_just_got_42_million_ips_from/ [reddit.com]
And maybe up to 8 million of MIT's:
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-selling-8-million-coveted-ipv4-addresses-amazon-a-buyer.html [networkworld.com]
with at least 2.7 Million from that MIT block confirmed here:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2017/05/mit-goes-on-ipv4-selling-spree/ [internetsociety.org]
(I guess you could look into the details of ownership through ARIN to confirm exactly how much of those they hold currently, but that's way too much effort for me right now)
They've (probably) been buying up a lot of contiguous blocks from the old holders in order to assign them to the whole AWS infrastructure - apparently AWS instances can get a public IPv4 address assigned on launch, so I guess they want a large pool to assign from.
There's a bit more of the history summarised here:
http://www.trefor.net/2017/05/12/ipv4-address-market/ [trefor.net]
With Microsoft & Amazon being the big buyers from the legacy holders. (And you thought getting into Bitcoins early was profitable...)