Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129059

by izik • 6 years ago

307 141 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

Tepix2• 6 years ago

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.

djaychela• 6 years ago

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

Kiro• 6 years ago

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

izik2• 6 years ago

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.

Tepix2• 6 years ago

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.

reustle• 6 years ago

Maybe with Bridgefy?

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

speedgoose• 6 years ago

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.

izik2• 6 years ago

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.

philprx• 6 years ago

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.

DoingIsLearning3• 6 years ago

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.

barbegal2• 6 years ago

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.

iansowinski• 6 years ago

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

idof• 6 years ago

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.

anakaine• 6 years ago

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.

bigiain3• 6 years ago

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"

bigiain3• 6 years ago

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"...

ryankrage77• 6 years ago

$20 devices

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

bigiain3• 6 years ago

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)

notemaker• 6 years ago

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

ignoramous2• 6 years ago

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.

pjc502• 6 years ago

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?

StevenWaterman• 6 years ago

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.

DoingIsLearning3• 6 years ago

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.

literallycancer• 6 years ago

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.

throwaway5355• 6 years ago

Indian government shutsdown internet after removal of article 370

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

max_hammer• 6 years ago

(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...

OCuvui0i• 6 years ago

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.

oconnore• 6 years ago

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

andromeduck• 6 years ago

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.

gnarea6• 6 years ago

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

urza3• 6 years ago

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.

aasasd• 6 years ago

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

masukomi• 6 years ago

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.

atemerev• 6 years ago

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.

Jaruzel3• 6 years ago

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/

Jaruzel3• 6 years ago

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

est2• 6 years ago

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

wcoenen• 6 years ago

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.

gitgud2• 6 years ago

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...

easton• 6 years ago

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.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

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.

kybernetikos• 6 years ago

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.

lvs2• 6 years ago

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.

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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

lvs2• 6 years ago

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

totetsu2• 6 years ago

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

Moonshot787• 6 years ago

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

gnarea6• 6 years ago

But Loon requires the authorisation of the local government.

keraf• 6 years ago

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.

brabel2• 6 years ago

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.

thewinnie• 6 years ago

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

kqr• 6 years ago

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.)

pjc502• 6 years ago

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.

est2• 6 years ago

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.

bobthechef2• 6 years ago

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.

gnarea6• 6 years ago

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.

NietTim• 6 years ago

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

jcun4128• 6 years ago

I've seen ham radio network AREDN

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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?

throwaway89201• 6 years ago

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

eitland• 6 years ago

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.

nix233• 6 years ago

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.

zx_xma• 6 years ago

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!

gitgud2• 6 years ago

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

varjag3• 6 years ago

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!)

pulse7• 6 years ago

"...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...

selectodude2• 6 years ago

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

londons_explore• 6 years ago

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

varjag3• 6 years ago

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.

gnarea6• 6 years ago

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...).

varjag3• 6 years ago

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.

baybal22• 6 years ago

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.

kova12• 6 years ago

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.

sjg007• 6 years ago

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

practice9• 6 years ago

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)

jmnicolas6• 6 years ago

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 ?

urza3• 6 years ago

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.

zoobab• 6 years ago

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

rch• 6 years ago

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

hackerman123469• 6 years ago

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.

jschwartzi• 6 years ago

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.

adam-p• 6 years ago

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...

madhead• 6 years ago

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

Regenaxer• 6 years ago

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

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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.

GoblinSlayer• 6 years ago

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

You just said how to evade the pressure.

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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

jmnicolas6• 6 years ago

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.

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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

komali23• 6 years ago

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.

Klaster_1• 6 years ago

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

AbrahamParangi• 6 years ago

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.

blimey74• 6 years ago

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?

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

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?

z3t4• 6 years ago

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

moksly• 6 years ago

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.

373637822726• 6 years ago

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.

beamatronic• 6 years ago

Cuba does it with flash drives passed around.

blablabla123• 6 years ago

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

brightball• 6 years ago

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

Pick-A-Hill2019• 6 years ago

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.

LinuxBender• 6 years ago

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.

l332mn• 6 years ago

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

solarkraft• 6 years ago

Certainly not the Belarusian people.

How certain are you?

sushshshsh• 6 years ago

Satellite internet, ham radio, exfiltration from Belarus

punnerud• 6 years ago

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.

nicopace• 6 years ago

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.

Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

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