Its very practical for a country to cut 95%+ of its Internet connectivity.
Its not a complete cut-off, there is some limited connectivity. But for
most ordinary individuals, their communication channels are cut-off.
Implementation specifics vary. Most rely on state control of consumer ISPs and implement a variety of systems at that layer. Many also have chokepoints for international connectivity as well.
Penalties for evading the censorship regime? I don’t know specifically what those entail, but probably at the very least fines and confiscation of equipment, possibly imprisonment, or even worse in some places? Scanning for RF emissions on common communications frequencies isn’t particularly difficult, nor is police just looking around their jurisdictions for such antennas on the exterior of buildings.
Of course, there will always be ways around these sorts of things for people who have the means/resources/technical capability to do so, and some will be much harder to get caught with than others. But the 0.01% of people who have the means and resources aren’t the real target anyway, as many people with the means are people who already have a lot to lose and hence tend to remain loyal to the state to begin with. The 0.01% who have the technical capability to do something like build a unidirectional transceiver from parts and deploy it in a way that it won’t easily be detected are a small enough group that they can be written off. It’s the other 99.8% whom they’re worried about and against whom censorship regimes have the best overall efficacy.
Implementation specifics vary. Most rely on state control of consumer ISPs and implement a variety of systems at that layer. Many also have chokepoints for >international connectivity as well.
I guess all these governments who like to control access so tightly are going to be in a total tailspin over Starlink eh.
One would hope so, but I am I sure they will just threaten their
population on using it. Tyrannical regimes know no bounds.
Thanks,
Scott Fisher
Team Cymru
Do we have any ideas which prefixes are still accessible?
And this is why, despite all the disdainful remarks labeling such
things as "antiquated", mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups are vastly
superior to web sites/message boards/et.al. when it comes to facilitating
many-to-many communications between people. Why? Well, there are many
reasons, but one of the applicable ones in this use case is that their
queues can be written to media, physically transported in/out, and then
injected either into an internal or external network seamlessly modulo the
time delay. And because the computing resources required to handle this
are in any laptop or desktop made in the last decade, probably earlier.
If you're trying to get information in/out of a society that is raising
network barriers to realtime communication, then you need methods that
don't rely on a network and aren't realtime.
---rsk
Maybe one day we’ll see Ham-SD-Radio P2P News and Files Sharing economy.
This was (not quite) how bits of sub-saharan Africa got netnews in the early days. Store-and-forward, UUCP links over dial-ups, and the occasional mag tape couriered over.
paul
There are some on this list who can corroborate the mag tape shipping...
seems like I'm still too young, after all :-).
Mark.