Putin Signs Law To Create an Independent Russian Internet (cnn.com) 214
Russia is one step closer to creating its own, independent internet -- at least legally speaking. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law new measures that would enable the creation of a national network, able to operate separately from the rest of the world, according to documents posted on a government portal this week. From a report: For now, the network remains largely theoretical though, with few practical details disclosed. In concept, the new law aims to protect Russia from foreign online restrictions by creating what the Kremlin calls a "sustainable, secure and fully functioning" local internet. The legislation takes effect in November, state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. According to a summary from RIA-Novosti, the law calls for the creation of a monitoring and a management center supervised by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecoms agency. The state agency will be charged with ensuring the availability of communication services in Russia in extraordinary situations. During such situations, it would also be empowered to cut off external traffic exchange, creating a purely Russian web.
An excellent challenge to the rest of the world (Score:2)
Let's see if they can really keep us out. If they can, we have a problem. Unfettered communication is still an illusion.
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Regardless of being an illusion, I think that 2016 showed us that it's genuinely dangerous. The wild west Internet was a naive dream, we underestimated how much hateful ideologies could brainwash white males and incels with a victim complex, and because of that now we have to deal with a traitorous, illegitimate LITERAL neo-nazi in the White House.
Internet providers now need to take responsibility for spreading hate and cut that shit out before it gets even worse. Right-wing hate crimes are rising at an ala
You've totally backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
It showed that unprepared/naive/desperate-for-religious-programming people are genuinely dangerous. People keep doing or believing whatever they're told, without ever demanding evidence. We are going to have the same problems we had in 2016 until this is fixed.
The internet is not the problem, and even if you kill the internet, as long as people are able to receive communications somehow, they're going to do what they
Re:An excellent challenge to the rest of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Rubbish, there was hate before the internet and there is still hate after it, or do you forget the holocaust.or crusades, slavery ...., no hate there right? As a % of the population we are in the most peaceful time in human history. What is causing this is not the internet but tribal physiology that has been around for ages. We label people we don't agree with as sub human, dismissing their ideas, calling them stupid. saying they are brainwashed because there ideas are wrong and ours are right?
This extremism from both sides does even things out it just causes more extremism from the other side.
If you silence people their opinions, they will not simply go away they just form the opinion that are not being heard and form even more extreme opinions.
I am not a Trump supporter but I cannot simply dismiss 46% of US population as being stupid or brainwashed, Or being white males like that is something bad (you dismissed their opinions based solely on race and sex), I have definitely seen women that where avid trump supporters. If only white males supported him he would not be in power.
Just recently people where saying on slashdot, you are racist to say "It's OK to be white", this is not a racist statement just statement that they feel persecuted being white, true or not it should be rationally discussed, not dismissed as racist because that only leads them to feel even more persecuted because the issues are not being addressed. This statement similar to "Black lives matter" it a statement that the system seems not to value black lives as much as white (which I believe is true), not a statement that white lives don't matter. But from the right angle you can read both statements as hate.
I do however agree text, one way communications without immediate feedback does lead misunderstandings that regular one on one speech does not, I don't know how that can be addressed, but I don't know if that is better than not talking at all that happened before the internet.
Re: An excellent challenge to the rest of the worl (Score:2)
Except lots of women and non-white males voted for him too. By the way why do you supposed anti-patriarchy people keep judging men by how much sex they have as if you were a bunch of high school jocks?
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>
Internet providers now need to take responsibility for spreading hate and cut that shit out before it gets even worse. Right-wing hate crimes are rising at an alarming rate and all these platforms just seem content with doing fuckall and letting the nazis win. SMH
That's the dumbest most short-sighted shit I've read a really long time. You really want your ISP deciding what information you're mature enough to consume?
The internet is the greatest communication tool mankind has ever had, but you have to be able to separate the bullshit from the fact, and behave like a thinking adult.
Internet users now need to take personal responsibility for spreading hate and cut that shit out before it gets even worse.
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Fuck off with your notions of social control. Sure, it is possible to exert social control at the packet level, but it is WRONG. Fuck off.
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You can misunderestimate it though. He doesn't seem so bad, looking back.
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Is he a Russian troll inside a Russian troll?
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They certainly can, to first approximation. Such things already exist. And to be honest, the world would be a much better place if everyone else forced them off the rest of the network. So we should encourage them
I don't think this is a particularly good thing (since the bad actors will certainly still have access to the free world network). But it is a perfectly predictable development, and probably will not be the only example.
The EU could easily find themselves
ah, it's easy (Score:5, Funny)
(1) Russia terminates all cable traffic at the landfall in new Nyet-class fast switches (they have defense industries, they can build them.)
(2) switches usually set to let everything through.
(3) on command, script blocks all incoming traffic from outside, routes all internal traffic to FSB.
(4) Gulag!
response time from command, one minute or less.
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Gulag indeed. Why anyone ever imagined that Putin, the former head of the KGB, was somehow different than his USSR predecessors, is beyond understanding. Yet both Bush and Obama, and the EU, was slobbering all over themselves for quite a while to be his pal.
Re: An excellent challenge to the rest of the worl (Score:2)
By fine "shakedown" do you mean prosecuting corporations that break EU law? How dare they!
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Laws based on the same principle that every protection racket has used since civilization began, that is, you have some money that we want.
Everything can be made legal, as long as the gangsters are running the government.
Re: An excellent challenge to the rest of the wor (Score:2)
These fines are not just arbitrarily handed down but are the result of lengthy legal proceedings and are decided by a judge. If the corporations want to avoid the "shakedown", they should stop breaking the law.
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You do not get what this is really all about. You paid no attention during the failed US/EU sanctions of Russia, which the Russian government wanted by the way, to do exactly what they did, rebuild Russian industry without competition from the West and Russians no complaining because the west cut them off, rather than the Russian government putting in tariffs.
So what is an independent internet about. Well Russia is a bit behind in the internet game, so Russia tech firms need a breathe to catch up and some
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My suggested implementation: take IPv4 and just flip it, so that private addresses are public, and public addresses are private. That would be enough addresses for the entire Russian population, but neatly makes it impossible for the rest of the world to penetrate them. They can create routers that are coded to implement this, and deploy it from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
That would make it even easier to make IPv4 obsolete. For Russians who want to access the internet outside their borders, they'd hav
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Why would the U.S. have a problem if Russian wants to keep out the rest of the world. Mind you, China is already headed down that same path if they aren't there already with the Great Sino Wall or whatever they are calling their 1984 experiment these days.
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I agree. And the Russians are nearly as bad.
drabadabaTISH!
And don't let them out (Score:3, Insightful)
Our internet will be greatly improved with fewer Russians. Also, easier to spot the state sponsored hacking traffic.
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Our internet will be greatly improved with fewer Russians. Also, easier to spot the state sponsored hacking traffic.
What are we going to do without those millions of hilarious Russian fail videos?
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right.
IT security pro here - Russian hacking is the LEAST of my worries.
US National Security Letter mandated backdoors, vulnerability by design, CIA cyberweapons and Data collection by third parties that is then syphoned by the NSA is a far, far greater threat to my clients.
I'm pretty sure anyone that posts here at slashdot, and doesn't realise that the whole Russia hacks thing was a load of shit from the get go isn't really an IT professional at all - more likely someone being paid to be here shitposting B
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You're trying to say Fancy Bear was not a thing? Rejected.
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With blackjack, and hookers, and waterproof mattresses.
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What we ought to do is cut them off ourselves, right now. Literally take a fire axe to the fiber lines, and air-gap the entirety of Russia. At least that way we eliminate one of two attack vectors. Then get the CIA and INTERPOL to track down the rest.
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I'd like that.
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Russians should demonstrate they are a strong people by getting rid of their mafia bosses.
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Let's try.
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Bye, Ivan.
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As a "good Russian" I hope you understand the damage that your "bad Russians" have done to your reputation. The fact is, bad Russians control your country, and that has consequences. Don't complain to me about it.
Bridging (Score:1)
No one would _EVER_ attempt to bridge this new super secure special Russia only national network with the greater internet, no, that would never happen.
If only... (Score:1)
I wish it meant that Russia would not be able to interact with the rest of the Internet...
The tribe's network (Score:3)
Even more insular and provincial than the Brits. Well, they both believe they are The Chosen People - the Russians have been claiming, for centuries, that Moscow is the third Rome.
At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, and the tribal stupidity continues unabated.
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At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, and the tribal stupidity continues unabated.
Two decades will not destroy what took billions of years to build. Sorry, you gotta wait at least another million to notice even the tiniest change in the species.
Re:The tribe's network (Score:4, Insightful)
Even Karl Marx thought Russia was far too backwards and uncivilized to try out communism, heh. over 100 years later and Russia is still backwards and primitive, ruled by gangsters, and the average salary is $650 a month. what a shithole..
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Sounds like most red states.
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no, the lowest income state is Mississippi with average salary of $3600 a month.
Puny Russian average income is only 18% of that!
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When comparing incomes between countries, don't forget to allow for cost of living difference too.
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Cost of living only 48% lower (and the quality of items is lower too), so doesn't make up for Russia being low income shithole
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Yes, but only half as much of a shithole as a simple income comparison would suggest. Shithole is not binary.
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No, that still leaves them 1/3 the buying power of our poorest state's average wage earner. Very shitty shithole, Russia is.
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nonsense, Russians wished they lived in a red state, would be paradise compared to their shithole.
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And so it begins... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll have to think on it for a bit, to decide what the world-wide Intern
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Started long ago, when China erected a firewall.
Even without the firewalls, the internet is fairly divided along language lines. How many Japanese sites do you encounter on a daily basis? There is a whole world of Japanese sites, huge ones like NicoNico, goo, impress.co.jp, Rakuten, yahoo.co.jp (no longer related to western Yahoo), fc2, kakaku, ameblo, syosetu...
It's interesting that non-Latin domain names haven't really caught on though. In China they often use numerical domains (like 012345.com), because
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Russia's natural response to freedom (Score:5, Funny)
You think your western internet is so great? We're gonna go build our own internet, with durak and hookers!
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"On second thought, forget the internet!"
Fortunately for Putin (Score:5, Interesting)
People are well-behaved on the internet. In a less-civil world, he'd have to worry about hackers figuring out how the cutoff commands are handled, incessantly disabling Russia's network connections to everyone else.
Fortunately, that's not the world we live in.
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
Censorship and fears of retribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia fully identifies the online realm as a viable military / espionage target, and it is likely they are afraid of the weaponized tools they themselves have developed - in turn they do not want to expose those kinds vulnerabilities to other nations. If they have their own "internet" then the ability for other nations to seek retribution after a a preemptive attack by Russia may be reduced.
This is also about control and censorship of the information Russians are exposed to outside state sanctioned / controlled news organizations and social networks.
I think they will fail on both counts, and this will lead to a false sense of security (there are too many millions of Russian entities - people, businesses, etc - online for them to vet them all, thus foreign agents can easily infiltrate their network physically and have the same access as if they were outside the physical boundaries of the country). All it takes is one physical VPN bridge to an outside network via satellite, etc, to get around the "cut off external traffic exchange" bit.
Re:Censorship and fears of retribution (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. Just look at how Putin is spinning the deaths of over 3,000 Russian soldiers when he attacked Ukraine. There are literally groups who go to cemeteries when soldiers are buried and beat up anyone who asks questions about where, when, and how the soldier died.
Parents and relatives aren't allowed to ask questions or risk not getting the deceased's death benefits. When mothers of dead soldiers went online to organize groups to find answers, they were both shut down and threatened with jail. In fact, Putin ordered a law which says talking about the deaths of soldiers is a crime [theguardian.com] punishable by jail.
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That's more or less how I read this, too.
Thinking optimistically, this is an opportunity for Russia to build a network for the modern age, rather than the kludged-together mess the world currently uses. Enforce network segregation, IPv6, DNSSEC, maybe even a decent email protocol...
At the same time, it makes attacks more difficult. Sure, the CIA could easily drop in a bridge with a satellite link... but in the event of an actual attack, that entry node would light up like a beacon on a traffic monitor, and
Seems like a riskier idea (Score:2)
it is likely they are afraid of the weaponized tools they themselves have developed
It seems like closing yourself off almost puts you at more risk, because once someone gets in systems inside might be weaker or not as carefully managed thinking they are isolated...
Seems like a short-sighted and not well thought out approach.
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Yea from a purely theoretical/military defense stand point I'm sure it sounds great to them, but it was clearly dreamed up by someone who doesn't fully understand that it'll just create the most expensive game of whack-a-mole in history. Especially in Russia, where buying people off is the absolute norm.
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Heh, I think they will fail on ALL counts.
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Another threat to Russia is the extent to which they cut off their science access to the internet. It isn't as though they have vibrant science and technology thing going. And it will also contribute to a brain drain...but Putin probably thinks that is a good thing.
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I doubt they expect this to make them invulnerable to foreign interference, but it will make it harder for Russian people to get news from reliable sources like the BBC, which Russia cannot control.
I expect they have other measures in place to protect themselves from things like social media interference stirring up trouble.
suspicious minds (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do any posts that could be seen as implicitly or explicitly critical of the Russian government get immediately flooded with the copy-paste trolls? And not just here, but across all social media and web discussions?
And why does this also happen to any discussions of stories that could be seen as critical of the Trump regime?
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In Soviet Russia government pays propagandists. In United States of America propagandists work for free.
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A lot of people, nearly all on one of the two sides, see the "establishment" -- the politicians and journalists who are fighting Trump -- as a far bigger threat to their well being than Russians. Russia is weak, has tons of problems, and as long as they don't hack the actual votes, I don't care if they engage in mind hacking attempts, everyone does. The "establishment" on the other hand -- and this is serious, these are people like GW Bush and Hillary Clinton who have shown they would gladly wage wars, just
Name? (Score:2)
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Iron Curtain 2.0
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so many comments (Score:3)
and not a single thread about what is the stated reason for that piece of legislation: given how the relationships between Russia and the Western world have been rapidly deteriorating for the last decade, and that US/EU would not hesitate to use internet connectivity and technologies as weapons if the ruling elites deem it to be in their interests, Russians have no other choice but to make sure they have a self-sufficient Internet infrastructure, "and then some". objectively, that has been unavoidable from the start, but it took this long for Russian tech and infrastructure to get there.
(disclaimer: I am Russian, who lives in Western countries for the last 10+ years)
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It's stupid to think that Russia would use Internet technologies to link together its critical infrastructure and then allow outside entities to interfere with that traffic on a whim.
From a tech podcast I heard about this, the requirement is that all ISP's be able to route traffic destined for Russia towards Russia (i.e. not through Ukraine or other neighbors).
They can keep routing however they want for cost, day to day, but they will have to have a switch to keep internal stuff flowing when necessary and w
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Here is the funny thing: The Internet is a bunch of smaller networks interconnected. Specifying that your smaller internet is the Internet that can be connected to the world wide Internet is utterly nonsensical as that is already what it is.
Something else is going on here but we can't tell because none of the people reporting on it really understand networks.
Excellent (Score:2)
Now, let's pull the plug on Internet feeds to/from Russia.
So ... they can pull the plug? (Score:2)
Anyway ... what is the Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is not an unified functional body.
It was created on the military designed TCP/IP protocol, that was defined in such way that when some part of the network stop working, the other part will continue with its tasks (remember, in a war zone this is a possibility).
However, when the several independent networks were connected in the Inter-network we call the Internet, we lost the sight on the real edges we have under the hood. All the servers in this planet are located in different countries that work with different laws and different definitions about what is privacy and service. We don't have the servers in our backyard.
So, China has a separated network controlled by a huge firewall. North Korea has a very big LAN behaving as a network behind some sort of security infrastructure. The United States also has a tight control, both physically and legally, about what happens within the country borders ... and many other countries have the same. And, at the end, we realize that Russia is trying to have a separable networking body as many others already have even if they don't disclose it in public.
The main problem is that a lot of people think that the Internet services are something as a human right, when they are really commercial services. Let's think about Facebook Twitter, Google, etc. They are not even focused on what a country could or not to define but about what the shareholders think is the right direction for their business. And as they are alive today, they could die tomorrow or mutate in something we really don't like or don't need.
I really don't see a problem when a country has a switch to isolate itself. Could be circumstances, natural, political, etc., where the country must continue working as an unity even if the rest of the world (or some part of it) behaves against that country. Although this only will work if the country is big enough and has at least one of each type of service the population needs to have a normal life. If not, to use the switch will produce a big impact inside and outside the country ... a negative one.
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if a phone call is can be described as a right (e.g. Miranda), by the same logic Internet access can also be construed as a right.
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Miranda has nothing to do with phone calls, it has to do with informing an arrested suspect of their constitutional rights. The "one phone call" has been perpetuated through popular media as a right, however it is not a constitutional right. Some states do have laws that give an arrested person the right to communicate but it's hardly a universal right and there's no law regarding this at the federal level. Additional reading [findlaw.com], if you're interested.
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mine was not a legal point (I don't really care that much about those, as they usually are a blend of tradition and progress at any given point in time), but rather an ethical one. I'm saying it is ethical to consider Internet access (not access to any particular website, just internet in general) is a right, for multiple reasons.
It is an opportunity (Score:2)
Certainly some (most?) of the changes would be with monitoring in mind. But that's not to say that some improved design elements wouldn't come
WWW (Score:2)
Well, it was the World-Wide Web for a while, but this was inevitable. I expect everyone to have their own Natnet, and then have larger Internets that connect countries with good relations and coordinated goals. Just be sure to note, this is not "Russia's Internet" because it's not the Internet at all. It's more like ARPANet: a decentralized national network designed to withstand massive infrastructure damage.
At least it isn't WWIII. That's pretty much the proposition that started the whole thing.
The forkening (Score:3)
I also expect nation-states to rewrite their own homebrewed layers 1-4 for national security reasons, and that we'll have to insert a new virtualized network arbiter between 4 and 5 (maybe not an OSI layer, but a self-contained ISO internetworking system and firewall) that allows them to talk to each other with national security limited permissions.
I may be crazy, but I think countries are going to try to write their own alternatives to TCP/IP in the end.
I think everyone's eventually going to have a differe
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I think everyone's eventually going to have a different 1-4, if not nationally then regionally.
Obfuscating the layers won't help. The layers are there to transmit information. If they fail to transmit information, then they don't work. If they do transmit information, then who cares?
Using TCP/IP related technology is the best that we can do for now considering all of the tradeoffs. Before TCP/IP, there were lots of standards, but they all failed for general purpose usage in relation to TCP/IP. Moving to something else will require lots of testing and rewriting until it becomes as good as TCP/IP.
And t
Much depends on the technical details (Score:2)
Is this just a simple segmentation behind a firewall? Will it also have its own DNS and other network services? Its own protocols? Packet format?
The lower down the stack you go, the more separate and more secure it gets.
World War III is being waged on the Internet (Score:2)
Having a separate Internet is a good way for them to reduce the risk of retaliation.
pretty fucking sensible (Score:2)
Sounds pretty sensible to me.
I would like to control the 5 eyes if I was Putin.
While we bitch about Russian interference, US has always been spying and manipulating with impunity.
In case of WWIII every country should have this capability.
Bridge that network to the Internet and you have T (Score:2)
kremvax.demos.su (Score:2)
Makes sense from a certain perspective (Score:2)
I was watching a video about planes and it said that the USSR had its airspace locked down for the rest of the world. I'm now reading an article [scmp.com] about how that was the case for all soviet-aligned countries.
I think they have a lot of isolationist baggage.
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It's less about isolation and more about controlling the speech and access to the information on the web. Russia started making feeble attempts at this by for example requiring that all personal information of Russian citizens be stored on servers in Russia (pretty much no one complied with this). Now this new law. In reality, this new law probably has to do with the national security. Why would the Russians want an internet where the internal traffic may be routed through equipment in EU or China for examp
It needs a good name (Score:2)
Putinet perhaps. Let give it a good name even if it is a bad idea for Russia.
Disgusting posters (Score:2)
The amount of Russophobic xenophobia in the comments, such as the ones calling to have a country of more than 140million people disconnected, is truly disgusting. If such comments were posted with regards to say Israel, Palestinian Authority, or say Nigeria, they'd probably get modded down or deleted. But somehow, the endless vilifying of Russia by the western corporate media has elevated anti-Russian xenophobia into a new normal. Every person however distantly connected to the Russian state or Russian olig
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Yeah, we call it "intranet". The Russians want a really big one, for putting people in a "cage" of sorts. Well, no use singling them out. All sorts of governments want the same thing. Can't allow too much liberty you know.
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This is precisely what North Korea did: create a intranet within their borders, and have everyone play within that sandbox. But Russia would need a far larger one, and if they want something that's inoperable w/ the rest of the world, they should just monkey around w/ the IPv4 protocol, and they'd be off to the races
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Isn't "local internet" an oxymoron?
It depends on how you define "local". An "internet" is just a system with multiple networks that are connected to each other. If "local" means Local Area Network, then yes, you can't really have an internet that consists of a single LAN. In this case, though, "local" just means within Russia; most likely, every home and business would still have their own LAN like they do now, so it would still be an internet.
Re:So they can shit on everyone else's (Score:4, Interesting)
Other countries (including the U.S.) already do this. Russia just wants to make it nationwide, which indicates the additional dual purpose of state-wide monitoring.
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Why not? Usually, language is a major delimiter w/ cultures, and since they'd all be speaking Russian, all content they'd want within their borders would be available. They wouldn't have to have Netflix or Facebook, they can use local alternatives to those
Yeah, it would be an intranet, but sometimes, that's adequate: very few people need access to the entire internet
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