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The Internet

A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters (nytimes.com) 103

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The Myanmar soldiers descended before dawn on Feb. 1, bearing rifles and wire cutters. At gunpoint, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to switch off the internet. For good measure, the soldiers snipped wires without knowing what they were severing, according to an eyewitness and a person briefed on the events. The New York Times: The data center raids in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar were part of a coordinated strike in which the military seized power, locked up the country's elected leaders and took most of its internet users offline. Since the coup, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites, isolating a country that had only in the past few years linked to the outside world. The military regime has also floated legislation that could criminalize the mildest opinions expressed online.

So far, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has depended on cruder forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But the army seems serious about setting up a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. Developing such a system could take years and would likely require outside help from Beijing or Moscow, according to experts. Such a comprehensive firewall may also exact a heavy price: The internet outages since the coup have paralyzed a struggling economy. Longer disruptions will damage local business interests and foreign investor confidence as well as the military's own vast business interests.

[...] If Myanmar's digital controls become permanent, they would add to the global walls that are increasingly dividing what was supposed to be an open, borderless internet. The blocks would also offer fresh evidence that more countries are looking to China's authoritarian model to tame the internet. Two weeks after the coup, Cambodia, which is under China's economic sway, also unveiled its own sweeping internet controls. Even policymakers in the United States and Europe are setting their own rules, although these are far less severe. Technologists worry such moves could ultimately break apart the internet, effectively undermining the online networks that link the world together.
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A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters More

A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters

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  • You can help Burmese people evade their firewall! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Traverman ( 4909095 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @10:34AM (#61095426)
    Are you thinking "This is awful. We're witnessing the rise of yet another totalitarian state, but there's nothing I can do about it." Well, here are some ideas which I'm sure others will add to. Step one is to call all your Burmese friends whether inside or outside of the country. Tell them about:
    * Telegram
    * Tor
    * Brave
    * Orbot
    * Signal
    * VPN apps
    * EFF and all its fantastic privacy tools
    Then be a hero and sign up for a VPN account. Give the username and password to one of them for their own exclusive use.
    To be sure, the army will attempt to block all of the above, but it's easier said than done. Nevertheless, if you're really charitable, sign up for several different VPNs and give the credentials to several different Burmese friends. Be aware that they likely won't ever be able to top up the accounts, so I would encourage you to make each account as prepaid as far as you can afford. (We're talking mere tens of dollars a year, in most cases, for the privilege of punching holes in their nascent national firewall.)
    For the network experts out there, a little router education would also go a long way for them. For one thing, you might be able to teach them how to use a VPN via a router instead of an app so that one VPN account can serve many people.

    • Re:You can help Burmese people evade their firewal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @10:40AM (#61095450)

      Doesn't really work when your packet loss is 100%

      • Fortunately this isn't actually the case. On a nationwide basis, their connectivity has been impaired multiple times since the coup, only to return or partially return within a about a day. Netblocks is informative.

      • They can't keep a complete outage forever - the economic impact is too severe. Total shutdown is just the quickest way to secure control. Given time the internet will be brought back,but with heavy filtering, and likely a deliberately raised price to keep the lower classes from using it casually.

    • I'm gonna ping Elon Musk and see if he'll have some of his people work on a system to launch groups of Starlink receivers encased in multiple independent hardened vehicles suitable for re-entry into the atmosphere. Then we can deliver freedom anywhere he agrees to send it. The only downside is possible full-scale nuclear conflict, but I say freedom is worth it.
      • While I appreciate the sentiment, the one risk to this plan is that the distinct Starlink receiver dishes are a rather easy and prominent identifier for state security services in identifying potential dissidents to military rule.

        • It is a lot easier to disguise a small receiver dish than to hide a 1000 km cable.

          • It is a lot easier to disguise a small receiver dish than to hide a 1000 km cable.

            And it is even easier to just jam the signal*. Looking for dishes/antennas takes continuous effort and time, installing some jammers in the right places can blackout Skylink across the entire country with very little effort. To be effective all they would have to do is swamp the ground side of the link with enough noise in the right frequency range to prevent a connection. There was a story a couple months ago about almost an entire town's WiFi getting wiped out every morning by an old TV set someone tur

        • It's a pizza sized dish. There's plenty of optically opaque materials that are transparent to V-Band frequencies; you can disguise it. Parabolic (dish) antennas emit mostly in one direction, but there is some small amount of radiation emitted in other directions, so there is a possibility of triangulating the position of the ground-based transmitter if the equipment used is sensitive enough and close enough. If some genius would invent a maser that emits V-band frequencies, and there was some way to modu
      • The problem with Starlink (which might be available there within a year) is that it might well dump Myanmar satellite traffic back onto Myanmar backbone, which is clearly a nonstarter. It would be much more effective to explode the Army's problem of discovering which IPs to block. Tor makes this hard. Tor bridges make it harder. And Telegram's domain obfuscation makes it so difficult that even the Russians evidently gave up.

    • Or set up a vpn server yourself and give people access to it, far less likely to be noticed than a service which is advertising vpn accounts to the public.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      this is literally what TOR was designed for in the first place. they could air drop a bunch of OpenWRT routers to build a mesh wireless internet or at least an intranet of sorts for the rest of the people to coordinate their efforts and communicate. Combine that with mobile devices and you're well on your way to a digital revolution. With TOR people can host their own secret bulletin boards and chat rooms. They can communicate directly with encrypted instant messaging apps on their mobile devices and comput

      • Tor relies on directory servers [torproject.org] to function. If Burmese users can't access those, they won't be able to use the network. There are decentralized alternatives [docs.loki.network], but without outbound access to the wider Internet, there won't be much content to access.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          but without outbound access to the wider Internet, there won't be much content to access.

          What they need more than access to the outside world is communications within the country.

      • this is literally what TOR was designed for in the first place.

        TIL: Tor is a magical internet that can exist when the physical infrastructure has been destroyed and you can't get online at all.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 )

          hence why you need a bunch of OpenWRT routers running a mesh network. You do know how routing works right? IPv4 not too foreign to you right? The only thing that makes the internet the internet are the peering points and root name servers. Otherwise its just one big-ass WAN. you can build your own 'internet' for your country... being connected to the rest of the world in no way is actually a requirement for it to be an internet. It is only needed if you need to communicate with the outside world. Technicall

    • How does any of that help if you can't get outside the country? You'd be better off sending ham radios or HackRF devices.

    • It's ironic that a technology developed by the military to use multiple network pathways to be resistant to physical attack can be so disrupted by the military.

    • To be sure, the army will attempt to block all of the above, but it's easier said than done.

      Sorry but that's just bullshit as they've proven with nothing more complicated than a pair of wire cutters. If you cut the cables then no more internet. You can have all the VPN accounts you want and the best router ever invented but if the army have cut the cables at the ISPs then you've got nothing.

  • be cool to just push the red button on the way out (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @10:37AM (#61095430)

    be cool to just push the red button on the way out.

    Just tell the soldiers that is the kill button.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nt8d09 ( 3638509 )

      Lock the doors with them inside, and press the Big Red Button to release the Halon 1301.

    • With a little suspicion that this would happen some day the techs could have set up a large dummy switch labeled 'internet ON OFF' and some cabling attached to it. Guards could report mission success, internet continues uninterrupted except enabling the firewall rules to bin anything from the local military's address block.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by JockTroll ( 996521 )
        And then they would have come back, once they noticed that things did not go as planned, and brutally executed the smartasses and their families. You might not be aware of this, but the military dictatorship in Myanmar has been quite brutal even for the standards of military dictatorships. When confronted with government-empowered thugs who will torture you and your whole family in public and then execute you in the most painful and horrible way possible for the slightest motive, you do not play smartass. N

  • It's always reported that way, but reading Wikipedia for five minutes, apparently, it's a military dicatorship since 1962, and it was a British dictatorship before that.
    Its just that they allowed "elections" from time to time in the last years, and every time, that woman that they despise wins. And they then just don't accept it and keep on dictating.

    That's the TL;DR. Our side of it.

    Given how these things usually run though, it is highly likely that neither the military nor that woman and her revolution and

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      the guy that invented TOR believed you could air drop a bunch of wireless routers running a mesh and a private TOR network so that the people could communicate securely and privately amongst themselves. A country that is not the primary lifter in their own liberation will just repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Freedom always comes at the price of blood. There is a blood price to be paid to be free and a blood price to be paid if you fail. You have to ask yourself if you are willing to do what is
    • So you think Britain is engaged in murdering people in Burma in support of democracy and has some kind of moral equivalence with the Burmese military? You are deluded.

  • The only sad part is that people didn't expect it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by holophrastic ( 221104 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @11:08AM (#61095516)

    The concept of the "open" internet is just as utopian as any other cross-border policy.

    By definition, you can't have a cross-border "open" anything. In this case, that's the definition of a country-border.

    This about how much of the internet violates some country's laws? You don't need to look very far. Gambling sites violate USA laws. Pron sites violate middle-east laws. Many countries censor information, while others don't censor disinformation.

    How was that "open" ever expected to work? The answer is simple: the internet was very very small. Now that it's big, it simply can't work.

    The internet is full of e-commerce. Did anyone think that different countries wouldn't have different commerce laws? Different anti-competition laws?

    Cat videos. In some countries, cats are considered deities. Perhaps videos of gods appearing fooling would be censored. What if it were your god?

    Countries exist because laws are different. Anyone in the USA should know that -- 48 times someone has drawn a line in the sand and said "I don't like your laws. I'm going to make my own laws.".

    • > The concept of the "open" internet is just as utopian as any other cross-border policy.

      OK, in the sense that neither open borders nor open communication are "utopian"; they're the only common-sense objective; it's actually the borders of any kind which can ONLY be maintained by war and genocide, and which don't benefit the ordinary people more than pens to the cattle -- they only benefit the rich, who can freely transfer capital from one part of the world to another, arbitrage differences in the standa

      • I'm not following your comment. An open border is an oxymoron. A border is defined as one place being different than another. The internet is pervasive (just as anything so big would be). For it to extend across borders, all of commerce and tax law would need to be the same, as well as all of speech laws, publication laws, protest laws, information laws, and privacy laws -- not to mention religious freedoms and human rights and what's considered discrimination. That's simply too much to maintain a bord

        • > An open border is an oxymoron

          Is the border between Belgium and France an oxymoron? Or is that not a "real" border? (a "real" border being, of course, one that only capital, criminals and armies can cross)

          > you aren't familiar with ancient history, cats, and how to use a search engine.

          1. ancient history is past 2. I'm only "familiar" with my own cats 3. I prefer primary sources to googled up factoids.

          > Here's a tip: look for a country where stray cats are protected.

          Are they protected from making m

          • Belgium and France allow citizens on either side to choose which tax laws to follow? I doubt that.

            3. one uses search engines to find primary sources. welcome to 1995.
            2. sorry to hear that you've never played with anyone else's cats.
            1. a knowledge of ancient history would have made it very clear to you which culture deifies cats today. if you're limiting yourself to modern knowledge, enjoy your box.

            You've used two pronouns without defining either of them; I don't follow your question. I know nothing abou

        • There's a border between the states of California and Oregon that's an open border. You can cross it without being stopped and there's no one on guard there. Some countries probably have a similar situation even if it's usually not quite as lax.

          • open to foot traffic isn't what we're talking about. if a californian were to cross that border, they still need to pay taxes to california. they are still bound by californian laws. the border defines everything.

            So sure, that human can walk across the border. But they can't bring their lives with them.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        it's actually the borders of any kind which can ONLY be maintained by war and genocide, and which don't benefit the ordinary people more than pens to the cattle

        Umm not at all. We are tribal species. When you get right down to i humans don't like people who are different than them. Its this forced pretending diversity makes anyone happen anywhere that is making the world such a miserable place. We'd all be much happier if we could go back to nations as they existed before WWI with mostly homogeneous populations with shared values and beliefs.

        • > We are tribal species. When you get right down to i humans don't like people who are different than them.

          Then we can just rid of any civilization at all -- only keep alliegance to our extended family, and keep killing each other. You better go live in a tribal area for a change -- even small villages are split between tribes that hate each other guts. Even a county-size political entity is completely utopical if we go down to our tribal urges

          > nations as they existed before WWI with mostly homogene

        • I will take social strife from assimilation over the more traditional mechanisms of invasion, slaughter, and enslavement any day. History is replete with conflict, and it wasn't twitter fueds.
    • I don't know where that concept came from, but it was foolish and idealistic from the start. The same is true of cryptocurrency.

      People have talked about the utopian free-flow of information, but the fact is cultural leakage is a huge deal in some nations. To use geopolitical terms, a nation is defined as a group of people who share common language, culture, and values. A state is a political entity governing a ruling territory. A Nation-State is the combination of the two; a geogrpahic region (defi

      • Dang, very well said. To summarize (and abbreviate) what I understood:

        culture forms nation
        state governs nation
        internet creates culture-leak
        culture-leak sub-divides the nation into multiple nations
        one state has trouble pleasing multiple nations

        I'll make explicit, a point that I think was implicit in your explanation: it's the state's duty to keep itself together by discouraging cultural divides -- such is the need for stability in the desire for government.

        • Exactly. The modern Nation-State is a good system, but it has one fundamental flaw: it's an agreement between two entities, the Nation and the State. When that agreement works, then a country is stable. But the key flaw is that both entities, like all entities, look for self-preservation. When this relationship breaks down, the disparate nations find themselves trapped and under threat, and the State feels like things are shifting. But the State has governing power and violence, so it resorts to these

      • > To use geopolitical terms, a nation is defined as a group of people who share common language, culture, and values.

        That definition excludes almost any REAL "nation-state" in the world, starting with the most succesful of all, Switzerland.

        And "values" doesn't mean fucking anything at all -- it's simply a dog-whistle code for excluding people you still don't like for one reason or another, even if they happen to speak the same language and have the same skin color (= "culture") as you.

        • OK, just to be clear. That definition you're quoting isn't for Nation-States, it's for Nations. And no, the Peace of Westphalia which is the start of the modern Nation-State is defined in these exact terms.

          A Nation - a group of people with a shared and common language, culture, and values.

          A State - A political entity that governs a specific geography defined by borders.

          A Nation-State - the modern country defined by the relationship between the two entities.

          Values - I don't even know where to

          • No real nation-state was created based on "common language, culture, and values".

            Take France -- there were like 500 or 600 years between the time where France had become a unified state, a military power, and a proud nation and the time where most people switched to standard French as their everyday language in most provinces. The state was first, THEN the "nation" and the "culture". As to the "values", the noble, the bourgeois and the poor NEVER shared the same "values"; for anybody who has the slightest c

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_United_States

      There seems to be more to it than that.
    • Which people didn't expect it? I did my IT degree in the mid 90's and this was a common thought at the time.

  • when they don't fight other militaries, only civilians? what campaigns have they fought? what wars have they won?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It only has to be "real" enough to be able to topple elected leaders. Did the US military stop being a "military" just because it lost Vietnam?

      • I didn't say that winning was the only possible definition. I would like to reword my earlier statement: s/wars/battles/

        The US doesn't really win wars, not in a clear cut way. They tend to end in an ambiguous and unsatisfactory way. Such is the nature of an utter lack of clear and definitive military and political objectives.

        Normally I would think a nation's military functions either to defend the nation from an aggressor, or to be the aggressor. If your military is purely defensive and you only lose battle

        • The US doesn't really win wars, not in a clear cut way. They tend to end in an ambiguous and unsatisfactory way.

          Like WW2, as an example? Or the Civil War? Just for two rather large examples....

          • I don't think you can win a Civil War. It's complicated. I would use the Mexican–American War as a better example of a famous victorious war.
            During the interwar period, the US was part of an Allied force to intervene in the Russian Civil War. They failed.

            The Allies won WW2 against the Axis powers. Paid for with the lives of 8m Russian soldiers, 580k British soldiers,
            400k American soldiers, ...

            The Korean War is a great example of an ambiguous outcome. The Vietnam War is an example of a loss. Cambodian

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ghoul ( 157158 )
            Is WW2 over? I mean US occupying forces are still stationed in Germany, Japan and Italy. And US is still deporting people for WW2 crimes. And Civil war? Just last month the Confederate flag was flying over the US Capitol. They dont really seem to be over.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          Beating down your own citizens as your primary function makes you cops, not soldiers.

          Neither. I'd say it makes you "professional thugs".

      • Vietnam.

        ... Korea, Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria...

        Hell, you've been fighting at least one side of civil war in Somalia for the last 30 years and I'm sure that's going just great.

    • what wars have they won?

      The same argument could be levied against the USA. I can't think of one single war they've fought on their own where they've won. Even the American War of Independence was only won when the French stepped in.

  • Suddenly there's tons of protesters and international support. Yet 2-3 years ago when the military kicked out the Muslim Rohingya, barely a sound was made by the international community, and the citizens who are now protesters were cheering on the military. I'm simply not sure what to think at this point. Perhaps something about karma may be fitting...

  • These are the mortal enemy of the dictator, military or otherwise.
    What a shithole country. Oh and by the way, U.S.? This is the sort of thing the right-wing extremists and so-called 'white nationalists' would love to see happen here, too.

  • A reminder - this isn't like situations in so many struggling democracies around the world where you have a 51%-49% election result and violence erupts as people won't accept the result. The junta's party won something like 5% of seats. This is a brutal coup with no support from the populace.

    If the international community were halfway functional at all - the way it was for a brief window of time during the Clinton administration - there would be a United Nations intervention. But it's in Putin's and Xi Jinp

  • Maybe shortwave will become popular again.

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