The plan was executed, a test (condensing the article)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11934411/Russia-tried-to-cut-off-World-Wide-Web.html
The purpose:
QuoteRussia has run large scale experiments to test the feasibility of cutting the country off the World Wide Web, a senior industry executive has claimed.
The tests, which come amid mounting concern about a Kremlin campaign to clamp down on internet freedoms, have been described by experts as preparations for an information blackout in the event of a domestic political crisis.
The Test:
QuoteThe objective was to see whether the Runet – the informal name for the Russian internet – could continue to function in isolation from the global internet.
The experiment, which took place in spring this year, failed because thousands of smaller service providers, which Roskomnadzor has little control over, continued to pass information out of the country, Mr Semerikov said.
It failed because:
QuoteSmaller providers account for over 50 per cent of the market in some Russian regions, generally lack the DPI technology used by the larger companies to implement the blocking orders, and often use satellite connections that cannot be easily blocked.
The official denial:
QuoteRussian officials denied any such experiment had taken place. A Roskomnadzor spokesman said "there was not such experiment".
Guess WHO ordered the test?
QuoteBut the reported Spring experiment follows a similar test in July last year, when security agencies including the FSB, the defence ministry, and the interior ministry collaborated with the national telephone operator to see if a national intranet made up of the domain names ending in .ru or. рф could continue to operate if cut off from other parts of the Internet.
That test was reportedly ordered personally by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to assess the Russian internet's ability to continue operating if Western countries introduce sanctions cutting off the country from the internet, and resulted in a decision to build backup infrastructure to ensure the Runet's continued operation.
"the interior ministry collaborated with..." translation: "you WILL..."
It worked on a small scale...
QuoteSanctions that prevent Western companies from doing business in Crimea, the province of Ukraine annexed by Russia in 2014, have made some internet services unavailable there.
Fear of Freedom (the West).
QuoteIn reality, said Mr Soldatov, officials are readying for the possibility of shutting down the information flow to and from the outside world in case of a domestic political emergency.
"This is actually just one of a series of such experiments, and it gives us a very good idea of what they have in mind. If you look at the doctrine of information security, it is all about the same thing: the fear of Western countries using the internet as an instrument of influence in Russia and so on," he said.
The truth - they're already censoring.
QuoteLegislation to date includes blacklisting of websites deemed "extremist" or harmful to children, making bloggers with more than 3,000 daily readers subject to the same restrictions and regulation as newspapers and television, and requiring internet companies to move all servers containing data on Russia citizens to Russia.
Critics said the extremism and child protection laws are so loosely worded they can be applied arbitrarily. Sites banned under the extremism law include the website of Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and Kremlin critic, grani.ru, an opposition news website, and the blog of Alexey Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and vociferous critic of Mr Putin.
35 years ago, a elderly friend of my family said, "there is an information war coming, the haves and have-nots, too much information for the average person to sift through, to get to basic truth." He wasn't a conspiracy theorist, just a small businessman, making cheese in Canada - with good insight.
All that, to say this:
WHO was it that proposed an INTERNET SWITCH a few years ago? VOTE them out of office.
The traffic is so MIXED between business, communications, cell, infrastructure, etc., it would need to be physically divided, or software filtered to allow what needs to work, to continue to work. DPI is already in use as a way of keeping a business operating in a hacker attack.
Quote from: Dori on October 16, 2015, 03:41:05 PM
Obama would love this.
I know he tried last year, and never heard anymore about it.
If DPI becomes required, then one method of filtering traffic is in place.
Your connection is up, but the only places you can go are the "approved" sites.
Related and interesting. Talk about control:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-pocket-sized-dystopian-internet-of-north-korea--2
QuoteConventional wisdom never gets you very far when you're trying to understand the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Take, for example, the bizarre, self-contained universe that is the North Korean internet.
In the past few weeks, there's been a spike in chatter about the House of Kim's Web presence. First came speculation about what North Korean netizens were being told about the botched missile launch, then came self-satisfied mockery of the $15 page template the regime bought for its English-language site. The takeaway might seem pretty simple: the DPRK's network is censored and silly, like a dime-store version of China's.
But the reality is much weirder. "Maybe only one-tenth of the online freedom you see in China is present in North Korea," said Kongdan Oh, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
That's not because the censors are tougher. It's because North Korea built its own internet.
The vast majority of North Korean surfers have never actually seen the Web. At libraries and educational facilities, they log on to something called Kwangmyong (roughly translated as "bright"). It's been around since the early 2000s and it's a completely closed intranet system, operating via fiber optic cable. It most likely has no more than a few dozen sites, most of them for education or propaganda.
Quote from: taxed on October 18, 2015, 04:14:06 PM
Related and interesting. Talk about control:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-pocket-sized-dystopian-internet-of-north-korea--2
Remember when people screamed "that's CENSORSHIP!!!". If they weren't running (actually ruining) the country now, MEH, nevermind - they'll be back, or their lawyers will be back for them.