Hacker News Reader

Comment by egao1980 | Hacker News Reader

egao1980

Russian here. Few points:

- Root DNS and most of the cloud providers are in US jurisdiction. US declared Russia as top 3 enemy and applies random 'sanctions'; - Russian (and EU) laws require companies to store citizen's personal information locally; - many lazy developers and service providers relied on AWS/GCP thus breaking the law.

Telegram blocking attempt has shown that even some government resources are hosted outside Russia. In case of severe confrontation escalation US/NATO will cut DNS or will engage in cyberwarfare operations against Russia. So Russian government wants to make sure that Russian infrastructure will continue to function properly.

This is not PRIZM or Great Firewall of China type of system or regulation. There are no plans to cut off internet. There's a group of people that spread FUD and hype around this initiative.

View on HN

No plans to cut off from the internet? This was in the news a few days ago:

"Russia plans to test a kill switch that disconnects the country from the internet" https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/russia-internet-turn-off-d...

To be fair that article says pretty much what the OP says. They want to ensure the country keeps functioning if it is cut off from the internet.

On one level I sort of understand. My own country would stuffed for a short while if DNS in particular went down. It's not just the internet - the phone system, a lot of TV and god knows what else would be in real trouble.

But on the another level, fixing it would just require DNAT'ing a bunch of IP's. If it happened (and it seems like a big if) it would be mostly over after 24 hours of mad scrambling. If you were paranoid enough to want to have everything in place you could try doing the DNAT on small sections, see what broke and what it didn't effect because packets will still flying out, and fix it without inflicting a worse case cyber war outcome on the entire country.

From a western perspective, the cost / benefit of what they are proposing seems way out of kilter. Maybe it is politicly reasonable thing to do in Russia, but in the west a whole sections of society (business, sporting associations, professions) would be willing to put in a few dollars to ensure whosever idea it was would never hold the reigns of power again.

I agree, Russian Government is doing this because US and its allies are threatening all legitimate governments around the world. They want to impose their puppets. Look at what's happening in Venezuela. People in Venezuela is suffering beacuse of US sanctions and war threats, but the news are always that "the Dictatorship don't let people eat".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com