When the Internet Stopped in Belarus | Hacker News Reader

When the Internet Stopped in Belarus

vicki.substack.com

26 pointsexolymph7 comments

So, Psiphon, Lantern, and Tor were the only functioning VPNs during the blockade.

And if these VPNs were indeed working, how were WhatsApp et al down? What is Telegram doing that these others apps don't?

Telegram is routing traffic through external servers. Google and Apple's servers. So to stop telegram you have to stop the entire OS and thousands of apps (imagine blocking google.com or so)

Russia failed too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia

A good read on why Russia failed - https://web.archive.org/web/20200630075731/https://www.washi...

Thanks. So, according to WaPo, Telegram uses something akin to domain fronting [0]. Then again, VPNs tunnel encrypted traffic (Tor esp makes it difficult to trace source and destination), how were WhatsApp and other apps not unblocked?

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/def-con-new-tool-brings-back-d...

Am not well informed on these topics, but I think they were shut down. So Whatsapp, facebook, etc maybe refused traffic from Belarus numbers to comply with government orders?

Or maybe they just don't accept TOR traffic for security purposes

Yeah, that's likely, thanks.

I stumbled upon another article which confirmed VPNs (like Psiphon and Lantern) effectively bypass Chinese and Iranian censorship, whilst Telegram (as a standalone app) can't [0]. So, by extension, other apps like WhatsApp should have worked too with VPNs unless of course WhatsApp (and others) disallow VPN traffic.

Among other things, it looks like telegram, on its own (without VPNs) was able to evade the Russian censorship apparatus owing to sheer number of Russian volunteers running proxy servers to relay telegram traffic [1].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/telegram-anti-censorship-c...

[1] https://t.me/durov/77

fwiw ,except for election day, viber has been up continuously--used it every day to communicate with family

The article is really bad : a mixture of almost-technical information with some condescending analogies.

TL;DR: internet is made of data flowing from your device to the service you want to reach.

In BL it goes through infrastructure controlled by the state.

The state shut down the infrastructure and BL did not have internet.

The article forgot to mention GSM data on borders from neighboring countries (one way some images were exfiltred) and satellite communications available to some (including some foreign companies that use it as a backup)

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