Comment by kotri
Comment by kotri 4 days ago
Terrible, this is Internet curfew. It's not uncommon to imagine they'd shutdown Internet across border during any war (like against Taiwan).
Comment by kotri 4 days ago
Terrible, this is Internet curfew. It's not uncommon to imagine they'd shutdown Internet across border during any war (like against Taiwan).
I laughed when I saw "Nginxia", thinking it was a portmanteau of, well, nginx and wuxia, a Chinese fiction genre. Reality is much less funny when I looked up NWCD, and you likely just made a typo of Ningxia.
"Xia" would map to a single character (code point) in Chinese. For instance, in simplified Chinese, it could be 下 (xia, meaning down), 侠 (martial arts - like the xia in wuxia), or any number of other homophones. Since the characters are already combinatorial, I'm not sure a Chinese speaker would think of this as a portmanteau.
> It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht (Mandatory real name & address, not only for business, but private persons with web presence, too.
Same for Domain/DNS(which applies to everything in the European Union))
> You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).
Wait what? So I can DoS any Web site in China by creating a rogue DNS record that points to its IP address, even under a completely unrelated domain? How would they even find those records?
I guess they would find it the moment someone in China using a Chinese resolver tries to resolve your rogue record, since that would recurse to one of the root mirrors in China, which presumably feeds this mechanism.
Seems like a very minor speed bump in your plan, though: presumably something like https://www.chinafirewalltest.com would achieve that, or send a few emails for folks to click.
I wonder if this is actually tied to Chinese domains and Chinese run registrars? That way it would be easy to flag the usage of foreign nameservers and there's no DoS risk.
Not all Western companies comply with Beijing, like Route53, a name I've never heard of; Cloudflare seems to be most popular in China.
But yeah, they can shutdown anything unless proxy server is widely used. as <Nearly 90% of Iranians now use a VPN to bypass internet censorship>.
In fact, it’s a common tactic to do something unusual, in a recurrent way, so people aren’t alerted when it happens for real. (When the Mossad stole 7 boats from a French port (that they had fully paid), they prepared a few months in advance by having the pilots start the engines every night at 23:00, pretending they needed it against the cold temperatures. When they day came, they started the engines and left, no-one saw it coming).
It could also be a test to look for surprising things that break, in case they want to do this permanently at some later point.
You shouldn't use razors haphazardly or you might cut yourself.
A mistake that also weirdly increments some TCP fields for the three subsequent RST packets when that's not how the existing GFW devices behave would need some explanation before you could conclude it to be the most likely explanation.
It was five boats [1], an good story nonetheless. Think whatever you want about Mossad, it can not be denied that these guys have balls.
Could you bring something like a starlink mini for backup i wonder? Id imagine this would be very worrying being stuck there as a foreigner in such a situation.
> Starlink connects you to the internet via a ground station in the country where you are registered
Not true anymore.
> and the antenna will also only operate in an approved zone (depending on your country and account type). You cannot use it in China.
This is still correct.
No it does not. Against a huge state adversary like China it does not matter. They have satellites looking down so they can quickly locate any starlink users. And then ...
The only thing that could bypass is GPS + laser links (meaning physically aiming a laser both on the ground AND on a satellite). You cannot detect that without being in the direct path of the laser (though of course you can still see the equipment aiming the laser, so it doesn't just need to work it needs to be properly disguised). That requires coherent beams (not easy, but well studied), aimed to within 2 wavelengths of distance at 160km (so your direction needs to be accurate to 2 billionths of a degree, obviously you'll need stabilization), at a moving target, using camouflaged equipment.
This is not truly beyond current technology, but you can be pretty confident even the military doesn't have this yet.
The aim doesn't need to be that accurate. Laser beams diverge due to diffraction. You can't break the laws of physics - a non-divergent laser beam would need to be infinitely wide. A 1cm wide laser beam of 700nm light will have a divergence width of approximately asin(0.0000007/0.01) which is 0.004 degrees, which is 14 arcseconds, which is very easily aimable using off-the-shelf components. People get a tracking accuracy around 1 arcsecond using standard hobbyist telescope mounts.
However, this solution is going to stop working when a cloud drifts past.
What makes it so that this kind of precision is required? I have little knowledge of the physics behind it, but a few decades ago, a local university had an open day where they bounced lasers off of a retro reflector on the moon to measure the distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment...
The moon is 700 times farther away than the starlink satellites (or twice that, if you consider the bounce), so I find it hard to imagine that it would be impossible to communicate with much closer satellites over laser when both sides can have an active transmitter.
That's what's so great about LoRA. Decentralized txt msgs, ultra cheap radios people run at home or wherever. $10-35USD ON AMAZON. Least txts get through.
FT8 has such a small payload that you couldn't fit an emoji, much less an average English sentence.
There's no authentication so anyone can pretend to be you. Traditional methods of verifying the sender (HMAC) would take so many hours to transmit that the physical propagation paths you're communicating through will probably collapse before you deliver the smallest verified message.
If you need to communicate information, FT-8 is not for you.
Agreed but if you're trapped in a war zone, time is one thing you have. And equipment for FT8 is simple to build yourself. It's also very difficult to trace. And you can take up some fields used for other stuff and convert them to data (like the sender). This would be illegal on amateur bands since it's required to identify oneself but again in a war situation this is less relevant since any covert communication will probably be forbidden anyway.
You do need a time source though. GPS is generally used for that but it doesn't need to be extremely accurate with FT-8 like with some other protocols.
I would imagine using it for a regular "I'm ok" message for the home front in such a situation using pre-arranged contents.
I live in the suburbs, not really any high rises around be but some townhouses, I can “see” 180 nodes, but I can’t reliably message my friend 1km away. I get a lot of messages on the public chat but if I send one it’s a 50/50 if it will be acknowledged by any nodes.
I tried it while staying in a high rise hotel and the experience was great. Instant acknowledgement and super reliable communication
> Terrible, this is Internet curfew.
If you think this is bad...
You can't even have a blog in China without authorization. It doesn't matter if you pay "AWS" for a machine. It won't open port 80 or 443 until you get an ICP recordal. Which you can only do if you are in China, and get the approval. It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate. The reason "AWS" is in quotes is because it isn't AWS, they got kicked out. In Beijing, it is actually Sinnet, in Nginxia it's NWCD
You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).
In a nutshell, they not only can shutdown cross border traffic (and that can happen randomly if the Great Firewall gets annoyed at your packets, and it also gets overloaded during China business hours), but they can easily shutdown any website they want.