What I suggest, perhaps as last ditch effort, is look in the opposite direction: attacking the remaining Beltelecom and mobile layer2/3 connectivity in the country.
The only reason the limited networking is still up and running is not some residual generosity of the regime. It is because traditional PSTN and long range special comms services are all routed via IP trunking these days. Disrupting these will also disrupt operations level communication between KGB, police and presidential security units that are squashing the protests.
(Жыве Беларусь!)
It allows you to create your own social media feed with messages, responses and media completely offline. You then gossip that feed to anyone you want, for example via the local (WiFi) network or even by USB stick. Long range communication is done by car or by train.
There are servers (pubs) that can be used for more real-time communication. Or to make the information available on the internet after it has been sneaked out of Belarus. The main pubs have a dedicated, friendly and active community. [3]
https://boingboing.net/2018/05/03/inside-cubas-massive-weekl... https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
If crackers around the world want to actually be useful, now is the time.
I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus. It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world.
Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.
You can have a network of consumer radio walkie talkies with privacy codes, each node spread with a range of about 20km, depending on the weather and terrain. But this is would need dedicated hardware which I assume is not easily sourced in the current restricted environment.
Edit: Maybe if you setup a network of walkie talkies on rooftops you could probably maximize the node spread if are able to keep line of sight across each node.
disaster.radio is an off-grid, solar-powered, long-range mesh network built on free, open source software and affordable, open hardware.
Designed to be open, distributed, and decentralized, disaster.radio is currently in the prototype/development phase.
Generally, I think Briar is your best bet for the organisers of the protest, since it's meant to communicate a group of people, but not broadcast data to anyone (inc. strangers). It can help you before, during and after the protest. However, you'll need a connection to the Internet to synchronise over what you describe as mid- and long-ranges (it'd use Tor in that case).
One thing to note is that when a repressive regime cuts off the Internet, it never gets to 100% of the affected population. At a minimum, certain government institutions will remain connected, but often also international organisations and hotels. Of course, in practice, finding which places remain connected to the Internet will be hard, but these are some of the places you could try. Also, if you have a land border and a SIM from the neighbour country, you'll generally get mobile access near the border.
During the protest, I think the Qual.net project is worth considering, although I must admit I haven't tried it myself.
Please, do not use FireChat or Bridgefy. They're pretty insecure: Data is neither encrypted or signed.
Shameless plug:
I'm leading the Relaynet project (https://relaynet.network/), a technology to restore connectivity when the Internet is totally cut off. Relaynet-compatible apps will use the Internet seamlessly when it's available, but they'll switch to a fallback medium (such as a sneakernet) when the Internet is cut off. No additional hardware required.
Relaynet's proof of concept made it possible to post and receive tweets without the Internet and we're currently funded by the Open Technology Fund. The protocol suite has been independently audited. The Android implementation will be ready by the end of the summer (and it'll also be audited).
Although we're focusing on connecting the general public, the security and privacy guarantees it offers should also be adequate for protesters (subject to the security/privacy guarantees of the Relaynet apps they use). Consequently, the initial version of Relaynet should come in handy before and after protests, and once we add support for Bluetooth-based meshnets (aka "scatternets"), it should also support protesters during a protest.
I think if you can still make cross border International phone calls you can setup modem on both sides and create a end-to-end network.
There's a smattering of third parties confirming this, like: https://beincrypto.com/psiphon-connects-beincrypto-journalis...
Mesh / opportunistic network solutions are great in theory, but require the installation of special software, which is difficult to coordinate on large scale. Also, this is an adversarial environment. We need to assume that every new network will be infiltrated by pro-government forces.
Only mobile internet was affected so far, so for now the most effective response was encouraging people to remove their WiFi passwords.
For everyone talking about solutions that involve deploying additional hardware: who's going to pay for it and how are you going to get it into Belarus?
There exist long range communication : Meshtastic, with $20 devices you can send messages with kilometers range.
What would be ideal is for Briar to embrace the "Bluetooth to LoRa node".
We can extend Briar Bluetooth network by adding Bluetooth to LoRa node that can connect multiple bluetooth mesh networks together.
Examples: https://gotenna.com/
They all rely on your phone and themselves cost more than a whole low-end phone! I am really confused as to why meshing requires much additional hardware that isn't already in a phone.
I also asked some Belarusian friends how they keep getting information from there. They said they have intermittent access to Telegram but it works better by using proxies. Some of the news channels on Telegram are managed by people outside the country who receive the information via text message. Not sure what type of block was in place (cellular data?).
Edit: Another Belarusian friend said he's able to communicate again with people back home after 3 days of quasi constant blackout.
There are companies that sell software-defined radio products to help deploy volunteer-run radio networks, but those may be easy to jam and/or illegal: https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/
Not sure how far srsLTE (https://www.srslte.com/) can go here without requiring special equipment and Internet connectivity (someone well-versed can perhaps comment on its feasibility as a standalone backhaul): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569961
Walkie-talkies work nicely for comms but not secure, should work well enough for coded messages; however.
I stumbled upon now-defunct https://opentech.fund backed https://www.qaul.net a few days back, developed in response to censorship in MENA, that I personally like: They maintain a mapping of devices (similar to BitTorrent) over Wifi P2P and/or Bluetooth to create a decentralised secure routing network. No extra hardware needed.
A bit earlier today there was also a HN post about a re-play attack on VoLTE encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129977
For information distribution look in to I2P as a means of caching popular News sites. Local password free wi-fi access points (but obviously only for those that can can risk a knock on the door). Power-Over-Ethernet Access Points are useful.
Good luck to all.
They work okay in home networks, but due to the noise of the active A/C power-line they don't scale that far.
Perhaps they could work in long distances at low bit-rates with high redundancy error-correction to account for the noise. Sending email and text messages...
Everyone should have an app like Canva, to easily add+edit text on images. This way people can communicate without any new technology.
Feel free to join the community, and contribute, www.berty.tech https://github.com/berty
Cheers peers!
To stay connected to each other, set up your own self hosted email servers. Email is old but is well designed for this. It is also easier to set up than IRC and does not depend on real time communication. Mail servers will queue messages and retry periodically. Look for "HOW-TO: Dovecot Postfix". Set up self hosted mail servers inside your country and configure them to relay to external sites using HAM, Satellite, whatever you can get your hands on. Even better, see if you can find obscure forms of internet that have not been blocked. Dial-up for example. It isn't fast, but will relay emails and small attachments just fine. Mail servers will queue messages and retry periodically. Adjust attachment limits on your email servers and let your friends know what that limit is. Use your own domains. Ensure that you configure your mail servers to enforce TLS, or at least enforce it for domains that you know use TLS. Most important, increase the retention time of the mail spool so that the server will keep trying to send messages for a month instead of a week. Get multiple accounts on mail servers hosted in other countries that your mail server can authenticated and relay through. This eliminates the need for things like FCrDNS, DMARC, etc... on your server. A dial-up will do just fine. Read up on how to use postfix header checks to sanitized email headers so that your users IP addresses are not exposed.
One advantage of self hosted email servers is that anyone inside your country that can reach the server can communicate directly to each other through that server. Nothing has to leave the country and can not be censored. Be sure to encrypt the mail and spool folders.
For trusted circles of friends, especially those responsible for maintaining servers, ensure they create and share PGP keys. There are how-to's for this as well. Create code phrases that mean different things, so that you can tell others if you have been compromised.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-int...
You could send an email/tweet to SpaceX and ask to be part of the Starlink beta program. They'd have to be granted a license for your country first, however.
Look at what happened to Ukraine a few years ago and look at the state where it's at now. Do you really want that for your country ?