Information and technological tools for the practical survival of social communities in the context of the Internet shutdown in 2014

In December last (2013), a statement by Alexander Gostev (an expert from Kaspersky Lab) made at a special press conference was made public , according to which this (2014) year will be the last year for the Internet in Russia. The authorities of Russia, according to Gostev, are aiming to create a national network with limited access to foreign resources.

A month later (in January of this year), the emergence of a bill providing for a notification procedure for creating servers on the Internet showed, in a practical way, that Gostev rather downplayed the scope of intentions of domestic legislators. First (February 26) it became known that this bill was approved by the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, that it is preparing for the first reading in the State Duma; then, literally two days later (February 28), it also became known that the bill was passed by the State Duma in the first reading. What will be the further development of events? It is possible to suspect, and not without reason, that in the end everything will turn out about the same as happened with rallies and other mass gatherings of citizens: the notification procedure prescribed by law will naturally become de facto permissive, and the number of such servers allowed for mass visits via the Internet in Russia, it will be closer to the shrewd and gloomy estimate of ≈1943, which is sometimes attributed to Thomas J. Watson, then president of IBM (see photo) - no more than five pieces per year.

I’ll say right away: trying to use a couple of hundreds of the last days of Habrahabr's existence with maximum benefit, I, of course, will not discuss political measures to counteract the above-mentioned legislative initiative, because the Habrahabr rules prohibit it. Also, I will not touch upon its influence on the business in order not to fall for it in the hub-offtopic . Quite the contrary - the practical survival of completely non-profit social communities will be the subject of my concern, and this is achieved not by political, but by purely IT tools. That is why the thoughts set forth below are to be conveyed not only to Habrahabr (which would partially work with offtopics), but also to the external (in relation to Habrahabr) communities of its unregistered readers. For this now, it’s true, they have also recently come to the hub-offtopic, but directly to the black list of the Federal Guard Service (collecting names, addresses and other data on negatively-minded Internet users) - but this is apparently an inevitable evil. . Not everyone is given, once having comprehended the benefit of the Internet, to have a positive attitude to the intentions of those who now actively hate it and are trying to destroy it. Rather, the opposite is given. Therefore, I suspect that the hour is not far when dissatisfaction becomes universal - and the FSO will inevitably have to purchase the Rostelecom subscriber base (and other providers) and use it instead of its own black lists.
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The bottom line is this: it would be nice to be ready for the future gradual destruction of the Internet. Are you ready? Is an alternative to the Internet possible, free from the fatal flaws that predetermined its destruction?

I propose a simple mental exercise of the mind. Imagine yourself a member of a vast social community formed on the Internet and uniting residents of various remote cities - uniting citizens who are far from personal acquaintance and communication in the so-called real world. One or two servers important to this community already show “451 ° error” instead of their home page; and very soon (perhaps already to the table of the Second World War? ...) all, all its servers on the Internet will share the same fate in Russia: the Internet will become the Internet for them (from the word “Internet”).

In addition, you are an IT specialist.

A ready-made (illustrative) example of such a community is in the current RuNet a community of so-called “animeshnikov” (the term is to a certain extent conditional, since the community also includes fans of other forms of modern Japanese artistic culture - fans of not only anime, but also manga, ranobe , visual novels, danmaku, mini-sculptures, dakmakur, and so on). This example is also not alien to Habrahabru: a survey in 2012 showed that more than ⅓ of Habrahabr's readers are positive about anime; besides, at Habrahabr at least half a dozen blog entries (for example, available on the “ this world ’s banter ment ” tag) gave readers the opportunity to read in detail and closely observe the development and growth of government efforts to suppress animeshnik activity on the Internet - this increase occurs under the specious excuse to combat “Suicide propaganda” and, more recently, “pedophilia”.

Baseless or flimsy pretexts are called "ridiculous." However, it is not a laughing matter for a long time. Not fun, but a sense of burning and intolerable shame increases in the soul when you see Orthodox people in the Sverdlovsk region creating an “ Orthodox system of fighting anime ” after the suicide of Yekaterinburg schoolgirls, in whose personal belongings a manga was discovered (perhaps, having no attitude to work) - while none of these Orthodox for decades paid no attention and did not rise to the struggle against the fact that in the very name of their region was one of the most directly perpetuated x organizers of mass infanticide (and even more: the murder of the entire family of the last Emperor, later canonized). Or when you see visitors of the Anime News Network site discussing the news that a Volgograd resident received three years in prison who uploaded unnamed videos of fictional minors who were sexually recognized by the court — although a much more serious problem with the sexual corruption of real children is far from final solutions in Russia, so ANN visitors are at a loss.

Does animeshnikov only concern this? Of course not. Seven months ago (August 8, 2013), I called the Russian anime community a kind of “miner’s canary”, a living indicator of future negative changes in the entire Russian Internet. And now I am not backing away from this opinion: the same fate awaits all network communities, all social networks in Russia. The authorities will seek their closure and destruction under baseless and unfounded pretexts, and will be more effective.

There are recent examples, and the most glaring examples. We all happened to read the other day ( here and here , for example) about the rapidly preparing ban on access to Yandex and Wikipedia (and the ban was supposed to be imposed without their prior notification) on the pretext that you can find some information about the film "Eternal Jew" (1940). The court considered this as a sufficient excuse. (It is worth mentioning that the practice of hiding this film from the public gradually acquires the features of fanatical persecution: it even went so far that on January 31, 2012, by decision of the Murom City Court, the image of a person of Jewish nationality was added to the Federal list of extremist materials , at the bottom the text "eternal Jew" - therefore, the publication was made not only of the movie itself, but also of its posters , in which the title is below, and not above the title character. for illustration, you can see an example of such a poster, on which the inscription “eternal Jew” is located at the top and which therefore was not prohibited by that court decision.) Also, YouTube was closed by part of Russian providers, because in several billion videos recorded by YouTube every day just one radical video call for Ukrainians.

There is a theoretical background. On February 21, the article “ The Catalyst of Hate ” was published in Expert, in the title of which even an inattentive reader can easily recognize the consonance with such materials of Russian anti-opposition propaganda as “ Anatomy of Protest ” or “ Biochemistry of Betrayal ”, whose names began in the same characteristic way - from the scientific the term. The essence of this article is to list a number of evidence in favor of this opinion: the mechanisms of group thinking, which are an integral part of the human psyche, inevitably make any kind of social network a means of gradually transforming its participants into radicals, extremists, supporters of national, religious, civilizational, political and intolerance, so that the ability of people to look for like-minded people and communicate with them on social networks creates fanatics and terrorists by the very fact of their being tweaked, resulting in a loss of critical thinking, ensures compliance in relation to the arguments of paid podryvateley rating of the Russian president, has fueled the escalation of violence in the real world, an example of what the author calls the Ukraine, as well as Syria and (unexpectedly) to Yemen.

In short, this article justifies the use of the well-known repressive antisocial principle “not to gather more than three” (also “ you need to sit at home ” , etc.) not only in the so-called real world, but also in relation to the Internet social networks and communities. If the government believes in any way the pro-government experts of this kind, then it inevitably came to the idea of ​​the need for the speedy physical destruction of all social networks (and not the Internet as a whole) in Russia. It is this, perhaps, that we are seeing not the first year.

Having finished this introductory part, which is conscious, you can go to the second (and main) part of our mind exercise - go to brainstorming. What shall we do? What are all of our existing (non-political) means and methods for such opposition, which would allow social communities, deprived of the current Internet, to survive and survive?

First of all, it is appropriate to point to such a non-trivial, but widespread computing and communication tool, which is a modern smartphone. And I pointed it out to the animes guy in the interview I gave to Nubtayp (an informational publication on anonymous imageboards on which animeshniks hang out), and now I am pointing to Habrahabr. Having opened the twenty fourth number of “Nubtype”, which was released on December 14, 2013, you can easily read in it (on page 13) this is my opinion:

I wish the readers of "Nubtype" attentive attitude to the capabilities of those smartphones that many of us carry in our pockets. Each latest-generation smartphone (among the Android models supporting leading manufacturers) is endowed with a FullHD screen, a multi-core processor, dozens of gigabytes of long-term memory, and a powerful video accelerator. They can not only listen to soundtracks or read manga, but also watch anime (even with a ten-bit video quality). In addition, the emergence of the BakaReader EX application (which resulted in about a year and a half of the work of the Baka-Tsuki site fans ) allows you to read many mobile English translations in English, such as E-mail right now (for example, Log Horizon or Golden Time "), and has long been filmed (for example," Asura Cryin '" or" Denpa Teki na Kanojo "). Do not miss this opportunity.

Right now, work is underway to introduce high-speed mobile communication networks (LTE) in Russia. For the time being, this process has affected only a few dozen major cities, but its ending promises to our smartphones completely new possibilities for streaming video viewing and file sharing. Do not miss these opportunities.

The future is radiant. I even admit the possibility of combining smartphones into an Internet network that is little affected by the restrictions of Roskomnadzor, due to which tens of thousands of Russian animers have lost the ability to directly watch many anime websites (“Danbooru”, “Gelbooru”, “Sankaku Complex”; references to such network repression can be found at Habrahabr on the "banish ment of this world" tag) were forced to look for workarounds (anonymizers, onion routers, virtual private networks) or accept.

What did I have in mind when speaking of the integration of smartphones into the non-Internet network? Yes, about the same as what was said on December 28, 2012 in Habrahabr:

For paranoid heaven, cryptography is not enough; there should be more steganography.

Something like this: wireless keys are worn by cats, with which keys are implanted under the skin, and no one is suspicious of cats.

The network participant went out into the yard to knock out the carpet — and a solid-state wireless router was woven into the carpet with a metal thread , and at that moment the packet wireless data transmission inside the square of four houses surrounding the yard began.

Don't we look like cats? It seems to be somewhat similar: no one will suspect a person with a smartphone (a smartphone is completely normal), and meanwhile, the capabilities of modern networks (such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi — for example, Wi-Fi Direct) allow two people met in the crowd at high speed to exchange data, even without getting smartphones out of their pockets. The same capabilities are possessed, in addition to smartphones, also tablets and laptops.

Such data exchange makes it possible at the modern technical level to revive the old practice of flopping (data transfer on floppy disks during a personal meeting of IT specialists) that existed in the eighties and partly in the nineties. Another option for such an "floppy upgrade" is the exchange of high-capacity flash drives (even in a provincial city like Gelendzhik, you can buy a 128-gigabyte flash drive for less than 4,000 rubles). The one and the other variant of the “modern floppy” can serve as the transport level of the Fidonet network or another FTN (Fidonet-type Network) with all its services: netmail (similar to the Internet e-mail), echomail (analogue of the Internet forums, blogs, communities , message boards), file echo conferences (for broadcasting files), as well as so-called freaks (file requests, that is, file requests) and FAQ servers — both are Fidonet’s analogous sites.

In other words, such a network does not need the Internet, although it can also use it as a long-range transport. It does not need to continuously connect its nodes to each other: it is enough to connect them during the exchange of information (several times a day, and not even once every few days).

You can immediately indicate that the FTN network and disadvantages will be appropriate: such services that require continuous connection of network nodes to each other (chats, telephones, videophones, streaming video, network “radio”) cannot exist over FTN.

An information network that is technically organized in this way becomes another social network, on top of which (as over transport) all other (narrower) communities exist. As in the case of P2P file sharing, the FTN network does not have any such SPOF (single point of failure, that is, a single point of failure) that the authorities of any state can hit in order to eliminate the community as a whole. At the same time, the Internet has a fatal flaw that predetermined its destruction in Russia: it is enough for the authorities to close one site (key for some community) to lead to the elimination of this community (for example, the Habrahabr community will not survive the destruction of Habrahabr, while Fidonet’s echo conference can survive Suppose a moderator leaves Fidonet), and it’s enough for the authorities to give one provider (Rostelecom) a flick to disrupt the existence of the entire network (or any of its sites) in most Russian cities (whereas in Fidonet, the disappearance of the network coordinator leads to re-election, the disappearance of a large hub leads to a reorganization of the routing, and the network is able to recover from this).

Suppression of the FTN network by the authorities is possible, but (as it happens in the case of P2P file sharing) it cannot take the form of a SPOF point strike, so it takes the form of either mass reprisals against all community members, or pinpoint repressions of randomly selected citizens are both more annoying to society. (Torrent file sharing is not pure P2P and contains SPOF in the form of trackers - and it is easy to see that the trackers are hit by the authorities: arrests of the “Pirate Bay” participants, weaning RuTracker's domain and all that.)

It is also not difficult to see that the FTN-type network excludes anonymous participation (operators of nodes connecting directly have to know each other). This can be perceived as a disadvantage that prevents unrestricted freedom of speech. At the same time, this factor can be perceived as a virtue, since it eliminates a number of negative manifestations on the network (anonymous spam, anonymous trolling ...) and restrains the radicalization of the participants' statements.The possibility of anonymous repression by the authorities is also excluded, because the repressed always turns out to be a more or less well-known member of the global “community of communities” whose other members are geographically close (in the real world). In addition (as I mentioned in the same interview with Nubtayp), if in a certain community the complete anonymity of statements is spread (for which you don’t even need a pseudonym), then you often get such a confused situation when you can thank for valuable thoughts ), but you can’t listen carefully to their authors in the future - therefore, in the anonymous community, no relationship “senpai-kohai” or “guru-teaching, and the spread of experience occurs mainly according to the memetic principle: thoughts survive not when backed up by a harmonious system (made up of several statements by one author) or by author's charisma, but when they are short and memorable, capable of imposing in mind. An alternative to the short memo is a long “copy-paste” (literal quotation of a long text of one anonym by other anonymous authors), but this is not a popular way.

In a brainstorming session, we cannot focus on a single idea; And moving further, it is appropriate to mention that the further development (“upgrade”) of the FTN network idea is the mesh network idea ,in which data transfer between neighboring nodes occurs not sporadically, but continuously. Such a network is more reminiscent of the Internet than Fidonet, therefore, it is able to provide non-Fidoneto services (chat rooms, telephones, video telephones, streaming video, network radio) on top of itself; At the same time, it can retain almost all of the above-listed advantages of the “community of communities” (lack of SPOF, beneficial non-anonymity), which are not typical of traditional providers. On September 10, 2013, Jeditobe in Habrahabr gave two examples of fairly extensive mesh networks: Guifi (more than 21,130 participants, Spain) and AWMN (about 1120 nodes and 2500 end users, Greece).

A natural disadvantage of such a network is the need for a minimum IT density, that is, some such number of IT specialists per kilometer, only above which it becomes possible to have uninterrupted wireless communication between them (or rather, between their nodes, which are stationary and connected to electrical outlets). Aytishnym elegant solution to this problem would not be able to become, unfortunately, even the appearance of any program that makes every smartphone (or tablet, or laptop) new serventom nonprofit internetopodobnoy global mesh-network;could not, because they do not have enough energy for the necessary power; And without that, the battery is barely enough from morning to evening, and the laptop has even less. We can only hope that in the future the network of sockets for recharging (especially wireless) will grow, and then within its limits the work of the mesh network will be possible , start up and only during recharging (in this mode, for example, BOINC calculations on Android work ) .

In addition, such a network (similar to the Internet) is too inclined to learn the fatal lack of the Internet, that is, to arrange within itself irreplaceable servers (sites) that can become a convenient object of repression, destroying a separate community around them. Network members should moderately refrain from this, that is, they should strive, for example, to use P2P for file delivery (instead of storing on the site or on an FTP server), and also, perhaps, use echomail (not Fogo over IP ) or other distributed technology (for example, some analogue of Twisternot hoping for global availability or for the eternal work of the nodes of the network in which it is running). It can be shorter to express this game of words: everyone will have to understand that they are still in the mesh network, and not in the “inter-net”.

In addition to the efforts of the Russian IT community, it must be said, external powerful forces are capable of arranging a mesh network in Russia, if they only have the will and the means to launch atmospheric satellites over Russia or to distribute Wi-Fi teapots in each house (united by mesh- network) under the guise of ordinary teapots. About these last I noticedOn October 27, 2013, that the idea of ​​spreading them reminds Lazarevich's fiction about the forced introduction of information communism; and now you can still joke that the Olympics will happen then in Russia, not “instead of communism” (as in the evil anti-Soviet joke of 1980), but jointly. However, to take such forces from nowhere; "No one will give us deliverance."

A good strategist (like Shiroe in the anime “Log Horizon” or Lelouch in the anime “Code Geass”) is obliged to calculate the opponent's moves, so I propose to speculate also about the possible actions of the state aimed at blocking the wireless network of the popular masses by IT people - and how the IT community could defend against such actions.

Firstly, the state can prohibit the use of Wi-Fi necessary for the network , explaining that it is a struggle against the clogging of radio broadcasts. The natural IT non-political response of the network “community of communities” to such a measure can and should be the rejection of Wi-Fi in favor of an alternative data transfer technology. For a non-permanent connection (FTN network), this technology can be the exchange of multi-gigabyte flash drives; for a permanent connection (mesh network), this technology can probably become one hundred megabyte Li-Fi , especially as support for it appears in smartphonesand other mobile devices. Theoretically, more exotic communication channels are also possible - for example, TCP / IP via audio channel ([ 1 ], [ 2 ]) or automatic generation of QR codes at one end and scanning them at the other. However, these alternatives are unlikely to gain popularity - the data transfer rate achieved by them is too low.

Secondly, the state can prohibit free public information networks, explaining this with another baseless and unfounded pretext. A good analogue is the idea of ​​banning free Internet access via Wi-Fi with a motivation that appeared in January, but what if via Wi-Fiin a cafe you can blow up a nuclear power plant? ... ". To counter this can only spread the practice of free public information networks to such an extent that the violent ban of free networks (working within community friendships) in favor of paid and state-controlled providers would be perceived as intolerable interference with the privacy of many ordinary citizens - just as if it were, for example, the violent prohibition of free sex (occurring in love and in marriage) in favor of paid and state-controlled prostitutes OK. I gloomily suspect, however, that such a wide prevalence of free networks can be achieved only by winning a victory over the state in the competition "who will more quickly destroy the Internet in their favor."

Thirdly, the state can prohibit the possession of smartphones (tablets, laptops, routers) capable of organizing into a network that is not controlled by the state. Bill No. 449120-6 (“Foreign equipment can be used on the territory of the Russian Federation in communication equipment, communication equipment, communication networks of all forms of ownership only if there is no similar Russian-made communication equipment complying with the requirements of paragraph 2.1.2 of this article ” ) -After all, it is possible that it will be possible for you in your private property to prohibit the use of an iPhone, a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a router, any imported equipment that does not have keypad “bookmarks” inside. Perhaps, over time, they will not just be banned, but will also be withdrawn from the population, as non-channel radio receivers were seized during the Great Patriotic War - especially since we have a war on the nose, as you know.

Fourth, the state can simply eliminate all computer-literate citizens, seeing in them a threat to stability and following the historical example of the Khmer Rouge, who eliminated all literate citizens in general.

It is clear that to oppose the third and fourth options can only form an agreement in society on the question of the categorical unacceptability of mass repressions and a significant infringement of the rights of citizens. And in society and at the top. But I'm not very sure, gentlemen, that such a consent exists. Maybe it will turn out quite the opposite: let them read their “Catalyst of hatred” and wish us all to be torn to pieces by such and such a mother in order to defeat extremism and terrorism. If in Volgograd you can condemn an ​​animeshnik by analogy “spread hentai - it's just the same as if a child fucked up, damn pedophile”, then you can probably condemn an ​​IT-guy by analogy “set up a mesh network -it is the same as if people in Volgograd were blown up, the terrorist is a cursed one. ” Public opinion is extremely malleable.

On this my reasoning is over. In conclusion, I ask you to follow my example, looking in the comments primarily for IT solutions (and not business solutions and not political solutions) for the problems discussed - when such solutions are possible, of course.