Information Policy

Francisco Partners-owned Sandvine profits from shutdowns and oppression in Belarus

On the night of August 9, 2020, as news started to come in that the Belarus election results might have been fraudulent, citizen reports and technical evidence showed that authorities were deliberately cutting access to the internet. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition monitored and reported on the shutdowns. The shutdowns were also followed by extreme police violence and detentions of peaceful protesters.

Continue reading "Francisco Partners-owned Sandvine profits from shutdowns and oppression in Belarus" »

Gregory Asmolov In the new information environment, state violence against hyperlocal dispersed protests is becoming less effective in suppressing them. As the situation in Belarus shows, violence is providing a new motivation for people to take to the streets.

Contributors: Vesna Manojlovic, Rene Wilhelm

 

 

On 9 August, Belarus experienced country-wide Internet outages. Here's a first glance at what our tools and datasets have to tell us about the scale of these outages and their impact.

 

Continue reading "Our First Glance at the Belarus Outages" »

Over 7,000 people have been detained in mass protests since August 9

Before we start investigating what is happening with the Internet within and outside of Belarus, let us quote a couple of sentences we are repeating in annual National Reliability Research & Report:

“Strictly speaking, when the BGP and the world of interdomain routing were in the design stage, the creators assumed that every non-transit AS would have at least two upstream providers to guarantee fault tolerance in case one goes down. However, the reality is different; over 45% of ISP’s have only one connection to an upstream transit provider. A range of unconventional relationships among transit ISPs further reduces reliability. So, have transit ISPs ever failed? The answer is yes, and it happens with some frequency. The more appropriate question is — under what conditions would a particular ISP experience service degradation? If such problems seem unlikely, it may be worth considering Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will.”

The path to the square: the role of digital technologies in Belarus’ protests

Gregory Asmolov In the new information environment, state violence against hyperlocal dispersed protests is becoming less effective in suppressing them. As the situation in Belarus shows, violence is providing a new motivation for people to take to the streets.

Our First Glance at the Belarus Outages

Contributors: Vesna Manojlovic, Rene Wilhelm

 

 

On 9 August, Belarus experienced country-wide Internet outages. Here's a first glance at what our tools and datasets have to tell us about the scale of these outages and their impact.

 

Continue reading "Our First Glance at the Belarus Outages" »

Over 7,000 people have been detained in mass protests since August 9

Before we start investigating what is happening with the Internet within and outside of Belarus, let us quote a couple of sentences we are repeating in annual National Reliability Research & Report:

“Strictly speaking, when the BGP and the world of interdomain routing were in the design stage, the creators assumed that every non-transit AS would have at least two upstream providers to guarantee fault tolerance in case one goes down. However, the reality is different; over 45% of ISP’s have only one connection to an upstream transit provider. A range of unconventional relationships among transit ISPs further reduces reliability. So, have transit ISPs ever failed? The answer is yes, and it happens with some frequency. The more appropriate question is — under what conditions would a particular ISP experience service degradation? If such problems seem unlikely, it may be worth considering Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will.”

‘Concerned IT specialists’ launch database of detained Belarusian protesters

Over 7,000 people have been detained in mass protests since August 9

What is happening with the BY internet segment in terms of BGP and IPv4/IPv6

Before we start investigating what is happening with the Internet within and outside of Belarus, let us quote a couple of sentences we are repeating in annual National Reliability Research & Report:

“Strictly speaking, when the BGP and the world of interdomain routing were in the design stage, the creators assumed that every non-transit AS would have at least two upstream providers to guarantee fault tolerance in case one goes down. However, the reality is different; over 45% of ISP’s have only one connection to an upstream transit provider. A range of unconventional relationships among transit ISPs further reduces reliability. So, have transit ISPs ever failed? The answer is yes, and it happens with some frequency. The more appropriate question is — under what conditions would a particular ISP experience service degradation? If such problems seem unlikely, it may be worth considering Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will.”