cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42209343
When Russians look back at 2025, they might remember it as the year when the government took even tighter control of the internet.
Credit cards that won’t buy a ticket on public transport. ATMs that don’t connect to a network. Messaging apps that are down. Cellphones that don’t receive texts or data after a trip abroad. Mothers of diabetic children even complain with alarm that they can’t monitor their kids’ blood glucose levels during outages.
Boo hoo. While your culture makes lives miserable worldwide, you have slow internet.
God Russia is a hell hole.
The background: Ukraine didn’t have 30 years to refine its cruise missiles and long range strike drones - they built them in 3 years.
There are many ways to make a missile navigate.
- it may follow terrain features (hard, you need to thoroughly map a country using a fleet of satellites)
- it may take readings from a satnav system (this can be jammed)
- it may scan for mobile phone towers and match their ID codes to a map
Once a missile has the direction of 2…3 towers confirmed, it knows where it is - and where to go. Crashing into the final target uses machine vision, but getting there does not.
As a result, Russia tries to counter them by shutting down mobile networks. Not sure if it works. Going by the news, doesn’t seem to work very well.
As for how to avoid exfiltration of mobile network data - hopeless. People have so much spyware and crap on their phones that you don’t need to put an agent on ground to get a list of towers. You just buy out a smartphone app from a shady supplier and develop it into a rootkit, or sell rooted phones on the cheap in the target country.
Russia has propaganda now, on how life is better without internet.
With gloomy pictures showing people using their phones and looking unhappy, contrasted with people walking together holding hands and smiling.
(Seen on Jake Broe on youtube.)"You like this better, or else "
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
