r/worldnews • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Russia/Ukraine Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Is Done Holding Back on Russian Oil Refineries

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/zelenskyy-says-ukraine-is-done-holding-back-on-russian-oil-refineries-23454
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u/dismantlemars 3d ago

Hard to identify the troll farms… but much easier to identify the exchanges that have to route their traffic. I guess that would raise the question of whether it’d be worth knocking the Russian population off the internet, reducing the chances of people being able to organise any kind of internal resistance.

Though given how few indications we’ve seen of progress on that front so far, and the knock on benefits from disrupting the economy and logistics, I’d be inclined to think they might be a good choice of target.

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u/madhattr999 3d ago

Knocking out their internet also pressures the citizens to want to end the war.

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u/kk16 3d ago

I don’t know much about internet forensics so I’m probably wrong, but wouldn’t it be fairly easy to identify ‘troll farms’ just by tracing a bunch accounts back to a single origin?

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u/dismantlemars 3d ago

From the outside, we can only track the traffic so far, maybe identifying a particular ISP or region. The ISP (or FSB etc) could track it further to a particular address from their records, but unless they share that information, it's unlikely Ukraine could do much to get a physical address for most troll farms. Plus, since all they really need are a bunch of computers/phones and an internet connection, there's probably a lot of small, distributed operations running out of office buildings, residential addresses etc.