Slashdot Mirror
Belarus Bans Use of Foreign Websites
bs0d3 writes "A new law in Belarus prohibits people from using 'foreign' websites. The law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. The tax authorities and the secret police are authorized to investigate violations."
Belarus is a dictatorship with a history of human rights abuse. All bets are off.
Thank you for providing us anti-SOPA people with a rhetorical example of an internet rights disaster that is less politically sensitive than China. (Also, it may be time for another revolution.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
This is different from post SOPA USA how?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This will do nothing more than work to isolate the Belorussians and stifle their growth going forward. Shortsightedness leading to stagnation in the name of security...
Coldmoon over Dark water...
This basically prevents residents of the nation to buy / maintain a foreign TLD. It does not prevent people from accessing them.
Sound like a country determined to be poor.
If you live in that country you may as well just stop using the internet completely then, since it's effectively not the internet anymore, just an extremely small walled garden. Anyone want to take bets on exactly how many weeks this continues before they rescind it? A move like this couldn't be good for any country's economy.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Wow, someone doesn't understand World Wide Web do they? Why don't they just block all access out side of Belarus and run it like a big LAN.
"Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet."
They're banning businesses from using foreign sites to operate. By not doing this, a large percentage of their economy will most likely be going to foreign interests.
Wrong. From TFA: "Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet."
If you're not allowed to go to an internet cafe and visit slashdot.org without being identified and reported to the authorities, that sounds pretty close to being banned from using a foreign site to me.
Not really, troll.
You've got to be kidding; this is the most idiotic thing I've read all day.
The Tea Party is indeed full of nincompoops, but protectionism is the exact opposite of what they want; they want anarchy with giant corporations and their private armies making all the rules, much like Somalia. It's all about "the free market" and "The Invisible Hand", which just devolves into "the biggest bully wins", but to conflate this idea with protectionism and hating foreigners is just idiotic.
will be right over to liberate the Belaruse people.... right over....any time now... oh they only have trees....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Citation please, or shall I just label this 'Incredible BS'?
The Tea Party does not want this here.The Tea Party is for a free and open internet and open source software! The Tea Party does not back SOPA! The Tea Party is not racist. The Tea Party is for a strong economy! Are you from china or any other country with a repressive internet policy?
I think this is a hell of an approach for a country to ensure that it's business world doesn't try to offshore and outsource it's services to evade taxation.
I think using a country TLD is also a source of national pride. The .com may be international, but not all businesses are international in nature.
I was going to register a .ca myself, but I soon learned it's far more expensive to get a .ca domain than a .com. A .ca will have to wait until I can afford it, in the meantime the http://domain.com/tld-code/ approach will work, particularly as the concern is more to provide language options that country/region options.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I get the impression that this only applies to commercial transactions... So visiting Slashdot alone probably won't run afoul of the law, but donating money to Slashdot might.
Either way this law is ridiculous. Trade is a good thing; they're basically cutting themselves out of the global market.
For those who are unaware, Belarus is ruled by a turd named Alexander Lukashenko. He's been their president since 1994 and initially increased presidential term limits from the standard five years to seven and later removed presidential term limits altogether.
Some of his memorable moments include:
... and so on.
In other words, such stories while shocking are, IMO, hardly surprising ...
You are not banned from using foreign sites, however you are banned from allowing others to use foreign sites on your computer. It is stated quite clearly in the law. The reason for this is not as clear.
liberated!!
They are allowed aa little contradiction. No reason they cant be against regulation in general for their economic policy while still wishing to oppose unamerican influence socially. As political contradictions go, that barely even registers.
It's unknown how accurate the summary in TFA is, but if my quote above is correct, that sounds like a lot more than just commercial transactions. Of course, it could be a stupidly-written law that meant to only apply to commercial transactions, but that's irrelevant as the law's text is what's important, but again, the accuracy of the article is unknown; it's common for "journalists" these days to totally screw up basic facts.
I see that protectionism is something you are against, as am I. Hail fellow, well met!
Do you agree with me that no moral case can be made for further impoverishing workers in poor countries to further enrich incredibly rich (by world standards) US union members?
It's not that I don't get the politics of protectionism, I just have this little conscience problem when I consider the big picture.
Control. If everyone is breaking the law, you can arrest anyone at any time for any reason.
The reason for this is not as clear.
Presumably it's the same reason why typewriters were so strictly controlled in the 'good old days'; so they can send the secret police around to whoever is found accessing an evil foreign web site and arrest the owner of the computer.
This is exactly the type of laws that protectionists and tea party activists want. They hate foreigners, and want to force people not to interact or trade with them.
If you are going to spout mindless drivel like this, please use the term "tea-baggers" so we can filter you more easily. Thanks!
some form of Slavic word for 'idiot'?
Imagine this were the USA and Western Europe situation: there is no www.google.com, yro.slashdot.org, www.facebook.com, or similar. Everything you do in in the *.cn domain, with IP addresses assigned by the Chinese, and physically located in China. Would that be a good situation for the USA or Western Europe?
It's no different for Belarus.
(bummer, because I **like** the USA having more control over Belarus)
I wonder how this will affect the World of Tanks and other computer games put out by Wargaming.net [Wikipedia] since their development center is in Minsk, Belrus.
I can assure you the politicians controlling the Tea Party want nothing to do with any regulation or protectionism. You might find some common people who identify as TPers who might be in favor of some protectionism, but they don't control anything. As soon as one of the politicians tells them "protectionism is bad! regulation is bad!" they'll change their minds.
No. You are stupid.
We're Number Two! We're Number Two!
Yeah, Baby! We are now only the second stupidest country on the planet regarding writing Internet laws that completely misunderstand how the Internet works. Thanks Belarus! You've shown that our politicians are not quite the most ignorant twits in positions of power on Earth!
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
You don't have to lie about the Tea Party to make it look bad. They can do that quite well themselves.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yea, just the other day I went to www.baidu.cn and the secret police arrived and arrested me.
Seriously, what are you smoking?
I actually like this, which is weird, because I wouldn't have thought so. But it makes sense that in order to benefit from all of the various business-related incentives that your country may provide, including your business licence in the first place, that you continue to spend your money domestically.
I run a business in Canada, and I use Rackspace out of the U.S.A.. I've very happy with Rackspace, as anyone should be, they are indeed fantastic in every way. But I feel guilty for not remaining in Canada, and do wish that they'd open a Canadian datacentre. Recently, I've found a worthy Canadian competitor, and simply cannot justify the transitional effort.
But I'd appreciate such a law. Sure it would cause momentary distress for me and for my business, but I think it would improve competition amongst my competitors, and also attract foreign suppliers -- Rackspace included.
The actual law says that if you trade in Belarus, your servers should physically be in Belarus (pretty scary, if you ask me), and they should be "properly registered" (whatever this means) with the state. This registration requirement may or may not force you to use their ccTLD, I cannot find any information on this.
It also says that if you let others to use your network, you must identify your users and keep logs for one year. You also must not let people access stuff that is illegal to access. I think this one is close to what they have in some parts of Westen Europe.
Apparently its strawman day on slashdot. I wait with bated breath to see the next one.
This is plain stupid. A human will not stand and stare. A human will stab and be fare. It's just a matter of time.
This article is false and misleading. Try using Google Translate before jumping to conclusions. The restrictions that are being put in place are no different than ones already implemented in places like China and the Middle East.
Are you suggesting that it ever isn't?
You're not talking about the article because you didn't read it. Here:
Are you done, or do you want to humiliate yourself further?
$5 says that this won't apply to Alexander Lukashenko, his cronies, or anyone else in a position of power in the government of Belarus.
We're a democracy! That means that the vast majority of the people agree that the internet as we know it should be destroyed, because the RIAA and MPAA aren't making enough money! Because of piracy! Likewise, we've decided that suspending miranda rights and indefinite detention without a trial or chance to confront your accusers is A-OK! I know that China is rubbing their hands gleefully because they think they can point at us as an example of moral rightness and claim they're just following our example. But it's different! Because here, EVERYONE decided that, while over there the Communist Party did! You see how it's different, right?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I never quite understood why the focus on typewriters; if someone wants to write something the government doesn't like, it's easy enough to just get a pen and some paper, right? Yes, handwriting can be identified, but it isn't that hard to change your writing into something different from your regular handwriting; write in all-caps, for instance, or practice using your left hand.
May this measure be as successful as previous er, "strong democracies" that forbade and required permits for radio sets, mimeographs, typewriters, cameras, ... and, later, VCRs, sattellite dishes, cellphones, satphones, etc.
In other places at this date, being functionally literate, or able to apply any level of critical thinking, automatically makes one suspect.
Not to mention "laws" equivalent to the one the Nazis passed when Prussia became theirs, that allowed police to arrest people on the accusation of "walking suspiciously". Papier, Bitte?
It specifically mentions entrepreneurs... in other words small business. This smells like a ploy to prop up a local ISP (monopoly or state-controlled?) by forcing small businesses to use them for email, hosting, and domain registration.
Because Belarus is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Organisation
A war against Belarus means a war against Russia.
I am left handed, you insensitive clod!
I have yet to see ANY of the Tea Party candidates come out and say SOPA is bad law, will veto it if it comes to them when in office, and if it gets passed before they take office will refuse to enforce it and pressure Congress to revoke it.
I have heard from a second-hand source that Ron Paul is against it. But he's not Tea Party.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Next thing you know the dictators in China might just copy from their Belarusian counterparts
The US citizens have not lost a single right guaranteed by the constitution or Bill of Rights and the right to be anonymous is not mentioned in any of these founding documents.
You are either a decent troll or a fucking idiot. Stop claiming that the US Constitution grants us rights, it in no way grants rights. The Constitution is a framework to define and limit power of the Federal government AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MORE.
How dare you claim that some person, people or document granted me my rights as a human being. That notion is vile and disgusting.
Handwriting - written in all-caps - is uniquely identifiable. Opposite-hand is probably identifiable too, but it's excruciatingly slow to write.
The focus on typewriters was to make sure that anonymous speech - anybody could be behind that keyboard, after all - was restricted to a single device. Simultaneously, steps were taken (samples of text were typed before delivery and linked, on paper, with the serial number of the typewriter that produced them, and the sale was tracked) to ensure that the device wasn't anonymous. The "registered" owner of the typewriter was the one who got the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Modern analogy: Anyone can post as an AC on Slashdot. But the government runs the only ISP in town, all IPs are static, and can cross-reference traffic between your IP and Slashdot (or Tor, etc), and the timestamp of the post on Slashdot.
then i will agree that the US is like 1920s germany.
not saying it couldnt happen. just saying... im not convinced. WWI was fundamental to the german experience in the 20s, with masses of ex soldiers bitter and angry at society.
we do not have masses of ex soldiers - they make up a tiny percentage of the US population. there are unlikely to be putsches by people who spend their late teens playing skyrim instead of being involved in trench warfare and forced to starve on the street unless they join some paramilitary brigade.
The truth is that in countries like this, all you need to do is throw a few shiny dollars the way of the police and nobody will ever enforce the law. I highly doubt such a small country has the necessary resources to enforce something so insane anyway.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Of course the US is not a dictatorship.
It is however, a culture with quite repressive mores on sexuality, an increasingly partisan and divisive electorate that is slowly killing interest and participation in democracy, a culture that is more interested in assigning blame than creating solutions, an unstable and stratifying economy with a distinct distrust of socialist solutions, a history of militant aggression towards other nations and of popular support for military spending, great fear and loathing of Islam (a rival, external religious / ethnic force), a growing apathy towards human rights violations (e.g. torture, indefinite detention, repression of protest), etc.
If you don't see the parallels to 1920s & 30s Germany, then you are not a very good student of history. After all, the Weimar Republic was a democracy too before it collapsed, and America itself almost fell to the same pressures during the Great Depression. We dodged the bullet once. Don't assume we always will without vigilance.
Opposite-hand is probably identifiable too, but it's excruciatingly slow to write.
Well you don't have to do it all at once. I mean, do your first draft in normal handwriting so you can get your thoughts down quickly (have a lighter handy in case you need to burn it though!). Then, either you or a cohort use opposite-hand writing to rewrite the paper.
And as you pointed out, typewritten text can be tracked to the typewriter that wrote it. With handwriting, surely they didn't have a national database of everyone's handwriting to compare against (and definitely not opposite-hand). Unless they had their eyes on you already, intentionally bad handwriting should be pretty good for anonymity, whereas it's easy for a repressive government to track typewriter sales. After all, how are they going to figure out which of 10+ million people is the suspect just based on handwriting? Now of course, if you're already suspected of being a subversive, it'd be harder, but still it isn't that hard to forge someone else's handwriting. Sure, it's slow, but are you writing a novel the size of War and Peace or just an article for Der Spiegel?
American here.
No, it's not like 1920s Germany, because even the Nazis were idealistic in their own fucked up way. "Kill those other people" is a political platform, as stupid as it is.
In America we don't have anything like that. I know, I know, some of you are going to trot out some Republican quotes, but Republicans only get somewhere around half the votes, and even when they gain ground they always accrue backlash. Even Democrats beat the Republicans half the time; that's how weak Republican support is. America doesn't have the passion or will to commit to racism anymore; it's just not worth the effort to care.
The purpose of our federal government is entirely to do whatever is most profitable for campaign contributors. That can vary widely, but "kill those other people" is almost never as profitable as "steal from those other people." We'll tax, then we'll spend without tax, sometimes taking income and sometimes taking assets. It's all about sucking America dry. The Nazis had a different thing going on than that.
Belarus Bans Use of Foreign Websites but US seizure domains without judge decisions.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
By the way, Slashdot, why are you preventing comments here to be posted from a Tor network? Making it easy for Lukashenko to find who to jail ?
I was trying to read find the actual law in Russian or Belorussian, but going through Belorussian main sites -- such as tut.by -- nothing is mentioned there
http://news.tut.by/politics/1
Only reference I found is here
http://www.interfax.by/news/belarus/101604
The law if I read the English article, essentially prohibits Belorussian businesses to allow their clients (and themselves) to use non-belorussian websites.
Since access to internet is through a business -- the law makes everybody in Belarus who uses Google an unwilling accomplice to a criminal act (while the actual business a 'willing one' )..
Furthermore, in Belarus -- like in any 3d world country people try find additional sources of income when possible. That includes for example selling things that you bought (or where give to you as a present, or you bought with a purpose of re-selling). That kind of environment makes everybody an 'eligible business' -- and therefore to be under this law
There are some also interesting comments at the end of http://www.interfax.by/news/belarus/101604
One of them talks about -- AntiVirus. Antivirus programs rely on for example external websites to download the updated virus definition files , these programs are on business computers -- so part of the business and participating.
Last year, Lukasehnko made a law that no more than 3 people can gather together
http://www.rosbalt.ru/exussr/2011/11/12/911681.html
Furthemore, it is not allowed to post information on the intended gathering on the web or cell networks
Clapping was used a a silent form of protest -- it is now prohibited. See this youtube clip especially starting from 0:41
Basically, the country is screwed -- I do not think anything that can be done -- except running away from that place.
I would rather see Belarus be part of Poland (or Russia, but better Poland) -- what's there now does not make sense and its geo-political and demographic situation does not make sense for it to be an independent country.
Asking the belorussians to fight for their freedom with bare hands-- is asking too much. Many will die without any support and at the end -- if the country wants to be still indepdent -- it will not make it.
Other facts:
Belarus is not oil producing country, but oil-refining. It is landlocked, has no access to ports. Belarus has very close relationship with Iran, helping them in many different areas with technology.
Most of the radiation from chernobyl ended up not in Ukrain, but in South east Belarus (because the winds where blowing that way on April 26 1986)
Therefore 10 fold increase in child thyroid cancer (this is just one of many horrible things for the Belorussian people to endure)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17891238
When Lukashenko came to power, he overtime, dramatically increased the pay and benefits to the 'military and other 'force structures' -- to ensure deep contempt and support by the ones in the uniforms.
Since the readership on slashdot is so diverse -- will use it a soap box to ask for the following
a) do not allow to remove term limits. And also actually do what you can to have them be put in place for any political post on Federal or large state or huge city level (Bloomberg should not have been allowed to extend his rain for the 3d term as a mayor of new york, Chavez and Lukashenko (all made sure they removed any term limits by a 'referndum' ).
b) support Tor networks
c) support bitcoin and similar
d) fight against SOPA or any government involvement in social media
e) may be controversial -- but pls support the right to own functioning firearms by citizens.
This is not a Godwin. 1920 Germany was a country in a big crisis that had a lot of debts because they were in war before. That triggered a hyperinflation and a lot of radical political moves, but it wasn't anywhere near the situation Godwin is all about.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The law is not balanced. It would mean that websites of Visa, MasterCard, Skype, websites of foreign banks, where many influential people have got accounts, would be illegal.
You probably will not, unless it leads to increased taxes it is not something of wide interest for that lobbying group.
A quick search shows various Tea Party local groups against it, such as http://clevelandteapartypatriots.blogspot.com/2011/12/obamacare-for-internet-stop-sopa-now.html
We saw on TV that leaders are skiing in European countries, for example, in Austria. How can they go there without using foreign websites to book a hotel or an airline ticket? Without using foreign payment systems, which also do have websites?
Or it will be again like in the USSR: all people are equal, but some are more equal?
Since there are no DNS servers in Belarus, apparently they are not allowed to use URL with non-numeric host parts.
I really wish I had a magic wand so I could selectively grant people what they ask for in _full_measure.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
_eventually_ we will use the following system for DNS:
(1) A DHT that anybody can add records too. There can be as many entries for MacDonalds.com as people care to add.
(2) DHT participants will use rotating port numbers as both servers and clients.
(3) Most participants will encrypt all inter-hash-node traffic.
(4) "Real" (e.g. useful) DNS entries will actually be found by Public (e.g. PGP) Key Fingerprint (or even full key).
(5) Key or Key Fingerprint records will automatically be pruned and rejected from the DHT if the are not signed by the public key referenced by the fingerprint or key they claim to represent.
(6) A key record may contain aliases to alias itself out to names like MacDonalds.com
(7) in most cases the so-called "top level domains" will be meaningless and you will only see MacDonalds.
(at this point, nobody has to "control" the DNS records. name records are advisory and signed records are of "higher quality".
(8) Banks and real institutions will regularly use QRCode, and physical tokens, and Apps, and App Tokens to pass PGP Key Fingerprint style host-part URLs around. (And maybe people will start using their home-pages and bookmarks for their original purpose, to keep an online repository of links useful to themselves as opposed to others.)
(9) "Smart" clients will require the information comming from a site to be signed with the key issued to the DNS record.
(10) There will be key echanges built in, by RFC or by common use of X- headers, to most non-trivial network requests such that each respondent will be provided wiht the key to use to encrypt the message body to the peer. In particular it will be de-regur to encrypt the first request sent via a key-located DNS record with the body encrypted uing the key from the DNS record. The first message will include his own public key in the encrypted body and the server will respond by creating a session with the associated key(s) and so forth.
(11) Someone will introduce "keyed:" as a transfer prototype where it is essentially defined as identical to "http:" but the entire message stream is encrypted in both directions, the initiator must determine the key to use before transit (see the DHT and other public key repositories) and any message may include a key to set/change the key for future messages in that stream.
(12) Trusted sub-communities will form inside corporations and associations where inter-DHT-participants will pass initialization keys around on QRCode business cards. The sub communities will export their record groups but selectively filter imports and only from "high quality" peers. This last bit will be to prevent DOS "malicious record submission" attacks. Eventualy this will be used to get around the government firewalls as getting a 3x5 card into the hands of one dissident will be enough to establish a fresh sub-community on a wholly different set of transit particulars over the same system.
(13) Modems will make a limited come-back to provide the out-of-band handshakes for final key validation etc. ...
Oh it will take a while, and the first implementations will be slapped onto the side of the bittorrent "magnet link" facility and so on, but one abuse at a time the free part of the internet will adopt it, and then some cutting edges companies will jump on thinking to "capture" the "fringe market" and it will all come to pass.
I like inventing systems like this, and this system would be almost trivial to code using existing bittorrent DHTs etc, but coding them is tedious, so the first implementation(s( are left as a excercise for the reader.
Trivial details may vary.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I just read a story (in German sorry) about underground media in Belarus that is distributed as a PDF via burned CDs or USB sticks. It seems to work pretty well: http://berlinergazette.de/weissrussland-internet-freiheit/
Stopping that would require banning digital technology altogether. I hope they can find a way to get rid of that dirtbag.
Yes, that's right. Because Romney, Ron Paul, Gingrich, et al were all sentenced to 16 years in prison for running against Obama in the next elections.
Don't be silly.
I'll take my chances then.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
"While falling foul of Godwin's law tends to cause the individual making the comparison to lose their argument and/or credibility, Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate.[10] Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes") have been made by Glenn Greenwald.[11]"
From what I remember of civics class, It's good that we are not a true democracy, otherwise we'd be suffering from "Tyranny of the masses". Which, after witnessing how many Americans believe in god and that they are superior to everyone in other countries, frankly scares me.
The good news is that this is unsustainable and will ultimately collapse. A country that tries to protect its authority by blinding itself to the worlds advance, is operationally doomed. It might take a year, it might take a couple generations, but such a country can't compete at any level on a world market, and will have less and less to offer as one by one they deplete their natural resources.
The bad news is that before they fold, a lot of innocent people are going to suffer horribly. Sadly, the kinds of things one can do to try to remedy such a problem child are few, and will have limited impact.
The ugly part of this mess is the complex relationship between Russia, Belarus, and the rest of eastern and western Europe. Many of the complexities of oil trade and other less legal trade going in and coming out of Slavic countries are bolstering these dictatorial regimes. Its perhaps time to question any kind of trade with a nation that eat its own young.
It can be argued that the constitution limited the powers of the states well before the 14th amendment. An example of this is that the states can't declare war. So, establishing the federal government pretty much sets limits on the states by default. Since the states ratified the constitution, they agreed to limit their powers in line with the federal government framework.
That being said, the 14th amendment was quite a power grab, albeit a necessary one at the time.
Aahhh! That felt good!
That is the argument of fascists, right wingers, conservatives and freedom-haters over the ages. Well done for parrotting a trite argument foisted on you by your economic and political masters.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The text of the law (in Russian) is available here: http://www.pravo.by/pdf/2011-134/2011-134(010-029).pdf (first page, registration number 2/1869).
Google translation of subject matter bellow:
"Article 22.16. Violation of requirements for the use of the national segment
Internet
1. To work on the sale of goods, works and
services in the territory of the Republic of Belarus with the use of information networks,
and resources with an Internet connection is not located on the territory of the Republic of Belarus and (or) not registered in the prescribed manner -
punishable by a fine for an individual entrepreneur or legal entity
in size from ten to thirty basic values.
2. Violation of the requirements of legislation to implement the identification
subscriber units in the provision of Internet services and (or) users of Internet services
points of the collective use of the web services, recording and storing information about the subscriber's devices, personal data of users of Internet services, as well as information about Internet services rendered -
punishable by a fine of from five to fifteen basic values.
3. Breach of the law to restrict user access inernet services to the information gap for distribution in accordance with
legislation -
punishable by a fine for an individual entrepreneur or legal entity
in size from ten to thirty base units.. "
So, I don't see the problem for person in Belarus to log into amazon or gmail as long, as it is performed for personal, educational or other non-commertial purposes. Problems starts if you want to do business and your systems are outside of the country. And this most likely affects businesspeople from other countries visiting .by.
Of course, it is Belarus. And how widely this law will be [ab]used remains to be seen.
It seems to be a mistranslation of the Russian original, which only makes Internet cafe owners guilty of violating the law if they allow their users to access (and do not report if accessed) websites that are specifically banned according to court decision because of "extremist" materials or pornography. There is a distinct provision that further requires providers to "identify users and equipment" and to "log activity" (regardless of materials visited; it also says nothing about "reporting to authority"), and makes them liable if they do not make this happen. However, there's nothing in there saying that any foreign website is banned.
Gotta love it when news articles are just downright wrong because journalists are incompetent.
It seems that the author has made incorred several incorrect assumptions regarding Internet regulation in Belarus.
Trying to explain things in short, the hosting requirement is applicable only to Belarusian legal entities and entrepreneurs. Only Belarusian residents can be fined and (approx EUR 32 to EUR 96), but not to Internet users trying to access websites violating the Edict.
There are no legal obstacles for any Belarusian resident to operate a website under international top-level domain names (.com, .net, etc.) or national domain names of other states (.ru, .ch, it. etc.).
Neither visiting foreign websites is considered as a violation nor has any of foreign websites been blocked as both these measures are not prescribed by the Edict.
For correct understanding, please, consider the true-to-life (or at least the most objective) legal interpretation of the current Internet regulation in Belarus, available at belarusial lawyer (Aleksey Ponomrev) Blog dedicated to Information Technology law and Internet regulation in Belarus available at www.ITlaw.by