Russian Wikipedia Shutters In Protest of Internet Blacklist Plans

decora writes "If you visit Russian Wikipedia today you will be forgiven for thinking the entire site has crashed. It is not a crash, but a protest of the Russian State Duma's Bill 89417-6 According to Ria Novosti, the bill is 'proposing a unified digital blacklist of all websites containing pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.' Russian Wikipedia's main page has been replaced with a redacted logo and a protest text, part of which says 'The Wikipedia community protests against censorship, dangerous to free knowledge, open to all mankind. We ask you to support us in opposing this bill.' (translation by Google Translate)"

Comments

Bot Nets

[zippo01]

I wonder is this bill would also shut down all the Russian Bot nets. You now how many porn offers I get a day from Russia/Asia.

Re:"shutters"?

[Bill Currie]

Verbing nouns is something English speakers have been doing for a very long time.

Good luck

[siddesu]

The Russian Internet has been under a very strong pressure to shut up from the political elite for a long time now (I got banned from a forum for the first time for criticizing Hutin in 2004 or thereabouts), but this law is like opening the proverbial floodgate of abuse.

Good luck fighting back. Democracy is a process, not a state -- unless the people are prepared to stand up for it, it goes.

In passing, hardly anyone would think the site has crashed -- those who use it often will read the notice, and those who don't will only go there because they've seen the news of the protest.

Re:Good luck

[Johann Lau]

What's with the snarks? What's so funny?

http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/01/before-twitter-revolutions-there-was.html

http://w2.eff.org/Activism/russian_coup_netuse.article

Date: Tue, 20 Aug 91 00:17:31 +0300 (MSD)

            Hi!

            Don't worry, we're OK, though frightened and angry. Moscow is full
            of tanks and military machines, I hate them. They try to close all
            mass media, they shutted up CNN an hour ago, Soviet TV transmits
            opera and old movies. But, thanks Heaven, they don't consider
            RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit
            information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life :-).
            Hope all will turn out well at long last...

            Polina

Date: Wed, 21 Aug 91 21:12:26 +0300 (MSD)

            Thank you, Larry!

            Now all information media are on, CNN transmites our
            "Time" TV program, and I can watch them both!
            I'v heard (may be it was CNN) that they withdraw
            armed forces from Baltics cities. I'm not near the
            parliament, I'm still at the computer, but the situation
            on the net became lighter now and I hope to sleep a little, it was
            my dream during last two days :-)

            You can't even imagine, how grateful we are for your
            help and support in this terrible time! The best thing
            is to know, that we aren't alone.

Looking at the above, and then looking at this "discussion", I have one word for all of you: regression.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russian Internet has been under a very strong pressure to shut up from the political elite for a long time now

Exactly. They are creating a nyet-net.

Re:Good luck

[Robert Zenz]

Maybe the admin likes Putin? I'm not sure how you relate from a private forum to the whole internet and politics debate.

Re:Good luck

[siddesu]

Not really, hence the emphasis on the first time I recall it happening. The removal of even mildly anti-government stuff began in the early 2000s, but it didn't end there. Later on quite a few sites in the .ru TLD were told first to remove anti-government discussions and news, then raided, then finally forced to move away from the runet altogether.

There are reports that on many occasions the FSB (Federal Security Service) has requested that ISPs and sites provide information on users. Things have gotten particularly bad since the mass protests during the 2010 winter and then around the elections in 2011 and this year.

It is not only the Internet, all media are being targeted. The editors of one of the leading newspapers, the Kommersant (critical of Putin), were sacked (by the owners, who are very close to Pu) because of the way they covered the elections in 2011, the independent radio Echo of Moscow saw some editorial changes, etc. etc.

Russia is descending back to something that looks a lot like the socialism of the Brezhnev era (or stabilitism, as people joke these days, playing word games with Putin's constant calls for "stability").

I have an idea

[slashmydots]

Maybe if they want to block all "dangerous" sites, they should block all the Russian sites.

Not Just English Speakers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Verbing nouns is something English speakers have been doing for a very long time.

It's not just "English speakers". Americans have been "verbing nouns" for a long time, too.

Re:Not Just English Speakers.

[Datamonstar]

Yeah, we've been known to pork pork or buffalo Buffalo buffalo from time to time.

Tor Discussion Forums + DNSCrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

# In this post:
#
# 1. Tor Discussion Forums (two hidden services)
# 2. DNSCrypt - for Linux, Mac, and Windows (from opendns)

# 1. Tor Discussion Forums (two hidden services)

We need an official Tor discussion forum.

I did not see this issue mentioned in Roger's *latest* notes post, so for now, mature adults should visit and post at one or both of these unofficial tor discussion forums, these tinyurls will take you to:

** HackBB:
http://www.tinyurl.com/hackbbonion

** Onion Forum 2.0
http://www.tinyurl.com/onionforum2

Each tinyurl link will take you to a hidden service discussion forum. Tor is required to visit these links, even though they appear to be on the open web, they will lead you to .onion sites.

I know the Tor developers can do better, but how many years are we to wait?

Caution: some topics may be disturbing. You should be eighteen years or older. I recommend you disable images in your browser when viewing these two forums[1] and only enabling them if you are posting a message, but still be careful! Disable javascript and cookies, too.

If you prefer to visit the hidden services directly, bypassing the tinyurl service:

HackBB: (directly)
http://clsvtzwzdgzkjda7.onion/

Onion Forum 2.0: (directly)
http://65bgvta7yos3sce5.onion/

The tinyurl links are provided as a simple means of memorizing the hidden services via a link shortening service (tinyurl.com).

[1]: Because any content can be posted! Think 4chan, for example. onionforum2 does not appear to be heavily moderated so be aware and take precautions.

###

# 2. DNSCrypt for Linux, Windows, Mac (from opendns.com)

"In the same way the SSL turns HTTP web traffic into HTTPS encrypted Web traffic, DNSCrypt turns regular DNS traffic into encrypted DNS traffic that is secure from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. It does not require any changes to domain names or how they work, it simply provides a method for securely encrypting communication between our customers and our DNS servers in our data centers. We know that claims alone do not work in the security world, however, so we have opened up the source to our DNSCrypt code base and it is available on GitHub"

https://www.opendns.com/technology/dnscrypt/

- Download the right package for your Linux distribution:
https://blog.opendns.com/2012/02/16/tales-from-the-dnscrypt-linux-rising/

https://github.com/opendns/dnscrypt-proxy/blob/master/README.markdown
https://github.com/opendns
https://blog.opendns.com/2012/05/08/dnscrypt-for-windows-has-arrived/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/05/dnscrypt-encrypts-your-dns-traffic-because-theres-always-someone-out-to-get-you/
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/DNSCrypt-a-tool-to-encrypt-all-DNS-traffic-1392283.html
http://blog.opendns.com/2012/02/06/dnscrypt-hackers-wanted/
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/dnscrypt-930439/

###

eof

Re:No more coffee ads

[cheekyjohnson]

what is extreme?

Along with "obscene," everything that the government doesn't like.

I just got up from sleep

[torsmo]

...and all I saw: "If you visit Russian Wikipedia today you will be forgiven for thinking". May I be blessed.

Re:"shutters"?

[glwtta]

Has been since 1826: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shutter

Re:"shutters"?

[kevmitch]

Appears to exist in American English at least.

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Add child to pornography, replace ads with sales, and promoting suicide with cyberbullying, and things sound eerily similar to what US lawmakers keep trying to push.

Re:"shutters"?

[mrbester]

It's a well established gerund - like "bridge" that serves its purpose. Unlike such idiocy as "burglarize" (burgle already exists), even most -ized words coined by the inarticulate.

Re:Hutin?

[temcat]

No, it's a simple syllable transposition "Putin - (k)hui" (Russian for "Putin is a dick") -> "(K)Hutin - pui".

Re:did the site crash? durr

[boneglorious]

Some people don't read messages, as every current and former tech support person can no doubt attest.