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Russia Seeking To Ban Tor, VPNs and Other Anonymizing Tools
An anonymous reader writes Three separate Russian authorities have spoken out in favor of banning online anonymizing tools since February 5th, with particular emphasis on Tor, which — despite its popularity with whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden and with online activists — Russia's Safe Internet League describes as an 'Anonymous network used primarily to commit crimes'. The three authorities involved are the Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, powerful Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor and the Safe Internet League, comprising the country's top three network providers, including state telecoms provider Rostelecom. Roskomnadzor's press secretary Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky describes the obstacles to identifying and blocking Tor and VPN traffic as "difficult, but solvable."
Anything the evil former Commies do now is held up as a destroyer of freedom. If someone here proposes a similar law, half of Congress will (hopefully) stand up and say "That's something the Russians would do to suppress Freedom(TM)."
Will all of the VPN traffic that originates from Russia to steal data out of US homes and companies finally end?
Awesome!
This was reported this week. I wonder if his condition is repsonsible in some way for his thoughts and actions.
We need a distributed VPN/Proxy.
We need a ubiquitous p2p proxy that is both a client and server. It needs to be ridiculously easy to set up, as in download it, click a few buttons and you are browsing the web through random onion routing and allowing others to do the same. 100s of millions of server/clients cannot be shut down if they run over https.
Lantern may fit the bill. https://www.getlantern.org/ If there are others they need to get funding and widespread publicity as quickly as possible.
This should make the Internet safer for everyone else.
I can see annoying tools being banned in North America at some point. Maybe not personal and business VPNs, but anonymizing services in general. I don't agree with it but we see our online rights being chipped aways slowly but surely, especially in Canada.
All the communist country are doing just that.
This is one of the more meta troll-posts I've seen on /. If you had only posted it anonymously it would have been perfect.
There you go Braveheart... troll-spotting from the grassy knoll.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In Soviet Russia, government bans you!
I'm pretty sure I'm being trolled here... and he used a nick instead of his real name, foiled again. Now that you do mention it, it would be useful... what's your name and address again?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky" -- the second word is not part of the name, that's the organization name he is working for. It should be "Vadim Ampelonsky".
... Waiting for a barrage of "but Tor isn't primarily used for crime" - style posts. Get real. Just as with Bit Torrent, the criminals vastly outnumber the legitimate users.
Hmm.. one can access a server via SSH then net or VPN from there... Will SSH be banned too, will Russian telecommuters be forced to use telnet?
TOR is owned and funded by the CIA
If you're gonna stop people from freely communicating, why have internet connections at all? Why not simply ban sales of all cables and telecom equipment?
... oh, here it is.
“If we find evidence of a terrorist plot and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that [encryption], that’s a problem,” Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. “They’re patriots.” ...
Emphasis mine.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption!
When privacy is outlawed, only oligarchs will have privacy!
When free speech is outlawed, Tor is "an anonymous network to commit crimes"!
And last but not least...
In Soviet Russia, VPN watches you!
is a technology magazine based in an urban industrial sublet in Kensington.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The same wonderful country that have brought us Russian Mafia Cyber Criminals is now going to break the net wide open for government criminals.
I expect the Russian Mafia will continue to have the benefit of government protection and enjoy Tor and VPN while Russian opposition is going to get assfisted. Hail Putin.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
This is straight from The Dictator's Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention (recommended).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
You can embed a lot of "what's on the other side of the Great Firewall"- and "let's plan the revolution"-type text in an innocent-looking image.
Those looking to use it to hide their warez- and pr0n-trading are probably out of luck though, the overhead is just too much.
Did I say future? For all I know, it may be the present. Oh wait, I think I've said too much.
Snowden, the great whistleblower, the great freedom fighter, ended up in *Russia* - a fascist country that suppresses individual liberties, deprives its citizens of privacy and inculcates patriotic insanity. Right now Russia is in war with one of its neighbours (Ukraine) and has recently stolen parts of two other neighbours by force (Georgia and Moldova) and the official TV threatens with war Poland, Litva, Latvia and Estonia, and even Finland. I wonder how does Snowden reconcile his free spirit with the fascist regime of the country he chose to live in?
Welcome to the internet. Be it piracy, spam, cyber bullying, or malware distribution... Oh and porn, which adding to Russia's list would be gay porn as a crime. Honestly, it's always great when an authoritarian regime on a subject is so shitty at it and keeps grabbing for more as if that's any sort of solution. In the US, it's the war on drugs. In Russia, it's basically anything so long as it's not actually mob related.
Like you could even do anything with that information if you had it. Candyass.
The Russians won't block it if you've paid them the right amount.
Given that Snowden traded US intelligence information for his life, he will only be subject to the law when he can no longer pay off the Russians.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hithiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Just sayin'.
there goes all my favorite exit nodes!
Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky describes the obstacles to identifying and blocking Tor and VPN traffic as "difficult, but solvable."
Yeah, good luck with that. All you will achieve is a new arms race for the ultimate distributed encryped anonymised stealth network. And you are always going to be one step behind. Doing this will ultimately only benefit the criminals by giving them better tools while causing nothing more than an occasional, slight inconvenience for everybody else. And it's going to cost you millions. In the first year.
Poe's law.
The sad thing is that I've seen articles from people who really believe this. Long rants...
The World
FTFY!
Wrong in both cases - it's already the past.
Decades ago I noticed a lot of large jpgs that have the visual quality of tiny jpgs... That implies that all of the low bits aren't correlated with the visual data.
Perhaps they find some allies there?
Those ***ocrats are becoming more and more alike each other.
Both countries have small penises. Can we please move on.
I dunno, Alaska and Kamchatka are both sizable peninsulas.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
That country has very little going for it these days and I can't see it staying open if it continues in the direction it is.
I wonder what is the Fridom Fighter Edichka Snodenov feels now.
Yet there's plenty of non-anonymous trolls on Facebook. Did Facebook made the world a better place? I don't think so. Trolls will be trolls, even if you strip them off their anonymity.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Didn't they just steal this idea off the British?
Fucking China can't block Tor. Why could Russia?
When russia annexes the country still retains their government but have left veto to the russian government.
When the USA "brings democracy" to a country, it still retains their government but if they don't play ball with the USA, they'll shock and awe them into the stone age and complicance.
So tell us what the difference is.
...without the freedom to commit crimes?
Take away all the ways to break the laws, and what do you get?
Certainly not a free society.
"The denial of free speech is the first act of tyranny."
As a species, we've reached our peak. But it's all down hill from here, dragged back down into the Darwinian muck by greed, ignorance, the lust for power regardless of consequence, racist nationalism, misogyny, religious-driven intolerance and murder...
It was a nice try. Perhaps the cockroaches or yeast will succeed where we failed.
We're ALL being sold that anonymity online is a BAD thing and ONLY criminals use it.
Lets be real about this - the fact is that anonymizing is not used just by normal people who expect the right to privacy our various founding documents, but by whistleblowers trying to contact journalists, and other 'subversives' who look to expose the corruption and crimes of the power elite, whether it be government or corporation.
The power elite, and it doesn't matter which power elite you're talking about, they all want to eliminate the threat of exposure in their respective spheres of influence, using criminal activity or terrorism or child pornography or whatever justification to protect their own interests.
When will oppressive authorities understand that as long as it's mathematically possible to hide information from them, people will do whatever it takes to do so? There are no technical limitations to how well a piece of information can be hidden away and piggy-backed onto seemingly uninteresting or useless data; the only way to shut down unwanted communication is to prevent ANY AND ALL communication.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
The New York Times is run by Russians?
While the New York Times has gone on leftward slants, it's not run by Russians.
On the other hand, the Russian government (which has received such information from Snowden) is run by Russians.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Are they seeking the ban due to backdoor in Tor?
Casteism
Since it embarrasses the USA for nearly no effort on Putins part, what do you think?
It may be boring and not Biggles meets Bond, but sometimes life's not like the movies.