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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."
"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".
This misses the point. The crackdown on VPNs has been getting tougher. (I live in China.) Yes, there are ways around it, but the bottleneck is that most people use a VPN provider, and the VPN providers have a limited number of IP addresses. If the government blocks the IP addresses of known VPN providers, it prevents most VPN access while not blocking terribly much of the traffic it considers acceptable. Allowing VPN traffic to flow through a significant fraction of the net's IP addresses requires a large organizational push from.... well, whatever organizations would not like to see VPNs blocked, but I think the international tech industry might be on our side in this one. There are certainly other things that can be done to disguise VPN traffic, but that's an easier game with more limited results.
By law, they have to have sets of cameras on them... because there will be no other way to find who is at fault if a wreck happens.
Dashcams are a good idea. I live in America, and I have one. I bought it for $39 from Amazon. It hasn't recorded an accident yet, but I did record a robbery that occurred in front of my car in a parking lot. I emailed the video to the cops, and they said it helped them nail the guy. The victim was an Indian woman. They are often targeted by muggers because they wear a lot of solid gold jewelry.
The civil war in Transnistria happened when Putin was just a suitcase carrier for the then-mayor of St. Petersburg.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap