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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!
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.
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.
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
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".
Actually, I like Asperger with hollandaise sauce and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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?
Because the object is to keep tabs on what's going on, not push it underground.
In $INSERT_COUNTRY Tor watches YOU!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
... 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.
"If you define "crime" properly, pretty much _everything_ anybody does on the Internet is criminal."
Well said, and correct, Anonymous poster. "Criminal" has no meaning, or any meaning they wish.
In Russia, criticizing the Orthodox Church will see them slam you in prison, and calling out Putin as a pedo will get you and half a restaurant radioactively poisoned with polonium, which only comes from government nuclear reactors.
In Israel, trying to leave your ghetto may get you killed, tortured, or dumped in prison, or all three.
In Saudi Arabia, pretty much anything is "criminal" (except, of course, anything royals choose to do, including creating and running Al Qaida).
Everything and nothing is a crime. Bedspreads are golden sprinkler cookie clowns. See? So much fun when words mean nothing at all.
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)
Ultimately, all traffic that is not clear text in a language understood by the sensors will have to be banned.
Because blocking port 21 or 22 would not stop ssh, you can agree with the server to user any port for that protocol..
That means, no more movies, pictures, or any digital content that is not written in cyrillic and approved by tsar putin.
Welcome to the 1880's internet.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
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.
In soviet Russia, you watch TOR!
err... Wait a minute..
In soviet Russia, government watches you using TOR!
Wait. That isn't news... For Russia maybe... hmm...
In Soviet Russia, you watch the government!
That about right...? I'm confused.
In the USA you can be picked up by the police for a traffic violation, put in jail with a murderer and then allowed to bleed out on the jailroom floor after having your head knocked on. Or shot while running unarmed from a police officer, or if you're a teenage kid shot in front of your parents for carrying a screw driver because the police didn't want to waste their time teaching you the lesson your parents intended. I'm not sure. There's so much more. In any event, you're more likely to be killed in the USA than just about anywhere else in the world. The poorer you are, the better your chances of being killed at any given moment.
Let alone how does Russia reconcile giving asylum to Snowden with banning all the freedom rights he represents.
Poe's law.
The sad thing is that I've seen articles from people who really believe this. Long rants...
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.
Your pee smells funny
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
In USA, he can live the rest of his life in a prison cell that's 6' by 8'.
In Russia, he can live the rest of his life in a prison cell that's 6,600,000 square miles wide.
Which one would you choose?
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.
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.
No, he doesn't. That was just some bogus analysis by people who have never directly observed him to reach a diagnosis: http://www.forbes.com/sites/fayeflam/2015/02/09/stories-claiming-putin-has-aspergers-reveal-more-about-pathology-in-media-than-in-russian-leader/
My son has Asperger's Syndrome (actually diagnosed by a medical professional who spent 6 hours directly observing my son). I deal with actual-Asperger's every day. You don't get a diagnosis from someone watching some news clips. If Putin sees a medical professional and actually obtains a diagnosis, I'll change my mind, but you can't declare he has Asperger's based on a couple of people who watched a clip or two of him and decided "that's kinda Aspy."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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
lol. True.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.