Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

VPN Provider Removes Russian Presence After Servers Seized (thestack.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the master-key dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: VPN provider Private Internet Access has pulled out of Russia in the wake of new internet surveillance legislation in the country. The company claims that some of its Russian servers were seized by the government as punishment for not complying with the rules, which ask providers to log and hold all Russian internet traffic and session data for up to a year. Upon learning of the federal action, the company immediately removed its Russian availability and announced that it would no longer be operating in the region. "We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process," wrote Private Internet Access in a blog post. The company advises users to update their desktop clients. They also noted that its manual configurations now support the "strongest new encryption algorithms including AES-256, SHA-256, and RSA-4096." Putin has given Federal Security Agents two weeks to produce "encryption keys" for the internet.

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. When in Rome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Do as the Romans. You need to follow the laws of the country you are in, otherwise, there are consequences.

    1. Re: When in Rome by mnemotronic · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Russia is a gas station. Want to see them implode? Stop buying their product.

      --
      The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
    2. Re: When in Rome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      With the prices of oil imploding it doesn't matter whether anyone buys their oil or not. Add in Russia's inefficiency and legendary graft and it is costing more for them to pull oil out of the ground then they can sell it for. If Russia loses it's monopoly on natural gas exports to Europe they will be doubly screwed. If Russia isn't careful they will end up being a Chinese client state. Hell the state of California has a higher GDP than Russia.

  2. Re:putin making demands by bloodhawk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    you mean the same demands that US/UK/AU governments etc are making? They aren't the first to push for this, nor will they be the last.

  3. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I find it a great jump point for many other regions of Europe, my own country (Australia) has insane intrusive internet monitoring laws and I would much prefer a country like Russia sees what I am accessing as they are far less likely to do something about it whereas western world is very much all joined human centipede style.

  4. Certificates by Chewbacon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They also yanked all certificates (or will soon). Customers will have to download the new ones if they use OpenVPN or something of the like.

    --
    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.