Russia Bans Pornhub, YouPorn - Tells Citizens To Meet Someone In Real Life (arstechnica.com)

Russia has blocked two of the biggest porn websites. The Russian state watchdog Roskomnadzor, which oversees internet in the country, announced that it was blockeing Pornhub and YouPorn. When a Russian citizen asked on Twitter about an alternative, it replied; "as an alternative you can meet someone in real life,". From a report: The regulator dropped the banhammer on Tuesday, applying rules which had previously been imposed by two separate regional courts. Any Russian citizen visiting PornHub or YouPorn is now redirected to a simple message telling them that the sites have been blocked "by decision of public authorities." Sexually explicit material isn't illegal in the country, but according to the BBC's Vitaliy Shevchenko, the law confusingly appears to ban "the illegal production, dissemination, and advertisement of pornographic materials and objects."

Comments

article kind of useless

[phantomfive]

The article is kind of useless, it doesn't say what technology is being used to block websites.

This article is a little better. The government keeps a central database of websites that should be blocked (or sometimes just individual pages, from what I understand).

Each ISP (or network operator) is required to download the database of blocked pages, and get updates every day. Many of the ISPs don't have real filtering capability, so they just block the website at the IP level. If they don't block the content (and some don't), then they get a fine.