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Russia To Block LinkedIn After Court Ruling on User Data (go.com)
Social network for professionals LinkedIn faces being blocked in Russia after a court ruled it broke a law on data storage. From a report on AP:Moscow city court spokeswoman Ulyana Solopova tells The Associated Press that the court rejected an appeal Thursday by LinkedIn against a district court's decision that the company had broken a law that requires personal data on Russian citizens to be stored on servers within Russia. Solopova says LinkedIn can appeal Thursday's ruling. The case was brought by Roskomnadzor, the Russian state telecommunications and media regulator.
You can't block any Russian that wants to use Linkedin, short of severing all comm out of Russia. Proxies, vpn, etc. What morons.
Requirements of domestic storage of information related to a particular country's citizens will just balkanize the web into a silo per country. Otherwise, when citizens of one country that requires domestic storage (such as Russia) interact with citizens of another country that requires domestic storage, on whose soil shall the record of their interaction be stored?
The other term is just marketing. There is no sport involved to it. Utility? OK. Vehicle? Well, I suppose that has a better ring to it than wagon, but it just to play you. To game you. Sucka!
Of course. If they can't put in their own Room 641A, they don't want it in their country.
There are hh.ru and moikrug.ru (which effectively mirrors linkedin's functionality) for those looking for a job in Russia. I bet there's a party at both offices! (Well, given the time difference, they should be already drunk).
However, the trend is disturbing. Roskomnazgul is taking on larger and larger targets. If they get an uproar, they fall back immediately (like with github and wikipedia). If there's no uproar, they move on. One bit at a time.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
How is this law impossible to comply with? Put some servers in Russia. That's it.
It's not that easy in practice. For instance, one can run a fairly big site on MySQL, but if there's requirement to put part of the storage in a specific place, the choice is limited:
1. Rewrite the software to handle distributed database;
2. Run a totally separate entity in Russia (same logo, same software and nothing much else in common);
3. Move ALL data storage to Russia.
In theory, a common database with master-master replication is possible, but that's not actually compliant with the law because Russian citizens' data gets stored abroad in the end.
For giants like Google and Facebook who already use distributed custom databases that's peanuts. For a (say) low-cost airline, not so much.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
>Perhaps a more concrete example might be easier to understand: If information about Russian users is stored on servers in Russia, and information about German users is stored on servers in Germany,
Here how it was designed to work:
1. KGB knocks on Google's Moscow's office and says: you are not keeping data on dissident A, B. and C in Russia because their spooks can't find them in the data they intercept
2. Google responds that A, B, and C registered their accounts outside of Russia
3. KGB claims that they didn't and threaten Google to close them down if they keep withholding data of "Russians"
4. Google gives KGB access to a full mirror of their database including people who have nothing to do with Russia
In 2013, Google gave Russian government an SSL key from their Russian Google market server, most likely with full understanding how Russians will use it (and they thought that they will use it to spy on their own dissidents). But Russians used that SSL certificate to do MITM attacks to remotely install spyware on phones of British members of parliament in Britain. After that, Google disbanded their Russian office, only leaving some non-tech operations people in Saint Petersburg. Of course they also invalidated that individual certificate (Google market was not tied to a specific SSL cert as long as it was signed by Google).
sure you get blocked from Russian users but it may be worth if it blocked Russian hackers too.
Why have any business like this reside in the us when the 3 letter agencies etc are so hostile and demanding. Just move your business to f.ex. a neutral place like Finland and then "play nice" with everyone. It does afterall not matter if you place then the us data in us and russian data in russia. The business itself will be better of. And nsa will just get the us data and not all of europes data then also when they demand access.
This is just another step in the master plan of the evil, world-domination triumvirate: Putin, Trump, Zuckerberg.