Slashdot Mirror
Russia Bans VPNs To Stop Users From Looking at Censored Sites (cnn.com)
Russia is cracking down on software that allows users to view internet sites banned by the government. From a report: President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill that prohibits services, including virtual private networks (VPNs), that enable users to skirt government censorship efforts. The law will take effect on November 1. Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor maintains a blacklist of thousands of websites. Leonid Levin, chairman of a parliamentary committee on information policy and communications, said the law signed by Putin does not "introduce any new restrictions and especially no censorship." "My colleagues only included the restriction of access to information that is already forbidden by law or a court decision," he told state news agency RIA Novosti earlier this month.
Does he have any children? Might be interesting for Russians to see who's in charge after he leaves office (sorry, I mean when he dies).
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Keep fighting to stop the US from abandoning Net Neutrality. Governments naturally want to enforce censorship on their citizens and Net Neutrality is an obstacle to this censorship. Once you give up one freedom, more will follow.
It's all about censorship, and detecting and punishing dissidents, of which I'm sure there are many. Putin is even less trustworthy than the communist Chinese government, and more ruthless and bloodthirsty to boot. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who is a Russian citizen.
Take a shot every time you see whataboutism (America does it too)
Take two shots for every mention of snowflakes and SJWs.
Take 3 shots for mention's of Hillary's emails.
This apparently coincides with a crackdown in China. The BBC is running a story about Apple pulling VPN's from its app store.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
When questioned further if this could be used to silence free speech and be abused by the government, Levin was quoted as saying, "Nothing to see here. Move along."
Unless they're just all gay clown Putin images. Meh.
In Russia you are owned
Don't worry, I'm sure bogaboga and the usual vatnik brigade on Slashdot will be here to spew whataboutism and pretend that Trump isn't salivating over the idea.
1. United Kingdom
2. China
3. USA (ice seizures)
4. Russia
I never see any Russians protesting about their freedoms disappearing...
...to a United States near you!
...good luck with your wet dream of banning any type of online activity.
Oh, and thanks for the laugh. I need that on a Monday.
Ban VPNs in Russia full of Russian hackers. Like that will ever work.
(captcha=disallow)
Who needs freedom when there's vodka!
They've had several generations to normalize to the fact that they live somewhere where there are no 'freedoms' to speak of. I get the impression that many of them, presented with 'freedom', wouldn't even know what to do with themselves. Their country is run by thugs and is rife with corruption, from the lowliest beat-cop all the way up the food chain to Putin. I'd imagine the last thing the average Russian citizen wants to do is attract attention to themselves.
Russia's very much controlled media. Putin culls dissident reporters, they get stabbed, shot, arrested, if they report his embezzlement, they get charged with embezzlement.
And this just shows how frightened he is of uncontrolled communications. He's frightened what Russians might read about him, or might say about him.
IMHO, Russia is a bigger threat to the west than any other country, and Putin needs to be viewed as an Osama Bin Laden style target. You don't tolerate an all out attack on elections in the west and turn a blind eye to it. You don't watch them offer business deals in exchange for help getting sanctions lifted (e.g. Mooch and his Davos meeting with Vnesheconombank's fund manager) and ignore it like it didn't happen.
How do you 'block' a VPN?
And if they're so easy to spot (and block), what good are they? (Same problem with Tor)
And once again(!), why aren't people helping more with circumvention of the blockages?? Put on your thinking caps, people! Why can't we have a good news story about wide spread circumvention of ALL censorship??? When can we have a network that remains out of reach and control of the tyrants? Is there even a single safe place anywhere on the planet for a server?
because they're afraid they'll be taken away in the middle of the night
I wonder if SSH tunnels are considered a 'VPN' under this law.
Vladmir is a funny guy
This isn't just a government thing. Netflix has been blocking VPN's for at least a year. Amazon Video did for a while, but now it's ok. Oh, and many Youtube videos cannot be served to my VPN.
damaged by dogma
We need to crack down on FAKE NEWS sites like the Fraud News Network (CNN) and the New York Slimes (New York Times).
#MAGA!
I disagree with your assessment. I speak Russian rather well and in the previous decade I spent a decent amount of time in the ex-USSR and I got to talk to a lot of people from different walks of life and see all kinds of places that tourists usually don't get to.
The main freedom that Russians have and care about, and this is more or less true in China, is that of free travel. In the old communist systems you couldn't leave for any reason unless you were highly vetted and they were pretty sure you were coming back because defectors made them look bad. Russians are free to leave Russia and visit whatever country they want and even move there if they have the means. This is very important to a lot of people and it has released a lot of pressure from society to allow this.
I don't really understand this, but Russians have a real history that goes back into the tsarist era of believing that the top guy running the show is a really good person and when things go wrong, it's the fault of the people under him and oh if only he knew what those worthless people working for him were doing. North Korea has this too. Large numbers of defectors have praised whatever Kim was in charge at the time they left while blasting other parts of society. You'll still find people in Russia who think that Stalin was fantastic instead of correctly realizing he was a homicidal maniac and a guy who gives Hitler a great run for the money for the prize of being the most evil ruler of all time. Russian elections are mostly, but not completely, free because most people actually love Putin, as they always love the guy in charge, and Putin does legitimately win his elections. There may be some election fraud, but even if they cleaned up all of it, Putin would still win.
Corruption is a big problem in all the ex-USSR except maybe the Baltic States. I say maybe because I haven't been there. People grow up with it and they don't really care. It's a normal thing to them because they've never known anything else. And they don't really seem to care that thugs run everything because the USSR was run by thugs to a certain extent anyway and with no travel restrictions, if they can't deal with it they can legally immigrate and just make that somebody else's problem. As long Putin pays the pensions for old people and thumbs his nose at the west, that's really all they care about. He feeds their feeling (some might say "delusion") that they can once again push around significant chunks of the world and that is important to them.
The UK government laid down the model for taking on the freedoms offered by unfettered access to the Internet- and eliminating those freedoms one by one. Next Spring, the Internet in the UK becomes the most censored in the world, as Blairites use the excuse of 'think of the children' and access to 'hardcore' porn to begin the process of having UK residents only see the net through a government approved 'whitelist'.
But of course facts don't matter here, so long as the owners of slashdot get a daily chance to bash Russia.
Clinton butchered an entire nation- Libya- and in doing so eliminated gay and female rights in that nation. Libya was a modern secular autocracy, based on socialist principles that had no issue with women or differing forms of Human sexuality. Now thanks to the owners of slashdot, and the neo-liberal monsters they support- like Clinton- Libya is a wahhabi hellhole where Saudi Arabia has successfully extended its obscene tentacles.
Sadly as the Deep State continue to demonise Russia in preparation for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against that nation, Russia is becoming more authoritarian as a security response. In this respect Russia is no different from France, Britain, the USA or most major nations across the globe. When the world marches to war, this always happens.
But this site is mostly read by Yanks. And a few days back 99% of the Congress voted for sanctions against Russia, and to conflate Russia with Iran and N Korea to further demonise an 'enemy' America is preparing to attack. Yes the entire official Democrat movement allied with the entire official Republican movement and almost every independent to vote against Russia. There wasn't even this consensus in Congress when America was fighting the nazis. The 'fake news' ILLUSION of two party politics in the USA is dead- but Slashdot won't every report on that fact.
Russia has driven the US created, Saudi funded wahhabi terror groups out of Syria, and the response of the mainstream media is to say Russia's reward should be pain and death. When Trump ended the mass murdering CIA terror training program, all of slashdot's media allies expressed their OUTRAGE. Outrage that the CIA was no longer able to torture and mass murder in Syria. This is how low the fake left has fallen.
The NSA and GCHQ announced years ago that they have paid shill programs to flood forums like this one with posts attacking such as mine. They boasted that their funding was essentially 'unlimited' so watch as their "every critic is a Putin bot" style posts attempt to choke the arguement here- just like the sheep in Animal Farm.
It is a fact that Hilary Clinton is a mass murdering horror. It is a fact slashdot and the rest of the mainstream media gave absolue support to clinton during the election cycle. It is a fact that the 'left' in the USA has no problem with Clinton's warmongering, or Clinton's murder of secular regimes in the Middle East, or Clinton's political and military support of wahhabi terror across the planet in alliance with Saudi Arabia.
When Trump tried to offer an anti-war alternative to Clinton, the Deep State ensured that the entirety of Congress rallied as one to frustrate Trump and put him back on a warmongering course.
Putin will do everything he must to ensure that when war comes, Russia is ready. Sheeple support of the neo-liberals and neo-cons in Congress means that sooner or later this war will come. And while, at the time of the nuclear plant disaster in Japan, Slashdot actually ran stories stating "radiation is good for you" (don't believe me- go Google), the reality of Russia's nuclear technology is that when war happens, all Human life on the US mainland ends. The demonisation of Russia is intended to have one ending only- your mass suicide.
America is still run by the religious- and for these nutters 'armaggedon' shows that 'god still lives'. You Clinton loving yanks dumb enough to think youselves 'above' this have no idea what you are going to unleash. Look again at the monolithic voting bloc in your so-called 'Congress' and comprehend even the illusion of debate has ended in the USA.
I find a number of problems in what you're saying, not the least of which is '..in the previous decade', and 'being able to leave China'. I also find it difficult at best to believe that living under a government (and country) so full of corruption as Russia would make anyone living there feel comfortable to the point of 'not caring', as you claim. Perhaps you were mislead by people minimizing things, perhaps for reasons of not wanting to draw unwanted attention to themselves by being 'complainers' or 'dissidents'.
No. That's a slippery slope to fascism.
Take your ass back to reddit, Ivan.
Oh that's right...duh. You can change leadership, but it's always the same old bullshit just different tech.
I disagree with your assessment. I speak Russian rather well....
I was born in USSR. Best thing my family did was to leave when opportunity presented itself. Corruption is rampant in every second world state on every level. It is expected. Russia is a decaying corpse of USSR and more akin to Neo-Feudalism than anything else. Until it economically collapses (shit hits the fan), which I hope happens soon for the sake of entire planet, there will be no "bright future". Unless you consider train in the end of a tunnel or a peaceful atom in every home.
The king is dead, long live the king.
The problem with "tsars" is not necessarily who you have, but what happens when all of that consolidated power changes hands to someone far less savory. You'd think the average Russian would have learned that lesson long ago. Oh well, as an American, it's not our monkey, not our business. I say, good luck to them all.
Life is not for the lazy.
You're looking at it through western eyes. As unfortunate as it is, he's right. Take it from a Ukrainian who emigrated to the west (Ukraine is the same as Russia in that respect).
We learn of the shanaigns of our leaders mostly when they are pointed out by the free press and sometimes the political opposition. Neither of those exist in Russia. Even with both of those in the U.S, the constant reporting on embarrasing leaks and blunders and the criticizem of Trump's actions and policies by the opposition party, you still have a significant portion of the country that steadfastly believes it all to be "fake news"
To be fair to Russians, that is the human condition. America makes a big deal about freedom in its scriptures, but what percentage of Americans actually value it or do anything with it?
It's hard to decide what to do with your life!
Everywhere, most people just get with The Program. Exceptions are rare. Yes, you know of these exceptions and maybe can list two or three who you personally know, but they're virtually celebrities. It's way less than one in ten.
Then I feel sorry for you and all your countrymen that living in such shitty conditions has become 'normal' for you, and having such a corrupt and violent government is just 'business as usual' to you.
Some companies are talking about providing internet service from a swarm of low orbiting mini-satellites. If this comes about, in spite of the reservation in the article, would they be censorship proof?
What are the actual rules?
DNS will be leaked. To avoid that, an x2go remote desktop might be the easy solution. x2go uses ssh too.
The condition you've described here is called slave mentality, and the vast majority of Russians suffer greatly from it.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
You missed one huge glaring important point. Putin controls the media in Russia. All the media there has nothing but favourable things to say about Putin and his cronies. The great Russian masses are thoroughly brain washed.
Unfortunately Yanks do too.
No such restriction exists in Ukraine. Welcome to Putin's Russia, everyone supporting the RF takeover in Ukraine. You don't have to learn Ukrainian anymore. You can continue speaking Russian as you always did. Just don't set your sights on reading anything in English.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
What's to stop them?
Is there a technical solution that would prevent them from finding and blocking VPNs? Like obfuscating VPN traffic to look like Skype traffic.
I guess we could go back to encrypted file sharing via USENET.
They own Rocketfella, who owns Bush, who runs the drug trades in Afgan
No it wouldn't Because there is no such thing as free lunch. Somebody have to pay for these satellites.
And it is quite easy for authoritarian government to prevent its citizens from paying to the satellite owner.
Note that Bitcoins is already illegal in Russia.
So, owner of these satellites would have three choices
1. Adhere to censorship rules
2. Don't service any people in these countries except few who are brave enough to use some criminal payment scheme.
3. Get some foreign government to pay for free access of users of particular country as part of information war against it.
I don't think that variant 3 gives much freedom to users.
Moreover, Internet is bidirectional by its nature. So, every satellite modem has to transmit some radiowaves on some particular frequency. And this signal have to be strong enough to reach nearest satellite (which is not less than several hundreds kilometers away). So, law enforcers would be able to detect such transmissions using ground-based equipment, which is lot nearer to the transmitter (they don't need to decipher contents, just locate transmitter) and seize modem.
Oh, really? Your american mass-media do not cover regular Moscow meetings since 2011?
To control the sources of information is the old and still effective method. Russia, China prefer it. A more sophisticated way is to control the information itself instead of its sources. US prefers this method.
Information control requires spamming, FUD, discrediting sources, muddying issues, distractions, privileged spam-free channels, among other things. Web2.0 essentially does it automatically by letting everyone voice their opinions. Hundreds of thousands of opinions every day effectively drown out, distract, derail, muddy almost all useful information.
Web2.0/social media/fake news is not freedom. It is control. And yes, slashdot plays its part in the controlling. Pretty easy way to gauge the value of an information is to see if its source gets hunted down or not. For example: is Snowden hunted, therefore is his information valuable?
I don't really understand this, but Russians have a real history that goes back into the tsarist era of believing that the top guy running the show is a really good person and when things go wrong, it's the fault of the people under him and oh if only he knew what those worthless people working for him were doing.
Battered Wife Syndrome.
I speak Russian rather well
So you may like to read the original text of the law in question: http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001201707300002
The text is very bureaucratic and may be hard to read (possibly, even for native Russians), but paragraph 17 (at page 13) says these rules do not apply when connecting a service with limited access, like your own server, to satisfy technical needs.
Shouldn't it say they are doing this to prevent access to UNcensored web sites?
Russia may be rife with corruption and crime, but it did enjoy a period of relatively free politics in 90s and early 00s, and serious crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly didn't begin until late 00s. So there are plenty of people who are not "normalized" to the way things are becoming now.
The real problem is that many people don't like when things are "too free".
I'm Russian (both ethnically and a citizen), and I can confirm what he said.
It should be noted though that there are some people who don't necessarily disagree that Putin is authoritarian, or that Stalin was a bloody dictator. But they genuinely believe that it's how things should be run, either because it's in the "Russian national character" (and anything else leads to ruin), or because they genuinely believe it's a better form of government in general.