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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.
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.