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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.
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
Putin has an estimated net worth of 200 billion with all the money he's squirreled away from bribes and taking money off the top of govt contracts.
His family will not need to be publicly in charge to be in charge.
Call him what he is; the world's most powerful crime lord in history. Who do you think the Russian Mob answers to?
Old Soviet Joke:
Can the son of a general become general himself?
Yes, of course he can.
Can the son of a general even become a marshal?
Not if the marshal has a son, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
You missed a couple.
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.
Putin has an estimated net worth of 200 billion with all the money he's squirreled away ...
That actually is a classic example of fake news. Hermitage Capital Management Founder Bill Browder called him the "Richest man in the world" when speaking to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and all of the Time Warner etc. media carried articles amplifying the statement. Usually, they said Bezos and Gates together didn't come close to Putin's wealth. Nonetheless, the Forbes most recent list of richest in the world https://goo.gl/NvqgGk puts Gates in the top slot.
The trick is that Putin's wealth is secret!
Russia has things worthy of criticism. The soon-to-take-effect VPN ban is a good one. But Putin being super, super rich is just BS.
(||) Nehmo (||)
There's always one of those. One fucking anonymous smartass.
If the U.S. governement was anywhere as bad as Putin and his crime family, Stephen Colbert would be dead of polonium 210 poisoning by now.
Try to disparage, insult, or throw accusations at the U.S. president or government, what will happen to you ? Nothing. Or maybe the orange clown will tweet an insulting, sexist or racist comment about you.
Try to disparage, insult, or throw accusations at Putin, you'll end up arrested, charged with some bogus "fraud" accusation and imprisoned. Keep it up, and you'll end up dead in some accident, or assassinated by a supposed opposition militant or tchetchen terrorist who'll end up conveniently shot dead by the glorious police force of the magnificent leader Putin.
Forbes has a policy of not including "rulers and dictators" on its various lists of the Worlds's Billionaires.
source
So, you can't assume anything from his absence. And since Putin's declared wealth is so paltry, proving the existence of Putin's secret nest egg is likely to be difficult and dangerous.
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.
As far as I've read - no. Even if you run a corporate VPN and give acces to it only for your employees, it is OK.
You encouinter this new law only if you are providing public VPN service. And even so, VPN is not banned. You are just required to register with authorities, and download daily list of banned sites, and restrict access to them. Of course, you have to provide logs on request.
Really, members of Russian Duma don't realize that there is something in the internet except "sites" and may be "torrents". And they think that they get rid of later by including rutracker.org (formerly torrents.ru) site into list of banned.