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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
Call him what he is; the world's most powerful crime lord in history. Who do you think the Russian Mob answers to?
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.
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.