Russia Bans VPNs To Stop Users From Looking at Censored Sites (cnn.com) 119
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.
Dear Leader Putin Does What He Likes (Score:2)
Re: Dear Leader Putin Does What He Likes (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: Dear Leader Putin Does What He Likes (Score:5, Insightful)
Call him what he is; the world's most powerful crime lord in history. Who do you think the Russian Mob answers to?
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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 "fra
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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 [goo.gl] puts Gates in the top slot.
The trick is that Putin's wealth is secret!
R
Re: Dear Leader Putin Does What He Likes (Score:4, Informative)
Forbes has a policy of not including "rulers and dictators" on its various lists of the Worlds's Billionaires.
source [forbes.com]
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.
Re:Dear Leader Putin Does What He Likes (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I think he have a daughter but I highly doubt she would like to follow him so probably his next best hunchback will be the anointed.
I don't see his daughter as being in the game either.
He just answered that question in a Q&A session. He answered that people want leaders to choose a successor, but in the end, it's up to the people.
https://www.usnews.com/news/wo... [usnews.com]
“the successor to the president is determined only by the Russian people in the course of democratic elections, and no one else.”
https://www.rt.com/politics/39... [rt.com]
It's revealing to compare the two reports of the same event.
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He divorced in 2013, but has 2 daughters from that marriage. Relations w/ one of them seems estranged. One of them is married into the family of a co-owner of Rossiya Bank, and is estimated to be worth $2B, so wouldn't need daddy's money. Dunno about the other.
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Use Netflix? (Score:2)
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.
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Netflix has to attempt to stop distribution beyond contract regions by contract. Netflix doesn't care about cons but the mpaa does and they have massively headache rules of which country can view what content at what time and in what format.
Want Netflix to drop their vpn rules? Get the mpaa to work up a 21 st century distribution model for content taking in the fact that when a company releases a video in one country every country can then watch it live too. The 6-12 months later crap they love needs to e
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I thought that net neutrality wasn't about that at all: it was about ISPs not being allowed to prevent consumers from accessing content over the internet. E.g. not being allowed to watch CNN live on their website unless one has signed on to a cable plan.
What a bunch of BULLSHIT (Score:1)
Re: What a bunch of BULLSHIT (Score:1)
VPNs are illegal for evading the Iron Firewall but I doubt that would be applied to visiting business people connecting to their offices. Of course there's always the risk that it could be if you offend someone in power, like any other third world country with vague laws, flexible courts and corruption ingrained from top to bottom. One more reason not to do business with Russia.
Russophile apologists and trolls inc. (Score:1)
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.
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Your very mention of snowflakes and SJWs, and Hillary's emails in this context count as 2 "whataboutisms" here (2 shots) in addition to the mentions themselves, which adds 2 and 3 shots respectively.
You're due for 7 shots, ya alky.
Re: Russophile apologists and trolls inc. (Score:2)
I don't normally drink, but this game sounds tempting, I'm pretty sure it would kill me by alcohol poisoning.
Banning VPN's is in style (Score:5, Informative)
This apparently coincides with a crackdown in China. The BBC is running a story about Apple pulling VPN's from its app store. [bbc.com]
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And this, right here, is a prime example of why Apple's walled garden is fundamentally antithetical to freedom. China and Russia would never be able to ban VPNs on Android phones, because you can trivially download them from somewhere else and sideload them. Apple's "App Store apps only" design plays right into the hands of authoritarian governments and makes possible a degree of control that could only have been dreamed about in the pre-lockdown era of computing.
Apple's management should be ashamed of t
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Problem with that is malware. Malware authors are criminals. And an awful lot of them are from Russia . Ironically.
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Didn't some American say something about those who would trade freedom for temporary security deserve neither? I mean sure, malware is a problem but so is the manufacturer literally telling you what you can and can't do with your own device, guided by the "friend" government.
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The general concept is applicable I would say. If you want to hand over your freedom to a company to handle the "security" on your behalf, you don't get to complain when it serves you up on a platter to the powers that be.
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I'm not saying it should be trivial to sideload software. But it should be possible without having to download Xcode, get a developer account, and use cryptic commands in Terminal to manually re-sign a package (in such a way that then fundamentally prevents it from sharing data with the original app if you have an old version installed already and lost the ability to upgrade it).
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I knew somebody was going use their own prejudices to turn Russia's making VPN's illegal into it being apple's fault. Thanks for being _that_ person...
Russia didn't just pass a law making the sale of VPN software on an App Store illegal, they passed a law making their use on phones in Russia illegal.
Given how jackbooted Russia's enforcement is turning, spot checks on people's phones to check for the presence of VPN software is beyond likely. So, mr Android zealot, how will the absence of a walled garden mak
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No, it's not Apple's fault that VPNs are illegal in Russia. It's Apple's fault that people aren't able to choose to violate a law that intrinsically violates basic human rights.
That's completely irrelevant. It shoul
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Android will not be a refuge from Putin's laws as I pointed out - and you ignored.
It should be the user's choice whether to take that risk, and Apple is denying them that right.
Ah, you're one of those "unlimited inalienable rights" people who think that _everything_ is a "right" that must be a personal choice and that laws "denying them" that choice are unnatural.
- People should have the "right" to drive on whichever side of the street they choose
- People should have the "right" to buy/sell/consume heroin/fentanyl
and most importantly:
- People should have the "right" to put illegal software on their p
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I wonder when USA will do the same. :/
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I suspect UK would be first. Theresa May already said something about "Making Britain world leader in the Internet control".
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Countries that block sites: (Score:1)
1. United Kingdom
2. China
3. USA (ice seizures)
4. Russia
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The average person in America is so brainwashed, they still believe this is the Land of the Free. The fact that we have the highest incarceration rate is irrelevant because those incarcerated people are criminals.
Re:Do Russians even have a clue what is happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do Russians even have a clue what is happening (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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).
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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.
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Re:Do Russians even have a clue what is happening (Score:4, Informative)
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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".
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Oh, really? Your american mass-media do not cover regular Moscow meetings since 2011?
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Have any proof to back up that hyperbole? Naah, didn't think so.
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"I would suspect" != proof, just more hyperbole.
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There were no attacks on elections in the west, at least not in the US. Find a new narrative.
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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".
Vyzov prinyat! (Score:2)
Vladmir is a funny guy
Following in the footsteps of the UK... (Score:1, Interesting)
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
Internet from censorship proof? (Score:2)
Some companies [wired.com] 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?
Re: Internet from censorship proof? (Score:1)
That would seem to be covered. Even if the sign up page isn't blocked and they accept payment, paying a foreign company for the service would doubtless invite further criminal charges.
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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
Low information news article (Score:1)
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If you can read Russian, here is link from the Duma site:
http://asozd2.duma.gov.ru/main... [duma.gov.ru]
It's official
meanwhile (Score:2)
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SSH supports SOCKS5 protocol, so DNS wouldn't be leaked if your browser does it to.
Really., SOCKS4 (which doesn't intercert DNS queries) wouldn't help anyway, because russian providers often fake DNS records for banned sites, redirecting users to their page with text "This site is banned due to government request".