Does anyone care about the fate of the Internet in Russia?

There have been a lot of new policies in Russia in the last year or two, despite the fact that people and organizations opposed them. They were implemented.

Now ISPs have to "filter the Internet" for everyone. Initially there were three blacklists: "Propaganda of Suicides", "Drugs" and "Child porn"... Now there are 8 blacklist categories: they've added "Extremism", "Prostitution", "Gambling", "Copyrighted stuff" and "Arbitrary websites banned by court order"... Soon they are going to add "Internet pharmacies" and "Graphic images of dead people"...

Generally, they are trying to create "child filter" that is going to work on the backbone cables, for everyone... Right now it's implemented on ISP level (unlike US, there are hundreds of ISPs in Russia), but it ended up "not effective enough"... Right now most ISPs don't have DPI hardware, and are blocking websites simply by IP (with huge collateral damage most of the time)... Some providers, who have DPI, block URLs, but they can't block HTTPs traffic and sometimes they do MitM attacks on those websites, substitute SSL certificate with an unsigned "wildcard" certificate, decrypt your traffic, check for forbidden URLs and re-encrypt it on the other end. Apparently, this is not against the law.

You can see what content is blacklisted in Russia right now on this website, just copy/paste URLs: http://reestr.rublacklist.net

"Propaganda of Suicides" blacklist contains mostly black humor, "dark" art on Deviantart, some forums designed to provide help, and wide known award-winning social ad "Dumb ways to die". Here's that blacklist: http://reestr.rublacklist.net/gov/3/

"Child porn" blacklist is the largest one, but it does not contain child porn. I guess they simply can't find any on the Internet, but they are obliged to add X number of URLs every month, so they add: anime/hentai and other drawings (palcomix, e621, booru and other imageboards), a lot of Japanese blogs on fc2.com, nudist/naturist websites and forums, and a couple of fake porn-sites (you know them, click-bait pictures that forward you to another fake websites with a lot of ads and viruses, in a circle, and no actual porn content)... How is it supposed to help with child abuse? http://reestr.rublacklist.net/gov/2/

"Drugs" blacklist is probably the least stupid one. It really contains websites which sell drugs. However it also contains some local forums that contained one post about selling drugs at some point, and even after it has been deleted, that forum couldn't be removed from the blacklist.

It's easy to be included, but the procedure to be excluded is very hard, and you have to file some papers to "Roscomnadzor" personally, including the documents confirming that you are the legal owner of the website. If your website is not registered to the organization or legal entity, if your website is running on your home computer, you simply don't have documents required to remove your website from the blacklist.

"Extremism" blacklist contains mostly websites that provide "alternative view" on Ukraine crisis and sites where people organize protests together with any mass-media, news websites that take a risk and write news articles about those protests. Yes, that means if some news website writes "wrong news" about people who don't like what's going on in the country, the whole news website will be banned for everyone in Russia (Unless you're using VPN, proxy or anonymizer)

They also implemented the law, that defined the term "blogger" as "any webpage with daily audience above 3000 people"... Stupid. There's no method to determine that, but they fill the list of "bloggers" now with some semi-random crap. The problem with that list is that if your page is in there, you're treated as "mass media" and if you, or someone else post something "controversial", you'll get very large fine and your "blog" will be added to the "blacklist".

There's also a law that defines "organizers of dissemination of information" and the registry for them... That stupid term can (and is) applied to every website that has any kind of user content, all blogs, social networks, forums and even websites that provide comments section under every article... If you are in that registry, you'll have to provide all the user information to any government agency with no court order, you have to store ALL communication on your website for 6 months, you should not allow posting of user content if you can't figure out the real name of the person, no anonymous posts are allowed, and so on... That's why many Russian news websites don't have comments sections anymore – if anyone, any anonymous user post a comment that says "Putin huilo", they risk to be fined and closed for a week or so...

There's also a proposal to implement "Internet tax" similar to Hungary. The only difference is that there will be no mass protests in Russia and the bill may pass easily, no-one seems to care now. And people are afraid to go protest, because spontaneous protests are outlawed, you have to ask the government officials to allow the organization of the protest 30 days in advance... There's already a 1% tax on all devices that can record, store and play media content (including USB drives and DVD-R discs) that goes to Mr.Mikhalkov and sponsors his movies (mostly Russia and Soviet supremacy propaganda, that always fail in theaters)...

There's also a bill to outlaw all the "Open WiFi hotspots", stating that any access to the Internet through hotspots has to be provided only after de-anonymization through SMS or Passport... They've implemented this system partially for a limited amount of government sponsored "Public access" hotspots, but I can clearly see it expanded later...

Wow that sucks....  any loop holes? like VPn proxies and DNS?

 

 

Right now, VPN, proxies, anonimizers and something as simple as browsing the Internet through Google Translate works totally fine... Some ISPs block all DNS servers except their own, rerouting all DNS requests (i.e. to Google public DNS) to DNS servers they control, and from time to time, when blacklists are being updated, random websites become inaccessible... For example, websites on Cloudflare, all Google services, big blogging platforms, and generally any service that uses one IP for many websites for DDoS protection or load-balancing. Google's caching servers appear and disappear in "blacklist" all the time. For example, they have to manually change the IP of all the blogs on Blogspot they've added to the blacklist to some random terrorists website IP (72.8.190.47) in order to prevent the ISPs from blocking the Whole Google... For example http://reestr.rublacklist.net/rec/46528/

Sometimes when some random picture from googleusercontent is added to blacklist, all images on Google+ and Youtube become blank, usually with Error 504... 

But things may change to the worse in the future if more and more people become educated about how to circumvent this censorship...

Some recent news are awful... You know, Russian economy is failing right now since the price of oil is falling... They're trying to find at least some sources to fill the budget – new taxes, new and increased excises, ans so on...

On the Internet part they suggest reclassification of inbound trans-border Internet traffic as "the import of goods" and apply customs fees...

Lol Russia blows as a country. I feel sorry for Russian citizens.

I dare say the Russian censors will sooner-or-later have the Tek Syndicate on their 'blacklist'. It seems many western countries are intent on limiting the free-flow of information across the international borders.

 

It's sad in many respects, the 'father-of-the-internet': Sir Tim Berners-Lee's objective was to make information, and access to the internet freely available to the people of the world.

 

But it seems corporate lobbyists combined with the duplicitous individuals of whom occupy government positions have an express desire to suppress free-thought, and the dissemination of information.



The internet / the world-wide web possesses the capacity to break-down borders, and age-old differences in ethnicity (but the 'war pigs' in either corrupt western governments, or even communist oligarchies like Putin's, don't see it in that light)