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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 02 2018, @02:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the be-quiet dept.

Zello rose to fame in August 2017 when the 'walkie-talkie' app was used by relief effort volunteers and those stranded in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Russian government, however, wants to take the app down and this week it was revealed that the country's telecoms regulator told ISPs to prepare to block 15 million IP addresses, most belonging to Amazon, in order to do so.

If reports coming out this week hold true, extremely far indeed.

The controversy centers around an app called Zello, which acts as a kind of ‘walkie-talkie’, assisting communication between close friends or in groups of up to a thousand people.

[...] But while the app clearly has some fantastic uses, Zello seems to represent a challenge to the authority of the Russian government.

Under the so-called ‘Yarovaya law‘, services like Zello, ISPs, and other telecoms companies, are required to register with Russian telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor. Amendments to come into force this year also require them to store the actual content of user communications for six months and metadata (such as who communicated with who, when, and for how long) for three years.

Encrypted services are also required to share keys which allow law enforcement bodies so that they can decrypt messages sent and received by users, something which has communications and VPN companies extremely concerned.

[...] Neither Rozkomnadzor nor Amazon have commented publicly on the news and Russia’s Ministry of Communications has refused to comment. Fortunately, at the time of writing there have been no reports of ISPs mass-blocking IP addresses connected to Zello.

Whether Russia would really flex its muscles so broadly and aggressively just to prove a point is unknown but with the growing war on privacy the way it is, almost anything seems possible.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @02:08AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @02:08AM (#661302)

    But it's a little hard to get to......

    Ha. You EFFing cocksuckers gonna gush about Tor and VPNs and proxies and shit, but guess what morons, as soon as it's a little bit hard to get to, folks gonna stop using it. You stupid fucking cocksuckers.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @02:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @02:19AM (#661305)

    Hahaha! You can mod down the signal, but you Can't Stop The Signal!!!

    I'm everywhere and in your hair!!