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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the gimme-more-control dept.

Archive.org has become the latest site to be blocked in Russia:

Archive.org, home to the popular Wayback Machine, is again blocked in Russia, according to a site that monitors IP addresses banned in that country. The Internet Archive's address, 207.241.224.2, turns up in the latest dump by Antizapret on GitHub.

The anti-censorship Antizapret maintains a list (currently beyond 12,000 addresses) of blocked IPs, and also provides information about anti-censorship tools like VPNs. The blog Meduza.io, which reported Antizapret's original announcement, says the Kremlin's media watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor, took exception to Wayback archiving links to Syrian Islamist videos. Because Archive.org uses HTTPS, the individual pages can't be blocked, so the whole site's been blacklisted.

It's not the first time the non-profit archive's robots have stored content that Roskomnadzor doesn't like. Wayback raised Russia's ire in June when it scooped up a page referring to the "theory and practice of partisan resistance."

Previously, Reddit was blocked in Russia for hosting a single page about growing psychedelic mushrooms, and Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted for its entry on Charas, a hashish form of cannabis. A day after Wikipedia's block was lifted, Moscow's head of communication and culture, Yevgeny Gerasimov, discussed plans for an alternate Russian version of the site.

The effects of erratic site blocking may pale in comparison to the data localization requirement that amended the Russian Federal Law on Personal Data, which came into effect on Sept. 1. Bloomberg reports:

A law now forces tech firms with Russian customers to operate local servers to handle Russian personal data. It's the latest in a string of about 20 laws tightening government control of the Internet, all put into place since President Vladimir Putin's re-election in 2012. Taken at face value the new program is aimed at protecting the privacy of Russian citizens. It's not a uniquely Russian idea, and is something Brazil and Germany are also exploring in the post-Snowden era. Yet human rights activists fear the regulation will be misused, allowing officials to spy on citizens and suppress political activists. It comes into force days after Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted because of an article about cannabis.

"The regime is already ramping up censorship and surveillance and using it to target opposition activists, so the requiring of companies to host data on servers in the country makes it easier for the government to access that data," says Laura Reed, a research analyst from Freedom House.

In theory Russia's intelligence services need a court order to access any data, but observers say they are rarely turned down. All eyes are now on Facebook, Google and Twitter, which have been meeting with the Kremlin in private to make sense of the law. At this stage it's not clear whether they will agree to comply. Google declined to comment. Facebook simply says it won't comment on speculation, and that "we regularly meet with government officials and have nothing more to share at this time."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:50PM (#231444)

    Who cares if Russia's rulers want to lobotomize the populace. Let them go right ahead. There will never be a need for Russians to co-operate with us in the rest of the world; life is a zero-sum game and the worse off they are, the better for the rest of us.

  • (Score: 1) by FreeUser on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:05PM

    by FreeUser (5423) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:05PM (#231450) Homepage

    Who cares if Russia's rulers want to lobotomize the populace. Let them go right ahead. There will never be a need for Russians to co-operate with us in the rest of the world; life is a zero-sum game and the worse off they are, the better for the rest of us.

    That's not how I read the post. I think what s/he is saying is, if the Russians want to shoot themselves in the foot let them. These things tend to be self correcting, and as their competitiveness declines compared to the rest of the developed world (I assume s/he means due to lack of info, or lack of ability to look up info quickly because its blocked, so slower iteration, slower development, etc. Imagine trying to do a day's work with Google missing half it's links) circumstance would presumably force them to walk these draconian actions back. Certainly pressure from the West doesn't seem to matter much.

    There is actually historical precedence for this, if you consider the decline and fall of the very uncompetitive, top-heavy Soviet Union vs. the West and the developing world. Of course, we took the wrong lesson from the West's "victory" in the Cold War. The pundits and Republicans shouted "capitalism wins!" from the rooftops, and credited Reagan and the then-reigning, pedophile-shuffling pope with the end of the cold war. More accurately, it was the feedback loop and incremental performance improvements provided by Democracy, vs. top-down, heavy handed centralized planning, and had more to do with Russia's leaders recognizing this and making internal reforms (e.g. Glasnost).

    Which is maybe why we are so eagerly replacing our checks-and-balances and Democratic institutions with architectures of control and authoritarianism instead: because we didn't learn a damn thing from the Cold War, and now we're heading down the same path. Even so, we'll still be more competitive than Russia, because while we may be monitored, we at least can still get to the information. Of course, failing to learn the correct lesson from the cold war probably means we're well on the way to failure ourselves, thank you so much Plutocrats clinging to power at the cost of Democratic change, whether it's the FBI infiltrating Occupy Wallstreet, or the EU's institutions effectively outlawing any progressive economic policies (for those unlucky enough to have been suckered into the Currency Union).

    So maybe Russia will be competative after all, and maybe we *should* be putting what pressure we can on them to change. But we won't, because there's no money in it, and our own leaders benefit far more by tightening the noose around our necks than they do loosening the noose around Russia's.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy, a Novel