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Russia has banned VPNs capable of circumventing website blocking, and will require users of chat apps to have a phone number associated with their accounts:
Vladimir Putin has banned virtual private networks (VPNs) and Tor in a crackdown on apps that allow access to websites prohibited in Russia. The law, signed by Mr Putin, was passed by Russia's parliament last week and will now come into force on 1 November. A second law to ban anonymous use of online messaging services will take effect on 1 January next year.
It would make it easier for the state to snoop on citizens' browsing habits, one internet security expert suggested.
The laws signed by Mr Putin are meant only to block access to "unlawful content" and not target law-abiding web users, the head of the lower house of parliament said, according to the RIA news agency.
One feature of the second law is the provision to require internet operators to restrict users' access if they are found to be distributing illegal content.
Also at Engadget, ZDNet, RT, TechCrunch, and CNET.
Related: Apple Capitulates, Removes Unlicensed VPN Apps From China App Store
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday August 01 2017, @01:14AM
No, you were told by people smarter and more informed that an absolutist position was merely an egotistical framing of simple mathematical truths. It's not that it is possible, it is that it is the only way. These "magic powers" you refer to are better known as mathematical principles. There are "wizards" that understand them and work them to a degree that is admittedly out of the reach of small minds. Hence, your conflation of encryption algorithms with magic.
So when the scientists, mathematicians, and crypto "weenies" get together and tell you that backdoors are not possible, it's not because they don't like you and simply don't want to, it's because it's logically and mathematically precluded. No egotistical posturing, or silverbacks running around grunting and pummeling their chests declaring that crypto must and always be free.
Just people much smarter than you trying to explain how it works, and how it can't work. No emotions involved, just the immutable mathematical truths like 2 + 2 = 4.
Riiiiigggght. It was all the crypto weenies and those intractable, anti-American, immutable bastards that are mathematical laws. If only infinity wasn't so fucking unreasonable and could be locked down to a finite numbers, and why the fuck do we have to keep writing out Pi for so many damn numbers? Can't we shorten it?
I've often been mad to at math too and how unreasonable it is.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.