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Hackers undermine Russia's attempts to control the internet
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:41:47 -0400
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: July 25, 2017 at 10:49:19 AM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Hackers undermine Russia's attempts to control the internet Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This item comes from friend Steve Goldstein. DLH] Hackers undermine Russia's attempts to control the internet Authorities have blacklisted thousands of sites for political dissent since Putin’s re-election in 2012 – but activists have subverted the system By Alec Luhn in Moscow Jul 25 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/25/hackers-undermine-russias-attempts-to-control-the-internet> Moscow’s attempt to control the internet inside Russia has come unstuck following a campaign by hackers who have subverted a system of blacklisting sites deemed inappropriate. Since Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2012, authorities have banned thousands of sites – some for promoting “social ills”, others for political dissent – by inscribing their particulars on a blacklist and forcing internet service providers (ISPs) to block them. But in recent weeks, activists seeking to push back against the crackdown have undermined the system by purchasing banned sites and inserting the particulars of perfectly legal web pages into their domain names. Havoc ensued. Last month, cash machines belonging to big state banks VTB and Sberbank stopped working. Major news sites and social media services were blocked and even Google became inaccessible. “The Kremlin proved incapable of putting the internet under control by technical means. The only thing that partly works is intimidation of companies and users,” said Andrei Soldatov, author of The Red Web, a book about Russia’s online surveillance. “To make intimidation more effective you need to make the rules more vague and complicated, to make almost everyone guilty by definition,” he said. With the blacklisting system looking vulnerable, the fear is that the authorities will retaliate by introducing an even harsher system of control on what web users can view. Already they have created a new “whitelist” of sites that can never be blocked. And last week, parliament passed a law banning the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), used by many to access blocked content. Hundreds of people staged a protest march in Moscow at the weekend to object to online censorship. The internet cat-and-mouse game started five years ago when the state telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, was given broad powers to censor the Russian web via amendments to a law drafted to “protect children from information harming their health and development”. This provided for the creation of a register, or blacklist, of banned sites that internet service providers were required to block. Wikipedia, LiveJournal, Russia’s largest social network VK and largest search engine Yandex protested the law as a crackdown on the freedom of information. With its blacklist, Roskomnadzor went after sites containing child pornography and information on narcotics and suicide. But it also bans pages for “extremist statements”, a slippery term that has been applied to everything from terrorist groups to liberal opposition news sites, and for information about unsanctioned public demonstrations. In the first two years, more than 50,000 web sites were blocked, some 4,000 of them for extremism. Sites can be blocked based on a court decision or a complaint by government agencies or citizens. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
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- Hackers undermine Russia's attempts to control the internet Dave Farber (Jul 25)