Hackers undermine Russia's attempts to control the internet

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> 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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