Russia to ban all VPNs – again – says senator Russia intends to prohibit VPNs being offered in the nation's app stores starting in 2024. A Tuesday report in local outlet RIA quotes senator Artem Sheikin as saying that Russia's telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor, will block any VPNs that allow access to banned material. The senator said the ban's intent is to stop Russians …
For the moment, it sounds like they're limiting this to app stores that can install the VPN on mobile devices, not the network connection to endpoints altogether. I wouldn't expect that to make a dent, but I built my own, and probably most average Russians trying to avoid the censorship won't be doing that.
However, if they do decide to block connections, they may have more ability to do so than China. China wants business to happen, so they allow VPN traffic from ones they think are corporate and only go after ones that appear to be public with moderate success. Russia has cut itself off more than China has and may well decide that, since we in the west have mostly stopped employing Russian residents anyway, they might as well have all Russians work for Russian companies which can have VPN endpoints located inside Russia. It won't help their economy, but nearly nothing they've done in the past year and a half has and that hasn't stopped Putin any of those times.
Yeah, let me know how the great firewall of Russia or China keeps the vpn's out.
China certainly does. Deep packet inspection identifies likely VPN endpoints, and blocks those foreign IPs.
They've been lenient about VPNs years ago, but more recently have been very aggressive and rather successful at blocking nearly all VPN services.
https://www.techradar.com/news/china-will-block-all-non-approved-vpns-from-next-month
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-vpn-idUSKBN1A51OB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall (Search for "VPN")
They do generally allow VPNs to/from foreign companies, but they get blocked from time to time. I had to deal with it myself a number of years ago when my company had offices in China. And these days they may need to be registered to be allowed at all.
"The senator said the ban's intent is to stop Russians getting access to all inappropriate material" - such as the truth.
Yet one of the first actions in the SMO was for the EU and UK to ban access to Russian news services..
Which sounds like a big win for Vladimir Putin's regime of pervasive censorship – save for the fact that he's been trying to crack down on VPNs for years with precious little success.
Yet the UK and EU have been doing exactly the same for years. Bulk data retention, proposed bans on end-end encryption, big fines for not blocking 'disinformation', introducing new crimes for 'hate speech', and of course more commercially motivated attacks on VPNs because they can allow people to bypass geo-restrictions. But as the old saying goes, the Internet loves to route around problems, epecially when the problem is heavy handed censorship and content regulation from both the West, and Russia.
Yet one of the first actions in the SMO
The word you are looking for is war. Or unprovoked invasion if you prefer.
And then some whataboutism to bulk up your post.
By the way, RT and Sputnik aren't news services. They're straight propaganda. But we also didn't ban access to them. You can still get them online, if you so desire. I don't think the UK even did anything. But the EU banned them from their satellite broadcast. I don't know if that affected the UK service, or if they just decided to shut up shop because sanctions would have made it harder to pay the bills. Even if the EU ban knocked them off Freesat, they could have still gone out on Freeview.
Anon,
You might be right there. You used to be able to get to RT, but not today.
I looked this up to see if the UK had banned it. And I missed that Ofcom had rescinded RT's UK broadcasting license in March 2022. The EU banned them from the satellite feed in February, so they'd already disappeared from our screens. But unlike newspapers in the UK, TV stations have to meet impartiality requirements - which are overseen by Ofcom. I guess it didn't get widely reported, seeing as it was rather late.
I can't find a mention of any internet ban / block. Admittedly only after a quick search. You can still get to TASS, which is a Russian state-owned news agency. But you can still get to the Sputnik news website, which is the same group as RT - they're both part or RIA Novosti. So I've no idea whether it's been stopped here, or by RT themselves.
I wouldn't have banned them. Though to keep them broadcasting in the UK would have required a change of law - which I also wouldn't have done. Because Ofcom had already found them guilty in several impartiality cases, and they were non-stop offenders once the full-scale invasion of UK started. I wouldn't have blocked RT.com.
Probably your ISP's DNS server, as that's what this ban has been when talked about in the past, although that hasn't stopped the Russia adherents from pretending that's a governmental ban. If you're posting here, you should already know at least three ways of bypassing that and I'm not talking about VPNs, but changing the IP address to a different resolver which has other benefits anyway. As usual, my UK-based endpoint can resolve and load RT's site just fine.
Broadcasting licences were withdrawn in the UK. At least two ISPs (BT and Virgin) block RT: there being irony in that VPN services connecting via the USA are unhindered.
Criticism of NATO's proxy war with Russia has been stifled in the UK and in other NATO nations. Indeed, in the UK there is a wing of the military - the 77th Brigade - now dedicated to propaganda and 'misinformation' to confuse a population whose collective thought processes rarely rise above the TV "Come Dancing" and similar pap.
The word you are looking for is war. Or unprovoked invasion if you prefer.
Wrong on both counts. But you are not alone in this disinformation age-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_military_operation
"Special military operation"[a] (also "special operation," and abbreviated as "SVO"[b]) is a euphemism[1][2][3][4] used by the Russian government and pro-Russian sources to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022
There have been many not-wars around the world, from the Falklands 'war' to Yugoslavia to the current occupation of Syria. This is because war has a specific legal meaning in most countries and in international law. Neither Russia, Ukraine nor NATO have formally declared war, which in many ways is a good thing. Germany's foreign minister and senior diplomat did say Germany was at war, but Germany's government hadn't declared war either. It's just one of those things that allows governments to run armed conflicts, police actions etc without the legal formalities that go with full-on war. Which is probably just as well given Ukraine did previously talk about declaring war on Russia, which Russia would then respond in kind.. And then woulld be able to wage unrestricted war on Ukraine.
It also wasn't an unprovoked invasion. There were plenty of provocations, with Ukraine poised to retake Donbas and Crimea by force until Russia intervened. Russia made that point when it announced the SMO by using the same language we used to justify our invasion and destruction of Yugoslavia.
By the way, RT and Sputnik aren't news services. They're straight propaganda. But we also didn't ban access to them
We did in the UK. We could still access them via VPNs, but govenments want to ban those so we only get official propaganda. RT is a Russian state broacaster, the Bbc is the UK's state broadcaster. Both broadcast propaganda. Censorship distorts the plurality of news, and ensures a compliant population only recieves the official propaganda and disinformation. This should be abundently clear from the extremely biased and one-sided reporting of the current conflict. Or even in politics. The British state broadcaster seems determined to interfere in US elections, probably because it's desperate for US revenues. But in covering the Trump trial, it reported some strange 'facts'. Like Florida's assessed value of Mar-a-Lago being only around $18m. This was odd, especially as Bbc journos probably own property in the US, and would know that assessed value for property taxes are very different to valuations for sale. Especially when that property is something like 10 acres of prime Palm Beach real estate which had a 125-room mansion built on it.
But like many on the extreme left, the Bbc hates Trump, despite his utter lack of relevance to 97% of UK licence fee payers. But the more it drifts to the left and into irrelevance, the more they'll find people stop paying for it. Which is also much the same with politics and increased authoritarianism and censorship across the EU. Slovakia just held elections. The majority didn't vote the way the EU elite wanted them to. Cue the claims of 'Russian disinformation', rather than Slovakians exercising their democratic right to be governed the way they want, not the shower of shite infesting Brussels.
What do you mean "retake"? Retake from whom? Donbas and Crimea were and are both within the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine. Yes there was some local unrest there, some people wanted independence from Kyiv, but they weren't sovereign regions in their own right. The word you should be using is "keep".
Russia is just calling it a SMO to avoid all the internal legalities that go with declaring war, and to make their populace believe it's nothing serious and would be over quickly.
What do you mean "retake"? Retake from whom? Donbas and Crimea were and are both within the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine. Yes there was some local unrest there, some people wanted independence from Kyiv, but they weren't sovereign regions in their own right.
"Some local unrest" is one way to describe an 8yr old civil war that had Ukraine bombing and shelling it's own population using cluster munitions etc, and resulting in thousands of dead and wounded. Yugoslavia killed fewer people, then we decided to invade that and now Yugoslavia no longer exists. The tensions created by redrawing that map still exist, but that's what usually happens when we decide to intervene in other nation's conflicts. See Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc etc for more info. But then our leaders really don't care about the lives of Ukrainians, they're just interested in engineering regime change in Russia and gaining control of it's resources. We're paying for it, you're one of the useful idiots cheering that on.
Russia is just calling it a SMO to avoid all the internal legalities that go with declaring war
As I said. Legally, it is not a war, yet people insist on calling it one. But that's politics. Again we've created many 'wars' in the last few decades, killed, injured or displaced millions of innocent people and along the way, creating the 'refugee crisis' the EU and UK are now struggling with, and paying for. Meanwhile, our supposedly 'liberal' governments have been cracking down on dissent, regulating for increased censorship and pretty much following Orwell's playbook. It's no wonder people are using VPNs to try and access information when the MSM all pretty much follow the same playbook. So of course, politicians want to ban VPNs.
Yeah one has an established legal basis, the other is entirely subjective and made up to maximise profits for realtors and property owners. Guess which one is relevant in a fraud trial?
Not sure what you're trying to say here? Sure, one has that established legal basis for property taxes, but are you saying that's the price home buyers should pay? I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, and there are many smaller homes sold in Florida for far more money & far less property. So are you saying those are all fraudulent? Or is that a matter between the buyer, and the seller to agree on a fair value? And if they agree, where's the fraud? Especially when trying to use an obscure bit of consumer fraud legislation to jail an ex-President who just so happens to be in an election cycle?
Meanwhile, more amusing election interference from the UK's state broadcaster-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67005444
Nancy Pelosi and her long-time deputy Steny Hoyer have been ordered to leave their workspaces in the US Capitol by acting House Speaker Patrick McHenry.
Ohnoes. Not sure why this is news. Pelosi hasn't been Speaker for a while, so why is it any suprise she's losing one of the perks that went with that job? Especially as it was apparently one of the largest and most luxurious bolt-holes hidden away in the Capitol.
Well... No, actually. Hilary Clinton got about 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016. Biden topped him by about 8 million votes in 2020. It the 18th century Rube Goldberg contraption of the Electoral College that let Trump win on 2016 and lose in 2020. Biden's EC vote was about the same as Trump got in 2016....and then claimed it was a "landslide".
I think they're working under the principle that "my enemy's enemy's friend's hamster's enemy is my enemy and friend, simultaneously".
The only metaphor I can come up with for this is playing 3D chess blindfold, hopping, while you hire Yoko Ono to scream into a microphone at you. While playing against a chess grandmaster.
"... when Moscow tightened censorship rules to prevent the populace from reading information that challenged its pathetic pretext for the illegal invasion of Ukraine – Russian citizens flocked to VPNs to access the content they craved."
Anyone troubling to study the history of events on the Ukrainian landmass from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day will be aware that the nation now calling itself Ukraine arose from turbulence among Europe's 'Great Powers'. Ukraine, at best, is an afterthought to the Soviet era: one consisting of what has turned out to be a toxic amalgam of several distinct European cultures; the poison introduced by 'Ukrainian Nationalists', these intimately associated with a legacy from Nazi Germany and Ukraine's home-grown Bandera.
To suit USA/NATO interests, these predicated on the Zbigniew Brzeziński doctrine (with extension now towards China), the story that present conflict in Ukraine started because of Russian invasion in February 2022 has been promulgated by Western officialdom. Even people hitherto unwilling to delve into the chequered history of life on the Ukrainian landmass might at least deign to note what happened in 2014 and observe how thereafter ethnic Russians within the old borders of Ukraine were provoked into revolt. What happened to Russian Ukrainians is now extending to others of ancestral origins in Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
..and they offer NOTHING modern to aspire to, only the yearning for the good old (empire) days.
Yeh, you're right. So there was a bit of a thing in Canada with their government, Zelensky and Germany's ambassador clapping and saluting a Canadian and Ukrainian 'war hero'. Who turned out to have been an SS volunteer who fought agains the Allies during WW2. Now, we have Politico trying to tell us that not all SS volunteers were Nazis, even though the oaths of alligience those volunteers swore were very much Nazi.. Which is a little odd given Holocaust Denial and glorification of Nazis is actually a crime in many parts of Europe.
But you're right. Some people are yearning for the good old days.. But this is also why others, like myself have an intense dislike for seeing Ukraine's infamous red and black flag and Banderite ideology re-emerging. But I expect plenty more thumbs down from people who don't understand that period of history, and probably think of themselves as being anti-fascists..
Name one Ukrainian who gives a toss about Bandera. They don't talk about him, he's irrelevant.
No, he's very relevant. 'We' don't talk about him because we're not supposed to support fascist, authoritarian and ultra-nationalist regimes. Meanwhile-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commemoration_of_Stepan_Bandera
Over 40 monuments have been erected.
Mainly in Western Ukraine, along with ripping down Soviet/Russian era monuments and replacing them with OUN-style ones, renaming streets, and of course-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera#Commemoration
On 1 January 2014, Bandera's 105th birthday was celebrated by a torchlight procession of 15,000 people in the centre of Kyiv and thousands more rallied near his statue in Lviv. The march was supported by the far-right Svoboda party and some members of the center-right Batkivshchyna
Y'know, those tiki-torch parades that normall upset the liberals. But Bandera worship isn't really the problem. Much as with the mad Austrian, he's just a figurehead for the resurgence of the OUN/UPA ideology, the symbology and the attrocities that went with it. So those red & black flags again. But for the defenders of fascism, like the Bbc.. Suggesting Ukraine has an ultra-nationalist problem is 'baseless Russian propaganda'. which is odd when the Bbc used to write and produce documentaries warning about it. I guess they've just become far more sympathetic towards fascism, authoriatarianism in their old age. The EU's much the same with the 'baseless' bullshit, except less publicly, the 50bn euro carrot currently being dangled in front of Ukraine is dependent on them dealing with their fascists and other reforms.. But those fascists have previously threatened to kill Zelensky if he tries. Plus they don't really want to be in the EU anyway because they believe in an 'independent' Ukraine..
