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LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

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Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#71
post #65

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

The great thing about guys like you is your astounding hypocrisy, the chutzpah with which you claim authority to represent Russians, and disdain for the "unwashed masses". If literally any other government introduced similar legislation to protect citizen data, it would be considered progressive and relevant to the times we live in. In Russia? "Nasty kremlin bastards". The sheer gall to consider that your own interpr…

The problem is, that legislation does not actually protect citizen data. All code is still controlled by LinkedIn, and Russian goverment still have no idea what it does. If FBI (or CIA or any other agency) comes to LinkedIn with an order, then does it matter if the technician serving the request pulls the data from Russian, European or US database? The data will be delivered anyway.

Moreover, the law does not actually prevent the companies from storing data somewhere else -- Article 12 mentions many allowed reasons to send the data to other countries.

What this law, however, allows is for government to apply pressure on the company by treating to seize their servers (such as this case: https://torrentfreak.com/police-shut-down-russian-rapidshare... ). I see no other reason for the law.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#72
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a large part of the Russian software market is overseas.and many developers work on contract. Further, this helps the Kremlin's agenda which has lead to economic stagnation, and the average gdp of Russians dropping below that of China.

Doesn't seem like it: https://www.google.ca/search?q=russia+gdp

Well, the Chinese median income is double that of Russia though

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#73

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

> The real motivation is that the Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time. This doesn't prevent or help Russia from spying on its own citizens. I get that you are anxious. But the traffic that travels from your computer to servers outside of Russia is just as easy to spy on for Russian intelligence services as the case where the servers are located inside the country. It do…

No, it does make a huge difference, actually. If the traffic is travelling to outside servers, it can be encrypted, and there's no mitigation that they can do to get access. But if it ends up on the servers inside the country, they control the endpoint where it has to be decrypted to be processed. Then it becomes a kind of a reverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM#SORM-2 set-up, with every prominent service provider having a preinstalled tap for the agencies.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#74

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

You can easily get VPN and continue to use Linkedin if you need to. > Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time. Most of the governments do love to spy on its own citizens, for obvious reasons.

> You can easily get VPN and continue to use Linkedin if you need to.

VPN is only temporary cure. I think soon or later Kremlin will try to crack down use of VPN when it becomes popular.

> Most of the governments do love to spy on its own citizens, for obvious reasons.

And I'm not fond of most governments and even notion of big intrusive government.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#75
post #65

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

The great thing about guys like you is your astounding hypocrisy, the chutzpah with which you claim authority to represent Russians, and disdain for the "unwashed masses". If literally any other government introduced similar legislation to protect citizen data, it would be considered progressive and relevant to the times we live in. In Russia? "Nasty kremlin bastards". The sheer gall to consider that your own interpr…

As people point out in comments below, the law does no such thing. It doesn't prohibit storing user data outside of Russia, so it doesn't offer any privacy protections whatsoever. What it does is require that data to also be stored inside Russia, where it is subject to warrants (and warrantless wiretapping under SORM-2 and similar arrangements). Which is really everything you need to know about the purpose of the law.

Speaking more broadly - yeah, Russia is an authoritarian populist regime with a known penchant for human rights abuses and suppression of political dissent. And so it's going to be judged as such when it does things, not equally to any other country. This is similar to how we judge people differently, and ascribe different motivations, based on their past actions that we know about.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#76

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

> The real motivation is that the Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time. This doesn't prevent or help Russia from spying on its own citizens. I get that you are anxious. But the traffic that travels from your computer to servers outside of Russia is just as easy to spy on for Russian intelligence services as the case where the servers are located inside the country. It do…

But the traffic that travels from your computer to servers outside of Russia is just as easy to spy on for Russian intelligence services as the case where the servers are located inside the country.

Ehh.. no? TLS protects the data against snooping, but only borders protect you from warrants. Russia based servers are subject to Russian law and warrants.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#77
post #4

I didn't know about this crazy new regulatory requirements until now. Quoting from an article [1] describing the new law: > “When collecting personal data, including through information and the internet telecommunications network, the operator is required to provide a record that the systematization, accumulation, storage, updating and retrieval of personal data of citizens of the Russian Federation, is held on datab…

I wonder what sort of onus is on the operators to determine the citizenship of its users. How do I know that Andrey Zhukov is a citizen of the Russian Federation? Does a Russian name and a home address of Saint Petersburg suffice?

They don't. That's the trick

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real motivation is that the Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time. This doesn't prevent or help Russia from spying on its own citizens. I get that you are anxious. But the traffic that travels from your computer to servers outside of Russia is just as easy to spy on for Russian intelligence services as the case where the servers are located inside the country. It do…

No, it does make a huge difference, actually. If the traffic is travelling to outside servers, it can be encrypted, and there's no mitigation that they can do to get access. But if it ends up on the servers inside the country, they control the endpoint where it has to be decrypted to be processed. Then it becomes a kind of a reverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM#SORM-2 set-up, with every prominent service provid…

I wonder what the Kremlin thinks of Livejournal.ru these days? Livejournal's a "back in the 2000s" memory for most of the English world, but as far as I know, Livejournal.ru is the top blogging-oriented network in Russia (http://blog.webcertain.com/targeting-russia-the-top-8-russia...). Also as far as I know, LJ's servers are still in the USA.

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#79

As a Russian citizen, I used LinkedIn heavily to find jobs in Europe (along with stackoverflow.com/jobs). I keep a lot of contacts there (e.g. former colleagues and European recruiters, some of them are very helpful). I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe. But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting int…

I am a Russian too, moved to New Zealand. I was talking to my colleague from Russia via Linkedin, he was asking me about moving to NZ, getting the visa and so on. But now he can't read my response...sigh

Re: LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia

#80
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of leaking of databases, which are vital for their business, is too high, IMHO. Did you remember closed government databases, with private information, written on CD and sold at Gorbushka for pennies?

That risk isn't bigger than anywhere else since we are talking about private company really concerned about security. How many leaks were there through government channels from Mail.ru Group or Yandex? None, and the reason is that, given all necessary security measures taken, you cannot just copy such a database to CD. The access will be limited to few well-paid people in IT Ops, the database can be secured using a s…

well, allegedly somebody sold Putin's own bank accounts in Cyprus on blackhack a year ago
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