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Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

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Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#111

Post by bluGill »

rsynnott wrote: post #77
nabogh wrote: post #13

I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. My impression was previously that Russia was somewhat of a wild west when it came to piracy and internet restrictions. To make things weirder, the article claims that only mobile networks are affected. I wonder why that is. Is this just the decisions of a handful of telcos and it's being reported as a state-imposed restriction? Edit: also in my opinion, "blocki…

If you’re a dictator who just survived an abortive coup, then, yeah, you’re probably going to want to tighten control on what people can and can’t see. Putin is very weak right now, and likely feeling extremely insecure. For good reason; like, you would not want to be his life insurance provider right now. This sort of this is as likely to be emotional support censorship for Vlad’s benefit as anything else; hard to i…

> you would not want to be his life insurance provider right now

Why not? Sounds like the perfect scam, collect the $$$, funnel it to some offshore account. When Putin dies the chaos of succession ensures that nobody will be able to attempt to collect before I leave the country.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#112

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

gwnywg wrote: post #79
hooby wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. People use VPNs to get western news and information through other channels than state-controlled Russian media. If Russia can block these other channels, then their own propaganda becomes the sole information citizens have access to.

If I was denied access to information sources I trust I would not go and swallow state propaganda.. Having said this, almost all of my Russian colleagues already talk like Russian TV and all of them use VPN this way or another..

> If I was denied access to information sources I trust I would not go and swallow state propaganda.

It seems there is always a segment of the population that takes up nationalism/populism. You don't need a majority to enable authoritarianism, just enough to ease them into power, maintain the facade of support and help chill dissent.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#113

Post by nirui »

Bluecobra wrote: post #56
gsa wrote: post #14

I have been researching VPN protocols that work in China and found that Xray [0] is the most recommended route to escape the GFW. An ideal VPN setup is one where packets appear as normal https traffic. Some VPN setups take it a step further and proxy the traffic through Cloudflare. Setting all this up is nowhere as easy as Wireguard. Coincidentally, I came across this project on Github earlier today which is an obfus…

If everyone does this wouldn’t that encourage them to try to do carrier grade SSL decryption? I seem to recall that some country is already doing this and to get online you need to trust the state’s CA.

Well, a long time back, there are proxies such as fqrouter, GoAgent and XX-NET which sends plain but loaded HTTP requests as transport. So I guess if a country decides to ban/decrypt TLS, people can just switch to another proxy/protocol.

Of course, both fqrouter and GoAgent is long gone by now and should not be used. However, it seems that XX-Net is still been actively developed and (according to their project page on GitHub) is currently give out one million free ChatGPT-3.5 tokens for it's paying user...(I mean like... what??? and why???)

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#114

Post by andreygrehov »

lifty wrote: post #60
nabogh wrote: post #13

I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. My impression was previously that Russia was somewhat of a wild west when it came to piracy and internet restrictions. To make things weirder, the article claims that only mobile networks are affected. I wonder why that is. Is this just the decisions of a handful of telcos and it's being reported as a state-imposed restriction? Edit: also in my opinion, "blocki…

This isn't about cracking down on piracy or anything of that sort. It's about slowly getting control of the media and information channels that Russian people have access to. The same playbook that China has been using since forever. Authorities have been encouraging popular Internet celebrities to start posting their content on local networks/apps, so in time Western media sources like Youtube and Twitter will be bl…

Many non-western countries do not share cultural values with western countries. As an example, see the number of anti-LGBT people in Georgia (the country, not the state of Georgia in US) – it's not just a small protest, but thousands of thousands of people. When it comes to Russia, they are doing it for the same reasons, but also in response to the sanctions: "If you don't want to work with us, you won't get any traffic from our country". Every country in the world seeks to control information; Russia is not unique in this regard. The primary reasons they are blocking the Internet are sanctions and an attempt to preserve conservative values.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#115

Post by Lex-2008 »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #84
lifty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about cracking down on piracy or anything of that sort. It's about slowly getting control of the media and information channels that Russian people have access to. The same playbook that China has been using since forever. Authorities have been encouraging popular Internet celebrities to start posting their content on local networks/apps, so in time Western media sources like Youtube and Twitter will be bl…

I don't live in China. Yet I'd very much like my country having its own national software stack (OS, search engine, browser, social media apps). All is fine for you guys in the US, but you forget when our national interests conflict with yours or big tech corporations or when the privacy of our citizens is concerned, it happens to be a national security issue. I trust my own government to not spy on me unnecessarily,…

> if I'm to be spied by someone, I'd prefer my own government who is far more likely to act in my best interests than the three letter agencies of US.

I'm also aware of an opposite opinion: if I'm to be spied by someone, it's better to be a three letter agency overseas, since it's much harder for them to harm me, than a three letter agency in my home country, which can just knock at my door.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#116

Post by askonomm »

Ah, of course. Good ol' Russia furthering its reach of state propaganda and brain washing its people into truly believing that Russia doesn't invade, but instead saves other countries.

Source: Am from Estonia, and a lot of Russians living here very much believe this.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#117

Post by Aerbil313 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #102
Aerbil313 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't live in China. Yet I'd very much like my country having its own national software stack (OS, search engine, browser, social media apps). All is fine for you guys in the US, but you forget when our national interests conflict with yours or big tech corporations or when the privacy of our citizens is concerned, it happens to be a national security issue. I trust my own government to not spy on me unnecessarily,…

I don’t disagree with this, but it would be better to have a stack that’s not controlled by any government but is based on technical standards - not governmental dictates or corporate control. I would also note that in your country the US agencies have no authority. However your own government can use that information to imprison you or otherwise exert its jurisdictional control. I think that’s generally what people…

> it would be better to have a stack that’s not controlled by any government but is based on technical standards

That era of globalization is slowly passing away.

> I would also note that in your country the US agencies have no authority.

No it plenty does. Not well-known on the west side of the internet, but the US can and did easily order to our governments the individuals (which she saw to be influential in the directions she didn't want) to be imprisoned, tortured and executed. And this is just cost-effective side of the coin. Three letter agencies can make anyone disappear. I just searched for almost 25 mins for an article documenting such a case. I was able to find it several times in the past with increasing difficulty. It's not even on the webarchive now. I think the article is finally nuked by some agency.

> there are lots of governments who oppress their citizens for being themselves and for who they associate with.

Not everyone agrees with the idea that individual freedom extremism is good, or that everyone should be allowed to do or say anything as long as it doesn't adversely affect others. In fact in this side of the world we think that's a silly and naive standpoint.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#118

Post by dsign »

Bear with me on this one. Look at Cuba, and North Korea. Those two suffer famines, crippling blackouts, and the harrowing and pervading stench of failed civilization. Yet, the citizens of none those countries are trying to topple their government. How do they manage? Massive brainwashing, which is in turn made possible by controlling access to information.

Cuba, the case I'm most familiar with, it's very interesting because (so far) it doesn't limit much the access to outside information using the Internet[^2], but only official newspapers, books, radio and TV programs are allowed.

I have this view that the information that the citizens of a country consume is like the regulatory signals of an organism. For a healthy organism, those signals must be coherent, otherwise some terrible disease will consume the organism.

Of course, as a creature of the enlightenment, I hate that notion. I want my information to be free.

But in the big scheme of things, the way I feel about it just doesn't matter. It's enough that states that police the information their citizens consume live longer than states that not. How to get from now to then is an open problem in some cases, but everybody is trying. CP and terrorism, and the vague term of "national security," are the vanguard which is being used to rive down the door on privacy in the Western countries, though the battle is already lost in much of the rest of the world.

[^2]: Except on those occasions when the citizens actually dare to riot, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Cuban_protests#cite_ref-1...

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#119

Post by tialaramex »

simfoo wrote: post #27
0xDEF wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed many new security and privacy oriented projects use Go and even C/C++. Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? Are crates like rustls/ring still intentionally sabotaging Rust's cryptographic ecosystem with their "we will always be pre-1.0.0 and never have a stable API" philosophy?

What if "C/C++" is not actually a thing and modern software engineering practices is what actually makes software safe? Writing modern C++ with good test coverage, sanitizers deployed and wrapping critical/unsafe parts into safe interfaces gets you _very_ far.

Wishing for something won't make it come true. C++ has had decades to get this to where it needs to be, there's no reason to hope that if we just give them another chance they'll get it right this time when you can instead use a language which got it right.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#120

Post by bjord »

vbezhenar wrote: post #59
azangru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your impression was absolutely wrong. Before war, Microsoft and other big western companies along with police hunted companies which tried to use pirate software. So it was not a good idea to use pirate software for company in Russia, at least if you're big enough to be noticed. Ordinary people were kind of ignored, AFAIK Didn't they say somewhere that in response to the sanctions imposed early in the war they were…

I'm not aware of any real steps about that. Probably empty words. There are enough software makers in Russia, so allowing piracy would just make their life harder. Like why would you want to buy КОМПАС-3D for some hefty price if you can pirate Autocad for free.

They were not empty words. Here are a couple examples:

https://torrentfreak.com/rutracker-found-itself-unblocked-in...

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/09/russian-cinemas-sc...

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