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Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

reuters.com

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Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#91
post #90
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was far from "all factual", and clearly in dispute since someone immediately disputed it. If you post strong political claims using pejorative language like "disease", "dictatorship", and "disregarding the people" (which in fact is almost all of what you said), you're going to take threads like this further into flamewar whether you mean to or not. That's bad for thoughtful discussion and therefore off topic here.…

Who disputed it? The only ones who "dispute" the autocratic nature of power in Russia are government backed trolls. That's not considered dispute by any means. And trying to be neutral or "soft" about these kind of things ends up in whitewashing it. It sounds strong, because the problem is serious.

The commenter who replied to you disputed it. Jumping to "government backed trolls" is exactly the mentality I was just trying to describe. That's just a form of assuming your conclusion, you have no evidence for saying it, and in fact it explicitly breaks the site guidelines to insinuate it. (Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

The range of legit opinion is much wider than most people think. That has become very obvious to us, looking at the data left by millions of readers, voters, and commenters.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#92
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it's not radical. DNS system is controlled by US company and if you rely on it your country's infrastructure is vulnerable. So if US decides to cut Russia from DNS national services including government sites should continue to function. People panic without understanding the reasons behind this law.

Doesn't Russia operate the authoritative servers for .ru ?

TLD servers are useless without root ones. There are several replicas of K-root in Russia, but they are under control of RIPE (EU organization).

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#93
post #91
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who disputed it? The only ones who "dispute" the autocratic nature of power in Russia are government backed trolls. That's not considered dispute by any means. And trying to be neutral or "soft" about these kind of things ends up in whitewashing it. It sounds strong, because the problem is serious.

The commenter who replied to you disputed it. Jumping to "government backed trolls" is exactly the mentality I was just trying to describe. That's just a form of assuming your conclusion, you have no evidence for saying it, and in fact it explicitly breaks the site guidelines to insinuate it. (Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. ) The range of legit opinion is much wider than most people thin…

> you have no evidence for saying it

I have more than enough experience to know who commonly "disputes" this, and it's not anyone good. You can use this kind of "dispute" as a very clear indicator about those who do it.

Opinions are applied to something subjective and they indeed can the the subject of dispute. Facts can't be replaced by them and disputing facts is rather strange to begin with.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. Maybe it wasn't designed with this objective in mind, but it is definitely used this way. And the fact that Google and Facebook are de-facto monopolies doesn't help. And I'm not from the government. I'm just another little guy that sees tons of that propaganda every day. For example, I watch mostly videos from conference…

Another example: on one of facebook groups I regularly see posts from a person regularly bashing Russia. Under every post he leaves derogatory comments. Sometimes he posts derogatory posts although the facebook group is not about Russia at all. Just recently he had shared a meme picture from some of the "opposition" groups (Alexei Navalny or his friends) stating that Russia has the highest suicides rate in the world…

> they're on a payroll from some non-Russian agency or NGO.

At this point, I would be incredibly surprised if any country in the world wasn't engaged in some sort of online trolling/fake news dissemination on either the global (e.g. Russia vs US vs China) or local (internal politics) scale. It's the best way to spread propaganda while making it seem as real as possible.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was…

> People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. Maybe it wasn't designed with this objective in mind, but it is definitely used this way. And the fact that Google and Facebook are de-facto monopolies doesn't help. And I'm not from the government. I'm just another little guy that sees tons of that propaganda every day. For example, I watch mostly videos from conference…

> Why YT displays rusophobic videos in the recommendations list

Because it suggests videos based on your previous interests/views.

Solution is pretty simple - stop watching those videos.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#96
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for a detailed explanation. That seems pretty radical. I mean, because of technology progress (mainly crypto improvements, but also cheaper hardware development) I only see two outcomes in the future: (it's a global issue, not just related to Russia) 1. We have a complete freedom of information exchange. It's a powerful thing. It's not only free speech, but also easily available all illegal digital content and…

Nope, it's not radical. DNS system is controlled by US company and if you rely on it your country's infrastructure is vulnerable. So if US decides to cut Russia from DNS national services including government sites should continue to function. People panic without understanding the reasons behind this law.

> DNS system is controlled by US company

Yes, of course. Russian propaganda never ceases to amaze me.

But just to be sure: do you know that DNS is decentralized protocol?

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#97
post #65
post #37

That's really just a symptom, while the disease is the dictatorship which can do whatever it wants disregarding the people.

Russian Dictatorship? Don't make me laugh boy! Maybe I am wrong but Russia isn't promoting the falling of governments around the world, that's something that US does.

Why down-voting? Did you know that the US attacked Venezuela's Power Grid. Is that "Freedom" and "Democracy"?

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#98
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you reference any significant 'opposition' meeting (such as this) that was not covered by RT for less than justifiable reason? E.g. - in this event the organizers prohibited RT from covering the event, which is a pretty decent reason for the lack of coverage!

What you say may be correct, but is it your position that these news sites are not Russian government propaganda machines, that they give good, objective coverage of what is right and wrong with the country and its government? And what is your own view of the Russian government?

First as a little update it turns out they did try to provide English language coverage of the protests, so much as possible [0].

As for your question, I think that's clearly a false dichotomy. I do think the issue of propaganda is important, especially in today's times. So let's consider an incident. Some weeks ago you probably read about Maduro's government, in Venezuela, setting one of the US aid trucks on fire. This was covered extensively. CNN stated that "a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks" [1] while describing the images of the trucks as sickening and repeating numerous calls for stronger action as a result of such things. If that page should change in the near future, the internet archive [2] is your friend. This was repeated by most other media sources as well.

The problem is that it was a lie. The aid truck was undoubtedly set on fire by anti-government forces. This is now being covered by the NYTimes [3] citing "unpublished video" and dutifully pondering 'how we got here'. The Intercept has also done a phenomenal piece on this event, here - showing how it was played out as propaganda and the entities that pushed it hardest. [4] Of course I haven't mentioned RT once yet, so what gives? This [5] gives. That's an article from RT. What you might notice is that they have an embedded video, literally the "unpublished video" from the NYTimes demonstrating that it was an anti-government protester setting the truck on fire. And it was published weeks ago, as soon as the information came to light while most western media continued to simply beat the war drums.

-------------

This is also not an isolated incident. I point this out not to claim that RT is amazing. If the roles were reversed and it was a very serious event such as Russia trying to foment a coup in another nation, I certainly would not expect RT to run timely articles indicating that actions being used as propaganda were, in fact, not the fault of the targeted government. You're not going to find any single source that provides "good, objective coverage" when it comes to issues that align with, or run against, their interests. So I find it important to expose yourself to a wide array of media and particularly to sources that are more like to challenge your viewpoints than affirm them. Nietzche might not approve, but in the end we're surrounded by nothing but abysses.

[0] - https://www.rt.com/russia/453483-internet-freedom-rally-mosc...

[1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo...

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190301142504/https://edition.c...

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...

[4] - https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...

[5] - https://www.rt.com/news/452326-venezuela-us-aid-truck-protes...

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was…

Thanks! That's a tough stance for a government to take. I guess using proxies, VPNs (w IPSec), and overlay networks like Tor and i2p would be made illegal too? DNS based blocking is easy to get around: It is known to not work effectively. Content based blocking can be done away with TLS. And... IP based blocking wouldn't scale [0], one would think, and def isn't reliable because of ElasticIPs offered by Cloud Provide…

I bet the next thing Russian (and many other oppressive ones) will try is forcing government-issued root certs on client devices with mandatory mitm. Sure, some devices might not be capable of importing new root certs, but for sufficiently dictatorial regime it's not a problem.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#100
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name one single other country where attendants are put in jail when attending a rally that was not permitted?

In Russia this might happen if you injure somebody or damage property during unpermitted rally.

That's of course a lie. Both from practical standpoint (police will invent stuff out of whole cloth if needed with courts rubber-stamping it) and from legal one, too. КоАП РФ [1] article 20.2 6.1, "unsanctioned gatherings leading to interruption of… pedestrian flow… up to 15 days of detention" (do I need to explain that any gathering is in practice an "interruption"?). Moreover, УК РФ 212.1 [2] says that breaking the previous one twice in a half year is punishable by up to 8 years in jail. I'd also like to remind you about the case of Ildar Dadin [3], who got thrown in jail for 3 years for one-person pickets. Sure, he was released when the case got widely publicised, but the laws and court system that did it are still in place.

I reckon you have a very… optimistic and cursory knowledge of Russian laws in that area.

[1]: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Кодекс_РФ_об_административных...

[2]: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Уголовный_кодекс_Российской_Ф...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ildar_Dadin

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