Techcrunch missed a very interesting point about Roscomnadzors tactic here - they actually bothered to get a court order! [1] This is not something they normally do or, I think, are even required under the laws they tend to us in such cases.
The sad part is that the way that legal regime works, they are following the letter of the law and the general populous is not likely to object, since the article covers content related to a controlled substance, and since Soviet times, controlled substances carry heavy stigma, especially among older generations.
Nobody blames Roscomnadzor too much - not much more than sorry fellows who dug the graves for people killed in concentration camps.
The current illegitimate parliament is to blame. Being appointed to their chairs by Putin's grey cardinals instead of popular vote, they did every thing to please the dictator. Probably won't get any punishment for that other than karmic rebirth into a frog in their next life.
This is typical of the coverage we got with blocking of github and reddit. Very much a knee-jerk reaction with little understanding of the Russian laws and procedures. Of course, it is a mistake to expect otherwise. The problem is that an average reader will come away with an impression: "those backwards Russians are censoring the internet again!"
I hope you realize we don't care whose laws they are--we regard that censorship as illegitimate. There's nationalism and chauvinism aplenty, but many of those you'll find criticizing Russia on this point frequently condemn our own governments when they veer into censorship.
>we don't care whose laws they are--we regard that censorship as illegitimate
who's we?
regardless of who you are, your regard of censorship by Russians in Russia is illegitimate. you are a bystander passing judgement, you are not an elected representative of the Russian people. an elected government in Russia made laws establishing the legal process governing this situation. your opinion is interesting but ultimately irrelevant to the problem. those who live and vote in Russia and have a voice on this thread are far more relevant to the discussion than you are.
I guess this suggests that your question about whether people deny countries have the right to censor things probably was rhetorical. Well, I guess you've noticed that a lot of people here don't agree, and think there's a kind of inherent illegitimacy around most information restrictions, maybe regardless of where they come from.
This kind of disagreement seems pretty intractable. :-(
Do you realize where this site is hosted, who owns it, and where the majority of its participants come from?
I can only assume the 'we' mentioned is the great many of the HNers who do not like censorship by any country, no matter how nationalistic some of its citizens are.
Drug making instructions are a gray area. Most countries have laws restricting what you're allowed to publish - and they're all a bit arbitrary and different. It sounds like Wikipedia is trying to push American values onto everyone else.
Imagine if Wikipedia was based in a country that didn't respect copyright. Would people in America be upset that it was getting banned for hosting pirated content?
I'll take American values over applying random norms to encyclopedia contents.
Russian language speakers are not limited to Russia, there's tens of millions speakers in other countries. Wikipedia can't cave to demands from specific country. That is a road that will quickly lead to removal and censorship of any information not in line with what state TV in that country say, "or else".
Moral arguments aside, what makes you think this will work?
Tomorrow, some town judge in Zazhopinsk, Udmurtia (population 5000) will open this single page in some sort of anonymizer and will issue blocking orders on, in some order: Wikipedia, anonymizer, Internet Explorer.
And yes, she will specifically search for such thing because she is promoted by the bulk of cases.
American values? While I would agree in many cases of disputes about wikipedia content, this is not one of them. How is free and unrestricted access to information an American value?
>How is free and unrestricted access to information an American value?
I think the OP meant that American laws (based on American values) govern the content that's legal on Wikipedia. For example, there is no content on the site showing child pornography based on the US legal definition. Note that US legal definition doesn't fit with the definitions from other countries.
The legal standards for suppression of information and the categories of information that can potentially trigger those standards are stricter and narrower in most respects in the U.S. than in most other jurisdictions. Also, many segments of society often express pride in the breadth and depth of U.S. legal protections for free expression, and argue that it's something that makes the U.S. or the U.S. legal system great.
Foreign law students sometimes find it hard to believe that some of the rules are so protective of speech (source: three different U.S. law professors have told me this).
A few examples:
* All fictional depictions of violence are protected.
* There are no restrictions on blasphemy or insults to religious doctrines, religious beliefs, religious believers or communities, or religious believers' feelings.
* Advocacy and glorification of any kind of illegal action (including war crimes and genocide) are fully protected if they aren't reasonably likely to lead to a specific imminent lawless action.
* Advocacy against the state or its powers is mostly completely protected for citizens, as is teaching that the prevailing political or economic system is inherently wrong. Urging resistance to or evasion of military conscription is mostly understood as protected now (unlike during World War I). Same thing with taxation, if you're not teaching people how to do it with the intention that they act on your advice.
* Detailed information about how to commit crimes is usually protected if the person publishing it didn't have a sufficiently specific intention to help people actually commit them in practice and didn't have some other responsibility to keep the published information secret.
* Insulting present or past state leaders or the virtue or legitimacy of the state or any political party is fully protected.
* It's protected to advocate regional or ethnic secession or territorial separatism (though not to conspire to effectuate it by force). It's protected to display flags or emblems of militant groups, even those that the U.S. is trying to oppose or suppress or is engaged in armed conflict with. It's protected to show disrespect to national symbols or emblems of the United States.
* Contrary to increasingly common popular belief, there are no restrictions on "hate speech" or group libel (for example saying that a particular group in society is bad, using slurs against a group, saying that some negative stereotype is true or that members of some group commonly or always have a negative characteristic, or wishing for or justifying ill treatment of a group).
* Most sexualized depictions of adults (and most sexualized depictions of fictional children) are now legally protected in practice, although there can theoretically be restrictions in various circumstances that seem to be becoming increasingly rare and exceptional.
* It's hard to punish people for downstream republication of leaked or misappropriated information.
* It's hard to punish people for repeating truthful negative information about other people, especially if they weren't originally involved in obtaining that information.
Approx. 30% of Russian internet providers will block Wikipedia.org entirely, because Wikipedia.org use HTTPS (and Deep Package Inspection is too damn costly).
The use of "DPI" is frequently has a buzzword-like nature, which could mean literally anything from real DPI to transparent and semi-transparent HTTP proxies and sometimes even DNS spoofing techniques.
The bad thing is that some ISPs MITM (with obviously invalid self-signed certificate, not even matching CN/DN of the domain being proxied) instead of completely dropping all tcp/443 traffic.
Not that it's bad intent to try to provide access to the non-blacklisted pages, but it's an absolutely harmful practice of teaching users to click the knobs "aw, ignore those errors, I want to read the site".
This is apparently an order from the Russian government to individual ISPs. Do you think the individual ISPs have the ability (and desire) to issue fake certs from compromised root CAs to MITM Wikipedia connections?
The question in this case is not whether some CA is compromised or malicious, but whether the entities involved have access to such a CA and are willing to use that access.
Also, a very wide-scale HTTPS MITM is more likely every month to be detected because there are more and more people looking for it. That may not be true of small-scale MITMs for some time, but it's probably true, for example, for a large-country-wide attack against a major site -- especially a site used by lots of technically sophisticated people who've been given prior warning that something sketchy is going to happen on a particular date!
CA private key won't help classic (passive) DPI systems. You have to perform active MITM attack.
And if anyone's aware of any ISP anywhere in the world, doing a MITM with a certificate that passes validation, they should really shout about this as loud as they can (or at least whisper to someone who can shout), because it concerns virtually everyone on the Internet.
This has already happened with github, reddit, and several other lesser known sites. In all those cases access was restored very quickly, within hours/days, as soon as site admins complied with the Russian law. What's different this time?
That's an extreme of oversimplification and doesn't make your xenophobic statement reasonable.
HN has users all over the world, including many from Russia, who deserve as much as anybody not to have their country insulted. It's hard to keep HN civil as it is. Chauvinism is literally the last thing we need, whether driven by shame or some other emotion.
I get that this is an intimate subject for you, not garden-variety prejudice. My criticism isn't personal, and I'm sure we could have an excellent conversation about it face-to-face. But such emotions channeled into political rhetoric release VOCs that HN is in no condition to process.
FWIW, as an American I have also become accustomed to a constant feeling of shame. Only difference is that my shame is mostly related to the terrible things that my country is responsible for in other countries and to other people in the last 100 years.
That's quite unwarranted. Despite all the brain washing, historians all know that you Russians are the ones who defeated Hitler. That was very far from granted. Weren't you there to stop the nazis, we Europeans would all be slaves right now.
That makes it even worse: we've lost 25 million lives defeating Hitler and now we live worse (and shorter, and with less impact) than any of Hitler allies or conquered countries. In the process the USSR controlled Eastern Europe, and now they are furious for that and blame - surprise - not the communist parties, not the communism, not the USSR but specifically ethnic Russians.
I mean, if the superhero who sucks at having a life is your role model, then yes, this will inspire you.
Otherwise you feel even worse because that's a loser's position.
You'll find plenty of other losers if you apply the same criterion: Belgium was constantly invaded by friends from all sides. Germany never had the dominant worldwide position it deserved. Poland is, well you know this story... China was three, four times defeated and ruled for centuries by small tribes of illiterate horsemen. All Africa is a mess, and South America too. Even the allmighty American Dream magic powder do not sell that well anymore. I would stop complaining about Russia's past and move forward, if I can share my thoughts. (Just think 2 mn about what it means to be a German nowadays, you'll see how the mud is much uglier on the other side)
The problem is, we can't move forward. We're stuck.
As a society we're so deep in blame shifting and ressentiment that no progress is possible. Visible in Putin's and parliament members' rhetoric who instead of trying to find solutions choose to blame circumstances and everybody else in the world and vocally return to traditions banana coocooland where every problem is inexistent. Oh, and also blame your fellow co-citizens for being agents of the enemy, defeatists, saboteurs and sources of the problems being discussed. They get away with this because the seed finds fertile soil.
To be a German is to be enjoying good beers on top of the best industrial complex in the world, having long admitted mistakes of the past and moved on. Russians infinitely return to mistakes of the past trying to revise history, find somebody else to blame or try to repeat those.
Five years ago I thought that we are moving, but then whole country just hit the brakes.
Hem, that's not so easy for the Germans. If only it was a mere "mistake" you can "admit and move on"... It is a crime against humanity that will never be forgotten, may I remind you.
And German beer tastes like piss, if you ask me (I'm Belgian for beers).
> Hem, that's not so easy for the Germans. If only it was a mere "mistake" you can "admit and move on"... It is a crime against humanity that will never be forgotten, may I remind you.
I beg to differ - both world wars belong now to the past century, and as more and more years pass by and their witnesses die, these atrocities belong more and more to history books along the Napoleon wars etc., being no more part of the modern story than other horrors of the past. What kind of relation exist between an average young German and the Nazi war machine? Even if someone had an SS officer in the family, they're likely to just feel ashamed and eliminate it from their memory, that's all.
" In the process the USSR controlled Eastern Europe, and now they are furious for that and blame - surprise - not the communist parties, not the communism, not the USSR but specifically ethnic Russians."
I don't think so. There are some with simplistic minds who follow this line of reasoning, but I'd argue that most sympathize with "average Russians", being aware that you're victims more than anyone else.
The only thing that makes people wonder is the opinion polls, when high support for Putin among the Russian population is claimed. Some consider these polls false, but some wonder just how much you've been brainwashed.
A lot. Some examples are readily available in the comments.
Still, the seeds found fertile soil of people whose whole life was a failure so now their standards are drastically lowered. I'm not sure this is fixable, imagine the whole country of people with childhood trauma, this is not much different but followed by adulthood trauma as well.
All that some-genuine-but-mostly-bullshit from the mentioned page dims before the conjecture that Russia was supposed to become 300-million-strong Denmark, and what we've got instead over the course of XX century is closer to 140-million-stong Nigeria in the snow. Real Nigeria, however, has much better demographic prospects.
"Есть пустыни и вулканы,
Острова и океаны.
Только жизни нет, только жизни нет..."
Luckly there are less than 10% of you in the Russian population despite how vocal you are. You'll never get support because your philosophy is one of hate and denial of what was and can be a great nation.
You always have the option of moving to Kiev. I hear they are building a European nation in line with your Putin hating values.
> You always have the option of moving to Kiev. I hear they are building a European nation in line with your Putin hating values.
Interesting. I've never seen (with my own eyes) a better example of the Putin worship and animosity towards Ukraine than your comment here. I'd heard that it existed, but started to wonder if that wasn't some Western propaganda after all.
Russia is actually having its own unique AIDS pandemy right now, contrary to the rest of the world who mostly figured that problem out. In Samara region, 3% of pregnant women are infected, scary isn't it? It's a pretty well developed area for the curious, not some obscure rural minority place.
I do find this to be disgusting, but I'd like to point out Wikipedia articles have become quite biased in the past years.
If content was based on purely factual information and opinions were contrasted/highlighted, Russia would have a much harder time finding a suitable argument.
Doesn't matter. Even if Wikipedia would be full of outright lies it still won't justify censorship and blocking. But considering your argument, now it at least makes sense why the Absurdopedia was blocked among the first sites, hah. /s
Those are our ideals but the reality is that countries have long restricted free speech. And each countries makes its own judgements and decisions on what kind of speech can and should be restricted. Personally I find "free speech zones" in the US disgusting.
That's how reality works. Our ideals are that people don't murder each other. Even if they do, it's not a reason to throw away the concept and agree that some murdering is ok since people do it anyway.
So yeah - free speech is a thing we should aim for. Some disrespect it more than others and Russia is definitely not a great example to follow.
Well, not like I can deny this (that would be denying a matter of fact), but yes - my personal opinion is that I strongly disagree they should have such right. Not like my opinion matters, though.
Another issue is, this is not even a limitation of someone's free speech, but limitation of my rights to read. I believe it's an important distinction.
This feels like one of the kinds of questions where people on HN and elsewhere have started to feel the need to say "I'm genuinely curious..." because otherwise they fear people will assume that it's a rhetorical question.
I assumed that the parent comment was genuinely curious about whether people in this discussion think that governments should be allowed to set their own limitations on free speech. I've spent a lot of time helping people find technical means to access things that local legislation says they shouldn't, and promoting the work of people who do that, so apparently I think the answer is no. But I think most people worldwide tend to think the answer is yes, so it wouldn't be so unreasonable to parse the parent post as a question about what people in the discussion think.
If Free Speech is defined as "whatever the government deems free speech" then the word itself becomes, at best, meaningless or, at worst, the twisted definition becomes itself a form of oppression.
"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." - 1984
Free Speech is an absolute. Every country falls short of it in some respect, but that does not detract from the concept.
>>Russia would have a much harder time finding a suitable argument
Arguments are for systems where there are dissenting voices. In blocking Wikipedia, they silence those voices. They are choosing between displaying information critical of their government and not displaying that information.
They could block it for having information about drugs (like Reddit) but that is not at all what this discussion is about.
>Wikipedia articles have become quite biased in the past years.
don't know why OP is getting downvoted because this reflects my observation as well
i trace the systemic bias in wikipedia to an equivalent bias in the English language media and wikipedia's policy of reliable sources. the latter is a doubly edged sword that keeps out the crackpots but also ignores reasoned dissenting voices that come from outside the corporate media circle.
Maybe people were offended that someone would criticize Wikipedia in this way in the context of news about censorship against it, the idea being that it's rude to bring up problems with a site's content just as the site is about to be censored.
Personally I think problems of bias on Wikipedia are an interesting issue that can be hard to deal with, because many Wikipedians have assumed that the elaborately-worked out policies about point of view, reliable sources, and citations have already addressed this. But maybe in many contexts these policies don't work well or don't achieve their goals well (and there are lots of ways that could be so, some of which are already identified within the Wikipedia community but not necessarily solved).
I assume the downvotes have to do with the implication that it's legitimate to block Internet content that is biased, rather than with the assertion that Wikipedia content is sometimes or increasingly biased.
The sad part is that the way that legal regime works, they are following the letter of the law and the general populous is not likely to object, since the article covers content related to a controlled substance, and since Soviet times, controlled substances carry heavy stigma, especially among older generations.
[1] http://m.lenta.ru/news/2015/08/24/wiki/ (sorry in Russian)