[tananaev]

Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

[_fat_santa]

I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.

[tananaev]

I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.

[proxysna]

Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.

[bbminner]

To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.

[wildylion]

Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.

(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).

[argulane]

If it's arm based mikrotik then you could run containers with fancier protocol wrappers

[konart]

I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.

But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.

[OCTAGRAM]

I would say they are trying to block every public VPN, and if some VPN tried to hide behind CloudFlare's backs thinking that they took all CloudFlare sites as hostages, then whole CloudFlare is nuked, and hostages did not save VPN from blocking.

[sega_sai]

I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.

[wildylion]

I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)

Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.

[pixl97]

Iron curtain is coming back up.

[TitaRusell]

On a positive note Russia is now the heart of digital piracy. They aren't in a mood to go after piracy groups.

[DANmode]

Now? lol

[Esn024]

>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.

The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).

The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).

[OCTAGRAM]

> unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government

Government did much to turn them away. And with regards to Makh messanger. Patriotic tech talents are supposed to be interested in Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. Does Makh messenger work on something Russian? No, Makh does not work on anything Russian. So what makes Makh Russian? We don't get it. It's some another Russia that we don't belong to. Our Russia is Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. And software from Astra group. People behind Elbrus 2000 support orthodoxal christianity, and people behind Astra group are for great Soviet past. They call one of Astra Linux releases "Leningrad". The proper name of what is currently known as "Saint-Petersburg."

Makh is from some commercial group that does not care about our values. Virtually openly violates traditional values. They are from VK group, and VK hosts VKFest, an open air for youth with rotten words, furnication songs, all that stuff.

Our Russia and their Russia don't mix like water and oil.

For military there is another communication network called Свод (Svod, Arch). It was 4 years late to the party, but at least goes in now.

[bojan]

That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.

Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.

[nasretdinov]

I think VK is being blocked in some Western countries because it allowed pirated content, not because Russia blocked it :)

[betaby]

VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.

[Modified3019]

> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.

[ekropotin]

Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.

[esafak]

Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.

[Terr_]

That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.

I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."

[itintheory]

> stenography

I think you mean steganography[0]. Stenography is shorthand, used for transcription.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

[wildylion]

That'll eventually get detected and put a massive target on the back of anybody dumb enough to use it. Sorry to burst your bubble.

[adgjlsfhk1]

oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service

[moralestapia]

What do they use, instead?

It's not like they don't want any videos online.

[OCTAGRAM]

+ Dzen Video

YouTube is easily accelerated via DPI bypass. It used to work with CloudFlare too, but not anymore, so CloudFlare is banned more hard than YouTube. With DPI bypass YouTube is very fast.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Rutube, VK.

[flexagoon]

> What do they use, instead?

a VPN

[mandeepj]

VPNs didn't help?

[OCTAGRAM]

Far not everybody cares to use them

[sourcegrift]

> youtube is slow

Maybe they're using Windows Phones?