[guycalledfrank]

Hi, pal. I live in Moscow too, and I agree with you: what's happening is really really sad. I use github for everyday work, and suddenly I failed to connect. I need my job actually, you know? And they just broke it. For what? For blocking one file, which nobody cared about? Are they serious? This is fucking insane. And regime is fucking insane. And "replace your t-shirt with a patriotic one" ads on streets are just too fucking dumb to be true. WTF?! 2013 wasn't too bad, and I had no thoughts about moving to another country, but in just one year everything gone to shit.

[acqq]

How do they ban it actually? In my West (!) European country (I don't know of any European country that doesn't do some censorship) they just serve court order to the providers, the providers remove the entries from the DNS but the banned sites are still reachable using the IP address. They you just need to fix your etc hosts file.

Try with https://192.30.252.128 and accept the certificate if it has A0:C4:A7:46:00:ED:A7:2D:C0:BE:CB:9A:8C:B6:07:CA:58:EE:74:5E SHA-1 fingerprint.

(The uploaders can be related to the companies selling VPN access to Russians.)

[guycalledfrank]

In Russia they seem to force all ISPs to ban specific IP addresses. Obviously, it blocks many stuff, and not just one page. I really HOPE that it'll be resolved soon, because a few months ago we had similar problems with wordpress and even youtube (!), but it was fixed in 1-2 days, because, you know, everyone watches youtube, and blocking half of it makes everyone mad. But github is not what everyone uses, it's just a thing for coders like me, so I'm also afraid, they wont give a shit, because only a "minority" of their clients complained. --- Can't load suggested IP as well

[hal9000xp]

I'm totally agree with you that they don't care about minority at all (by the way, in any field).

I think this issue with GitHub will be resolved soon.

But in general, this Internet Restriction Bill (Federal law of Russian Federation no. 139-FZ of 2012-07-28) is double purpose tool.

On the one hand it serves its first official purpose (i.e. by blocking illegal content). It often do it completely awkward and don't care about legitimate users (the issue with GitHub is the good example).

On the second hand it's very good and easy to use tool for internet censorship. For example, it's so easy to block sites with legitimate information which current regime don't like.

Just think about "sudden" blocking of GitHub or Wikipedia as a training for them (i.e. just to make sure that in case of political instability they can shutdown anything pretty quickly).

[acqq]

Or follow the money, who profits in this particular case? See my other comments here.

[vladtaltos]

I'm travelling frequently to both Russia and Turkey - to avoid having stupid spatial location based limitations I've been using privateinternetaccess.com for more than 6 months now. it's pretty cheap and has gateways all around the world - I recommend it without any hesitation... I especially like having access to streaming video for the shows I watch that is limited to country ip's like the daily show...

[acqq]

See tummybug's message here: ssh -D to setup a local socks proxy is far easier.

[acqq]

We're hackers, let's promote using our own servers and service providers, don't support the VPN sellers who can be behind this particular blockade, maybe even bribing the censors. See the comments here, ssh is enough.

[vladtaltos]

yes of course but that requires to have an always on computer to connect to...

[acqq]

I really suspect the sellers of VPN are involved. Managing to DOS the site that the professionals use, those that are able to use VPN too and are more probae to pay.

[kasthack]

>How do they ban it actually?

My ISP just changes DNS response. All blocked domains are resolved to local server that shows message like this: https://who.ec/iWN (Site is blocked. Legal reason: blah-blah-blah)

Some providers just block access to IPs. My friend's blog lost ~300 visits/day becasuse it used same cloudflare node as blocked site.

Rostelecom uses MitM & self-signed certificate for more accurate filtering.

[pantalaimon]

> I don't know of any European country that doesn't do some censorship

Germany doesn't, there where large protests when it was attempted in 2009 under the pretext of blocking child pornography.

Actually I'm only aware of Britain and Sweden censoring the web here in Europe, but enlighten me if I missed something.

[DanBC]

At least one company has been court ordered to block access to the Pirate Bay.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_...

> On 13 May 2010, the Hamburg District Court ordered an injunction against CB3Rob Ltd & Co KG (Cyberbunker) and its operator, Mr. Sven Olaf Kamphuis, restraining them from connecting The Pirate Bay site to the Internet.[24] The injunction application was brought by the Motion Picture Association's member companies.

Depending how you define censorship: can I sell a game that features Nazi symbols - such as the swastika - in Germany?

[darklajid]

That example (Nazi symbol) gets old.. [1]

Can I burn the American Flag or (in your case, if I'm correctly understanding that you're in London) the Union Jack in a public place?

What about nudity (no clue in the UK, but I'm still laughing hard about 'nipplegate' to this very day) on TV?

Every culture probably sets acceptable limits in what you can show/express/say or do (even the US free speech isn't protecting you from being sued for libel/hate speech or similar things, as far as I can tell). Yes, Swastikas/Nazi related symbols might be unpopular and even forbidden here. I refuse to consider that censorship, to be honest.

1: Wikipedia even seems to have an english page for this example - guess it's just so popular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

[DanBC]

There's no censorship laws about burning the Union flag in a public place.

> I refuse to consider that censorship, to be honest.

I did say it depends how you define censorship. Note that I didn't say this was bad!

[Turing_Machine]

"Can I burn the American Flag...in a public place?"

Yes.

"What about nudity"

What does nudity have to do with anything? The topic is political speech. Anyway, there's plenty of nudity on cable, on the net...

Note that if the nudity does have political significance, numerous U.S. courts have held that it's protected.

[waps]

Exactly. There is not a single European country without internet censorship, despite appearances.

References :

the Netherlands : http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.nu.nl/int...

Belgium : http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-regulation/belgium-expand-...

France : http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-regulation/france-wants-is...

United Kingdom : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

Germany, as you pointed out.

...

[kiiski]

Finland also has a secret blocklist maintained by the police. It is currently voluntary for ISPs to implement the blocks, but there has been some talk of making it mandatory "if necessary". The list is supposed to only contain foreign sites with child porn. There was a small, and pretty quickly forgotten, scandal in 2008 when they added to the list a Finnish site that was criticizing it (and published a copy of the list to show that it also contains other things besides child porn).

The Pirate Bay is also blocked here.

[kravietz]

Using the IP based URL won't work because GitHub correctly enforces the canonical address with a HTTP redirect. It will bring you back to the blocked IP.

I spent quite a lot of time in Russia each year and these bans seem to be lifted after a few weeks if they are as absurd as this one, and you can still bypass them easily with VPN.

[schrodinger]

Can you just add an entry to your hosts file?

[guard-of-terra]

Me exactly. Didn't think about moving, now it's the only thing I think of.

I actually gave Russia a big credit on patriotism and it wasted it all. It's done for me. The country where I grew up (for good or bad) no longer exists, they destroyed it.

[askoma]

oh man i feel the same.....

[andyjohnson0]

"And "replace your t-shirt with a patriotic one" ads on streets are just too fucking dumb to be true."

Are you referring to [1]? Very worrying: like a North Korea style personality cult. How prevalent is this?

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/07...

[guycalledfrank]

No, I didn't mean Putin T-shirt (I never saw that one before), but the same page has a photo of what I meant: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://im...

[DominikR]

Well what did you expect to happen?

Most Russians support Putin and especially his foreign policy and when Russia got sanctioned because of that policy many were personally offended.

So they made t-shirts that referr to these sanctions, that are in their view offending them.

It is an absolutely normal response for any society that is collectively sanctioned/attacked.