It's both good and bad. On one hand, it's sad that there's no access. On the other hand, it increases the diversity of tools and services worldwide. Google, for example, is well known for buying startups just to kill them.
In Russia and China, they have their own search engines, social networks, eBay/Amazon alternatives, and so on. These companies have produced great free software like LLMs, databases, development tools, etc.
Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet is usually good news for us, the small people - even if that change is coming from the government.
A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders. If they stop providing shareholder value (due to mass boycotts or public scandals), they have to change.
If it's a Putin-style dictator who has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country, there's literally nothing you can do that doesn't involve physical violence to change things.
> A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders.
A rich billioneaire is a shareholder.
> If they stop providing shareholder value [...] they have to change.
But we (the small people) don't care about the shareholder value. Shareholder value is often contrary to what we (the small people) value, so expect change for the worse.
> due to mass boycotts or public scandals
Sorry, what?
> has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country
Well, capitalists (as a group) spent 100+ years doing the same, so ...
It's baffling for me living in Russia that modern western societies see everything wrong with dictatorship from a goverment but nothing or almost nothing wrong with dictatorship from big capital. E.g. you can't change your break pads unless you go to authorized repair (literal control over your private property and how you use it) and big platforms banning you from multiple public forums because you said a big no-no word (deplatforming and cross-platform restrictions are a thing)
You don’t have to look very hard to see an enormous number of people expressing discontent at the latter.
To speak to your examples, the right to repair, farmers vs John Deere, the exodus from X to Bluesky, the rise of alternative messaging platforms, the outright murder of CEOs on the street and the beatification of the primary suspect on social media…just to scratch the surface
These are all headlines straight from HN and the fact that you even know about them is the difference.
The fundamental difference is while we both lack any real power to change this, under an actual dictatorship people get jailed or worse for that expression.
Let’s touch base on this again when Dictatorship from big capital means Disney puts me in prison for dissent against the mouse and then offers me clemency if I go to the front lines in their next special military operation.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, developments like Deepseek are clearly marks of progress and practically a gift to the society, and it's a good thing. The Chinese are also creating and maintaining many valuable open source projects (although they might not be that popular in the West due to security concerns, which is a different lengthy topic). So everybody wins, right?
On the other hand... People in the West rarely get the taste of what happens if someone deeply immoral gets to the top. The closest we got is Trump who might be an arrogant egoistic asshole, but he's very far from deciding to kill thousands of people to fulfill his ambitions. Nevertheless, normal sensitive people feel abhorred when they hear or see how immigrants are treated and so on. Imagine this developed decade after decade, also using modern tech, into a cold machine an ordinary person is powerless against.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it but imagine your whole life, and often of your family, can be destroyed in an instant because you found yourself in a wrong place, you made a wrong comment, you expressed your opinion too openly. You were relaxed because maybe you did similar things in the past but you still lived a normal life; then at that particular moment it ended abruptly and there is no recourse. Nobody can save you and you know it's all finished. In the West there is nothing close to that.
That depends on what you mean by "operating". This very website, Hacker News, is not blocked in Russia - does that mean Y Combinator is "operating" there?
This is an interesting question I wish I knew. Because I play war thunder and it is free to play but once a year I pay about $50 for the annual premium membership because I enjoy the game and worth it to me. But ultimately it is supposedly a Russian game. I know they have offices in other parts of the world but I have really wondered if the money is going back to Russia or if all the developed have just left and get it elsewhere in a different county.
There's a big difference -- when EU/US bans Russians from using Roblox and other things and seeing other culture, (or someone bans Russians or Iranians by IP), it's rightful and thoughtful decision to protect democracy. When Russia does the same, it's dictatorial censorship.
Incidentally nobody in Russia can read that article because they already banned the BBC and 80 other EU media outlets. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Twitter. And Discord.
This is standard Russian censorship of western media and news.
Yes, we have to use censorship circumvention tools to make the internet usable. Especially when it's mobile data. About a year ago I got fed up enough that I bought an OpenWRT router and installed Zapret on it. Now, at least while at home, I can mostly forget that internet censorship is a thing.
> In the end it'll likely end with whitelists of allowed IP addresses
I already had this idea of tunneling traffic through the voice/video calls in the Max messenger app. No one has done it in practice, yet, but I see no reason why it should not be possible.
Обход блокировок, который ловит даже на парковке ;)
That does not seem like a good idea at all. Even if you are “not doing something stupid” the fact that you would be circumventing their app to bypass censorship they may deem you treasonous and a possible risk. Who knows what they could arrest you for.
Law enforcement in Russia works differently than in the US, especially in politically charged fields. An exapmel: in the US, one man was charged of breaking construction codes because he was doing chemical experiments in the basement of his single-family house, in a block zoned accordingly.
I understand this is extreme, but a good illustration. He was doing something on his own, and was charged. Such enforcement is extremely unlikely in Russia even in todays situation. For instance, a recent law explicitly banned _searching_ for extremists materials, e.g. Navalny's party website (they're labelled as extremists ex-court by the Interior or the Justice ministry, I don't remember). But there's been just 1 court case since then. You can search whatever you want as long as you're not public about it. As soon as you get enough publicity, you do get on the radar.
Same kinds of examples: in the 1950's USSR some musicians were shadow-banned (there was no legal ban on them), and not published. A man made a lathe and carved disks with their music on used x-ray films. He was arrested when he got enough publicity and sold good deal of copies. He was charged not for copying them -- there was no ban on this -- but for illicit enterpreneurship, or speculation as it was called back then. Had he been doing this alone, he'd probably have not got under arrest.
I actually, think it's roughly the same as dealing with Torrent and trackers in the Western world nowadays.
Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal. They did make it recently such that writing about VPNs is grounds for blocking wherever you've written about it.
> Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal
Seeking extremist materials is illegal as of September. If that is not "bypassing censorship" then what is?
By the way. Extremist materials is a big list of thousands of things that no one can always know. What it means for a normal person? If you use VPN you can be finding extremist materials, if you don't = then you don't (because they are all helpfully blocked)
I don't think they would care as long as you don't do something stupid that would show up on their dashboards. But if you're paranoid, you can use phone numbers from, for example, Armenia or Kazakhstan. There are 8 countries besides Russia whose numbers they allow.
There are plenty of ways to circumvent whitelists, such as domain fronting. Some are already battle-tested in China and we'd be happy to share them with the rest of the world.
"everybody who is not a complete idiot" not true. looks like you're in your tech bubble and you think everybody else who is a regular person is an idiot.
using VPN for circumventing censorship is illegal in Russia. fine is worse if if you promote it. for people who can't afford to spend a few thousands it's enough.
some people don't care about fines, but new ISP equipment detects and ban VPNs quickly so people always need to keep trying new servers. so people get used to not using VPN more and more because it's annoying and unstable.
Of course, it is true. If you are not a complete idiot, you won't be content with being blocked from the information you seek, so you'd find someone technical to help you out. I personally give access to my vpn server to ~100 users for free, and so far the access is stable enough. I have little doubts that in the future it'll be more difficult, but we'll see about that when we get there.
Calling people "complete idiots" because they follow the law, because they don't have $$$ to spend on fines, because they are unlucky to be doing a job society actually needs like a teacher or cleaner or bus driver instead of vibe coding ai saas, will not help you convince people about the change you want to see
A normal person follows the law. It's bad when that law is forced by dictator but you should get off your high horse sometimes. If you think of regular public as complete idiots you should not be surprised when they vote for putin. Similar thing happened in america where democrats alienated as many people as possible by looking down on them like they're stupid
And why it is logically not true: an idiot is by definition a person with abnormality. If you are saying 90% of people are abnormal... idk what to tell you
> I personally give access to my vpn server to ~100 users for free, and so far the access is stable enough
yeah I often talk to a friend who does the same. depending on your region it won't be too stable for long.
> you won't be content with being blocked from the information you seek
You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know it is, you don't seek it. That's why censorship works
You aren't from Russia, aren't you? Yes, anyone in Russia who still doesn't have VPN access IS a complete idiot. This is the reality on the ground that I observe every day. Nannies in kindergartens have them, teachers at school have them, salespersons in perfume store have them, all students have them, schoolchildren have them.
And it has nothing to do with the law — currently, using vpn isn't breaking any laws.
Lol, the dictator's approval rating is so high that he bans, forces to exile or kills any opposing candidate, never risking elections vs anyone not fully controlled by him.
Every time someone like Bukele flexes that his approval rating is higher than Putin's, I laugh -- the guy clearly doesn't understand that this isn't the flex he thinks it is.
Putin's approval rating is genuinely that high, around 80%. Nobody cares about opposing candidates, because Russia has had one or two free elections in its entire history. Far more important is that Putin has flooded the lower classes with money. People who were used to surviving on a few hundred dollars a month are now receiving tens of thousands in sign-up bonuses alone, plus military wages and compensations. Absolutely life-changing money for them. It is comparable to flooding a troubled area like West Virginia with military sign-up bonuses ranging from hundreds of thousands to a million per enlistment, with additional money flowing into communities from injury and death compensations.
you are offtopic, but I will entertain your comment because I'm so confused/amused by what you say and what means "idiot" in your world.
- are you saying people forced to sign up for the war by force or rapists who do it to get out of jail in Russia are idiots?
- are you saying being pro putin/pro war is like being an idiot in Russia?
- are you saying russians in tech are saints and all like one are "not idiots" against the war? maybe you need a reminder about unit 26165 and APT28
- are you saying "everyone in russia/china/israel/iran/north korea/republican party is an idiot"? then allow me to congratulate you on such nuanced understanding of the world, enough said!
I'm from Russia (currently in Moscow), and I can read your comment just fine without VPN. BBC won't open... which is fine, as I jump straight to comments as many do here :))) .
Also do not miss twitter and facebook. Youtube is working (so far) with no ads.
Also stuff like WaPo is perfectly acessible. Sometimes I skim through it (also mostly comments), then check ZeroHedge to get the opposite view.
So a lot of info is acessible. Quite a few of resources are blocked on the other side though.
I surely can use VPN but prefer not to unless that required for more intellectual activity then reading news.
Can you elaborate here? ZeroHedge isn't an opposing viewpoint nor opinion, it's mostly made-up nonsense. Even calling it pseudoscience would be generous.
Yeah, I see it as a radical anti-establisment resource. I would not call it a complete nonsence though, for me it's a place where you can "get" thinking of folks who are opposing "the System". So there is some value.
I'm not political or activist of any kind. However sometimes it makes sense to get understanding how other people think, so sometimes I read comments here and there.
HN has its own bias as well. Usually the quality of discussion here is quite high though.
Right now, if you wish fully non-censored media, you need to live in a third world nation! All the high-and-mighty, old Europe powers are busy censoring a lot of stuff.
An example, not current, is that the US Government censored all access to wikileaks in 2010 - enforced for all Federal workers, military personal, etc.
You can certainly argue that this was ineffective censorship that could be evaded, but it was, in fact, censorship by the US Government.
It's the same across the world, countries that routinely censor material still have their citizens evading censorship.
Also:
Analysts from Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 57th in the world out of 180 countries in their 2025 Press Freedom Index and they gave the country a "problematic" designation.
Certain forms of speech, such as obscenity and defamation, are restricted in communications media by the government or by the industry on its own.
My bad - I thought Tiktok (and other Bytedance apps) were banned in the US but apparently not since President Trump reversed the US Supreme Court decision. Huh, so it is mainly the European powers who are the culprits. Changed my claim.
All good, it can be a ...chore to keep track of what decisions and reversals the current administration is making.
To support your original claim - when I was in the military, we were explicitly forbidden to look at anything Snowden leaked as it was still classified and would be a violation of our clearances as we did not have either the appropriate level (e.g., TS-SCI) or need to know. Kind of understandable, but still.
I was working at a place in the UK where I only had BPSS but everybody else in the office had top clearance as they worked on military stuff, this was when The Guardian were doing the Snowden stuff.
It was easily the best way of clearing the office for some peace - mention the front page of the newspaper and everybody would lock their laptops, pick up their papers and walk.
From what I can gather the fact you know something you shouldn't, even though it's in the national news, it causes problems when renewing your clearances, so...
It's not banned. I am within EU and can normally access RT website. I can also access yandex, etc. Without VPN or proxies. SO, how is this "standard European censorship"? Don't believe Facebook and Twitter propaganda bots.
Yes, it is officially banned (along with Sputnik and other Russian media). It is sad that you don't know this as an EU citizen and think that formal directives of your union are Facebook and Twitter propaganda bots
"On 2 March 2022, the Council of the European Union adopted a measure suspending the broadcasting activities of RT (and another Russian outlet Sputnik) in the EU"
Yeah, I know about that. But it's not been implemented, so RT is in practice accessible. As are other Russian websites. I don't know what is sad about it, I'm just saying what is in real life, not what is on paper.
It implemented on a DNS level. Easily circumvented by using a third party dns server (like Google or Cloudflare). Nonetheless this is political censorship plain and simple. EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.
Of course it's political, what else could it be? If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political? In other words, is there any censoring of news media (foreign or domestic) you would consider apolitical?
> EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.
I don't see any crying about censorship. It's a made up argument. Personally, I couldn't care less about censoring in Russia or any other country that I'm not living in.
> If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political?
Would like to point out that Russian bans came in response to the EU ban.
"The EU first banned Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik on March 1, 2022, as part of sanctions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia then restricted access to Western outlets, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, on March 4, 2022, in response. A more recent cycle occurred in 2024, with the EU banning Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta on May 17 (effective June 25), followed by Russia's ban on 81 EU media outlets, including Politico and AFP, on June 25. In both cases, Russia's actions came after the EU's."
Personally, I think this is stupid but domestic politics sadly always trump international common-sense.
In real life, European hypocrisy is off the charts.
BBC got caught manipulating videos featuring Trump. 12000 people were detained in the UK for thought crimes. In one year. One little old lady was arrested for praying silently.
France went after Durov.
Russia media IS banned, hiding behind ISP incompetence doesn't count.
Come on. Wake up. We who have lived under actual socialist dictators can see what's happening.
I see you have an axe to grind with EU. That's fine, but I'll say that I also lived in socialism, so I do have experience and perspective of what it was like. And precisely because of that, these EU bans don't worry me at all. I know the difference as opposed to many who think they know the difference.
We are sick of European hypocrisy; lecturing the "third world" on democracy, freedom of the press, human rights, climate change blah blah blah instead of introspecting on the mess within.
Yeah, the EU (and also the UK earlier) were always lecturing to the third world on human rights and tolerance and media freedom/integrity, blah-blah not so long ago. So many pompous speeches made. Now, it is eye-rolling to see them backtrack hard on everything they stood for.
> This is standard European censorship of Russian media and news.
There is not a single media outlet left in Russia anymore. The media crackdown is complete. They are all government propaganda now, repeating the same narratives dictated by the Kremlin and free only to choose the wording. They deserve to be removed from the market the same way a box of cereal is pulled when ingredients do not match the printing on the box.
Roblox has been banned in China since 2021. Perhaps it's something to do with nationalist governments not liking global corporate circumvention of their culture/power.
Or maybe Roblox is causing harm to children and nationalist governments are the fastest to both recognise and respond to the issue.
We can speculate all day, but we should try to analyse these sorts of things from a learning perspective. What can we learn from Russia, China, etc? How are they better?
I think you will mostly get "the west is the best" over here. And "look at those evil authoritarians over there"....Enjoy your "freedom" to participate in the culture wars digital serf...while the standard of living, personal autonomy, wealth, & health may be on the decline...of yours & your loved ones. At least we have many of each other to blame...while a few profit.
Well, the last couple sentences is me paraphrasing. But one thing that many in the West boast about is the ability to criticize the systems to improve said systems. Let's see if actions match the rhetoric.
They don’t need to hide behind a "think of the children" excuse to justify invading people’s privacy and rights. They already do that freely. But to be fair, they do actually think about the kids some times. Limiting screen time, banning certain games, and restricting social media are based policies for developing brains IMO.
In 20 years we'll look at a lot of things that are normalized today like we look at cigarettes now, in disbelief at how unhealthy it was.
As if you have a say other than "that guy" or "that other guy".
The wealthy already fund politicians' careers, they fund judges, they fund campaigns. The wealthy already run the country. They fund both parties as a tactic. The parties are just "good cop/bad cop".
This is democracy, it doesn't mean it's perfect. It's just a tool to keep a lot of people in line. It's the HOW that matters, which is what life finally is about.
Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme, which finally leads always to another crazy guy.
In between there is an ocean.
...and putting everything in the same pot is mostly wrong, but lately it's cool to be anti-everything.
It's both good and bad. On one hand, it's sad that there's no access. On the other hand, it increases the diversity of tools and services worldwide. Google, for example, is well known for buying startups just to kill them.
In Russia and China, they have their own search engines, social networks, eBay/Amazon alternatives, and so on. These companies have produced great free software like LLMs, databases, development tools, etc.
Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet is usually good news for us, the small people - even if that change is coming from the government.
> Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet
But the state controls the flow of information in a dictatorship. So to me this seems more a lose-lose scenario than a lose-win or win-win.
You're simplifying too much.
So to you its the state VS who? The rich billionaires + us?
The rich billionaires are the state. We're the ones with no real representation.
The fundamental divide is workers vs capitalists, not simply people vs government.
A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders. If they stop providing shareholder value (due to mass boycotts or public scandals), they have to change.
If it's a Putin-style dictator who has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country, there's literally nothing you can do that doesn't involve physical violence to change things.
> A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders.
A rich billioneaire is a shareholder.
> If they stop providing shareholder value [...] they have to change.
But we (the small people) don't care about the shareholder value. Shareholder value is often contrary to what we (the small people) value, so expect change for the worse.
> due to mass boycotts or public scandals
Sorry, what?
> has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country
Well, capitalists (as a group) spent 100+ years doing the same, so ...
It's baffling for me living in Russia that modern western societies see everything wrong with dictatorship from a goverment but nothing or almost nothing wrong with dictatorship from big capital. E.g. you can't change your break pads unless you go to authorized repair (literal control over your private property and how you use it) and big platforms banning you from multiple public forums because you said a big no-no word (deplatforming and cross-platform restrictions are a thing)
You don’t have to look very hard to see an enormous number of people expressing discontent at the latter.
To speak to your examples, the right to repair, farmers vs John Deere, the exodus from X to Bluesky, the rise of alternative messaging platforms, the outright murder of CEOs on the street and the beatification of the primary suspect on social media…just to scratch the surface
These are all headlines straight from HN and the fact that you even know about them is the difference.
The fundamental difference is while we both lack any real power to change this, under an actual dictatorship people get jailed or worse for that expression.
Let’s touch base on this again when Dictatorship from big capital means Disney puts me in prison for dissent against the mouse and then offers me clemency if I go to the front lines in their next special military operation.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, developments like Deepseek are clearly marks of progress and practically a gift to the society, and it's a good thing. The Chinese are also creating and maintaining many valuable open source projects (although they might not be that popular in the West due to security concerns, which is a different lengthy topic). So everybody wins, right?
On the other hand... People in the West rarely get the taste of what happens if someone deeply immoral gets to the top. The closest we got is Trump who might be an arrogant egoistic asshole, but he's very far from deciding to kill thousands of people to fulfill his ambitions. Nevertheless, normal sensitive people feel abhorred when they hear or see how immigrants are treated and so on. Imagine this developed decade after decade, also using modern tech, into a cold machine an ordinary person is powerless against.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it but imagine your whole life, and often of your family, can be destroyed in an instant because you found yourself in a wrong place, you made a wrong comment, you expressed your opinion too openly. You were relaxed because maybe you did similar things in the past but you still lived a normal life; then at that particular moment it ended abruptly and there is no recourse. Nobody can save you and you know it's all finished. In the West there is nothing close to that.
I don’t get it. Roblox is an American company. Wouldn’t the pretty broad sanctions prevent them from operating there already?
That depends on what you mean by "operating". This very website, Hacker News, is not blocked in Russia - does that mean Y Combinator is "operating" there?
Fun fact, Hacker News is blocked in China
I’m curious how you know this? Did you try to get to this site from mainland and it was blocked?
Seems to work fine from a Chinese VPN IP
If they get money from users in that particular country then yes.
Some stuff on Roblox is free, perhaps they were only enjoined from accepting payments?
This is an interesting question I wish I knew. Because I play war thunder and it is free to play but once a year I pay about $50 for the annual premium membership because I enjoy the game and worth it to me. But ultimately it is supposedly a Russian game. I know they have offices in other parts of the world but I have really wondered if the money is going back to Russia or if all the developed have just left and get it elsewhere in a different county.
Wikipedia says it's moved to Hungary in 2015.
There's a big difference -- when EU/US bans Russians from using Roblox and other things and seeing other culture, (or someone bans Russians or Iranians by IP), it's rightful and thoughtful decision to protect democracy. When Russia does the same, it's dictatorial censorship.
Incidentally nobody in Russia can read that article because they already banned the BBC and 80 other EU media outlets. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Twitter. And Discord.
This is standard Russian censorship of western media and news.
Yes, we have to use censorship circumvention tools to make the internet usable. Especially when it's mobile data. About a year ago I got fed up enough that I bought an OpenWRT router and installed Zapret on it. Now, at least while at home, I can mostly forget that internet censorship is a thing.
Zapret isn't good enough, because a lot of random websites geoblock RU via Cloudflare. you'd be better off with a VPN running on a cheap VPS.
Of course I also have a VPN that I selectively route traffic through, in just these kinds of situations.
VPNs on cheap VPSes are blocked quite a lot too.
Everybody in Russia who is not a complete idiot already has a VPN that allows to circumvent censorship (for now).
Source: I'm in Russia now.
In the end it'll likely end with whitelists of allowed IP addresses, and that will indeed insure that nobody would be able to access banned resources.
> In the end it'll likely end with whitelists of allowed IP addresses
I already had this idea of tunneling traffic through the voice/video calls in the Max messenger app. No one has done it in practice, yet, but I see no reason why it should not be possible.
Обход блокировок, который ловит даже на парковке ;)
That does not seem like a good idea at all. Even if you are “not doing something stupid” the fact that you would be circumventing their app to bypass censorship they may deem you treasonous and a possible risk. Who knows what they could arrest you for.
Law enforcement in Russia works differently than in the US, especially in politically charged fields. An exapmel: in the US, one man was charged of breaking construction codes because he was doing chemical experiments in the basement of his single-family house, in a block zoned accordingly.
I understand this is extreme, but a good illustration. He was doing something on his own, and was charged. Such enforcement is extremely unlikely in Russia even in todays situation. For instance, a recent law explicitly banned _searching_ for extremists materials, e.g. Navalny's party website (they're labelled as extremists ex-court by the Interior or the Justice ministry, I don't remember). But there's been just 1 court case since then. You can search whatever you want as long as you're not public about it. As soon as you get enough publicity, you do get on the radar.
Same kinds of examples: in the 1950's USSR some musicians were shadow-banned (there was no legal ban on them), and not published. A man made a lathe and carved disks with their music on used x-ray films. He was arrested when he got enough publicity and sold good deal of copies. He was charged not for copying them -- there was no ban on this -- but for illicit enterpreneurship, or speculation as it was called back then. Had he been doing this alone, he'd probably have not got under arrest.
I actually, think it's roughly the same as dealing with Torrent and trackers in the Western world nowadays.
Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal. They did make it recently such that writing about VPNs is grounds for blocking wherever you've written about it.
https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2024-11-22_v_rossii_zapretili_...
> Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal
Seeking extremist materials is illegal as of September. If that is not "bypassing censorship" then what is?
By the way. Extremist materials is a big list of thousands of things that no one can always know. What it means for a normal person? If you use VPN you can be finding extremist materials, if you don't = then you don't (because they are all helpfully blocked)
After 3 months there is one guy with a case for looking up Azov for example https://meduza.io/amp/cards/mvd-vpervye-popytalos-oshtrafova...
great idea. use the app tied to your passport and gosuslugi to make sure they know who is the genius when they detect it.
edit: didn't know they allow anything except belarus, cool... as long as you can anonymously register that number
I don't think they would care as long as you don't do something stupid that would show up on their dashboards. But if you're paranoid, you can use phone numbers from, for example, Armenia or Kazakhstan. There are 8 countries besides Russia whose numbers they allow.
There are plenty of ways to circumvent whitelists, such as domain fronting. Some are already battle-tested in China and we'd be happy to share them with the rest of the world.
"everybody who is not a complete idiot" not true. looks like you're in your tech bubble and you think everybody else who is a regular person is an idiot.
using VPN for circumventing censorship is illegal in Russia. fine is worse if if you promote it. for people who can't afford to spend a few thousands it's enough.
some people don't care about fines, but new ISP equipment detects and ban VPNs quickly so people always need to keep trying new servers. so people get used to not using VPN more and more because it's annoying and unstable.
Of course, it is true. If you are not a complete idiot, you won't be content with being blocked from the information you seek, so you'd find someone technical to help you out. I personally give access to my vpn server to ~100 users for free, and so far the access is stable enough. I have little doubts that in the future it'll be more difficult, but we'll see about that when we get there.
Calling people "complete idiots" because they follow the law, because they don't have $$$ to spend on fines, because they are unlucky to be doing a job society actually needs like a teacher or cleaner or bus driver instead of vibe coding ai saas, will not help you convince people about the change you want to see
A normal person follows the law. It's bad when that law is forced by dictator but you should get off your high horse sometimes. If you think of regular public as complete idiots you should not be surprised when they vote for putin. Similar thing happened in america where democrats alienated as many people as possible by looking down on them like they're stupid
And why it is logically not true: an idiot is by definition a person with abnormality. If you are saying 90% of people are abnormal... idk what to tell you
> I personally give access to my vpn server to ~100 users for free, and so far the access is stable enough
yeah I often talk to a friend who does the same. depending on your region it won't be too stable for long.
> you won't be content with being blocked from the information you seek
You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know it is, you don't seek it. That's why censorship works
You aren't from Russia, aren't you? Yes, anyone in Russia who still doesn't have VPN access IS a complete idiot. This is the reality on the ground that I observe every day. Nannies in kindergartens have them, teachers at school have them, salespersons in perfume store have them, all students have them, schoolchildren have them.
And it has nothing to do with the law — currently, using vpn isn't breaking any laws.
Where is that, Moscow? I guess you aren't from Russia)
> everybody else who is a regular person is an idiot.
Looking at your dictator's approval levels and the number of people willingly signing up to die while killing innocents, that sounds correct.
You all need help breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
Lol, the dictator's approval rating is so high that he bans, forces to exile or kills any opposing candidate, never risking elections vs anyone not fully controlled by him.
Every time someone like Bukele flexes that his approval rating is higher than Putin's, I laugh -- the guy clearly doesn't understand that this isn't the flex he thinks it is.
I used to be rosy eyed like you for a while
I think if you talked to more fellow russians you would be surprised how many support him unironically)
by my estimate more than 50% (of people who have an opinion)
control of information is a magical thing
Putin's approval rating is genuinely that high, around 80%. Nobody cares about opposing candidates, because Russia has had one or two free elections in its entire history. Far more important is that Putin has flooded the lower classes with money. People who were used to surviving on a few hundred dollars a month are now receiving tens of thousands in sign-up bonuses alone, plus military wages and compensations. Absolutely life-changing money for them. It is comparable to flooding a troubled area like West Virginia with military sign-up bonuses ranging from hundreds of thousands to a million per enlistment, with additional money flowing into communities from injury and death compensations.
you are offtopic, but I will entertain your comment because I'm so confused/amused by what you say and what means "idiot" in your world.
- are you saying people forced to sign up for the war by force or rapists who do it to get out of jail in Russia are idiots?
- are you saying being pro putin/pro war is like being an idiot in Russia?
- are you saying russians in tech are saints and all like one are "not idiots" against the war? maybe you need a reminder about unit 26165 and APT28
- are you saying "everyone in russia/china/israel/iran/north korea/republican party is an idiot"? then allow me to congratulate you on such nuanced understanding of the world, enough said!
I'm from Russia (currently in Moscow), and I can read your comment just fine without VPN. BBC won't open... which is fine, as I jump straight to comments as many do here :))) .
Also do not miss twitter and facebook. Youtube is working (so far) with no ads.
Also stuff like WaPo is perfectly acessible. Sometimes I skim through it (also mostly comments), then check ZeroHedge to get the opposite view.
So a lot of info is acessible. Quite a few of resources are blocked on the other side though.
I surely can use VPN but prefer not to unless that required for more intellectual activity then reading news.
> check ZeroHedge to get the opposite view
Can you elaborate here? ZeroHedge isn't an opposing viewpoint nor opinion, it's mostly made-up nonsense. Even calling it pseudoscience would be generous.
Yeah, I see it as a radical anti-establisment resource. I would not call it a complete nonsence though, for me it's a place where you can "get" thinking of folks who are opposing "the System". So there is some value.
I'm not political or activist of any kind. However sometimes it makes sense to get understanding how other people think, so sometimes I read comments here and there.
HN has its own bias as well. Usually the quality of discussion here is quite high though.
> Yeah, I see it as a radical anti-establisment resource.
Only if the 'establishment' involved is, well, reality.
> I would not call it a complete nonsence though, for me it's a place where you can "get" thinking of folks who are opposing "the System".
No, it's where you can get thinking from crazy people. Actual dissidents are elsewhere.
FYI: ZeroHedge is a project of two pro-Kremlin Bulgarians, a father and son:
https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-tr...
> Can you elaborate here? ZeroHedge isn't an opposing viewpoint nor opinion
People's worldviews define their opinions, no matter how bizarre or fantastical a worldview may be.
Right now, if you wish fully non-censored media, you need to live in a third world nation! All the high-and-mighty, old Europe powers are busy censoring a lot of stuff.
This is news to me! Could you share an example of some censored media in the US that's available elsewhere?
An example, not current, is that the US Government censored all access to wikileaks in 2010 - enforced for all Federal workers, military personal, etc.
You can certainly argue that this was ineffective censorship that could be evaded, but it was, in fact, censorship by the US Government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
It's the same across the world, countries that routinely censor material still have their citizens evading censorship.
Also:
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...~ https://rsf.org/en/index?year=2024
My bad - I thought Tiktok (and other Bytedance apps) were banned in the US but apparently not since President Trump reversed the US Supreme Court decision. Huh, so it is mainly the European powers who are the culprits. Changed my claim.
All good, it can be a ...chore to keep track of what decisions and reversals the current administration is making.
To support your original claim - when I was in the military, we were explicitly forbidden to look at anything Snowden leaked as it was still classified and would be a violation of our clearances as we did not have either the appropriate level (e.g., TS-SCI) or need to know. Kind of understandable, but still.
I was working at a place in the UK where I only had BPSS but everybody else in the office had top clearance as they worked on military stuff, this was when The Guardian were doing the Snowden stuff.
It was easily the best way of clearing the office for some peace - mention the front page of the newspaper and everybody would lock their laptops, pick up their papers and walk.
From what I can gather the fact you know something you shouldn't, even though it's in the national news, it causes problems when renewing your clearances, so...
Russia Today et al are banned in the EU.
This is standard European censorship of Russian media and news.
It's not banned. I am within EU and can normally access RT website. I can also access yandex, etc. Without VPN or proxies. SO, how is this "standard European censorship"? Don't believe Facebook and Twitter propaganda bots.
Yes, it is officially banned (along with Sputnik and other Russian media). It is sad that you don't know this as an EU citizen and think that formal directives of your union are Facebook and Twitter propaganda bots
"On 2 March 2022, the Council of the European Union adopted a measure suspending the broadcasting activities of RT (and another Russian outlet Sputnik) in the EU"
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
"Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine: Council bans broadcasting activities in the European Union of four more Russia-associated media outlets"
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024...
Yeah, I know about that. But it's not been implemented, so RT is in practice accessible. As are other Russian websites. I don't know what is sad about it, I'm just saying what is in real life, not what is on paper.
It implemented on a DNS level. Easily circumvented by using a third party dns server (like Google or Cloudflare). Nonetheless this is political censorship plain and simple. EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.
Of course it's political, what else could it be? If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political? In other words, is there any censoring of news media (foreign or domestic) you would consider apolitical?
> EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.
I don't see any crying about censorship. It's a made up argument. Personally, I couldn't care less about censoring in Russia or any other country that I'm not living in.
> If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political?
Would like to point out that Russian bans came in response to the EU ban.
"The EU first banned Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik on March 1, 2022, as part of sanctions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia then restricted access to Western outlets, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, on March 4, 2022, in response. A more recent cycle occurred in 2024, with the EU banning Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta on May 17 (effective June 25), followed by Russia's ban on 81 EU media outlets, including Politico and AFP, on June 25. In both cases, Russia's actions came after the EU's."
Personally, I think this is stupid but domestic politics sadly always trump international common-sense.
In real life, European hypocrisy is off the charts.
BBC got caught manipulating videos featuring Trump. 12000 people were detained in the UK for thought crimes. In one year. One little old lady was arrested for praying silently.
France went after Durov.
Russia media IS banned, hiding behind ISP incompetence doesn't count.
Come on. Wake up. We who have lived under actual socialist dictators can see what's happening.
I see you have an axe to grind with EU. That's fine, but I'll say that I also lived in socialism, so I do have experience and perspective of what it was like. And precisely because of that, these EU bans don't worry me at all. I know the difference as opposed to many who think they know the difference.
We are sick of European hypocrisy; lecturing the "third world" on democracy, freedom of the press, human rights, climate change blah blah blah instead of introspecting on the mess within.
[0] https://www.outlookindia.com/national/explained-what-jaishan...
Yeah, the EU (and also the UK earlier) were always lecturing to the third world on human rights and tolerance and media freedom/integrity, blah-blah not so long ago. So many pompous speeches made. Now, it is eye-rolling to see them backtrack hard on everything they stood for.
I live in a country that is in the process of banning TikTok.
I live in a country which banned TikTok. Nothing of value was lost.
[dead]
Yeah, that’s weird. Also many local news sites around the world are effectively banned in EU because of lack of GDPR compliance. Messed up.
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day"
The unsafe and extremist content is coming from INSIDE the Kremlin.
Roblox has been banned in China since 2021. Perhaps it's something to do with nationalist governments not liking global corporate circumvention of their culture/power.
Or maybe Roblox is causing harm to children and nationalist governments are the fastest to both recognise and respond to the issue.
We can speculate all day, but we should try to analyse these sorts of things from a learning perspective. What can we learn from Russia, China, etc? How are they better?
Not banning a video game because it has some LGBT stuff in it, perhaps ?
I think you will mostly get "the west is the best" over here. And "look at those evil authoritarians over there"....Enjoy your "freedom" to participate in the culture wars digital serf...while the standard of living, personal autonomy, wealth, & health may be on the decline...of yours & your loved ones. At least we have many of each other to blame...while a few profit.
Well, the last couple sentences is me paraphrasing. But one thing that many in the West boast about is the ability to criticize the systems to improve said systems. Let's see if actions match the rhetoric.
They don’t need to hide behind a "think of the children" excuse to justify invading people’s privacy and rights. They already do that freely. But to be fair, they do actually think about the kids some times. Limiting screen time, banning certain games, and restricting social media are based policies for developing brains IMO.
In 20 years we'll look at a lot of things that are normalized today like we look at cigarettes now, in disbelief at how unhealthy it was.
good
Yeah, Roblox sucks. They might be doing it for the wrong reasons, but it's a good outcome.
Censorship in a dictatorship.
Now if only democracies wouldn't censor anything either ...
See, there is no such thing as a 'democracy'. There's only autocratic systems that pretend better, and those who pretend worse.
The luxury of the West in 1 sentence.
Have fun telling that to yourself when a random idiot that 30% of people voted for has power of life and death over you and your family.
As if you have a say other than "that guy" or "that other guy".
The wealthy already fund politicians' careers, they fund judges, they fund campaigns. The wealthy already run the country. They fund both parties as a tactic. The parties are just "good cop/bad cop".
This is democracy, it doesn't mean it's perfect. It's just a tool to keep a lot of people in line. It's the HOW that matters, which is what life finally is about.
Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme, which finally leads always to another crazy guy.
In between there is an ocean.
...and putting everything in the same pot is mostly wrong, but lately it's cool to be anti-everything.
> Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme
no, the other extreme of "crazy authoritarian" is "liberal democracy"
The other extreme of "no government at all" is "everything is run by the government"
Fair enough, technically you are right.