Wikipedia is blacklisted in Russia | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia is blacklisted in Russia

techcrunch.com

62 pointsmarinintim74 comments

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.

[1] http://m.lenta.ru/news/2015/08/24/wiki/ (sorry in Russian)

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.

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.

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. :-(

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.

@guard-of-terra please take your "self-hating Russian" schtick elsewhere. your comments don't belong on hacker news.

You're being downvoted because you've crossed inappropriately into personal attacks. Please don't do that here.

On HN, when someone is wrong, politely show how they are wrong. If you feel too provoked to be able to do that, it's best to wait until you can.

Your many comments in this thread are provocative to the point of trolling and then some. Please stop.

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?

People on this site certainly would not be that upset, that is for sure.

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".

Except all they have to do is block a single page from being viewed by people accessing the site with a certain ip range in order to comply.

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.

I'm sure there are other examples!

That's very clear. It sounds like Wikipedia is following one of the loosest sets of rules available.

Approx. 30% of Russian internet providers will block Wikipedia.org entirely, because Wikipedia.org use HTTPS (and Deep Package Inspection is too damn costly).

Runet, as usual, is full of tragedy jokes: [lang=ru] https://tjournal.ru/p/rkn-wikipedia-block-bloggers

Deep Packet Inspection won't help you versus HTTPS (unless you're CIA and have crypto backdoors).

Or the private keys to a tonne of Certs from the cert authorities.

The massive elephant in the room is the cert authorities..

Not for long, the Wikimedia Foundation intends to implement HPKP:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92002

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.

Well, CINNIC and the French CA both did this before

Resulting in a lot of shouting. :-)

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!

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 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?

Wikipedia is non-profit, chance it's not going to cave.

Buzzfeed has Wikimedia Foundation's full statement (in the end of the article):

http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/russia-says-its-banning-wi...

Is there a list of the removals/alterations requested by the US government (and granted as indicated in the official statement)?

The statement says "U.S. law," it says nothing about requests by the U.S. government. Copyright, libel, etc.

It has been removed now: https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i/commit/482f8014b15cb0ef1b... (3 hours ago)

>-ru.wikipedia.org;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%E0%F0%E0%F1;

So it was in the register for 8 hours.

FYI, Wikipedia for Chinese languages has been inaccessible for months in China.

It looks like the Russian government find HN notable enough to unleash it's army of little internet commentators here.

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

>it still won't justify censorship and blocking

do you deny countries the legal right to set their own limitations on free speech?

That is the prevailing attitude here, that there should not be any limitations.

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.

Yes. Yes I Do.

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.

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.

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.

>>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.

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