Fine if you decide that porn is bad, I don't agree, but that's something the Russians need to work out for themself. It's the blatant lying and use of double standards that annoys me.
Fine if you decide that porn is bad, I don't agree, but that's something the Russians need to work out for themself. It's the blatant lying and use of double standards that annoys me.
I'm not too familiar with the specifics of this case, but I can easily imagine this just being a case of nationalist protection. In that they want people to go to local Russian porn outlets that can be better controlled, tracked & monetized. Then again, it could also be something as simple as some Russian official being pissed off and on a personal vendetta mission.
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That said, if it weren't pornography, small rant about our judicial system:
Any judge in any city pop 50000 can issue a country-wide block for any site. Often these resolutions are too far reaching, sometimes they order to block root page (/) instead of specific page (/foo/bar), rendering whole sites unavailable. Sometimes they ban ip addresses of aws services, disrupting half the internet.
Another important thing about these hearings is that there is often no defendant. They might call in the site hoster, but hosters are never interested in defending their customers so they simply ignore the subpoena. Site owner would often discover their site was blocked after the fact.
Finally, in many cases judges don't even bother writing their own verdict. Instead they copy-paste whatever public attorney cooked up, including all the factual and orthographic errors, and sign it.
https://medium.com/@aalien/law-limits-8d733178e158 this is a very insightful post (alas, only available in Russian) from @aalien, founder of lurkmore.ru, which is arguably the most often banned site in Russia, about how this horrible system functions (or rather, malfunctions). I found this excerpt especially hilarious:
«Full list of Roskomnadzor-banned pages is available on our site. Unfortunately, that page is also banned by Roskomnadzor, because it contains "textual information about committing suicide". It's in the quoted Roskomnadzor letter, of course»