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Comment by DmitryOlshansky | Hacker News Reader

Not a single piece of interesting facts in the post. And Telegram still works as of right now.

As the proverb goes: “Undue strictness of Russian laws was always compensated by it being optional to follow them.”

Generally speaking, I consider the combination of overly strict rules and relaxed rule application one of the most dangerous manifestations of authority abuse, because it leaves to the single person in charge of applying the rules the decision to do it or not. So the criteria to prosecute people are not decided any more by the public political discussion, but by the individual decisions of some random guys in the police forces. This mechanism often masks responsibility and allows for ad personam treatments, which I consider strongly unfair.

Rules should be valid for all and applied uniformly.

I agree. I think this is called selective enforcement[1] or prosecutorial discretion.

I believe it turns the biases of individual enforcement officers into society-wide inequalities. E.g. white kid with marijuana gets a stern warning while black kid gets his freedom taken away. Instead, the enforcement officers should be obligated to charge both with crimes due to the rule of law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

The court order was issued a few hours ago, they will block it shortly.

I would question that. Rutracker is supposed to be blocked by order of Roskomnadzor, but many isps here still are able to reach it. This happened almost a year ago so it's not a matter of propagation, it's just poor or lack of enforcement.

Telegram is also exceptionally popular here, so I have trouble believing it will stick or do anything in the first place.

Well, it's blocked by all the ISPs I have in any place. Generally Telegram will be blocked, and which is more imprortant, they will likely remove it from the app stores in Russia.

Still unblocked for me, but got the VPN at the ready... Removal from the app stores would be much more effective, at least on iOS.

I doubt because every ISP must install a special hardware (Revizor) manufactured by Roskomnadzor, which constantly checks blocked resources inside ISP network. If you don't block all the resources you will get fined. And there is a huge fine if you will try to trick this system.

Blocking rules are not perfect. For example, DNS resolution is done by Roskomnadzor and the lists are not updated instantly (usually they are updated daily or several times a day). If you change your IP address faster than lists are updated, blocking effectively doesn't work.

Yeah, sure. _will_ is the keyword.

It could take years to trully cover all ISPs. Like it was with rutracker.

And then LinkedIn is blocked for a long time now but I get new job opportunities through it quite often. Sometimes w/o turning VPN on.

According to the BBC[1] it is being blocked now.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43752337

Iron curtain wasn't that optional. We have a potential.

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