eng.mil.ru is returning HTTP 418 | Hacker News Reader

eng.mil.ru is returning HTTP 418

eng.mil.ru

117 pointsrobertlagrant48 comments

The http-status is 418 since 2022-02-24 10:07:41 UTC

  $ waybackpy --url https://eng.mil.ru/ --cdx --limit 10 --from 20220223053825 --cdx-print statuscode --cdx-print timestamp --cdx-print archiveurl

  20220223053825 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220223053825/http://www.eng.mil.ru/
  20220223114449 200 https://web.archive.org/web/20220223114449/https://eng.mil.ru/
  20220223120250 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220223120250/http://eng.mil.ru/
  20220224083710 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220224083710/http://www.eng.mil.ru/
  20220224100741 418 https://web.archive.org/web/20220224100741/https://eng.mil.ru/
  20220224211908 418 https://web.archive.org/web/20220224211908/https://www.eng.mil.ru/
  20220225023226 500 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225023226/https://eng.mil.ru/
  20220225042322 418 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225042322/https://www.eng.mil.ru/
  20220225110000 301 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225110000/http://www.eng.mil.ru/
  20220225110001 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220225110001/http://eng.mil.ru/
  20220225110001 418 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225110001/https://eng.mil.ru/
  20220225122228 301 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225122228/http://eng.mil.ru/
  20220225122228 418 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225122228/https://eng.mil.ru/
  20220225141350 500 https://web.archive.org/web/20220225141350/https://eng.mil.ru/

This is not new, 70 days ago "Russian MoD website blocked for non-Russian IPs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29594249

Obviously they didn't want to risk breaching the GDPR/CCPA.

The thing about this comment is that it gets more and more ironic the longer you think about it. Good one.

Mind to elaborate on the significance of a military site being a teapot?

Edit: ok, ok, definitely humongous and as such significant. Didn’t ment to be overly critical. Was more interested in the sites significance.

Link to version before the upgrade: https://web.archive.org/web/20220223114449/https://eng.mil.r...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418

>The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503. This error is a reference to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol defined in April Fools' jokes in 1998 and 2014.

EDIT: While looking deeper, this [1] looks like a pretty good answer that isn't just an "April Fools' Joke".

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/56189743

If someone hasn't yet made an IoT teapot that only returns that I'm officially disappointed in humanity.

It signifies it is sabotaged, either by someone internal or someone external I guess.

(Bonus points if there is something extraordinary funny that I can't grasp as I'm neither native Russian or native English speaking, but already this has probably made my morning better :-)

Edit: Bonus points awarded to rzzwilson above.

Since I cannot transfer points, some news instead:

Norway officially said that it is not illegal to go to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion.

A small number of Norwegians went to Kurdish areas to hunt war criminals from Daesh so it wouldn't be totally unexpected if some Vikings join the Ukrainian too.

Edit 2: Thinking of it, more Norwegians fought in Finland in the Winter War so maybe more are coming? I don't know.

> Thinking of it, more Norwegians fought in Finland in the Winter War so maybe more are coming? I don't know.

On which side? During the Winter War, Finland and Germany were allies, their common enemy being the USSR. (I don't know how F&G helped each other.)

At that time, Norwegians were fighting against Germany.

Politics can be complicated in that region.

The "I am a teapot" reference is extra humerous because in Russian slang a teapot (chainik, чайник) is a word used to describe someone ignorant and liable to cause a disaster.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainik

Or maybe they're brewing tea with polonium. ;)

I've tried using a Russian VPN (almost surprised nobody else did?), and mil.ru redirects to pda.mil.ru, and eng.mil.ru just loads a blank page. I think I'll take a further look once I'm home. For now, I think they wanted to make the site unavailable to western/NATO/European/..? countries and someone just made a joke out of it or whatever. Or maybe they wanted the site to appear as if it was hacked?

> they wanted to make the site unavailable

> I've tried using a Russian VPN

I have a hard time believing their genius way of "protecting" the website from the west is to just block western IPs, which can be easily bypassed.

You might, most HN users might, but really it only takes 1 reporter on Twitter, 0 verification, and a bunch of copycats to follow suit saying that “Anonymous has taken down the Russian military’s website”

I very much agree that just blocking western IPs is far from a perfect (or even at all _good_) way, and I'm not saying that anyone there thinks that. I don't even think the goal is to perfectly block all westerners.

It's just enough to stop the average Joe from reading around out of curiosity, whyever they want that. I mean, it's still a public facing website after all, it's not like they're going to put anything of significant strategic value or whatever on there.

Also, to me the theory that they're doing this on purpose makes the most sense, because everything else would imply that somehow the IT team of the Russian military is somehow not able to fix this, and that some error or hacktivists caused this scenario, where western IPs get an almost unused HTTP status code and Russian IPs don't. Both just seems very unlikely to me.

I don't know enough about networking, but could this be effective in defending against DoS attacks from outside the country?

Works for me (Russian, live in Russia)

Wouldn't "409 Conflict" be more appropriate?

Something something plausible deniability - that's a tad close to 410 Gone, and noone really wants to go there...

4xx codes indicate a permanent error condition. 409 conflict sounds like very pessimistic scenario.

4xx indicate client errors (you need to change you request). 5xx are server errors. "410 Gone" would be a 'permanent' error.

> 4xx codes indicate a permanent error condition.

Not necessarily, and especially not 409 Conflict, which “indicates that the request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state of the target resource.”

“Current state” being often mutable, 409 is not generally permanent. 410 Gone is permanent.

They've got breached yesterday.

https://cybernews.com/news/anonymous-leaks-database-of-the-r...

There should be an HTTP 482 іди нахуй

ІДИ /нахуй HTTP/1.1

Host: rуський корабель

why 482?

Founding date of Kyiv

I'll be writing an RFC/I-D to this effect

Accessing it through VPN from a Russian IP gives a 200 OK (but still an empty page)

So it looks like a geoblock returning 418 and that they blanked the English pages anyway.

I accidentally clicked it. I do hope that this does not make me a target.

Too late.

I hope you know how to evade cruise missiles

For hackers, not missiles. Thanks.

Since we appear to be inching closer and closer to a WWIII in real and cyber worlds.

What would be a good set of tools to protect and monitor your own network?

Unplug power

This was submitted/posted 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30453374

Looks like there are lots of russian website under heavy ddos. Look at kremlin.ru for example (party thanks to hackernews I guess)

You won't be able to get in via a normal VPN, because you need to be able to get past all the other geoblocking and such that will be in place.

If I understand correctly, you are going to need actual hardware setup in the country and remote into that instead. Of course you will be using a VPN connection to do this, and probably a proxy or two?

Either or. Have fun folks.

> If I understand correctly, you are going to need actual hardware setup in the country and remote into that instead.

This is precisely what a VPN does, and people in this thread have reported getting 200 instead of 418 when trying from a Russian/Kazakh VPN.

Yes, and no. Yes you are doing exactly that, but also no, because remoting into a physical machine and controlling the desktop remotely is not the same as using some vpn like nordvpn for instance to do your 'thing' on the internet, whatever it may be. This is akin to calling something like Magnet files and Torrent files the same thing. Yes they both use the same underlying programming for the most part. The same protocols, etc. But they both serve separate purposes while doing the same overall task in a different way.

Again, both remote desktop and the usual vpn's that most people use, use a virtual private network to do their job; but VPN's as sold on the internet are not an exact 1:1 of what I am referring to. Remote Desktop is just one of the many functionalities of computers that uses a virtual private network to do its job.

And as for that 200 code; that's cool. I guess I missed that particular comment when I was writing mine? Doesn't matter though, since ultimately my suggestion would have gotten them the exact same results ... or better... (Having physical hardware inside borderlines would be really nice to have, right? Imagine the possibilities if you can get a few trustable agents using it physically now and then too?)

I don't understand, do you suggest a VPN is not "physical hardware inside borderlines"? Or that you can't run your normal desktop entirely piped into the VPN just as if it were on the other side of the world (even transparently to the OS with router-level VPN)? Or something else entirely?

Here, maybe having you read this will help, because you don't seem to understand it when I say it.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remot...

That's 'remoting in'. If you have some sort of hardware inside russia that you can perform this connection to, it will allow you to control that hardware as if you are holding the keyboard and mouse; but from afar. This is usually done through a network connection that uses a virtual private network, which is where I think you are getting confused with the commonly referred to VPN's today that are actually just a bunch of honey pots and M.I.T.M's. (Yes, even whatever VPN you think you trust and use. Unless you own that hardware yourself, it's compromised and you cannot trust that you aren't being logged/etc...)

But, with that said... turns out NordVPN has a pretty good explanation you might understand better than listening to me.

https://nordvpn.com/blog/vpn-vs-rdp/

Here is the first paragraph: ---------------------------

VPN vs. remote desktop

Is a VPN the same as a remote desktop? No! They serve a similar function, but where a VPN gives you access to a secure network, RDP focuses on providing remote access to a specific computer. Both will (usually) encrypt your traffic in one way or another, and both will grant you private access to a server or device that might be thousands of miles away.

It does load for me.

found the Russian spy

I'm from Kazakhstan and it loads for me as well.

Putin must have plans for you?

Putin’s official website is also down, it seems:

http://eng.putin.kremlin.ru/

I am a glass of vodka!

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