Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned | Hacker News Reader

Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned

slate.com

65 pointsdanso12 comments

I'd be very surprised if it every gets to a stage where you literally can't break out from Russia into TOR or VPN or whatever.

Sure China has done it, but that seems non trivial and looking at the current state of their offensive and well army I'd say Russia probably have more urgent priorities right now

Russian government has no money to implement something like Chinese Great Firewall but feels an urgent need to censor online space so more likely scenario is a complete cut-off from an external world (like in North Korea). Russian ISPs has been tasked to prepare to operate all networks inside the country in isolated mode - like a huge LAN. Will it happen - no one knows for sure but there is a real possibility.

Even then, I can see a real market potential for bootleg sneakernet [1] dealers. VHS bootleg of western movies being dubbed by a single person were all the rage in the late 80’s Soviet countries [2]. If the internet is fully closed off, a new market for sneakernet of Internet segments would evidently emerge.

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

[2] https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/soviet-voice-over-cold-war-te...

A major difference is that in China it's one-sided. Here we also have other countries cutting Russia off.

Even in China I think you can get around it or at least you could when I was last there although there was a little more hassle than in other countries. See https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/best-free-vpns-china/ for example.

I think it is available on ipfs. Is it still possible to ban it there? considering the user has ipfs browser extension?

I was thinking the same thing when I saw this article. Just need 1 russian to pin it to a local russian based IPFS node and they are good. Get others to pin it from there as needed.

I wish them well, but Kiwix was very clunky as I remember it.

It has improved, but I think the best experience is still running kiwix-server and then using a regular web browser to access that.

Either way, it's certainly very usable, and all the important functionality (like search) works well enough.

10GB or larger? Was thinking about that eg. HHGTG or Encyclopedia I guess. Some SBC/eInk deal or seed among phones.

FTP to the rescue?

Wikipedia is controlled by a few people where it matters and any capable country should be banning it and replacing with a local alternative, like China has done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com