Signal messenger blocked in Russia, says Roskomnadzor | Hacker News Reader

Signal messenger blocked in Russia, says Roskomnadzor

reuters.com

88 pointsdtquad104 comments

YouTube is reportedly throttled to near unusable levels too¹, although that seems to be done with enough deniability to back-track should it cause too much problems for the economy.

In that respect StackOverflow is probably safe.

1: (Dutch) https://nos.nl/artikel/2532565-met-het-beperken-van-youtube-...

Today it appears they shut it off completely: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/russian-users-report...

Russia seem to be more reliant on TikTok these days https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesfarrell/2024/05/02/russias.... Make sense since TikTok is owned by their ally.

This flurry of social media ban might signal the start of the end of Putin's regime, with sudzha's fall by Ukraine. Right now Ukraine can seize artillery storage and destroy rail lines anywhere behind the frontline with ease, and Russia seems paralyzed. If they soften any of the frontline to reinforce the interior, that frontline will collapse.

TikTok is a completely different form of content. (Worse)

Youtube has excellent documentaries, movies, news and commentary if you go beyond the default Mr Beast sloppa.

TikTok is focusing on longer videos these days via allowing the video length to be longer, because short videos are a money sink. Meta realized this already as well, as Mark mentioned that they're losing 1B a year on short form videos.

Ok. Does not change the facts.

Are things like this on TikTokSloppatoppa?

Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MURDER" from HARVARD UNIVERSITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&list=PL30C13C91C...

BBC The Great War - 1of26 - On the Idle Hill of Summer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWJlv8hy0jQ&list=PLucsO-7vMQ...

The World At War 1973 WW2 EP 1 From Bluray: Hitler's New Germany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-esApmoj2tc&list=PLjcHtVEs8l...

Why are short form videos a money sink but not long form? The cost are the same and you can have higher ad loads with short form

Engagement. Ads in short videos are more likely to be skipped or navigated away from compared to an ad in a longer video when the user is engaged and more likely to stay engaged with that content through the ad.

Your second paragraph evidences how effective US censorship has been. YT blocked and deleted RT and other Russian channels including Shaman who is one of the most popular musicians in Russia. Military Summary https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUnc496-PPmFZVKlYxUnToA and Judging Freedom https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkEYb-TXJVWLvOokshtlsw are still available to fill some knowledge gaps on progress of the war.

This is more complicated than that. First, you have alternative railroads, so while Ukrainians can (and will) make logistics harder, the won't be a big problem (seized munitions and fuel is though). Another issue are power plants.

They do have reserve troups. The main issue is that those cannot be redeployed that fast, the redeployment will show weakness and be costly, at least politically.

Also, they have to move their S400 first (which are easier to move than patriot system to be fair, but will have to be recalibrated). Which is why the Falcons are a huge deal and their arrival probably unlocked the offensive (depending on their payload they could also be useful as more than a threat).

Yes it is. (Almost) everyone knows about it here, trying to bypass it however we can.

Invidious, Libretube... there are alternatives.

Rutube.

Those are all technological alternatives, but they lack the one thing what this is about: massive amounts of content uncensored by the Russian state.

Invidious it's a proxy for Youtube.

Russian here. Just to give you an idea of how aware of VPNs the general public is: I have a friend, she's 30 and she's never been tech-savvy or nerdy. A typical stay-at-home single mom focused on raising her kid. Today she asked me if I know of any good routers with built-in VPN support, and we had a chat about VPN protocols.

I recommend gl.inet routers :-) Happy user of flint2

Hardly the only thing blocked there. The internet in Russia is close to unusable without VPN if you are used to western content.

If I remember correctly, the earliest popular thing that they permanently blocked was LinkedIn for some reason.

Linkedin is a gold mine for professionals as well as government information gathering operations https://www.wired.com/story/linkedin-fake-profiles-state-act...

404

https://www.wired.com/story/linkedin-fake-profiles-state-act...

ors-scams/ wasn’t copied from url window it seems when user shared it.

Russian government is very concerned about the brain drain over the past two years. Fortunately (for the russian government), western sanctions on Russia make it much harder for educated professionals to relocate.

Unfortunately, internet is close to unusable WITH a VPN. Unending captchas, blocks, bans, throttles, login requirements ...

Sovereign countries are allowed to do pretty much what they want. This should be no surprise. I can see more like this happening as time goes on.

Does this relate to the situation in Kursk Oblast?

Hard to say for sure obviously. The timing is pretty convenient, if the government is doing a poor job responding to an invading force they have good reason to limit communication among the public to tools they can control.

This won't do much to stop the flow of information into Russia, but might hamper the flow within. I don't think it's meant to just affect the battlefield (and in that case it could have just been regionally limited.)

It's more likely to be a preparatory move. I have a feeling that the risk of a nuke being used just went up.

Yes. They, amazingly, discussed it already on state propaganda TV - how much should people know?

The regime really is concerned about controlling the narrative before it gets out of control. Neither panic nor clamoring for nuclear holocaust helps them here.

Routing over Tor coming soon?

The built-in “censorship circumvention” toggle seems to be enough for now.

Most of TOR nodes are owned by the CIA/NSA

There are also rumors of Signal being operated by them too

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-faci...

Whoever claims total anonymity in the US is full of crap

https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-goog...

All it takes is one backdoor or one engineered flaw

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/signal-downpl...

Likewise, whoever promotes that kind of messaging tool overseas is complicit

Lol signals definitely backdoored. It's a darling of 5 eyes intel agencies. They love it and they wouldn't use it unless it was backdoored lol.

Is telegram still blocked in Russia?

Nope. They got to some agreement

Sadly whatsapp got completely blocked, cause they’d never agree to that

Whatsapp isn't blocked in Russia. At least, it wasn't a few weeks ago when I last used it to talk to people from there

Might they be people using VPNs? I'm guessing it's almost universal for the people who are used to using WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube...

I stopped getting messages through to my Russian friends sometime around the 20th of July

Is that a sarcasm? Whatsapp is not blocked in Russia

Putinist state simply cannot accept non-controlled media. No big surprise here.

I think you mean to say Russia will not accept platforms controlled by NATO/US. Decentralized protocols such as XMPP, Matrix, Simplex, Session.. work fine and are not targeted for blocking.

Telegram is not blocked and is often the main channel through which people get their news.

Whatever stuff you want to see, you may consume there.

Indeed, news on the web are going the way of newspapers.

Though I really wonder why Telegram is not blocked given that it was historically.

For one, perhaps because Telegram does not take sides and does not take down Russian content.

Perhaps because they had some agreement in the end, perhaps because they simply couldn't.

In any case, it is now vital information infrastructure in ways YouTube isn't. Even though YouTube definitelt is critical. It's not just an amusement source.

> In any case, it is now vital information infrastructure in ways YouTube isn't.

Potentially, but then there is still the risk of what the government knows. Russian citizens living in the West who donated to Ukrainian organizations are at risk if they travel to Russia. If telegram is surveyed by the Russian state that turns into a problem quickly.

It can even go both ways: nothing prevents Telegram to be blocked in Russia, as well as being used to harvest potentially life threatening info about Russian citizens at the same time.

Same for YouTube. If it gets blocked for good, does not mean you can't go to jail for speaking out while on YouTube.

The obvious take away at the moment is to think twice what you write anywhere in the Internet, as well as to avoid doing things with such dire consequences, or at least not bragging about them anywhere on the net.

> For one, perhaps because Telegram does not take sides and does not take down Russian content.

it does take sides, FSB can take down channels that are too concerning for them, but for the most of it they are pleased with just monitoring and getting user data they need

I can't remember a single instance where Tg will take down a channel that is too concerning for FSB.

After all, Telegram is a worldwide platform and you can directly read Ukrainian news feeds there if you wish so. What would a concerning channel make compared to that?

YouTube was constantly blocking Russian channels and striking down videos, whereas I only remember Telegram banning a single channel in three years, due to a direct US sanctions hit.

> I can't remember a single instance where Tg will take down a channel that is too concerning for FSB.

Really? https://www.rferl.org/a/telegram-navalny-smart-voting/314662...

As the vote kicked off on September 17, the Smart Voting app disappeared from the Apple and Google online stores

Seems no special treatment though? Telegram always experiences double standards, imo. If faang does it, then it’s following the sovereign law. If telegram does it, it bends to FSB requests. Telegram still works in russia - it came to “some agreement”. Whatsapp never ever questioned there - it’s a secure end-to-end messenger.

Not sure what your point is. Neither Apple nor Google are known for resisting censorship.

I never said that Telegram was censorship resistant, it just does not take proactive steps to delete or restrict content it doesn't like.

Unfortunately democratic nations sometimes go there, too. The UK has threatened to weaken encryption in a way that would force signal to leave. Other nations have made noises about it, too.

UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936127

EU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40551260

Australia: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/signal-to-austra...

Belgium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210432

The genie is out of the bottle. Cryptography is already integrated deeply in out tech stack.

Russia is trying to follow China's example to shed dependence on West controlled services and grow domestic alternatives. Which is long overdue since they don't have equitable access to these services.

Cutting yourself off from civilization is not the hallmark of a society that is growing in a positive direction.

Russia considers itself to be its own kind of civilization, separate from Western, Chinese and others. It's all in a doctrine "Russian world"

You mean Russian government. I don't think people, trees, houses, and rivers care much.

How does expelling foreign journalists fit into this plan?

Russian domestic alternatives grew just fine without any blocking. Blocking stuff just angers people and teaches them to use VPN.

Russians can host videos on YouTube that get nuked on Russian alternatives

I would speculate that growing local products is not the prevailing reason. An automated detection and detention of free thinkers is.

Russia to block Google, IOS and Android.

Aleksei Didenko, a member of the Russian State Duma, has said that Google, including its Android operating system and Apple's iOS, will soon be blocked in Russia.

Didenko advised the public not to cling to services like YouTube, stating, "Soon Google will be blocked, along with Google Android. iOS will also be blocked, and this will not be our initiative."

t.me/ForeignAgentIntel

So they will not use Smartphones? I am not buying it.

Google has been blocked in all of China for many years. They mainly use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and variants without any proprietary Google. Their IOS devices connect to servers in and run by China. Russia can do something similar, but they are giving people some warning and time to migrate. Russia has banned IOS for most government employees after the Operation Triangulation fiasco.

As sibling commenter says, the China model is probably ideal for dictators. In China WeChat is used for everything: communicating, social media, payment (along with AliPay). And it doesn't take much imagination how effective that is for surveillance and control. They already delete posts that are "dangerous to the harmonious living" (i.e. things that are against the government narrative), and if you're afraid you'll get banned and lose your means of contact with friends (as well as a payment app needed for day to day living), you'd probably censor yourself.

And monitoring payments is another method of surveillance, along with the monitoring of communications (even with E2E encryption, just knowing which people are talking to each other, and with what sort of intensity, is useful for surveillance).

And Elon Musk wants to make a similar universal app out of the corpse of Twitter... ha, wouldn't we all like that. Ironically all the people who still defend him overlap with the ones who are yelling "The woke lefties want to control our speech!"

Good to hear that Signal is not cooperating. Russia is very cautious these days and punishes hard.

Reminds me of "Signal: Will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees" (02.06.2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40551260

More links in the other thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204384

OMEMO E2EE for XMPP has been made ready to be forced-disabled in the popular ejabberd XMPP server relatively soon after OMEMO adoption.

https://github.com/processone/ejabberd-contrib/commit/d84204...

> Signal: Will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees

Considering the Lavabit case [1] this reek of grandstanding to anyone else? Not saying Europe is panacea but considering the unaccountability of American intelligence or law enforcement the European position does seem more favourable.

And to those who bring up policies such as Chat Control. The vote for that in Brussels has been postponed after enough outcry. [2] Hopefully it does not come back to life however them trying again under a different banner would not be a surprise either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Connection_to_Edward_S...

[2] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-vote-postponed...

I think Signal is a silly messaging system if the servers are all centralized enough to be able to be blocked and require a VPN. They forbid federation: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . I am surprised that technical people use it; they see that the client and some of the server code is open sourced on GitHub and go all-in on the platform, instead of thinking critically about the actual messaging technology.

Totally pointless messaging platform. Use something real like XMPP.

XMPP? That is a protocol right?

Can you name drop some good client and server software for using that?

https://xmpp.org/software/ has a wealth of information about server and client SW. Here is a list of providers for a free account: https://providers.xmpp.net/.

I run my own XMPP server using metronome, but I also run a Simplex server I prefer to use.

On top of the links shared - I would recommend Snikket (https://snikket.org/) if you're getting started.

They provide a server you can self host, and apps for Android and iOS. Everything is designed to work together and offer a good onboarding experience.

Anyone can run a proxy for their centralized servers: https://signal.org/blog/proxy-please/

Yes, _their_ servers. If I can't run a server and have others easily join it in a normal & intended user flow, we're back with the same centralisation of WhatsApp, just with a "source available" coat of paint.

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