Russian Wikipedia Goes on Strike Over Censorship Plans | Hacker News Reader

Russian Wikipedia Goes on Strike Over Censorship Plans

en.ria.ru

93 pointsdchest35 comments

I hope the Russian editors don't end up in prison, or worse; that seems to be a not-uncommon fate of those who dare publicly oppose the government.

It's Putin, I expect they may just disappear sometime soon.

I don't believe this will matter. United Russia, pocket party of the current government & president, has all the power to approve or reject any proposed bill. Unfortunately, no amount of public opinion has any effect on them.

Public opinion has effect. It's just that government-controlled media would otherwise not report such controversial laws being considered. I sincerely thank Wikipedia for bringing public attention to this issue. Now twitter is trending with #RuWikiBlackout and all major Russian news channels are reporting the blackout.

Come on. The media will report about this law and the vast majority of the population will be thankful for the government cracking down on child pornographers.

Never underestimate the bullshit absorption rate of the general population.

Unfortunately, the public is being continuously brainwashed by the state controlled media to share their opinion.

"brainwashed by the state controlled media to share their opinion"? What do you mean?

Or did you mean "not to share their opinion"?

I expect "to share their [the media's] opinion" as opposed to "to share their [the citizens'] opinion".

Yes, "to share the media's/state's opinion", forgive my bad english.

It will probably not matter in terms of preventing the passage of the law, but this is the sort of thing that has led to the groundswell of support for Pirate Parties elsewhere in Europe. Given the current brewing of civil-society initiatives in Russia, this can well play a non-negligible role.

I wouldn't say "no amount", but it's clear that Russia as a whole is not ready to get rid of Putin yet. So 100k, 200k and maybe even 500k people protesting against him probably won't have much effect, unless it's millions of them, or the vast majority of them actually votes against him in the next election.

The legislation is aimed at fighting child abuse/porn websites, drug use promotion, and similar content. (it never states to block copyrighted content nor can be used to block opposition presence in the internet media). Please read the actual document before discussing it.

The opposing factions overreacted and tried to distort the point of legislation by comparing it to the Great Chinese Firewall (there will be no centralized infrastructure to control all traffic flow).

This is the same kind of "censorship" used in western countries to block TPB and others, yet it deals with really criminal and abusive content.

When the UK introduced Cleanfeed to block child porn, it was supposed to only be used for that. But when cases came up in court, ISPs could not deny that they had the capability to block individual websites, so it got repurposed to block things like TPB - which I think is wrong[1]. The fact that Western countries also misuse censorship is no excuse. All I expect that will be required is a compliant court, and further censorship may be applied once the infrastructure is in place.

[1] More widespread use also works against its original motivation, because it encourages people to work around the blocks with VPNs, proxies, etc. But that's generally restricted to very motivated and half-ways technically adept people.

Just to clarify, both courts and an as yet unspecified government agency will have the power to order content removed (by site operators, web hosts, and ISPs). Looking at http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&... , the criteria are open-ended (the list starts with objectionable stuff for the sake of framing the debate; the last bullet point says anything deemed unsuitable can be suppressed; links to the same content are disallowed as well). In practice I expect the motivation for this law is to crack down on political dissent, alternative candidates, and any platforms that may support them.

> Создаётся некая информационная система «Единый реестр доменных имен и (или) универсальных указателей страниц сайтов в сети Интернет и сетевых адресов сайтов в сети Интернет, содержащих информацию, запрещенную к распространению на территории Российской Федерации федеральными законами» (далее — Реестр).

> Оператор связи, оказывающий услуги по предоставлению доступа к сети Интернет, обязан в течение суток с момента включения сетевого адреса сайта в Реестр, ограничить к нему доступ. Тот факт, что на одном IP-адресе может находиться несколько тысяч сайтов законом не учитывается.

The fact that technically it will be slightly different, doesn't matter. We're going to have a Great Russian Registry of Forbidden Information, which can be extended by the means of Registry Operator (without any need for trial decision) and which every ISP should respect. Western countries, by contrast, can't force every ISP to block TPB and others without trial.

Well, the UK has the IWF, which ensures Child Pornography is blocked. If TPB had anything even resembling it, there's a chance it could be blocked UK-wide automatically. Of course, TPB already is thanks to that court order...

Sorry, this is not quite correct. The draft law states that any information prohibited for distribution by a Russian court can be blocked, and Russian courts are notorious for banning all sorts of data under the rubric of "anti-extremism" laws. The criteria in the draft law are extremely subjective, and coupled with the near-total absence of recourse (and such recourse as is given is to Russian courts, which does not inspire confidence in many) this is a very dangerous thing indeed.

Now, please, could you list any banned websites I cannot access?

http://www.minjust.ru/nko/fedspisok This list contains some URLs that ISPs are supposed to block. Most of those are either dead or not blocked in practice (it's really hard to force it on ISPs), but it might become reality one day.

ISPs are not required to block this. It's a list of so called extremist materials, mainly some radical religious books, nationalist and racist propaganda and such.

Basically, to break the law you have to publish or distribute them, but I can access every url listed.

I think the idea of the law is that now they would be required to block those lists.

Correct. In any case, I would not trust the government and courts of any country with such a huge loophole ("anything that might become banned in the future"), let along those of Russia.

The biggest problem with those lists is that any courthouse from a tiny town in a middle of nowhere has the power to add resource to the federal list. People who do not understand what they are doing. Thus we have seen the whole lib.ru being added there at some point, along with some parts of Quran declared extremist materials.

And now they want some random NGO to be compiling their own list of paedophile resources. They'll have all the control without much responsibility, hurray.

It effectively lets the government block any site that allows any kind of public submitted content. All it takes is to post a few offending comments and then blacklist the site for hosting them. You don't even need a court order to do it.

Also, Wikipedia was blocked without any notice in advance. It was an initiative of Russian administrators with voting taking place on July, 9-th. Vote quickly passed and Wikipedia was blocked on the next day (10-th).

It is an organized attempt to use Wikipedia as a tool for opposition's political means, not a people's fight for freedom.

You look like pro-Putin "Nashi" youth organisation member trashing the Internet with their prepaid comments.

Guess what. Wikipedia does what it wants to do. You do not like it, you might use any other wikipedia.

Exactly this. But Russian admins do not own Wikipedia and abused their power to pursue their own goals.

Who owns Wikipedia? It's the people who spend time on it, whether we like what they do or not.

If they chose to oppose the law, maybe it tells us something, don't you think?

Like I said, they did not give people time to vote, nor did they provide any notice of the planned actions beforehand.

We'll be more than happy to hear any real wikipedia contributors' points on the subject. We're not happy to hear for random people who aren't active contributors to wikipedia but still think wikipedia owes something to them.

They don't technically need to have all the "85 rouble party" crowd to do the voting before deciding anything. It's not how wikipedia works.

Why do you keep replying to yourself?

Sorry. For some reason, the reply link was unavailable on come comments. (workaround is to use "link" and open single comment with a reply field)

see http://imgur.com/yYOBm

It's not bug, it's a feature. Replying is only possible a few minutes after the comment was posted, to prevent discussion going out of hand.

Besides I don't understand what wikipedia did wrong.

Ah, thanks, the delay does not seem to be explained anywhere.

About Wikipedia. Do you still remember the SOPA blackout day? Everybody was warned about upcoming blackout a few weeks beforehand, and most importantly, pretty much everyone supported the blackout, thus reaching the consensus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus

Today, Russian Wiki is closed. The decision was taken yesterday by a bunch of admins, who started a poll, without any warning and without anyone prepared. It is a violation of consensus rules as described in the link above: "Consensus ... nor is it the result of a vote."

Admins' actions today are a blatant violation of these rules by Coordinated actions, Meatpuppetry and are biased in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:False_consensus

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