Comment by ingenter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ingenter | Hacker News Reader

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The cases of adding CloudFlare CDN addresses to the unified registry of banned information٭ are becoming more frequent.

It is related to active use of this service by violators of Russian laws.

Attempts to determine hosting provider for such web-sites using whois return CloudFlare IP addresses, hiding whereabouts information for this site in Internet.

This makes interaction between Roskomnadzor and real hosting provider harder and, factually, eliminates the possibility of removing illegal content in time, to restore٭٭ access to the blocked resource.

CloudFlare representatives are refusing to cooperate and do not react to official Roskomnadzor notifications.

Many conscientious resources using this CDN are blocked by ISPs in Russian Federation due to lack of reaction from CloudFlare.

To avoid such situations we recommend hosting web-sites using native (russian) hosting providers which abide Russian laws in good faith and timely restrict access to internet-resources and information which is prohibited for distribution in Russian Federation.

٭yes, it is as bad as it sounds

٭٭implying access will be restored after "illegal content" will be removed

Just to clarify, aside from the footnotes this is a translation of the original page.

They actually do restore the site.

Russian authorities have blackholed my site a couple times because some trolls posted illegal material there, and then turned around and reported that site to the authorities. Once the files were brought to my attention and removed, the blackhole was also removed.

As an aside, I hope authorities (and hosts) realise this is a trivial and common tactic to take down websites. It's one of the cheapest and least technical attacks available. Only the really large sites (the 0.1%) are immune to it due to their stature. I'm tempted to say that attackers employing this method are more skilled, because they understand risk-tree analysis better than the clowns with huge fancy botnets.

I think that Ruskomnadzor does understand the dynamic nature of the Internet which is why your sites were restored when you removed the illegal material. They don't want to block you, they just want to stop Russians from ignoring the law and sharing copyrighted materials.

Just remember, Russia is not the Soviet Union, neither the real one nor the imagined one that the West is always going on about. Russia is a technically advanced country that intends to be the most modern country in the world in the 21st century. A force to be reckoned with.

Is 'force to be reckoned with' a prerequisite for modern-country status?

I can think of plenty of countries that I consider modern that cannot change the course of global events by force, but do so by example.

Here in Seattle, USA, the way we teach our children mathematics may yet be altered by ideas from Singapore, a modern country.

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