From a short look at the linked/blocked documents, all of them are suicide instructions written in Russian.
1. Burn when entering the Earth's atmosphere Quaternary: probably open a few minutes. Availability: problematic - it is necessary to go into Earth orbit. Trustworthy: Trustworthy as much as you can do it. Notes: Exit into open space in low Earth orbit. Then turn down enough to get into the Atmosphere. You will witness of exiting view!
37. BEING BURNED UP IN UNPROTECTED RE-ENTRY (silly)
Time:
probably a few minutes
Available:
if you happen to be able to get into orbit
Certainty:
about as certain as you can get!
Notes:
Just go for a spacewalk in a low earth orbit, and
decelerate enough to enter the atmosphere. You'll get a
great view...Now there's a blast from the past.
Looking at the first takedown, there is the conspicuously named account "russian-suicide", which contains a fork of a blog. A cursory look reveals one post just like the other suicide lists, but it notably references a poem about how teenagers should just kill themselves because they have only shit to expect from growing up. (http://mudacek.livejournal.com/720.html)
The poem is prefaced by an assertion the author expects Roscomnadzor will take it down soon. It seems likely that they have been taking down anything with the word suicide they've come across. My guess would be some programmer reads these poems and started putting these silly suicide instructions into repos as a form of protest, and the authorities are trying to kill the protest as well.
>My guess would be some programmer got their blog shut down because it somewhere said something like "going to Ukraine is suicide" and the authorities used the censor suicide rule in their formal decision.
There is no such phrase. Subject of abuse was another file in repo that contains satiric poetry about Roskomnadzor that I copied from somewhere in the early 2013 to my blog. It sure contains suicide instructions as well as story about entry site being blocked because of single file.
In the early 2013 it looked funny, but now you can't really tell what is satire work and what is Russian government reality.
Another repos that were added in September/October 2014 (after first github ban) by different people contained list of methods to kill yourself.
What's up with the bans on suicide mentions? Is the topic growing because the public feels without hope as the poem seems to suggest, or is Roskomnadzor just tying to keep busy?
Livejournal blog linked there is a throwaway account of some unknown person, however I suspect Russian poet Leo Kaganov to be the author.
>or is Roskomnadzor just tying to keep busy?
this. just some bureaucrats being enthusiastic to assert their power.
Do you know of other surprising examples of sites getting takedown request because of "immoral behaviour" (or whatever the name is)? Does the suicide list when hosted on bitbucket get taken down? On deviantart? Etc
They banned vimeo for ISIS video just day before github. They also banned youtube and vkontakte before.
>Still, I'm surprised they bother with github being such a specialized website.
They are just targeting all popular resources on purpose to make public case.
Even if I disagree with the censorship, I can sorta understand what the problem is if it the list was meant to be serious - but banning black humour is just ridiculous.
I suppose we will soon learn what is the intersection of all free spech laws of the world.
Should the original Wolfenstein 3d images be released as Creative Commons and put up in a GitHub repository, will GitHub be banned in Germany as well?
Yeah, something like ACID test but for governments. Ultimate pack of offensive material in different jurisdictions.
Some nazi symbolics, some soviet symbolic, denial of Holocaust , Holodomor, some LGTB propaganda, something offensive for black or feminists, or Islam, or His Majesty the King of Thailand. And copyright infringement of course.
Not in the next few years since some years ago a push to implement DNS-level blocking met with an outcry by the German geeksphere that ultimately pushed the pirate party in elections. The plans then were dropped on fear of censorship like in GB and Australia.
But of course, this could be resurrected at some time - and Nazi symbols would be high on the list.
If there were hundreds of accounts sharing nazi propaganda all over Github, wouldn't they be forced by law to block Github in Germany?
As far as I can see it would not be against the Github terms of service to share such content as long as it doesn't violate any laws in your jurisdiction.
Accordingly, adding very small roadblocks for people who are contemplating suicide can have substantial effects in reducing suicide (an example is the restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen that can be sold per transaction in the UK), and people who attempt suicide and fail often express relief afterwards.
I'm not sure where the line ought to go, but that in any case puts it in a very different category from e.g. homicide or different political views.
Censoring suicide instructions is probably by far the least objectionable part of Russian censorship.
Let's put the fact aside that these "instructions" are a joke; consider a wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods. Should this page be censored? Since when removing the definition of a word in a dictionary makes a thing disappear? Sure, suicide is an issue, sure, it's better not to have it, but to censor anything mentioning it sounds like a bad adaptation of Orwells' 1984.
What's the problem with suicide prevention, suicide hotlines, destigmatisation of mental health problems? I'll tell you what's the problem - it doesn't help you instill an intellectual control system, censorship and, quite frankly, a form mind control (via media filters).
A censorship by any other reason is still a tool of oppression. It is not a tool for solving problems.
Also, could you please provide a reference to a single study published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal of psychology, which supports your claim that small roadblocks, and especially restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen sold per transaction helps prevent suicide.
Coincidentally, paracetamol poisoning a retarded way to go - it is probably more painless to kill oneself by drinking a lot of water (6l per 3hrs is enough to kill you). Why aren't drinking water sales not limited then? In fact, why aren't we all absolved of our personal responsibilities and taken care by the state, like some kind of a nanny?
Of course the people who fail express relief - if they don't we might lock them up. The same goes for your blanket arguments about temporary emotional states, _when you threaten a man with prison (whatever the hell you want to call it) he is way likely to say whatever he thinks you want to get out_.
A far superior approach would be better social care for people who might commit suicide, but that would cost money and effort, as opposed to a symbolic act of prohibition.
Besides, Internet filters always start with the really evil things, like suicide instructions or child pornography, and once established they are slowly expanded to cover terrorism, homosexual pornography, regular pornography, copyright infringement and finally political opposition. You really do not want to go down that slippery slope.
One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/uk-isps-to...
The article does not support your claim.
EDIT: To clarify, as per the reply I gave further down: There is no country wide "UK porn filter". There are voluntary filters put in place by each of the largest providers that are wildly inconsistent in what they block, and wildly ineffective.
Most of the filtering is also opt-in or opt-out for most of these providers, mostly apart from blocks targeting child porn.
Outside of the top 5-6 providers, many smaller providers don't filter at all.
EDIT: Maybe whoever downvoted might care to explain why? The comment is factual. There is no legally mandated filtering across the board in the UK. The only legally mandated filtering is a small set of specific court orders targeting a group of the largest ISPs, requiring them to filter specific sites (Pirate Bay being the main target).
From the media coverage of the "UK porn filter" that I followed, the government said they would make a law to require filtering, then the ISPs jumped on it and implemented their filtering systems, and then the proposed laws failed / stalled.
I do not know enough about the UK ISP landscape to be able to determine if all users of the major ISPs can switch to a non-filtering one, and at what additional expense.
That's not quite how it went. The government hinted that it might do so unless the ISPs implemented filters that people had to ask to opt-out of.
The ISPs jumped on adding a filtering choice for users in the form of a checkbox when they sign on. Something many of them had before. Some providers - notably the mobile providers - have defaulted to opt-out (since long before the government interference, on the basis that e.g. pay as you go sims can easily be obtained without providing id, and as a result they don't know if their subscribers are over 18), while most regular ISPs default to opt-in.
The government subsequently then did not propose any law, and issued triumphant press releases about protecting children, after Camerons advisers had been pleading with ISPs to at least make the checkboxes default to ticked. Largely the result was that they got mocked for not actually achieving any changes that made a difference to anything at all.
All the largest ISPs still filters child porn regardless of subscriber choice, but that's the only thing you're not able to turn off. Even that filtering is not covering nearly all ISPs.
Russia already did. Suicide filters were introduced two years ago or something. Now they are used to block porn, political opponents, sites about drugs and whatever government wants to declare "extrimism". Ah, and last time they added copyright infringement to the list.