
Wikipedia is blacklisted in Russia - marinintim
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/24/russian-wikipedia-editors-weighing-options-after-site-is-blacklisted-in-russia/
======
sologoub
Techcrunch missed a very interesting point about Roscomnadzors tactic here -
they actually bothered to get a court order! [1] This is not something they
normally do or, I think, are even required under the laws they tend to us in
such cases.

The sad part is that the way that legal regime works, they are following the
letter of the law and the general populous is not likely to object, since the
article covers content related to a controlled substance, and since Soviet
times, controlled substances carry heavy stigma, especially among older
generations.

[1]
[http://m.lenta.ru/news/2015/08/24/wiki/](http://m.lenta.ru/news/2015/08/24/wiki/)
(sorry in Russian)

~~~
guard-of-terra
Nobody blames Roscomnadzor too much - not much more than sorry fellows who dug
the graves for people killed in concentration camps.

The current illegitimate parliament is to blame. Being appointed to their
chairs by Putin's grey cardinals instead of popular vote, they did every thing
to please the dictator. Probably won't get any punishment for that other than
karmic rebirth into a frog in their next life.

~~~
osipov
@guard-of-terra please take your "self-hating Russian" schtick elsewhere. your
comments don't belong on hacker news.

~~~
dang
You're being downvoted because you've crossed inappropriately into personal
attacks. Please don't do that here.

On HN, when someone is wrong, politely show how they are wrong. If you feel
too provoked to be able to do that, it's best to wait until you can.

------
Asbostos
Drug making instructions are a gray area. Most countries have laws restricting
what you're allowed to publish - and they're all a bit arbitrary and
different. It sounds like Wikipedia is trying to push American values onto
everyone else.

Imagine if Wikipedia was based in a country that didn't respect copyright.
Would people in America be upset that it was getting banned for hosting
pirated content?

~~~
viraptor
American values? While I would agree in many cases of disputes about wikipedia
content, this is not one of them. How is free and unrestricted access to
information an American value?

~~~
schoen
The legal standards for suppression of information and the categories of
information that can potentially trigger those standards are stricter and
narrower in most respects in the U.S. than in most other jurisdictions. Also,
many segments of society often express pride in the breadth and depth of U.S.
legal protections for free expression, and argue that it's something that
makes the U.S. or the U.S. legal system great.

Foreign law students sometimes find it hard to believe that some of the rules
are so protective of speech (source: three different U.S. law professors have
told me this).

A few examples:

* All fictional depictions of violence are protected.

* There are no restrictions on blasphemy or insults to religious doctrines, religious beliefs, religious believers or communities, or religious believers' feelings.

* Advocacy and glorification of any kind of illegal action (including war crimes and genocide) are fully protected if they aren't reasonably likely to lead to a specific imminent lawless action.

* Advocacy against the state or its powers is mostly completely protected for citizens, as is teaching that the prevailing political or economic system is inherently wrong. Urging resistance to or evasion of military conscription is mostly understood as protected now (unlike during World War I). Same thing with taxation, if you're not teaching people how to do it with the intention that they act on your advice.

* Detailed information about how to commit crimes is usually protected if the person publishing it didn't have a sufficiently specific intention to help people actually commit them in practice and didn't have some other responsibility to keep the published information secret.

* Insulting present or past state leaders or the virtue or legitimacy of the state or any political party is fully protected.

* It's protected to advocate regional or ethnic secession or territorial separatism (though not to conspire to effectuate it by force). It's protected to display flags or emblems of militant groups, even those that the U.S. is trying to oppose or suppress or is engaged in armed conflict with. It's protected to show disrespect to national symbols or emblems of the United States.

* Contrary to increasingly common popular belief, there are no restrictions on "hate speech" or group libel (for example saying that a particular group in society is bad, using slurs against a group, saying that some negative stereotype is true or that members of some group commonly or always have a negative characteristic, or wishing for or justifying ill treatment of a group).

* Most sexualized depictions of adults (and most sexualized depictions of fictional children) are now legally protected in practice, although there can theoretically be restrictions in various circumstances that seem to be becoming increasingly rare and exceptional.

* It's hard to punish people for downstream republication of leaked or misappropriated information.

* It's hard to punish people for repeating truthful negative information about other people, especially if they weren't originally involved in obtaining that information.

I'm sure there are other examples!

~~~
Asbostos
That's very clear. It sounds like Wikipedia is following one of the loosest
sets of rules available.

------
marinintim
Approx. 30% of Russian internet providers will block Wikipedia.org entirely,
because Wikipedia.org use HTTPS (and Deep Package Inspection is too damn
costly).

Runet, as usual, is full of tragedy jokes: [lang=ru]
[https://tjournal.ru/p/rkn-wikipedia-block-
bloggers](https://tjournal.ru/p/rkn-wikipedia-block-bloggers)

~~~
guard-of-terra
Deep Packet Inspection won't help you versus HTTPS (unless you're CIA and have
crypto backdoors).

~~~
socceroos
Or the private keys to a tonne of Certs from the cert authorities.

The massive elephant in the room is the cert authorities..

~~~
drdaeman
CA private key won't help classic (passive) DPI systems. You have to perform
active MITM attack.

And if anyone's aware of any ISP anywhere in the world, doing a MITM with a
certificate that passes validation, they should really shout about this as
loud as they can (or at least whisper to someone who can shout), because it
concerns virtually everyone on the Internet.

~~~
kuschku
Well, CINNIC and the French CA both did this before

~~~
schoen
Resulting in a lot of shouting. :-)

------
osipov
This has already happened with github, reddit, and several other lesser known
sites. In all those cases access was restored very quickly, within hours/days,
as soon as site admins complied with the Russian law. What's different this
time?

~~~
guard-of-terra
Wikipedia is non-profit, chance it's not going to cave.

~~~
r721
Buzzfeed has Wikimedia Foundation's full statement (in the end of the
article):

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/russia-says-its-banning-
wi...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/russia-says-its-banning-wikipedia)

~~~
nitrogen
Is there a list of the removals/alterations requested by the US government
(and granted as indicated in the official statement)?

~~~
SamReidHughes
The statement says "U.S. law," it says nothing about requests by the U.S.
government. Copyright, libel, etc.

------
r721
It has been removed now: [https://github.com/zapret-
info/z-i/commit/482f8014b15cb0ef1b...](https://github.com/zapret-
info/z-i/commit/482f8014b15cb0ef1b5d05689f532e4aae95c0a2) (3 hours ago)

>-ru.wikipedia.org;[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%E0%F0%E0%F1;](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%E0%F0%E0%F1;)

So it was in the register for 8 hours.

------
ttflee
FYI, Wikipedia for Chinese languages has been inaccessible for months in
China.

------
EiZei
It looks like the Russian government find HN notable enough to unleash it's
army of little internet commentators here.

------
dataker
I do find this to be disgusting, but I'd like to point out Wikipedia articles
have become quite biased in the past years.

If content was based on purely factual information and opinions were
contrasted/highlighted, Russia would have a much harder time finding a
suitable argument.

~~~
drdaeman
Doesn't matter. Even if Wikipedia would be full of outright lies it still
won't justify censorship and blocking. But considering your argument, now it
at least makes sense why the Absurdopedia was blocked among the first sites,
hah. /s

~~~
osipov
>it still won't justify censorship and blocking

do you deny countries the legal right to set their own limitations on free
speech?

~~~
tedunangst
That is the prevailing attitude here, that there should not be any
limitations.

~~~
osipov
Those are our ideals but the reality is that countries have long restricted
free speech. And each countries makes its own judgements and decisions on what
kind of speech can and should be restricted. Personally I find "free speech
zones" in the US disgusting.

~~~
viraptor
That's how reality works. Our ideals are that people don't murder each other.
Even if they do, it's not a reason to throw away the concept and agree that
some murdering is ok since people do it anyway.

So yeah - free speech is a thing we should aim for. Some disrespect it more
than others and Russia is definitely not a great example to follow.

