

Russia briefly bans Wikipedia over page relating to drug use - r721
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/25/russia-bans-wikipedia-drug-charas-https

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r721
Interesting opinion from Andrei Soldatov:

“This is an important case because it’s part of the general offensive against
https. Roskomnadzor and the FSB [security services] don’t know what to do with
it,” said Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and author of Red Web, a book about
the Russian internet. Soldatov said SORM, the system Russia uses for internet
surveillance, does not work with the more secure https protocol, also used by
sites such as Facebook and Gmail.

...

Soldatov speculated that the move against Wikipedia could be part of a test of
another strategy: by threatening the site with bans over single pages, the
site could be forced off https to ensure that the whole site is not affected
when only one page is banned.

Soldatov said: “There are two options for https: the first is to have access
to the data before encryption, which explains the demand to store servers in
Russia. The second is to try to force services to give up on https, which is
what is happening with Wikipedia.”

