
Russia bans Reddit - HillRat
https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/08/12/russia-bans-reddit
======
gtirloni
I wouldn't read too much between the lines. There are countless examples of a
judge somewhere not getting his/her request for a single page take-down and
then ordering whole websites to be blocked.

~~~
hendry
You can't block a HTTPS site based on path

[http://dabase.com/blog/Centralisation_censorship_side_effect...](http://dabase.com/blog/Centralisation_censorship_side_effect/)

------
r721
Here's the unofficial mirror of a banned sites list:

[https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i](https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i)

The commit with the reddit url:

[https://github.com/zapret-
info/z-i/commit/3685d96a7e7bce2e3b...](https://github.com/zapret-
info/z-i/commit/3685d96a7e7bce2e3bd2c54c0bf6a33933b39b4b)

>198.41.208.137 | 198.41.208.138 | 198.41.208.139 | 198.41.208.140 |
198.41.208.141 | 198.41.208.142 | 198.41.208.143 | 198.41.209.136 |
198.41.209.137 | 198.41.209.138 | 198.41.209.139 | 198.41.209.140 |
198.41.209.141 | 198.41.209.142 |
198.41.209.143;www.reddit.com;[http://www.reddit.com/r/rudrugs/comments/1derq9/;](http://www.reddit.com/r/rudrugs/comments/1derq9/;)

~~~
minivan
Interestingly, the post is 2 years old, has one single comment by the OP. The
user didn't have any other contributions to Reddit other than that.

The sub itself was created by the same user two years ago and had no activity.

~~~
josu
And he just posted why:

>In Russia, there is a law which allow Roskomnadzor, Russian censorship
agency, to block any website without court rulling. Two years ago I tested how
RKN react to abuse on popular websites/crazy abuses. On of that websites was
Reddit.

>One thing I learned is that RKN doesn't want to block popular websites. They
respond me that this content is illegal and they blocked it, but they weren't.
It was on 05/21/2013\. On 10st Aug 2015 they posted a call to help them
contact Reddit administration to official VK page. Funny thing, but they
called Psilocybe a plant. Several hours ago they reported that Reddit is
blocked in Russia. Seems like things changed.

>How Reddit is blocked? Fully. As Reddit switched to HTTPS, there is no way to
block special page.

>Will I remove this post? No. I also think that Reddit administration needs to
do nothing. This is important issue on freedom of speech, and only RKN want to
violate it.

>BTW, this post is a guide for indoor growing Psilocybe mushrooms in Russian.
I'm not sure if any people saw this before blocking, but if you are here and
you can read Russian, now you know to grow some shrooms, thanks to RKN.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rudrugs/comments/3grm4d/tfw_you_are...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rudrugs/comments/3grm4d/tfw_you_are_the_reason_to_block_reddit_in_russia/)

------
jedberg
> On August 10, Russian censors complained that they were unable to contact
> Reddit's administrators

I'm going to guess this is either totally false, or if they did reach out to
reddit, they didn't make it at all clear they were a legitimate Russian
government organization.

~~~
nadams
> I'm going to guess this is either totally false

I tried to contact Reddit administration once - no response. They probably
either ignore uninteresting emails (read: any email except where people want
to give them money) - or it was labeled as spam and went into the bitbucket.

After the latest reddit drama - this isn't surprising. When you fire someone
who handles major publicity without telling anyone (I'm sure people knew and
knew why - but didn't want to say anything) - there is definitely a
communication problem in your company. And this is not a "sorry we will work
for better communication in the future" issue - it's a problem where they need
to identify the problem and fix it immediately.

~~~
Guvante
Publicly accessible email addresses are nearly impossible to manage. Reddit
has 20 million unique visitors per month. If in a given month 1% of users send
an email in a month, they are receiving an email an average of once every 13
seconds. Assuming you can read an email every second that is still three full
time employees just reading email to keep up.

~~~
nadams
> Publicly accessible email addresses are nearly impossible to manage.

That's hard to believe when many companies offer a support@company.com,
twitter, facebook, phone or other means of public contact.

And why would every visitor contact the owner of the website? Have you ever
sent email or wanted to send email to Comcast, Microsoft or any other
interesting company? I would imagine only a small number of people would ever
contact or even want to contact reddit administration (simply because the
subreddits are managed by other people). And I'm sure 90% of those who contact
reddit could be replied with pre-typed message of "We have no control of the
subreddits - please contact the subreddit moderators".

~~~
bad_user
> _That 's hard to believe when many companies offer a support@company.com,
> twitter, facebook, phone or other means of public contact_

Personally I couldn't find Twitter's support email. Tried out this page, but
all I'm getting is a bunch of contact forms:
[https://support.twitter.com/forms](https://support.twitter.com/forms) ;
Facebook does this too and here's the thing - they've got an automated system
that aggregate issues and bubble up popular ones to their support crew. The
long tail of that support queue is most probably completely ignored.

------
cryoshon
This is a long shot, but my hunch is that there's probably something political
going on here.

Reddit is typically the target of large scale pro-Russian propaganda
shilling/submissions, and, as far as I know, not well-used by Russians. With
that in mind, Russia isn't actually that serious about its "war on drugs"\--
it's probable that this was just a cover story.

~~~
gukov
It's probably due to /r/UkrainianConflict/

~~~
Uhhrrr
I followed that sub closely in its early days (I was worried about World War
III) and I can see why Russia wouldn't like it. Pro-Russian propaganda gets
called out pretty quickly. Pro-Western propaganda gets called out, too, but
not as much.

~~~
sgfc
It spilled over into /u/MilitaryPorn as well. We had at least four guys from
over there battling it out hard for a while with both posts and comments.

------
kushti
Reddit works fine for me(Russia/Yota provider), what is the target url?
Everything I can find for (Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe
site:reddit.com) works for me as well, but can't find that exact title in
search engines. Interesting, how bureaucrats finding such stuff? :)

~~~
thaumaturgy
There are posts in the most popular Reddit thread for this article
([https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3gqreu/](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3gqreu/))
explaining that the blocking varies from provider to provider. Some are only
blocking it on the DNS level, so users are able to use Google DNS to
circumvent the block. Others aren't bothering with the block at all. Still
others are incompetently trying to block only a single URL (which doesn't work
with https).

Saying "it works for me!" is rarely a very thorough diagnostic.

However there's also a lot of criticism for Meduza, the source reporting this.

~~~
r721
Meduza is usually criticized by pro-Putin people because they are quite
oppositionally-inclined:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meduza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meduza)

"Meduza is run by a team of around 20 journalists who resigned from their jobs
at Lenta.ru following Galina Timchenko’s unexpected removal from her post by
the website’s owner and Vladimir Putin ally, the oligarch Alexander Mamut"

------
mullen
If they think a recipe for growing mushrooms is bad, then they should not look
at the rest of the site.

~~~
asddubs
I think they may have, but thought that a recipe for growing mushrooms sounded
better as a reason

~~~
knn
true - they're probably aware of the streisand effect

------
xentronium
"The worse the better": I'd rather government banned whole internet except
kremlin.ru and everyone and their dog learned how to use proxies and vpns.

Other than that, as I noted in the other comment thread, I wouldn't read too
much into this event. Roskomnadzor is a ridiculously stupid organization, I
doubt they even knew reddit is a Big Deal in the West.

~~~
mirimir
I gather that VPN services are already quite popular in Russia.

------
stephengillie
That's quite a broad "ban-hammer" they're using to swat this fly.

I wonder how many Russians use Reddit. When Googling for that info, I only
found links to /r/russia and news articles about "Russia threatening to block
Reddit about Marijuana tips" which obviously predate the blurb in this thread.
Does anyone have some statistics?

~~~
greggarious
Reddit uses HTTPS so there's no way to tell which individual subreddit a user
is visiting.

~~~
stephengillie
I'm sure Reddit has a way of telling. :) I don't know if they make their stats
public.

------
AustinMunday
People are going to find a way to do/make drugs. If it is not reddit it will
be somewhere else. I think the 'drugs are bad' is a ploy to get an american
company out of Russia

------
ck2
I have a better question - how did they ban it?

Is all internet traffic in Russia portal-ed like it is in China?

Imagine the US government trying to block an overseas website, without
physically taking the server they would have little ability to do so, there
are too many alternate routes.

~~~
r721
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia#Blacklist_law)

------
iamcurious
And so, the balkanization of the internet continues.

~~~
blumkvist
This is like the first time I've seen this term used correctly.

I'm from the balkans btw.

------
Devid2014
Sounds just like "Russia bans Internet". Because Reddit is just a part of
Internet where you can find almost anything. What is the next step to ban
Wikipedia ?

~~~
maximsch2
"A list of Wikipedia pages banned by Roscomnadzor" (link in Russian):
[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%A1%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%8B_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B8,_%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%B2_%D0%95%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80_%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%89%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85_%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2)

------
logicallee
This is kind of besides the point, but do you have any idea what banning
reddit would do to America's GDP?

~~~
jotm
Yeah, banning Reddit, Imgur, Twitter, Instagram, Gawker Media, Facebook and
Hacker News would probably solve the national debt problem AND world hunger in
a few months :-D

------
wonkaWonka
Agreeing to serve an Error 451[1] page to Russian IP addresses, for the
offending content in question only, would be a cute resolution to all this.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451)

~~~
xentronium
JFYI, LiveJournal, Github and many other sites are already doing this.

Edit: Slight correction, Github responds with HTTP 200 and a "banned by your
government" stub, lj.rossia.org does the same (shows the 451 code in their
message though) and livejournal uses 404 code for the "banned by your
government" stub. I figure it's because it's not yet in the http standard or
something.

------
SirFatty
And they'll be better for it (the Russians)...

~~~
Retra
That is really judging a book by its cover.

~~~
rawTruthHurts
No, it's not.

------
cpmsmith
>"We assume that the website is simply understaffed during the summer
holidays[...]" officials said publicly.

That definitely smells like they didn't try too hard to get in contact.

------
mikkom
I really, really hope the official russian government trolls can't access it
either.

------
EGreg
Another consequence of centralization. It's like the Hamburg court to use
Germany -> EU -> Ireland to pressure Facebook to change its real names policy,
or pressuring ISPs to ban it.

Can't ban wordpress!

------
geff82
Cool. I think it is some kind of special award one can win: being blocked by
an authoritarian government. Kudos to Reddit. Long live free speech.

------
joesmo
Seems just like an excuse for Putin to censor dissenters.

------
alrayyes
In Soviet Russia Reddit bans you!

Sorry, had to be said....

~~~
neverminder
In America Reddit bans you, in Soviet Russia you ban Reddit.

------
ajuc
"Russia" is also killing opposition politicians and independent journalists,
sponsoring extremist parties in EU, and invading neighboring countries.

Censoring reddit isn't really significant to be honest.

------
Supersaiyan_IV
They issued the ban notice shortly after this news story became popular:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3gl0pg/missile_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3gl0pg/missile_parts_at_mh17_crash_site/)
I'm not trying to ring any bells. We all know what agendas are in action here
anyway.

~~~
kushti
The link you've provided works fine from Russia(Yota provider, the big one).
Try a proxy with a Russian IP by yourself. So you're wrong

~~~
Supersaiyan_IV
Seven Sky ISP has banned reddit. So, I guess we're both right.
[https://i.imgur.com/U8Vvkhl.png](https://i.imgur.com/U8Vvkhl.png)

------
curiousjorge
tragic, we won't be seeing russian reddit bots anymore. advertisers probably
don't get a lot of russian customers so I fail to see reddit being impacted.

------
sexbomb
_Пожалуйста_. As if "Russia" (read: Putin) could even begin to care about his
proud, loyal fellow citizens of the Motherland figuring out how to grow their
own weed. (Beyond the extent to which it might cut into his Chechen pals'
profit channels, that is).

/r/UkraineConflict and the various LGBT fora are far more likely to have been
the real drivers behind the decision. They just don't want to come out and say
it.

------
codeshaman
[from TFA]: The offending content was a page titled, "Minimal and Reliable
Methods for Growing Psilocybe Mushrooms."

It's no suprise that they would ban the whole of Reddit rather then let people
grow and eat psychedelic mushrooms.

It's just a testament to how dangerous they think this is for their current
regime.

Drugs, especially psychedelics, are antidotes for brainwashing and they know
it and won't allow it.

I strongly believe that if more people took psychedelics in Russia, the regime
would melt away and young people would start inventing crazy cool stuff and
organizing Burning Man's instead of listening to state propaganda and
preparing for WW3.

Theories aside, I'm really sorry for the people in Russia who are affected by
the decisions of these zombie officials and each time I see something like
this, I feel a greater need for a decentralized web which would be impossible
(or extremely difficult) to block.

(If you're working on something like a decentralized/p2p web/Internet/content
distribution platform), let me know, I'd love to join you.

~~~
maxxxxx
Somehow I doubt that in Russia young people "listen to state propaganda and
prepare WW3". If you believe this you are probably victim of other state
propaganda.

~~~
codeshaman
I speak Russian and I read and watch Russian media from time to time.

I'm sure not all young people are buying into the official propaganda.

Unfortunately 80%+ approval rating for Putin shows that most of the people,
including young ones, are believers in the same state-produced message: fear
and caution, revisionism, nationalism, conservationism, etc, etc.

And the subject of WW3 is discussed quite frequently, on talk shows on state
tv channels.

~~~
SXX
80%+ approval only saying that 60%+ of country population don't care about
politics. At all. People have too many other problems to worry about: how to
pay bills, where to work to get money for food and few others needs (like to
buy expensive clothes / iphone / etc). Unfortunately very little percentage of
country population have even rough understanding what things like "democracy"
or "liberalism" mean, but this is expected because there was never democracy
in Russia. Pretty sure that North Korea would have 100% approval rating for
almost same reasons.

Also to be clear I don't mean that no one affected by propaganda. Pretty sure
that like 70% of people may actually agree on many things shocking for average
european.

Though very few of these brainwashed people will actually go defend Putin
regime in case something happen. Likely it's about the same amount of people
you may see participate protests in past years.

------
mlvljr
Reddit works well from here -- and the rest of them (github, wayback machine)
as well. Hint: most of this sites have actually been blocked, then unblocked
multiple times!

If anyone wants a wager on whether Reddit is accessible through most ISPs in a
month, ping me :D

