Has anyone or is anyone working on displaying a HTML header above sites(or kind of an 'accept cookies' type of HTML UI) for Russian geoblocks that says something like "Please consider telling your government to stop the war on Ukraine".
I read earlier that Pornhub blocked Russian IPs completely and is showing a message but total blocking comes with its own downsides.
Honestly cutting Russians off from the western internet isn't a great idea. That just makes it that much easier for the Kremlin to control the narrative. It does far more to help Putin than to harm him.
Protesting against the government in Russia is a jailable offense. People have families, kids, lives. To most citizens of Russia, this war is pointless and they do not want it. But actually protesting it lands them in jail, possibly their families too. Are you suggesting that they abandon all of that just cause a website tells them that? Or is it your point that collective punishment works (it doesn't)?
Or maybe you think that if enough websites block them, people will think "well, maybe jail ain't so bad, so that i could access www.belltacospersonalsite.com"
EDIT: throttled, so reply to below comment by nope96 about calling in sick:
Call in sick -> no money -> your kids starve. Once again. It is easy to be sitting here and theorizing. Life is a lot more harsh in the former USSR.
Perhaps they decided that their children's lives are more important than your views of their regime? Until THEIR children/families/lives are threatened, their call is reasonable.
Would you sacrifice your life to save 10 people you've never heard of in a faraway place?
If you claim yes (a lie), sign your donor card and eat a bottle of aspirin. If you are truthful and you answer no, you know how Russians currently feel. They do not support this war, but the only thing they can do has no payoff and a high cost to each of them
> Until THEIR children/families/lives are threatened, their call is reasonable.
It may well come to that if this isn't dealt with inside Russia, that's the real trade-off.
> They do not support this war, but the only thing they can do has no payoff and a high cost to each of them
Not as high as the cost to Ukrainians. And that is what matters right now.
To do nothing is to effectively support the war, it may sound crude but that's how it is right now and only Russia can change that without further bloodshed, any other way forward will be far worse in the longer term. To put it bluntly: Russia never really properly got rid of their past, and now more than ever is the moment to consider that, do you want to continue to be on the wrong side of history or do you clean house? Both of these have extremely high price tags attached, the time for easy choices has run out, and some of our possible futures are no future at all.
Some words for contemplation:
"The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing"
The meaning is clear I think (even if the attribution is not), sometimes inaction is also an action.
Even 1% of Russian male population is a number bigger than Russia's combat troops number, and 10% will overwhelm the full force of the military.
If Moscow will suffer a nuclear strike by NATO to decapitate the Russian government, and prevent a coordinated first strike, these people will have no kids to care about.
The advancing crowd on the video been shot at by 5 RPGs, hail of sniper, and machinegun fire just few minutes prior, and they still routed the government special forces with just sticks, and rocks.
I don't see that happening. If they would do that it would instantly annihilate any support for NATO the world over. First user of nuclear weapons today is going to go down in history - assuming there will be anybody left to write it - as worse than Hitler.
It has in the eyes of some. Me included. That should have never happened and I don't for a second buy all the learned opinions about it, it was mass murder and as far as I am concerned it tainted the USA forever.
well, as the "replacement of imported goods and services with domestic equivalents" which Russia usually tries to do in response to sanctions, i guess Russia will have to dump the anti-gay laws and legalize same-sex marriage :) (the original joke is by Zelensky back in 2014 in response to Russian forces in Crimea - in Russian https://youtu.be/_zMEO6IiokU?t=185 )
I feel bad about all the attention this is getting. It happened because I asked myself "what can I do to help Ukrainians", and frankly it's costing me peanuts -- Tarsnap doesn't have a huge number of Ukrainian users. (As far as I'm aware, at least, hence my emailing the tarsnap-announce list to encourage other Ukrainians to identify themselves to me.) I didn't mean for this to turn into a publicity stunt!
But while I'm writing -- if you're looking for something you can do to help: Please contact your elected representatives and encourage them to allow visa-free travel to Ukrainian citizens. Ireland has already done this (https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/00aef-minister-mcentee-a...) and I wrote to my MP yesterday to encourage Canada to follow suit. This war is going to displace millions of civilians and while Putin's threats of nuclear war may prevent NATO from defending Ukraine, at least we can step up to help the refugees.
Nice gesture but I don't think unilaterally implementing policies on the basis of someone's speculated nationality -- based on analysis of their private data -- is the role of private companies
As well intentioned as this seems, it strikes me as a bit tone deaf. Ukrainians are hiding in bomb shelters, not backing up bulk data. I struggle to understand in what manner this helps.
You're struggling to understand because you misunderstand the situation and are probably relying on the HN title instead of reading the 3 short paragraphs in the link.
1) 45,000,000 people are not in bomb shelters.
2) Reading the very short post in the link, you can see that this is more about not deleting the data of Ukrainians that is already on tarsnap if they aren't able to provide payment because of the war.
> The last thing I want to do is delete what may be someone's
last copy of important data because they can't pay a bill while running for their lives.
This is charitable of cpervica and tarsnap; that said, for many people, it's probably easier and safer (and you'll receive greater legal protection, long-term) to proceed by uploading your (even pre-encrypted) documents to Google Drive or a similar cloud-based storage system.
Don't get me wrong - I like encryption and pushing the envelope for what's possible in terms of keeping content private for the general public. But I get a weird sense that this is like some kind of phishing-for-valuable-(meta)data expedition.
> But I get a weird sense that this is like some kind of phishing-for-valuable-(meta)data expedition.
RTFA. This isn’t a sales pitch, he’s forgiving payments for those who have more important things to worry about than checking the expiry date on their CC.
It is clearly stated that this is a gesture to existing customers who would like to keep their backups but can't pay right now, or even think about that.
It was problematic of me to phrase this as potential phishing, I'm sorry.
To attempt to explain - although it could be an excuse: I interpreted this situation as one that could lead to potentially less-familiar users onboarding at a risky and dangerous point-in-time, and that that could lead to the introduction of additional hazards.
The nature of the service as a highly privacy-preserving and technical one, I feel, could mean that practice and care are required (ideally, during a less risky time) in order for users to learn the nature of the system and how to use it appropriately in their own environment(s).
(self-replying to note that as of 2022-02-26 00:14 UTC, I'm not aware of tarsnap providing, for example, an onion address for source-obscured content upload)
I read earlier that Pornhub blocked Russian IPs completely and is showing a message but total blocking comes with its own downsides.