All meetings, demostrations, etc are required to request a permit or they can be deemed illegal.

It doesn’t mean they throw you in cage and torture for it but there are fines. The strategy is to keep people as inert as possible and they are doing pretty good job so far. But everything comes to an end.

So I doubt this case had to do anything with Stalin. It was something that looked political and slightly provocative and this was enough. They could as well burn Drumpf doll in public or something.

But we should strive to more definitive laws that are harder to be misused or misinterpreted. Right now it is clear how they are headed in the opposite direction.

The newest law about national Internet basically establishes single government body to control all national network infrastructure. It should be able not just see how providers are interconnected but be able to actively control routing and other aspects of connectivity. Also they want to have redundant core infrastructure services - such as DNS - to be available locally. So in case NSA “cuts off Russian Internet” it will be self-sufficient. Also they want to reduce transnational loop traffic - e.g. when someone in Moscow accesses some service in Saint-Petersburg their traffic should not go through Finland or China.

The idea seems probably good except it is technically absurd and is intended to mitigate non-existent threats. It is impossible to implement (without destroying national Internet at least), it is super expensive but if implemented at least partially it will help one thing - more effective Internet censorship which doesn’t work very well right now.

But it will be expensive and it will break things and boost censorship capabilities. Thus there are protests.

How do they think to finance such a large project?

Also this connectivity is mutual - e.g. Finland needs this redundancy as much as Russia so good luck convincing everyone to “isolate” someone.

t is pretty clear given the absurdity of some proposals. Also “siloviki” (military, intelligence and law enforcement) have special mentality and they don’t like not to be able to control things - and by controlling they usually mean “obey or else!”.

First wakeup call was with Telegram - when someone thought it was a good idea for all messaging applications to give up encryption keys to FSB so if they wanted they could intercept terrorist communications.

14 million addresses were blocked at some point, clipping a lot of legitimate services like Google.

They looked at China with their Golden Shield national filtering system and now they want something similar so they hopefully can bring these pesky Internet users to order.

[...] if you are an ISP then by law you have to put a small device on your network which connects to RosComNadzor periodically, updates the list of blocked resources and tries to connect to some of them. If it succeeds you get fined.

I am pretty sure they expect to do the same here. “We don’t quite know how but we would like to control all your network flows remotely so please make something.”

Funnily, it kind of reminds me of #Article13, which the European Union is going to pass despite the protests of the people.

leftover from the past, when secret services were essential to maintaining law and order.

I read about the youth that hailed Putin, and I wondered why. Now I read this, and still wonder what happened to them to hail this man.

Wait - the encriyption codes were given to a secret service branch (if I describe it correctly hereby; witht he FSB, the GRU, and what not), so that the whole advantage of Telegram was practically useless?

This is why states don#t work in the digital era - the internet relies on its freedom, its flexibility and self-regulated mechanism; if a state intendst o regulate it, it will automatically fail and implode.

Yes, Article 13 is a shame. I hope it will take some serious amendments. But it is at least lobbied with serious corporations (I won’t be surprised to find Google and Facebook behind it eager to sell their content filtering solutions). I hope EU will resist it. It is not just copyright issue but it also affects independence. I even wrote some letters to EU Parliament about it as the effect will be felt even here.

I am pretty sure he would win nationwide popularity contest anytime even today.

I don’t mean physical isolation but cultural - a lot of people don’t talk to foreigners, never been abroad, don’t really know or are curious what is going on in the world. But they don’t mind having a powerful leader and this image is supplied to them by TV.

Telegram publicly refused to do this for obvious reasons. By the way this also goes against our Constitution. Also the requirement is impossible for some applications such as WhatsApp where keys are generated on the fly and are unique.

Before that only techy people knew about VPN, Tor and such. But when you need a VPN to get your PlayStation working you learn quick :)

It is okay messaging app and I use it daily but it is not for really sensitive communications and it doesn’t care about privacy as much as they state. So I wouldn’t trust it with something that requires real secrecy.

[...] even Australia went bonkers with their security bill which basically requires all tech companies to help law enforcement with all technical means possible (implying hacking their own products, decrypting and all - I guess they want their own FSB). We might lose the Internet as we know it.

They are both equally terrible regarding freedom and diversity of services.

Does the OECD actually observe your country’s elections, or didn’t they get an allowance to do so?

Sigh… This kind of ignorance is what fuels nationalism and patriotism alike the most. Ignorance to the outside world and a provincial behaviour to the outside world.

It’s impossible to believe that they are going to shut down internet communication in the 21st century

What do you mean specifically?

• they claim to be open source and sometimes put a lot of emphasis on it. They are not really open source - only their protocol and client are. Servers are not.
• they are quite liberal with your contacts. They don't seem to leak them but they access them without asking much permission and upload them to their servers. It is hard to opt out of their discovery feature (when someone you know joins Telegram and you see "xxx started using Telegram!" - what if they rather wouldn't inform you?).
• they require working phone number to register and use it for further logins. It is okay for mainstream service but not for something with emphasis on privacy and security because in many countries (Russia included) you can't legally get a mobile number without identification. Plus phone number opens additional venues for tracking.
• Telegram doesn't use end-to-end encryption by default which means their servers can read your chats. Again, this is okay for mainstream app but it means if servers are compromised (hacked, seized, Telegram decides to sell your data, etc) - your data can be accessible.
• Telegram does offer end-to-end encryption but only for one-on-one chats. These encrypted chats are available on mobile devices only. They do not sync between multiple devices. There is no easy way to confirm identity of who you are speaking to. In general Telegram doesn't really seem interested in developing functionality related to encryption and security, they are clearly focused on entertainment more.
• Telegram doesn't take additional steps against possible compromise of your device. If someone seizes your phone and breaks phone encryption (if any) they might lift your Telegram profile data and use it to get access to your encrypted chats and even impersonate you for a limited time. Again it is okay for mainstream apps but secure messaging apps take steps to prevent this.
• Telegram isn't decentralized very well. It sure has a lot of entry servers which helps it to survive censorship but the core infrastructure is clearly not completely decentralized. There were outages affecting whole Europe - for a very short time but it means there is a single point of failure. Given the mentioned above closed server code who knows what these bottlenecks can be used for.

I guess the problem rather is the existence of states and legislatures

I agree. It also seems a proven tactic for many regimes trying to sway to totalitarian side. Create outside enemies, increase cultural isolation, and so on.

(when someone you know joins Telegram and you see “xxx started using Telegram!” - what if they rather wouldn’t inform you?).

they require working phone number to register and use it for further logins. It is okay for mainstream service but not for something with emphasis on privacy and security because in many countries (Russia included) you can’t legally get a mobile number without identification. Plus phone number opens additional venues for tracking.

Telegram does offer end-to-end encryption but only for one-on-one chats. These encrypted chats are available on mobile devices only. They do not sync between multiple devices. There is no easy way to confirm identity of who you are speaking to. In general Telegram doesn’t really seem interested in developing functionality related to encryption and security, they are clearly focused on entertainment more.

Telegram doesn’t take additional steps against possible compromise of your device. If someone seizes your phone and breaks phone encryption (if any) they might lift your Telegram profile data and use it to get access to your encrypted chats and even impersonate you for a limited time. Again it is okay for mainstream apps but secure messaging apps take steps to prevent this.

If something really requires additional security, privacy or deniability there are better tools.

quite often we use not what we want to use but what everyone has. Just consider cellular phones - they are horrible. Governments (and whoever who has connections or just can afford the equipment) can listen in, they track your location, your SIM can be cloned or stolen - yet most of us are walking with one in the pocket :) Although I know some people who don’t use cellular phones.

GPG is interesting because it is universal. In the simplest case you can just copy/paste your text into the app (or open any file), click encode and get encrypted text which you can send by any means you like, including printed form.

So they couldn’t legally distribute the program without being liable to criminal charges.

he couldn’t export the software so he published a book which contained source code printed. Anyone who bought the book could use that source code (by scanning the pages or just retyping it manually) and build their own program from it. American laws couldn’t restrict publishing of books as that would be considered impediment of Free Speech. It worked.

I guess that in this particular case, we smply lack a handy alternative.

People need to step off their paranoid horses.

We don’t wear body armor and take weapons to safely walk our dogs. We should have our governments making us feel as safe online.

People are afraid of encryption. Not sure about Germany but the US and Russia still have laws limiting encryption export and use.

There are lots of them - phones, smartwatches, routers, basically almost everything connectiong to the Internet nowadays encypts something. What do they “certify”? Are they checking if they can break the encryption?

Some time ago I had trouble because of these two because we used a lot of certain Cisco routers and CIA (or whoever does it there) decided they were too strong at encryption to be sold to Russia.

But you could download certain firmware upgrade from their site and they started to use encryption again. This is how money beats evil (and stupidity) :)

Governments have failed us all over the world, so why would somebody be naïve enough to still rely on the governments to take care of its people?

I wonder how many people they employed to check these devices on their hackability.