Russia's VPN Crackdown Caused Bank Outages, Telegram Founder Says (yahoo.com) 52
Russia's "great crackdown" on VPNs — and a clampdown on Telegram's messaging platform — had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It "triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram's billionaire founder Pavel Durov said."
"Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VPNs," Durov said Saturday in a post on Telegram. "The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure; cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday." Attempts on Friday to limit VPN use could have sparked the disruption affecting banking apps, The Bell and other Russian media reported, citing industry sources who weren't identified.
The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia's communications watchdog, according to the reports, with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability... Separately, payments for Apple Inc.'s app store and other services became unavailable in Russia from April 1, the US company said on its website, without saying why. Earlier, RBC newswire reported that the Digital Development Ministry had asked mobile operators to disable top-ups, which could help limit VPN use....
Durov, who's being investigated in Russia for allegedly aiding terrorist activity, compared the situation in his home country to Iran, where similar restrictions prompted widespread adoption of VPNs instead of the intended shift to state-backed messaging apps. "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters," said Durov, who has lived in Dubai and France in recent years. "The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions," he wrote, adding that Telegram would continue adapting to make its traffic harder to detect and block.
The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia's communications watchdog, according to the reports, with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability... Separately, payments for Apple Inc.'s app store and other services became unavailable in Russia from April 1, the US company said on its website, without saying why. Earlier, RBC newswire reported that the Digital Development Ministry had asked mobile operators to disable top-ups, which could help limit VPN use....
Durov, who's being investigated in Russia for allegedly aiding terrorist activity, compared the situation in his home country to Iran, where similar restrictions prompted widespread adoption of VPNs instead of the intended shift to state-backed messaging apps. "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters," said Durov, who has lived in Dubai and France in recent years. "The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions," he wrote, adding that Telegram would continue adapting to make its traffic harder to detect and block.
Slack Huddles (Score:5, Informative)
Slack Huddles have also been taken out for most of the past month too. Slack in general still works, but huddles see people unable to join or continuously losing their connection. It also might be ISP specific (some users can use huddles, while the majority cannot). The general consensus amongst my Russian team members is that it's mostly about Telegram and broad blocking or filtering of AWS IP address ranges. Maybe it's something else, it's hard to say.
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Could it be that some people just want to get work done and not get stuck in interminable video conferences?
"Whoops! My network connection just went down." (Holding Ethernet plug in hand.)
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Cynical, but also incorrect. The team members ask to switch to Teams, which they were surprised to discover has better audio quality (but we agree, the rest of the app is shitter). We also don't do much with video, just audio and screen sharing. Slack is better for collaborative screen sharing.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely (Score:5, Insightful)
Under Putin and his cronies, Russia has been drifting towards North Korea under the pretext of fighting with NATO. Money that could have been spent on education, science, healthcare and even space has been diverted to the war, where a new group of people are now stealing state money even more proficiently than before. With normal state contracts, there is at least some oversight; in war, you can steal everything and blame it on anything you want.
The internet is just one of many ways in which freedoms are being restricted. The war on VPNs exists for the sole purpose of controlling all information inflows and outflows, and even communications for its own citizens. Years ago, Viber, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were banned, and more recently, WhatsApp, Wire and, to a large extent, Telegram followed. Nowadays, you're expected to only use the state-developed and controlled Max messenger, where anything you say goes straight to the Kremlin.
Funnily enough, Putin doesn't stop there. He knows how privatisation was carried out in the early '90s, so the oligarchs who helped him rise to power and increase his authority, ultimately allowing him to rule for life, are no longer safe. They can lose everything they've grabbed in an instant under any pretext. That's been happening for years now.
Anyone who has opposed the government has either been physically eliminated, such as Navalny and Nemtsov, or jailed. The rest have escaped the country and now live in exile. If you dare to say anything against the war, the government or Putin himself, it is tantamount to treason and is punished by conscription into the army, extermination or up to 15 years in prison. The police are very well paid and on the government payroll, so they will beat the hell out of you if you try to hold a rally alone in any public square in a major Russian city. Anyone who still criticizes the government publicly is branded a foreign agent.
And the Russian people continue to endure despite their quality of life falling through the floor, runaway inflation, an inability to buy foreign goods and services, an inability to travel freely, and having to deal with an infinite number of flight delays for those who can still afford to travel to other countries.
I'm struggling to understand who still supports any of this. It's not enough to be a vatnik anymore; you have to be a literally insane vatnik.
It's quite sad that the West could have intervened in the years leading up to the Bolotnaya Square case, but decided that the Russians could figure it out themselves. The result is an authoritarian mafia state that is destroying its own country while continuing to funnel most of its profits to the West. Most of these people raise their children in the West, send them to Western universities and the kids barely speak Russian themselves.
If you ever thought that this was all being done to make Russia truly independent, it's all a sham and a faÃade. The real foreign agents who are doing everything to make Russia less competitive reside in the Kremlin.
Russia rivals Norway and the UAE when it comes to natural resources. This vast wealth could have been used to transform Russia into a literal paradise on earth. Instead, however, it is being spent on destroying a neighbour that dared to assert its allegiance to the West.
It's pure insanity.
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However, it was Obama and Biden that laid the groundwork for the war against Ukraine
This site needs to filter out AI-generated nonsense. It's both hilarious and annoying to have these hallucinations posted.
It's especially annoying when the AI can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of research and read The Budapet Memorandum [harvard.edu]. We know AI can't understand what it means, but it could at least scan it into its database.
Re: And soon for sure we will be in (Score:2)
To be fair, when Clinton and Yeltsin were running things, we thought the Cold War was finally over. We could focus on a new decade of globalization (a more palatable name for imperialism).
We had 20-30 to readdress the errors of the past adminstations but recall two things:
1. The media did not bring it up to the American people again
2. The legislature and political parties in the US did not make an issue of it.
Perhaps we pulled the wool over our own eyes. But it is useless to blame on leader or another for d
Re:And soon for sure we will be in (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it was Putin that laid the groundwork for the war against Ukraine. There was no enabling of Iran, you are probably referring to Obama relaxing the controls on Iranian money for the JCPOA. Then la Presidenta came into office, canceled the JCPOA because it had Obama's signature on it. He said he would replace it with something better. It took him until this second term when we found out that the better replacement meant $4+/gal. gasoline, Iran having de facto control of the Hormuz straight, and an even more entrenched Iranian regime. And now with the high price of oil, Putin and Iran are getting a lot of revenue, especially since Iran is cutting deals with countries and shipping their oil, and Putin is doing what he does best, kleptocracy.
It seems el Bunko figured that all that pay-for-play with Arabs would cause them to support his war. They didn't and now they feel jilted because it is clear to them it was only pay-for, the play sort of got lost in el Bunko's dementia. And his dementia meant he was easy pickins' for Netanyahu, although he has always been an easy mark.
It seems dimbulb figured Iran was just like Venezuela. He was deluded on so many accounts. He saw all that oil for easy deals. However, most of Venezuela's oil, if any of his sycophantic bozos cared to check, is like tar and good for asphalt and not much else without a lot of processing. It doesn't bubble up from the ground either. To get it you need to pump the oil field full of chemicals and steam. This is way in the meeting he had with Big Oil executives, they were highly unenthusiastic about V.'s oil.
Iran's oil will be also unavailable. He thinks American companies will simply stick straws into the ground and suck it out. However, another reason the Big Oil execs were unenthusiastic was that they didn't want to get into any politics in V., which would be necessary to get any of that black tar goo. And what Big Oil company is going to be dumb enough to help steal Iran's oil when they'd be under constant attack.
Remember the first rule of el Bunko: he destroys everything he touches.
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Fuck ACs (Score:3)
Bullshit like this is why anonymous posting shouldn't exist.
Re: Fuck ACs (Score:2)
Right, that's why my karma is maxed and you have to post anonymously because it actually makes your posts more visible.
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Roll that tape forward 1-2 years and you will have described the U.S. under el Bunko.
Re: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolu (Score:2)
And yet still be beating the US.
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And Iran will be banging rocks together trying to work out fire
Those who would give up freedom and security to attack an adversary who isn't even a threat are stupid fucks.
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well they're not a threat if you keep stopping them from making nukes.
Netanyahu, is that you? Was this lie about nukes they never had promised to you 3,000 years ago?
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Uranium is not a nuclear weapon. HTH, though I know it won't.
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Perhaps because it's not as bad as some media comment
Fuck (Score:2)
Why does Donald Trump swear at religious extremists? Just the candor that he takes against them justifies fighting in their minds.
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wonder who the good guys are...
Not anyone who is bombing schools, Nazi.
I will remind you that the Nazis were inspired by the USA. There is no universe in which the USA is the good guys.
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Anyone sane would just be trying to hold out until midterms, at which point things may change quickly. If not until Trump's term is over when things will definitely change.
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Re: Fuck (Score:2)
How centralized is the Russian Great Firewall? (Score:2)
Overload? It's probably an overly-excited inference, but that sounds like a basket with too many eggs in it. Anyone know?
"Ukraine, if you're listening..."
Typical IT ticket (Score:1)
Coming to a state near you (Score:2)
Maybe Minnesota should consider the effects of their brain dead legislature.
Idle hands are the devils workshop (Score:3)
I'm not so sure it is even in Putler's interests to be doing this. I assume he wants to ratchet up exposure to regime propaganda and deny the ability to use technology to organize opposition to his regime.
Yet the immediate impact of widely unpopular bans coinciding with embarrassing war related losses, exhaustion and economic decline will only trigger the politicization of a population that will increasingly cut against him.