How Roskomnadzor unsuccessfully tries to block telegrams
margarita virova
APRIL 13 Tagansky district court made a decision on the claim Roskomnadzor about blocking Telegram messenger. The department began blocking in the morning of April 16: "fighting", as they are called by the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, has been going on for the third day. Currently, telecom operators have blocked more than 19 million IP addresses, which has hurt resources that have nothing to do with the conflict between the FSB and Pavel Durov. At the same time, the messenger itself continues to work - some users report that it can be accessed without a proxy and VPN. We offer a look at the first (rather absurd) results of the struggle.
Millions of blocked IPs
They decided to banish the instant messenger from the Russian Internet by blocking IP addresses - on Tuesday the number of blacklisted addresses exceeded 19 million. At the request of the ministry, telecom operators blocked, including the addresses of Amazon and Google cloud servers, which led to interruptions in the work of websites and online stores, which literally accidentally came under fire. The owners of the affected resources say that they suffered real losses as a result of the actions of the RKN. At the moment, everything that happens is the largest locking operation. By noon on April 18, the number of IP addresses listed in the registry of banned sites dropped to 16 million.
Accidentally unblocked Kavkaz Center, Sputnik and Pogrom, Rutracker
During the operation, sites that were blocked for a long time were available, among them the torrent tracker rutracker.org, the websites Sputnik and Pogrom and Kasparov.ru, as well as the portal Kavkaz Center, recognized as extremist. With fresh columns of Egor Prosvirnin and pirated content, users could not enjoy for long - all sites are currently only available via VPN again, but the actions of the department have become even more reminiscent of a game in which you need to beat moles with a hammer.
Threaten to ban VPN
On April 16, Roskomnadzor sent letters to proxy servers and VPN owners providing access to prohibited resources: the agency warns of upcoming blockages, citing "extremism and calls for riots" as grounds. The full text of the letter was published by the owner of Vee Security, Alexander Litreyev. Meanwhile, Pavel Durov promised to pay grants to administrators of proxies and VPNs that provide block bypass. April 13 it became known about the termination of the work of the popular free application Opera VPN - but this is still an isolated case.
Explanations of Alexander Zharov
The head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, gave a great interview to Izvestia, in which, in particular, he claims that the reports on blocking "respectable" resources are exaggerated, seriously compares Russian Internet control methods with Chinese and continues to accuse Durov and his team of aiding terrorism - and even gracefully recalls the "criminal genius of Professor Moriarty". During the conversation, they raised a long-standing proposal to block Facebook in Russia: the site has not yet fulfilled the requirements of Roskomnadzor for localizing data from Russian users. The possible blocking of the social media network was also talked about as a real threat.
Everyone again fell in love with Durov
It took less than a week for the creator of Telegram to become a hero of resistance and movement for free Internet. Pavel Durov calls the actions of the FSB and Roskomnadzor unconstitutional, draws the symbol of "Digital Resistance", promises to support the owners of proxy servers and VPN and continue to defend the Russians right to privacy of correspondence. Edward Snowden is delighted - as are Internet users who do not want to part with a convenient and promising messenger.
RKN website is unavailable
Earlier, Roskomnadzor reported that the site was subjected to DDoS attacks, which were successfully repulsed. Nevertheless, the site of the RKN is still unavailable, and a joke from 2012 about how Roskomnadzor blocked itself can be uncovered: this morning, Internet providers received letters asking them to restart the "Auditor" complex, which is used to monitor sites from the banned registry - supposed that it hung due to the huge number of blocked IP addresses. Also in the letters, Roskomnadzor asked "hands" to remove the blocking of two addresses on which the "Auditor" is located.
Telegram continues to work
Despite the fact that Roskomnadzor, along with Internet providers, is working hard, the messenger continues to work: most people use methods to bypass the blocking, for some (for example, Beeline subscribers report this) Telegram works directly. The authors of popular Telegram channels report that the number of views is comparable to what is typed on ordinary days, some of them have increased coverage, in general, the activity indicators after blocking the messenger only increased. The biggest losses at the moment are in the termination of broadcasting channels of the federal media.