# Another blocked website

Temporarily (as of 2022-10-27) not publishing these notes, since many seemingly random websites are blocked for no apparent or discoverable reason (possibly based on keywords), and I don't want this one to be blocked. I am also not sure how safe it is for me; things are pretty bad (and keep worsening, as they did since the beginning of this document) now, dissent is prosecuted. So it is paused for now, until things will improve. There is plenty of information on the situation (including mass surveillance and censorship) in Russia online anyway: Wikipedia (censorship in Russia, media freedom in Russia, mass surveillance in Russia, human rights in Russia, among other articles) and Roskomsvoboda (including 10 years of Runet history, which is pretty close to what I used to compose here, though now it is blocked in Russia as well) are good starting points, along with Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, possibly RBC and Kommersant in Russian for general news/context. For criticizm and opposition media, see "foreign agents" and "undesirable organizations", including those listed as mass media in Russia and opposition to Vladimir <omitted-keyword> in Russia. One may also find similarities to the current situation in Trotsky's and Lenin's works, in dystopian novels, and other historical episodes. Plenty of interesting historical materials and modern studies of authoritorian regimes around, too. There are Levada Center and Russian Field for opinion polls, which seem to match my personal observations, along with international and opposition press coverage: they seem to do a pretty good job.

As for the initial subject of these notes, the IT-/network-related issues -- to sum it up, many websites are blocked, including past temporary Wikipedia and GitHub blocks, many smaller but nice ones, often random ones (I personally ran into hundreds of those, just with regular web browsing of non-political and mostly technologies-related materials), sometimes collateral damage while trying to block others by blocking whole subnets, pretty much everything about human rights or criticizing the government (including BBC, DW), and large websites containing any information they don't like (including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter). Proxy and VPN services, and many Tor bridges, plenty of decent mail servers are blocked, some XMPP servers. By 2024, there is protocol-based blocking of WireGuard and IPsec. This started approximately in 2012, with classical "think of the children" and "terrorists" by conservative/religious/monarchist/right-wing/pro-government/ultranationalist people, each time with assurances that it won't be abused. While mass surveillance reached the point where they preventively detain people with the help of facial recognition, require data retention from ISPs and backdoors in major online services, and so on. And there are the events of 2022--2024 on top, whith are dangerous to mention. Generally, somehow the Russian history keeps following the repeated "and then it got worse" formula. Hopefully this time around it will leave plenty of materials to study in the future, and to avoid repetition of such a mess. Meantime, The Basic Principles of War Propaganda and similar descriptions seem to be on point.

As of April 2023, I already had occasional issues with using services hosted at Hetzner, though it turned out to be just Rostelecom's technical issues, as probably were the previously spotted issues with seemingly random servers (which actually were with Hetzner servers, too): Rostelecom is peering with Hetzner via dataix.eu (whose NOC is actually helpful, replies quickly, and their address is written right on the website; they even followed through and wrote once again upon noticing that the issue is resolved), and the issue is that larger IP packets (more than 1486 bytes) with DF bit set are dropped, with ICMP PTB ("packet too big") messages rarely being sent back (though sometimes it does happen), as can be seen with `ping 157.90.29.18 -M do -s 1459` or `traceroute -F 157.90.29.18 1487`. Apparently it happens at Rostelecom's routers placed at DATAIX (178.18.227.8, 178.18.225.153). Rostelecom support's first line occasionally claims that it is not their zone of responsibility, but three attempts and a couple of hours of chatting with a clueless person and fighting their buggy web chat led to a ticket being filed, and in a couple more days the issue was fixed. Meantime, as a temporary workaround, at first I had set the MTU manually (`ip link set enp6s0 mtu 1486`), and then by adding "26,1486" into the DHCP options my home router advertises, so that other devices (including the phone) pick it up as well. Same thing happened with wikipedia.org (91.198.174.192), also with 87.226.133.33 on the path, and then 80.249.209.121 (apparently also a Rostelecom's router at an IX, but this one is at AMS-IX) responds with ICMP PTB message, but rarely. FWIW, network issues happen with local (already backdoored) servers as well, such as imap.yandex.ru (77.88.21.125), so maybe those are not even related to censorship.

As of October 2023, TCP connections to Hetzner from VympelCom (Beeline) in general behave oddly: after a few packets, TCP packets from the server to a client are replaced with RST ones, while nothing gets through to the server, and mtr shows loss between VympelCom routers: 10.10.31.141 and 62.105.150.254. XMPP connections fail consistently. After contacting the tech support (which is similar to that of Rostelecom: had to spend a while explaining that I do not have issues with SMS, then they called back and I learned that the ticket was filed as a Wi-Fi tethering issue; reaching somebody tech-savvy and capable of understanding the issue is hard), it was eventually fixed.

If I will disappear from the Internet, I think at this point (after August 2023) it is quite likely to be caused by the government actions (heavy isolation, Internet blocks in particular, or other oppression), rather than the usual causes such as being hit by a bus. Perhaps I can pretend that I live elsewhere in Europe sometime in the past few centuries then.

As a note on technological remedies (proxying, encryption, etc), I think that some people are overly optimistic about those making censorship and other interference by state impossible, since governments can do things including network protocol and host whitelisting, in some cases not letting citizens to use the Internet and computers at all, but such remedies do seem to complicate enforcement of unjust laws overnight, perhaps sharing that property with democratic insituations (which can similarly be dismantled, but that takes time).