As a Russian, I hate it when people do this. It's extremely annoying when you just click some random interesting-looking link from HN or Reddit or Twitter only to be greeted by a 403 or a connection timeout. Then you turn your VPN on, and magically, it loads just fine.
For many services, the expected value of letting people from Russia access their service is negative.
The reality is that Russia contributes a large portion of hacking attempts while providing very little to no revenue for the service.
At the end of the day it is just business, and sometimes letting countries access your service is bad for the bottom line.
I think you and the person above you can both have valid concerns at the same time. If someone said "~50% of theft is from <insert minority group> while they only account for 5% of my business, so I'm not going to let them in the door", assuming the absence of social and legal consequences which would realistically occur, it could be argued that it's the right move for their "bottom line" or whatever. Does that mean it's right, or good, or equitable?
Of course at the same time, if you hold yourself to a much higher standard than what's socially or legally acceptable, there's the inevitable fact that your competitors aren't. So it's a fine balance.
If <minority group> is covered by the same jurisdiction as <business>, then it's not close to a 1:1 comparison.
It's perfectly reasonable to not do business with people in countries that support piracy. And I'm referring to the Arrg/EyePatch type and the Buh/KeyboardWarrior type. In the end, it's a choice. If you don't have a legal means to deal with illicit activity, and blocking mostly works, there you go.
Your country is a bad global citizen. If they started taking action against the groups trying to break into my systems every minute of every day then I wouldn't need to block the entire jurisdiction.
Geoblocking all sanctioned countries was the best thing I ever did
I am powerless to prevent even my local county from voting to steal my income to fund nonsense welfare, so I can only imagine how much less hope you have for political change and in your ability to meaningfully enact any.
Anyone can attempt political change, but it all comes down to EV.
I live in the US. I can openly speak my mind with relative safety. And I mean relative. My physical safety will likely not be risked, nor the physical safety of my family. But we are very much at a stage where any dissent is accompanied by internet mobs and unemployment.
Do I think that I can convince > 50% of voters in my county to rescind a 1% tax on my household income over $200k? Unlikely. Near zero probability. And my guess is that that probability is certainly less than the probability I am called a racist, transphobe, white supremacist. And that may reduce my income to $0. The EV play doesn't make sense when I have children to raise.
I imagine the above weighted by an openly corrupt gov willing to imprision and kill further diminishes the EV for an individual.
But the voters in the US aren't voting for or against a 1% tax on household income over $200k, or anything complicated like that. They've voting for team vs the other. So even if you could convince people about this tax or whatever, you really still are just hoping that the tax aligns with one team or another. Just hope you don't have any other issues you care about.
But voting exists at all levels, and I've found that the more local, the more you're exposed to the tyranny of the majority.
My example is based off the very real Portland Metro Supportive Housing Tax. The process was: get measure on ballot => get > 50% of votes. There were no "better men" involved to declare gov welfare as beyond the scope of government. All it took were a bunch of people that wanted an outcome voting for a process to achieve that outcome without having to pay for it.
My point was that I'm effectively powerless to prevent that issue or to reverse it, yet it's likely much easier to change relative to Russian, state-level policies, and I'm not dealing with physical dangers. Hence my condolences to the Russian.
you are naive to think whether your government takes feedback is relevant or not (or that I was specifically talking about Russia, That is just one of many countries with shitty internet crime prevention that are routinely blocked and each of those shite countries have varying levels of shite leadership with varying levels of responsiveness).
Ah, yes, the remaining English speakers in Russia will overthrow the literal millions of the silovik class whose entire job is to repress (with violence) any independent political activity. There is no "lobbying" in Russia, if you didn't know.
If you hate all Russians just say you hate all Russians. No need for this "lobby your government" euphemistic BS.
>So political change in russia is literally impossible
Precisely. It's basically impossible. There has to be at least be a generational change, or a severe economic / military loss if we are talking about this decade, but even that isn't a guarantee since the system is perpetuating itself with force, with economic self-interest to continue doing so. Isolating Russian citizens from western sources of information (in addition to what the Russian government is already doing by itself) is not only not helping, it's counterproductive, since rejection engenders a rejection in return, lowering the probability that an inflection point in the Russian history would result in anything western.
>countries change
Authoritarian countries change when their enforcement class relaxes and loses control. It takes decades for it to occur. If there is no relaxation, then no change occurs, as demonstrated by numerous countries, not only Russia. Right now the control and propaganda are very tight. "Wanting to make change" publicly is literally a life-threatening activity.
Oh we do want to make this change. Desperately. The only minor issue with that is that we lack any means to do so. I'll be sure to do my part as soon as the window of opportunity opens.
No, there really isn't any means right now. Even peacefully protesting gets one arrested in minutes. It's not probably risky, it's risky with absolute certainty.
I did participate in opposition activities that were 100% safe. I signed for Nadezhdin and voted for Davankov for example.
What you're saying is there's no 100% safe way, not that there is no way.
Apparently desperately wanting change in Russia means desperately wanting someone else to change it for you, which perfectly aligns with the apathy the Russian population is infamous for.
If Putin somehow became unable to provide the population with food for three days, or pay his security team, you'd all quickly discover what desperately means, and I'm confident the problem would resolve itself quickly.
Your population's apathy has become the whole world's problem. pls fix.
Not sure what concrete advice you expect me to write here in a public comment. I'm not in Russia, only started learning about Russia 3 years ago, and know nothing about you.
I presume you're good with computers so have the ability to access (and distribute) information that others may not. There's historical precedent, research how people have fought oppression in the past. Many books and manuals have been written about how this is done.
You may be able to access forums where like minded people can discuss and possibly work together. Obviously stay as safe as you can.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history."
You're the best one to know what you can achieve - but I can tell you this, it's not nothing.
Anything that makes the mechanisms of oppression less efficient is a step in the right direction.
Every mechanism has weak points, leaky abstractions and incomplete assumptions. Find them.
There is no problem with access to information. Everyone who wants to access government-blocked resources knows how to do so.
The problem is that political change can't happen on the internet. And as soon as anyone tries to do something — anything — to that end in the real world, they face very real and fierce repression.
The consensus among most of the opposition-minded people at this point it that it's just better to wait it out because there's currently no opportunity for change.
They've won then. Nobody can do anything and Russia is lost and has become North Korea. I don't believe that.
How do you think change happens? Someone does something, while you continue to "wait it out".
Look into the Arab spring and many other examples of people changing things in ways that probably seemed impossible just the week before. Nothing was 100% safe, and yet it happened.
I hope that somewhere out there is a Russian that doesn't think it's "just better to wait it out", and isn't just impotently waiting for a fantasy 100% safe solution to be provided without any sacrifice.
I do understand that it's scary, but from the perspective of an interested outsider looking in...
Just like the Russian military, Russian society seems like a disorganized drunken shitshow, not well-organized nor impossible to overcome with concerted effort. It's all lies, bullying, bluster, imaginary facades, short-sighted and selfish corruption. Vranyo.
In comparison, I'm sure you'd agree that North Korea is much more of a brutal, almost impossible to overcome dictatorship. People starving and with no electricity.
What do you think would happen at a North Korean rally if the people threw the flags in the trash immediately after, with open disdain for the authorities, as they do after Russian ones?
That's the society to which you're headed.
Don't kid yourself, you are not headed in the direction of a society where 100% safe solutions will present themselves out of thin air. Russians need to do something to change that direction before it becomes increasingly difficult.
You have been lucky so far that you have been comfortable enough to have the luxury of not understanding what desperate means. Your stomach is full and you and probably nobody from your family has been mobilized yet. You can pretend the war won't affect you.
But it will eventually. As sanctions continue to take effect and resources are squeezed, times will become even tougher and the Russian people will lose more and more of their ability to create change.
They're already sending meat waves on motorbikes and golf carts against entrenched positions. Almost 500,000 Russians dead or wounded, for what? Defending the motherland from NATO, a defensive alliance? Nobody was attacking Russia.
This is all nothing but a manufactured distraction from the authorities' own financial corruption and mismanagement.
Soon enough will come Totaler Krieg and the paper-thin mask will come off.
Relatively free access to information will be restricted further, to strengthen the propaganda which will trend more and more towards alternate reality propaganda.
Russia's greatest success has been their post-truth propaganda that made their people, especially the ones without access to the government-blocked resources, apathetic and unable to determine truth for themselves despite relatively straightforward (for you) access to information.
The whole world is now having to deal with the consequences of your apathy.
Why do you think they made laws against disrespecting the military? Because the truth, if it was distributed to the ones who don't have access to it, is a weapon that will work against them. Bullies are weak and they know it. Also, their resources are getting more and more stretched the more they waste in Ukraine.
I'm sure with a bit of imagination and introspection you can think of other weapons that might work as well.
Or, hopefully someone else will, because you seem to have given up.
>Nobody can do anything and Russia is lost and has become North Korea. I don't believe that.
>seems
Can you not sanctimoniously and arrogantly teach people, who actually live in it, what to do, from the comfort of your western home, while knowing almost nothing, as evident from this write up?
The first youtuber you linked is systematically misinformed blabbing head, the other one is an immigrant turned neocon. If these are your sources of information, and you don't know Russian, good luck understanding anything at all.
Whatever nonsense I may spout, it's still up to the Russians to fix it. The country is a terrorist state and cancer on the world.
You've addressed nothing in my post, given no information, and provided no counter to anything I wrote.
The poster sounds like Putin's perfect Russian citizen. "Desperate for change", but does nothing because they must be "100% safe" at all times. Can't even consider doing anything.
They'll be a perfect mobik next year. Better order some more golf carts, or maybe by then they'll be down to stolen bicycles.
The idea that Westerners might "hate" Russians (the people -- not the dictators and their regimes' activities) always seemed so silly to me that I assumed the majority of the related propaganda would be laughed off.
In my experience, the worst general case you have from Americans is absolute "other side of the planet" indifference. Hence the apathetic practice of blocking Russian-originating IP traffic... This may be arguably worse than hate.
A slightly better case, I think, is a healthy segment of the American populace thinks Russians are like the FPSRussia YouTube channel from a few years ago. (Disclaimer: Not sure what the status of that channel is now. Plus, I always figured he was geographically in the southern USA.)
people here are not thinking in whole systems-- roads have dual purpose.. there is security AND there is trade .. a world without trade is a poor world.. that includes the intellectual arts, civilian institutions cooperating, common issues like Climate.
The voices here that say "I block everyone, don't bother me with your whining" .. it is a security practice.. OK. security is not the whole story of civilizations; obstinate thinking leads to ignorance, not evolution.
The topic is SSH, an administrative and secured access. Yes security applies. to be on-topic
Of course one can obfuscate and secure their own SSH access as much or as little as they want. Run sshd on a different port, require port knocking, ban IPs after failed login attempts, all that kind of stuff.
I'm, however, specifically talking about public-facing services like HTTP(S), which also get blocked with this "I'll just indiscriminately blacklist IPs belonging to countries I don't like" approach.
Malicious traffic is not limited to ssh and comes from the same usual suspects. Automated attacks against web applications is constant. I wouldn't say it's indiscriminate, it's practical.
There are bad people on both side of the border - don't be fooled that they are more on the "other" side of the border because there might be ones that you are not seeing (yet). Blocking the whole "other side" is simply the "path of least resistance" or the "low hanging fruit". Creation and all other good things ALWAYS require more energy than destruction and other bad things. But creation/invention is the only activity that leads to progress and evolution - everything else is stalling, regression, devolution ...
Internet was created BY military FOR military - but it evolved into THE only thing in the world that connects people. ALL people.
References at the bottom.
The most general problem in Internet are not the malicious people - botnets can infect insecure devices ANYWHERE in the world.
The main problem is that some (many) of the ISPs at the last mile allow outgoing IP packets with source IP address which is outside of the IP range(s) these ISPs operate/own. Larger ISPs on the upper layer can not prevent this because otherwise IP routing will break. So it all depends on the "last mile" ISPs. And it is quite possible for the "status quo" to live for many years ....
I think it’s harmless though if say it’s a business site or mail site that is only meant to do business with a subset of people, like a country or region. That said, I think it’s of highly limited value though because any hacker above Lvl 1 will know how to use a bot, remote box, or VPN from a more local IP.
Now imagine how annoying is russian traffic to world's sysadmins. Then could you please point your finger to who's more wrong here: your government or sysadmins of the world?
