Latest Belarusian censorship law & censorship actions
Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% of foreign investors. The law was passed really fast, only on 17st it came info parliament, and today, 21st, it's already signed by president. Nobody ever heard that such law are coming, even in the rumors. The law will came into force on 1st January. Yesterday domain name onliner.by, which hosted Belarusian media portal, was seized. They moved to onliner.ru. Media portal 21.by was also blocked. Two days ago some media was blocked, including charter97.org (they was already blocked for years for some users), belaruspartisan.org, gazetaby.com, zautra.by, udf.by, naviny.by, belapan.com, belapan.by. Minister of Information Liliya Ananich asked media to use only official sources and write articles in the national interest of the country. Besides media censorship, there is some financial problems because of Russian financial crisis. So the govt blocked 13 online markets which posted prices in US dollars, also 3 websites (deal.by, migom.by, kufar.by) was warned as they had ads on goods with price in $. prokopovi.ch, p2p currency exchange, was also blocked. http://www.pravo.by/main.aspx?guid=12551&p0=H11400213&p1=1 — text of the law (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) http://belapan.by/archive/2014/12/21/748603/ (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/290031/ (Russian) -- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc
Footnote: could happen almost anywhere. Even here in NL such a law could pass on the virtue of balancing safety and order with basic human rights in a fair manner. Footnote2: censorship being possible and even easy makes censorship happen. Defend or die must be part of the tech warrior's creed (sharing Mutual Equal Assured Destruction is a potential exception). I suppose Belarus works differently for things to pass so fast and so clearly in violation of international human rights laws. Good luck out there. On Dec 21, 2014 12:26 PM, "Anton Nesterov" <komachi@openmailbox.org> wrote:
Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% of foreign investors.
The law was passed really fast, only on 17st it came info parliament, and today, 21st, it's already signed by president. Nobody ever heard that such law are coming, even in the rumors.
The law will came into force on 1st January.
Yesterday domain name onliner.by, which hosted Belarusian media portal, was seized. They moved to onliner.ru.
Media portal 21.by was also blocked.
Two days ago some media was blocked, including charter97.org (they was already blocked for years for some users), belaruspartisan.org, gazetaby.com, zautra.by, udf.by, naviny.by, belapan.com, belapan.by.
Minister of Information Liliya Ananich asked media to use only official sources and write articles in the national interest of the country.
Besides media censorship, there is some financial problems because of Russian financial crisis. So the govt blocked 13 online markets which posted prices in US dollars, also 3 websites (deal.by, migom.by, kufar.by) was warned as they had ads on goods with price in $.
prokopovi.ch, p2p currency exchange, was also blocked.
http://www.pravo.by/main.aspx?guid=12551&p0=H11400213&p1=1 — text of the law (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) http://belapan.by/archive/2014/12/21/748603/ (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/290031/ (Russian)
-- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc
On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 03:09:36 -0800, Anton Nesterov <komachi@openmailbox.org> wrote:
Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% of foreign investors.
These days I actually celebrate each and every nation state attack on Internet freedom. The logic being that these attacks drive mass adoption of decentralized encryption better than anything else. The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed by Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 I'm going to ask that the lists begin discussing in a different thread, revised guidelines for use of GPG. If for no other reason than that things that taking donations of different (now hundreds) of cryptocurrencies, and that breathing or farting or feeding your pigs is now illegal, I think that we need to at least make some kind of halfhearted attempt to discuss when and in what circumstances GPG (ok, if you like I am tired, and you can say PGP too) key exchange is best for whole list and not just for betweent two persons. Dasvedanya, etc. - -O Seth:
On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 03:09:36 -0800, Anton Nesterov <komachi@openmailbox.org> wrote:
Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% of foreign investors.
These days I actually celebrate each and every nation state attack on Internet freedom. The logic being that these attacks drive mass adoption of decentralized encryption better than anything else.
The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed by Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html
- -- http://abis.io ~ "a protocol concept to enable decentralization and expansion of a giving economy, and a new social good" https://keybase.io/odinn -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJUl+wRAAoJEGxwq/inSG8CHiYH/3d4rmd4IM3BabaYLbTLLlKc FF86XYPfeuby/Khbwmi7pHxEYYOE+60pSjLvv6C/W688W8US8Hx8mwASeKXG59/m he2Q+8YhZLgPUUnrVsBVMpA1G7j4lzB33fWa3uTNZEAs7pnGr0Y6FO/esIR35kqF Hnix7nB6lk85xsCUVBaDDYIhF8HJIsdrS/mIFETzyp1Uum2E7Y+N1KKW3pTRJFr2 DxqXtsBfAlBRcOSKbSTAj2ylWpLRpzJ0e3kmrNnP0GWx2NNRKWdusyCtZBJDaw0t Vg935LbDVNQD5Cc3sRGFHO4rzVF+BQMeWhDmriP/u0zBOrEmAjmynIU2fjDFlfE= =8p8h -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Dnia niedziela, 21 grudnia 2014 11:09:36 Anton Nesterov pisze:
Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% of foreign investors.
So, my question is: how exactly are they going about blocking the websites? Is it a DNS-based block? DPI and content-based one? Anything else? Any info on it? -- Pozdrawiam, Michał "rysiek" Woźniak
On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 7:11 PM, rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:
So, my question is: how exactly are they going about blocking the websites? Is it a DNS-based block? DPI and content-based one? Anything else? Any info on it?
DNS resolution appears fine, based on traceroutes it does not appear to be more sophisticated than address blocking at the international frontier by the few gateway, in the case of Beltelecom near the border routers at 93.85.80.0/24. -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
participants (6)
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Anton Nesterov -
Collin Anderson -
Lodewijk andré de la porte -
odinn -
rysiek -
Seth