Russia Blocks Another Archive Site Because It Might Contain Old Pages About Drugs

from the block-bloc dept

Thu, Feb 4th 2016 11:41am — Tim Cushing

The Russian block party continues. The government agency in charge of censoring the internet is still working its way backwards, hoping to erase the collective memories of the web… or at least, keep Russian citizens from seeing certain bits of the archived past.

Last summer, Russia blocked the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine," an extremely useful tool that allows users to see historical snapshots of websites. The government may only have intended to block a single page, but because the Internet Archive utilizes HTTPS, the only practical way for ISPs to block the targeted pages was to block it at the domain level.

The same thing is now happening to archive.is, another useful tool that allows users to archive pages they feel might be altered or disappear altogether at some point in the future. (via Google Translate and an anonymous TD reader)

Roskomnadzor introduced archive.is service to Internet resources registry, prohibited by the law of the Russian Federation.

On the site supervisory authority pointed out that archive.is entered in the register by order of the Federal Service for Drug Control 28 January 2016.

Service continues to work as usual, but for many Russian customers of providers it is no longer available.

The problem here is the Russian's take on the War on Drugs. Because it's illegal to discuss drug use/abuse/sales, Roskomnadzor has disappeared another archive that might contain copies of pages it's blocked in the past. That the service would be of use to Russian citizens for non-drug related purposes appears to be of no concern to the Russian government.

And again, it's the use of HTTPS that's resulted in the entire site being blocked. Targeted pages can't be targeted if the connection is encrypted. So, down goes the entire site and, of course, no one in the web censorship body seems to be bothered by the collateral damage.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: archives, censorship, drugs, free speech, roskomnadzor, russia, site blocking
Companies: archive.is

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 4 Feb 2016 @ 11:53am

Are they censoring because of drug information, or because of the associated anti-authoritarian ideas that are commonly associated with drugs?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 4 Feb 2016 @ 1:13pm

Re:
Does it matter?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mark Wing, 4 Feb 2016 @ 1:52pm

Putin doesn't want people learning that he does blow with James Woods.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Wesha (profile), 4 Feb 2016 @ 4:37pm

Relax, guys. In Russia, nobody cares.
I always say that law in Russia looks like this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2RpeUxNxtU4/TQtLmeYnOZI/AAAAAAAAAg0/fYMNLYnessM/s1600/Parking+Control .jpg.png

They lawmakers can forbid aaaaaall they want. Nobody cares. We'll find our way around.

"The Duma pretends to make laws. People pretend to obey them."
[ link to this | view in thread ]
PaulT (profile), 5 Feb 2016 @ 12:11am

Re:
Who wouldn't if they got the chance?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Wendy Cockcroft, 5 Feb 2016 @ 6:08am

Re: Re:
I dunno, but you might not want him living in your house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doARYLLi7Jo
[ link to this | view in thread ]
tqk (profile), 5 Feb 2016 @ 1:24pm

Re: Re:

Putin doesn't want people learning that he does blow with James Woods.

Who wouldn't if they got the chance?

Seriously? I've watched a few of the things he's done as a movie or TV actor which I thought were well worth seeing. He can be entertaining that way. He's a competent, skilled actor. However, I doubt I'd enjoy ever being in the same room with him from what I've read of his off-screen persona.

Add to that I've never understood what people saw in cocaine or its derivatives. If he's a cokehead, that doesn't speak very highly of him. About the only one of them I ever liked was Sherlock Holmes, and he only did it to fill downtimes, and he was fictional.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
diginess, 7 Feb 2016 @ 8:43am

incompetence
Whoever made the decision to outright block the wayback machine obviously has no idea what they are doing. That's like a podunk government blocking YouTube for one video. You have an information resource with terabytes of information which may not be available elsewhere, and you block it because a few kilobytes offend you. Soon your citizens will all be familiar with VPNs.
[ link to this | view in thread ]