Russia Blocks Another Archive Site Because It Might Contain Old Pages About Drugs
from the block-bloc dept
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.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.
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.
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.
Filed Under: archives, censorship, drugs, free speech, roskomnadzor, russia, site blocking
Companies: archive.is
