Kazakh Government Takes Down 93k Websites To Site-Block A Single Massage Parlour

from the got-'em-though dept

Site blocking. When it comes to law enforcement and IP enforcement efforts, site blocking is the simple man's solution to a very complicated problem. The claim that floats out there in the ether is something like: hey, if we discover sites are breaking the law in some way, we can just order ISPs to block access to the site and the problem's solved. Despite that simplistic send up, the practice of blocking sites in this way inevitably leads to massive collateral damage and flat out abuse. And, yet, those that advocate for site blocking shrug their shoulders at this. After all, if you want to make an IP omelette, you have to break some percentage of the internet, right?

But the award for fucking this all up at scale must certainly go to the government of Kazakhstan, which wanted to take a massage parlor's website off of the internet for engaging in some very massage-parlor-y behavior, and managed to pull down 93,000 other websites along with it.

State censors trying to erase the web presence of an erotic massage emporium called Rainbow Spa back in late July did so by ordering the blocking of the site's IP address instead of its domain name.  The ban-happy block was targeted at two IP addresses, reported by local outlet Hola News as 185.165.123.36 and 185.165.123.206. The first of these hosts around 9,500 domains, while the second keeps just over 84,000 websites online.

Unfortunately for the bungling censors, these two IPs resolve to shared infrastructure in Russia – including a large number of websites hosted on the Tilda Publishing platform, a sort of Wordpress-style CMS-plus-prebuilt-skins intended for rapid deployment by the unskilled.

First, blocking a website by its IP address in 2019 is hilariously inept. Sites these days routinely share cloud infrastructure through providers. This isn't strictly some cost-cutting measure by web providers, but necessary to secure sites at scale against attack by filtering against malicious traffic. This is how hosts protect against DDoS attacks. To be handing the keys to blocking websites to people that very clearly haven't the slightest clue what they're doing is the kind of thing only national governments can do.

Tilda Publishing itself pointed this out.

Blocking a resource by IP address is an outdated and barbaric practice that has long been inconsistent with modern cloud-based IT technologies and access restriction mechanics.

And it's not just that there was so much collateral damage that makes all of this so damning for the Kazakh government. The massage parlor, as I type this, still has one of its websites up and live.

It's hard to imagine a better example of why we shouldn't allow government the power to block websites than this.

Filed Under: censorship, cloud computing, kazakhstan, site blocking

Kazakhstan Cops Protect Citizens' Free Speech Rights By Arresting A Protester Holding A Blank Sign

from the i'm-sorry-i-cannot-help-you-make-sense-of-this dept

Kazakhstan police unintentionally helped a protester prove his point. To protest the lack of free speech protections in the country, Aslan Sagutdinov engaged in a physical representation of a thought experiment.

To test the limits of his right to peacefully demonstrate in Kazakhstan, Aslan Sagutdinov, 22, stood in a public square holding a blank sign, predicting he would be detained.

He was right.

Sometimes it sucks to be right. Sagutdinov hoped to point out the "idiocy" of his country and its laws. Protesting nothing in particular, he was arrested by police and taken to the station. So far, there's been nothing reported as to which charges, if any, he'll be facing. But it's too late for the cops and his idiotic country. The point has already been made.

The police argued -- via an official statement -- that order must be maintained or something. According to the police, officers had "received a report" of an "unknown male" holding a blank placard and drawing a small crowd of curious onlookers. Rather than align themselves with the content of Sagutdinov's placard and do nothing, officers chose to something. And that "something" was to drive their irony-proof squad car to the scene and detain the protester.

The official explanation does not make the country look any less idiotic.

The police statement maintained that the authorities “were acting within the boundaries of the law.”

And then, because it couldn't possibly drill Sagutdinov's point home any harder, the police released another statement asserting the protester was wrong because he was right.

Bolatbek Beldibekov, the head of the local police department’s press service, told the newspaper Uralskaya Nedelya that the offense was not that he demonstrated with the blank placard. Rather, he said, Mr. Sagutdinov ran afoul of the law by making the political statement that “there is no democracy and free speech in Kazakhstan” in a public place.

Feel free to take as much time as you need to wrap your head around that statement.

Apparently, protesters in Kazakhstan have a Constitutional right to "peacefully" engage in "rallies, demonstrations, street processions, and pickets." But those rights are more like privileges and come with several caveats attached. Multiple court decisions and amendments have watered down this right from a given to a theoretical by allowing individual government agencies to decide whether or not they'll allow protests in front of their buildings or whether "peaceful processions" will actually be allowed to proceed from one place to another.

The protections are also badly-written, allowing the government to determine almost anything citizens believe would be protected expression to be unprotected and subject to criminal charges. Here are just a few of the many, many problems of this so-called right, as explained by Kazakhstan human rights activists.

The Law, together with decisions of local representative agencies limits the places for holding assemblies of citizens and public associations. In a series of cities, are established strictly out-of-the way places, as a rule, located on the outskirts of the city. Higher officials and local authorities, and also some political organizations, for the holding of assemblies, have the unfounded exclusive right to use squares in the city center, in comparison with citizens and their associations, which is discrimination. In addition to the element of discrimination, this is a violation of the essence of freedom of assembly. In fact, there can be no reasonable substantiation, from the viewpoint of international standards, to bind the realization of freedom of assembly to one location. Moreover, not all forms of assembly can be held in such conditions, since pickets, demonstrations or processions virtually cannot be contained to one place in the city.

[...]

The Law does not give clear definitions of types of peaceful assembly, which violates the principles of legal predictability and specificity. Any cluster of people in such a situation could be potentially termed an assembly in the sense of the Law, and correspondingly, illegal, if there was no permission given by an executive agency of the government. In other words, citizens seeking to lay flowers on a memorial or carrying a petition to the authorities, participants of flash mobs, courtyard meetings of apartment residents, etc may be held to administrative accountability. In addition, the Law does not contain a distinction between who is considered a participant in an assembly and who is not. This makes it possible to hold accountable anyone found in the location where an assembly is held.

This is why someone holding a blank sign can be arrested for protesting nothing. The sanctity of the whatever-the-fuck must be maintained by the immediate subduing of dissenting voices, even when it isn't immediately clear what they're dissenting from. The government has made an ass of itself and confirmed what many citizens already feared: their right to protest isn't being protected by their government.

Filed Under: free expression, free speech, kazakhstan, protests

Kazakhstan Decides To Break The Internet, Wage All Out War On Encryption

from the mandated-middle-men dept

Starting on January 1, the country of Kazakhstan has formally declared war on privacy, encryption, and a secure Internet. A new law takes effect in the new year that will require all citizens of the country to install a national, government-mandated security certificate allowing the interception of all encrypted citizen communications. In short, the country has decided that it would be a downright nifty idea to break HTTPS and SSL, essentially launching a "man in the middle" attack on every resident of the country.

While it has since been removed, a statement posted to the website of the country's largest ISP KazakhTelecom (Google cache and rather sloppy translation) stated that the ISP was required to intercept encrypted traffic to "secure protection of Kazakhstan users" who have access to encrypted content from "foreign Internet resources":

"The national security certificate will secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources...Detailed instructions for installation of security certificate will be placed in December 2015 on site www.telecom.kz.

Of course, such an effort will wind up doing the exact opposite of protecting the country's residents -- instead opening the door to rampant surveillance and potential security vulnerabilities should the certificate fall into the wrong hands. Oddly, while the notice states that all Windows, OS X, iOS and Android devices must adhere to the new law, Linux isn't mentioned, giving privacy conscious residents and journalists ample time to install their Linux distro of choice. Security experts are quick to point out the entire, ham-fisted affair is not only ethically idiotic, but likely impossible to fully implement and enforce:

"There are obvious, myriad ethical issues with this sort of mandated state surveillance," said (Security researcher Kenneth) White. "But I suspect that the political forces pushing these measures have grossly underestimated the technical hurdles and moral backlash that lay before them." "The best case scenario is that the regime will seriously weaken the security of only a subset of their citizens," said White.

Bang up job, team! Last month, Human Rights Watch described Kazakhstan as an authoritarian dictatorship with "few tangible and meaningful human rights." Freedom House, meanwhile, ranks Kazakhstan poorly when it comes to Internet freedom, noting that the country's war on religious extremists has resulted in an increase in Internet filters, a total blockade of Live Journal, intensified surveillance at cybercafes, and a spike in "physical assaults on bloggers and online journalists."

It's easy to dismiss what Kazakhstan is doing as the drunken stumbling of a tin pot dictatorship, until you remember that the UK is proposing something not entirely dissimilar, and both current leading U.S. Presidential candidates dream of waging their own war on encryption and common sense.

Filed Under: encryption, kazakhstan, man in the middle, privacy, security, surveillance

Almost No One Wants To Host The Olympics, Because It's A Costly, Corrupt Mess

from the protect-that-brand dept

For many years, we've written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization's insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as "we own and control everything." Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money. It's simply shining a light on just how corrupt the whole Olympic setup is. For decades, the Olympics has tried to hide this basic truth, and it has always been able to get various cities and countries to actively compete to suffer through the Olympics requirements, often with promises of big money in tourism and local business as a result. But it looks like jig may be up.

As Dan Wetzel notes, it appears that almost no one has any interest in hosting the 2022 Olympics. The only active attempts are Beijing (which is 120 miles from a mountain suitable for skiing) and Almaty Kazakhstan. All the other credible players have bailed out:

Certainly not Oslo, Norway, not even at the bargain rate of an estimated $5.4 billion in a nation of just five million people. It once wanted desperately to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and its bid was so perfect that it was considered the favorite to win. Then the country held a vote earlier this year and 55.9 percent of Norwegians opposed.

Wednesday the Norwegian government effectively pulled the bid. Norwegians are known for the ability to cross country ski really fast and being so friendly they beg visitors to come experience their picturesque nation. Since this involved the IOC however, they decided against having visitors come experience their picturesque nation to watch them cross country ski really fast.

They aren't alone. Previous finalist Krakow, Poland, saw 70 percent voter opposition and pulled its application. A majority felt the same way in Germany and Switzerland, killing bids in Munich and St. Moritz respectively. In Sweden the majority party rejected funding the proposed games in Stockholm.

Plenty of other countries didn't even bother thinking about it. As Wetzel points out, basically the only two countries interested are authoritarian regimes:

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren't allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

To sum it up:

Essentially the entire world has told the IOC it's a corrupt joke.

Don't hold back:

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn't pay the athletes. It doesn't share revenue with host countries. It doesn't pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn't lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn't pay taxes.

It basically holds caviar rich meetings in five star hotels in the Alps before calling it a day. That and conduct weak investigations into corruption charges of the bidding process, of course. "No evidence uncovered" is on a win streak.

It's a heck of a racket.

Except now the racket may be ending. Except for China and Kazakhstan. Wetzel's conclusion is spot on:

So China or Kazakhstan it is, the last two suckers on earth willing to step up to this carnival barker.

One lucky nation will win. The other will host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The Olympics are from another era -- one of top down, "we control and own everything while paying none" variety. We've seen those types of businesses failing in lots of other arenas -- and now it may be happening to the Olympics as well.

Filed Under: china, control, corruption, kazakhstan, olympics, sports, top down

How Neutral Can Kazakh-Language Wikipedians Be?

from the telling-it-as-it-is dept

Although there has been some sniping about the quality of Wikipedia's entries from time to time, we generally take it for granted that when key articles are missing they will get written, and that if they are unbalanced, they will gradually get better -- all thanks to the open, collaborative editing process that sorts out such problems. But an interesting post on registan.net notes that these dynamics may not apply to some versions of Wikipedia -- for example, the one written in the Kazakh language:

I also find the idea that thousands of diligent volunteer Kazakh Wikipedians are hard at work writing up an unbiased encyclopedia of the world and of their country [hard to believe]. The incentives for it are all wrong. The rewards for glowing diatribes on [Kazakhstan's President] Nazarbayev's Kazakhstan are clear, but the risks involved in challenging that narrative are equally so.

It's an important point. Wikipedia may request a "neutral point of view" from all its contributors, but when the consequences of telling the unvarnished truth are rather less pleasant than embellishing the facts a little, we can hardly blame people in countries like Kazakhstan for straying from the Wikipedian ideal.

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Filed Under: kazakhstan, language, neutrality, wikipedia