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When I say infiltrate - I refer to paid and unpaid trolls posting B.S. on comments sections on UA news sites and other local area websites. This is still going to happen.
But you're right - email and social media services in Ukraine are offered by Russian-owned companies. And I think the national security threat argument is fair:
How do the UA authorities investigate crimes originating from these sites? If it's on Facebook, law enforcement requests are handled quick and efficiently. In RU, the fat asses sit on their hands and act incompetent.
An independent UA state has a valid interest in cutting its population's economic ties with RU. Obviously it reeks of State Control to compel citizens to use one service over another like this, but these are unique times and people in Eastern Europe generally accept this form of heavy-handed governance if it yields results.
By the way, other news in UA is that UA nationals will no longer need to pay for a 60 Euro visa to enter the EU. Times are changing.
Yeah they already raise EU flags on buildings in celebration. 60 EUR is such savings after all.
This is an opportune time for internet/social media development in Ukraine -- hopefully someone steps up to the plate...
I completely understand what Ukraine is trying to do. But already look how many years it's taken already to break Russia's grasp (at a huge cost -- not just financially, but loss of life and land) ... it's not an easy task...
This is one more step in breaking free - and it may be the most difficult. Russia definitely will not want to easily give up this information grasp they have on the country -- and people are content with the services they've received...
Theoretically, in the war with Russia, this is a good move... Practically, it's going to be difficult... National patriotism/loyalty plays a big role in this war, and if the people aren't happy with this decision it's a win for Russia...
I'm sure countless more are using a (faster) VPN or SOCKS proxy.
125000 users is still a drop in the bucket. Remember: this was a country of nearly 50 million people before 2014 and this block still probably affects well over 40 million.
Actually it's probably a big cost to UA. It makes vacations to Bulgaria (instead of Odessa) cheaper in the summer; makes shopping trips to Poland or Romania easier; ...
Why should we hope that someone hopelessly tries to re-invent the wheel? It's the dream of these Nouveaux Communist countries like China and Russia to build their own domestic products to substitute things from abroad. Then they try to force these products on every other country in their sphere of influence.
Facebook does not give UA user data. Facebook does not even give DE user data. Facebook only gives the US gov user data, or US gov revalidated orders.
To see how much FB cares... they just accepted a 110mil $ settlement with the EU for illegal user data sharing of WhatsApp<->FB, not out of guilt but merely to close the case.
This the same principle VK uses, just in Russia, which is normal - you ignore foreign court orders, as simple as that.
Yet i still cannot import hardware to UA because customs are absolutely useless. Same as Russian. Not much difference there. KZ was simple, ironically.
CN or RU have no interest in local only internet, this is more Iran and Sudan.
Lol, don't bet any money on that.
The funniest thing for me, it's how official russian TV channels for 140 million country (all of these TV channels blocked in Ukraine because of propaganda) explain how to use proxy, and how to avoid blocks. They saying it like for ukranians, but to be clear, they did show a ways how to avoid their great russian firewall which already block 5.5 Million websites (no jokes, ukranine blocked just 10 domains, while russians already more then 5500000) for their nationals. Another big fail when VK.com launched ddos attack to Ukraine president website. Then today yandex start to do biggest spam history from email hoster in internet, he sends to ALL ukraine visitors & users which were hosted with yandex a spam, + trying to explain how to break laws for ukranians via sending tons of spam with ways how to avoid blocks by using proxies, vpn's etc.
You are speaking out of your arse. If you search you will see that Facebook shares user data with dictatorships, authoritarian regimes known for human right abuses and mafia owned states like Albania. It's hard to find a country on the map for which Facebook has not approved and acted upon sharing of information requests, despite the attrocities such actions have resulted. Facebook is all about money, they don't care what their actions lead to, they do everything to ensure market share in every country.
Facebook declined to give German courts data for nazi propaganda. This is fact.
They rather implemented a local censorship office where the content is removed.
If you talk about things that are illegal in US AND the requesting country, well, bad luck - that is to be expected, obviously. We talk here about generic censorship, not illegal porn or a murder livestream.
Albania is authoritarian, yes, but nothing against Montenegro (attempted coup 2016 - Albanian supported, not really any elections, mafia clan as government), should stop complaining down there, we have issues in ex-Yugoslavia as well, partly even worse.
Albania has no money.
This is completely false. They release audited reports.
https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/Ukraine/2016-H2/
https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/Germany/2016-H2/
This is an issue with Facebook "merging" data with two products that were initially separate and thus violating the Terms to which users agreed. Not really applicable to what we are discussing. (+ it proves what I'm saying: Facebook yields to courts outside the U.S.)
CN actively slows down foreign products (e.g. Facebook) for the benefit of domestic competition. It works: whereas some very Western-inspired Chinese users know to use a VPN, most most most of the mainlanders Buy China (TM).
I wouldn't bet any money either way. Poroshenko might lose his next election, but I doubt a pro-Kremlin candidate will replace him.
Most Ukrainians would probably prefer to have a good economic relationship with Russia - but in reality, RU has completely starved UA, and that was literally true during the Holodomer less than 90 years ago.
For crimes that are also crimes in the US. If it is none, as nazi propaganda and similar is not, FB will not release data. As noted above - If you livestream a murder from UA your data will end up with UA gov, which is obvious.
"Users/Accounts Requested" means there is a law in Germany (they cannot simply run around requesting random data, the STPO/STGB regulates this heavily), and by the percentage you see that lots of that are actually declined.
Germany essentially had to force them to open an office locally (rather expand by some people, the local office was merely selling ads) to remove/block this content and monitor local users (which probably are now handed over) with the threat of banning advertising by/on FB for DE/EU companies.
It is, as they did that intentionally with full knowledge what could (and likely would) happen. The EU statement said ultimately: They did know back then and had the technical ability to do so (the merger approval request said they had no ability to merge them at all in this way, else it would not have been approved, which was clear upfront to all sides.)
And same here - EU threatens to disallow money flow for ads, which is income for FB, which forces them to somewhat cooperate, the price paid now is lower in the end.
No, merely some of the CN ISPs do that (eg. Topway in Shenzhen is fast to Asia and China Mobile has ok-ish external connectivity all around) and it has multiple reasons:
You can easily pull 100Mbit over a direct China link from HK to Guangdong (eg. local ISP
AS9808 there with HK link to CM Int) or Fujian province (+ all Tier1 cities as Beijing and Shanghai), but not to Ürümqi (in xinjiang) or Ningxia (a central small province hard to reach economically).
They do generally buy offline by no choice - For just media VPN apps and similar are extremely popular. Expats have also access to other means of access (dedicated circuits) at a price locals cannot afford or get approved for.
That point is also simple visible to anyone, go to a random Chinese YT video and look at the comments...
And at last the income is (outside of T1 cities) low and they cannot (or do not want to) afford 'expensive' VPN services and payment can be hard if you have only eg. an Agricultural bank of China (Agbank) account with no international enabled unionpay.
This is a more accurate statement to make, but it's still murkier than that.
To clarify for the other readers: law enforcement requests are different than content take-downs, and they are handled differently as well. The former is a formal request by a government agency handled by a Facebook Legal Office somewhere. The latter is a report by ordinary users handled by content checkers in the Philippines and other (usually low-cost) places.
Germany indeed has very strict anti-hate laws that run up against the liberal, free-speech culture of other countries. Facebook has a mixed history with content take-downs, sometimes keeping obvious DE hate speech then reversing its decision later, etc.
But Facebook does generally comply with Germany's anti-hate laws though it doesn't grant 100% of all law enforcement requests. Facebook doesn't grant 100% of U.S. law enforcement requests either. Only countries like China and the former Soviet Union get 100% of all requests granted when requesting from companies in their jurisdiction.
That's adversarial law vs absolutism.
From the Kiev government's perspective, Facebook/US/EU is a much more amenable partner than VK/RU.
I do like your analysis, but it doesn't contradict the fact that the Beijing government has adopted a policy of firewalling that affects companies of Beijing's choosing.
As with anything, a written policy doesn't get implemented 100% all 100% of the time. And it definitely doesn't stop VPNs and Shadowsocks. But it does effectively block Facebook for the broad Chinese market by artificially making FB less competitive based on speed, and that wouldn't be happening if China operated a liberalized economy. (They claim the reason is for national security purposes I think, but it also has the effect of protecting Chinese companies.)
Not true, many ISP are already implementing it. Some suckers implemented it just a few hours after the decree was signed.
Also, this should only affect residential ISP, but some other networks will apply it in fear of government thugs using the decree to commit burglaries.
The decree violates the constitution of Ukraine and the laws of the country which both prohibit censorship and interferences with the free flow of information.
Real ISPs are currentling fighting it.
As for how they implement it, they use different methods, mostly dns based.
Yesterday as we were monitoring one ISP we started to notice that DNS answers from yandex were being hijacked and the record were amended to return IP from Amazon's networks.
They do not delete most of these if not from a German and not violating the FB ToS. Only access is blocked from German IPs.
Violation of the FB ToS does also not mean they give the user data to Germany.
You forget what China is - The government owns this companies ultimately, as it owns everything in the country, and has an interest in their profit/wellbeing. It is not always a censorship thing or political.
As in port 53 redirected entirely or just the ISPs DNS returning this records?
All my things in UA seem still fine, we'll see.
On a more bright side, UA ISPs are not too competent, not much worried what some will do. That email exchange is just... wtf.
just... wtf.
No, it's DPI. If you'd setup your local resolver, queries would be successfully sent to yandex NS but the ISP would hijack answers and modify the packets so that you receive lies.
This ISP said that they will activate the censorship completely on the 22. So then I could show you the fun.
Most mobile operators already activated censorship, we're going to check today how it's done but it's likely DNS.
This seems reasonable. Why should German law apply outside Germany against non-Germans?
Obviously it's hard to determine what jurisdiction applies on the Internet - as a German could easily masquerade as a non-German behind a VPN and post hateful speech in any language. But Facebook is still respecting German law in a reasonable way. This is a far cry from what was originally claimed.
First - China has had private property in the Constitution since 2004 and a legal framework since 2007. Private ownership and private wealth are allowed as long as the State's goals are met. Some companies are even traded on foreign stock exchanges. Where do you think these millionaires/billionaires get their money? Who owns all these apartments, Alibaba, etc?
Second - of course protectionism is political! What else would it be?
China hinders Facebook's place in the Chinese market due to pure politics - whether it is due to national security concerns or economic protectionism or whatever.
@William I think part of the problem could be your wording in the middle of your ticket... İt really didn't make sense in Russian...
But he paid for BGP and didn't receive it! Who cares if he just used Google Translate or whatever...
For that the Russian ISPs (and a Kyrgyz one, and one in KZ) did provide it perfectly fine, further it is not hard to understand what BGP is.
My request email is perfectly clear and perfect Russian.
If you would have read the entire 3 mails you would see this is a sales request, not an existing order. Nice try to troll though.
It's also not google translate but rather just my broken Russian, a phrasebook and a latin->cyrillic conversion tool (via yandex).
Considering this ISP has an AS they should know what i want from the initial request already and not require any reply.
Not this ^
This ^
So, basically, you contacted sales@ at an odd hour on Friday night/Saturday morning and someone told you to expect a proper response on Monday.
Funny. Because this was written by a Russian. More Russian than you. Living in Russia since birth.
Your trolling is really weak today... right running into the trap, the irony...
Yes, and? Others told me exactly that, wait until Monday, not requesting how BGP works or what it is. Further, multiple RU ISPs delivered yesterday and today, including BGP.
This is also perfectly fine, i do not expect them to work on weekends at all.
I bet the
part was not written by that guy though (should be Благодарю).
So today, we've noticed more attempt at hijacking packets.
For example at my apartment, I'm connected to this shit: https://www.lanet.ua/ and they are trying to replay http packets from yandex.ru/yandex.ua to replace the content with their own page but they aren't very successful yet.
Well it contains mistakes anyway, it does not look like it comes from a translator but the person who wrote it may not be a Russian native. And yes it should be Благодарю (also with the uppercase б). Otherwise it's perfectly understandable.
Any specific ones you want to point out?
Or maybe they wanted to stay 100% close to the original text, not taking too much freedoms in rephrasing stuff just to make it sound more fluid (and risk making actual mistakes in the process).
In any case, a VPS/dedi provider asking the customer to explain what BGP is, is inexcusable no matter which language or country. Aside from "they ought to know", they could just Google it before replying.
Also reminds me of when a broadband ISP here asked me to explain what kind of service "IPv6" is.
Eastern Slavic speakers use технологии (plural of technology) not only to describe abstract concepts like Westerners - but also to describe consumable products that are bought/sold (e.g., blenders and Plesk installations are examples of технологии)
Whoever answered that ticket at 01:00 on Saturday morning clearly is asking for a link on the ISP website referencing what product @William wants to pay for, possibly to flag it to the right person.
If the ISP has an ASN, obviously someone at the ISP knows what a BGP session is. Just not necessarily whoever monitors the sales@ inbox at 01:00 in the morning.
and it's Дякую not Благодарю
Actually, you're not allowed to bring political discussion into the cesspit anymore.
Arguments like that will be removed:
Yes.
No.
@doghouch. Well fair play, hadn't spotted that.
Дякую - on ukrainian
Благодарю - on russian
Cyrillic languages you can write in any sequence and the meaning they will save.
And about the blocking, I can say that some are blocked simply through DNS. Some providers block domains vk.com, yandex, some providers block AS VK, Mail and others. I do not know why this is done, but it can be bypassed by any student through the VPN.