Russia restricted foreign internet access across several regions over the weekend to test its national infrastructure.
Residents of the affected regions couldn’t access both foreign and local apps, including the likes of YouTube (one of the last Western social media platforms still available in Russia), Google, WhatsApp, and Telegram – The Record reported.
As per local reports, not even virtual private network (VPN) apps managed to help citizens bypass internet restrictions in what looks like a new phase of online censorship for the country.
“This event is crucial in the possible evolution of online censorship in Russia because it shows what’s technically possible – a very limited internet experience where most common things simply don’t work,” a technical expert from the Russian digital rights group Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar.
According to reports, Runet trials mostly affected residents living in areas populated by ethnic minorities, such as Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia.
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A new phase of Russian censorship
Russian censorship is clearly getting tougher, and visitors and residents are left with fewer means to overcome restrictions.
While the best VPN apps have become a crucial resource for people in Russia struggling to access international news and other blocked websites, 2024 has seen the Kremlin double down against Russia’s VPN usage.
For starters, a new law enforced in March now criminalizes the spread of information about ways to circumvent internet restrictions – VPNs included.
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Funny, but is there an actual serious resource like this? I don’t think I’ll need it but it sure would be awesome from a data hoarding perspective. Particularly if there are projects dedicated to maintaining local copies. Obv git + cron job for easy up-to-dates but with so much data, managing it might get more complex. At least having the initial sources lined up would be a great head start.
I doubt that there’s a single resource that fits all, but check out Kiwix, team behind Kiwix hoards and redistributes highly compressed wikis and other knowledge bases like stack overflow.
For stuff like coding documentation, I usually just go to the developers main site and they provide it in many formats.
For everything else I just wget mirror (properly throttled, I’m not a cunt) the entire thing once a year.