I’ve already mentioned that the hive.blog is blocked in Russia and I've to use a VPN to access it. This is not critical, but a little inconvenient, especially when you are paranoid, who doesn't like public vpn and sets up own server for this.
Why is it blocked and how? Well, working for the last 10 years in the Internet service provider company, I could tell a lot about this, but let's briefly. In fact, we are copying China's practice of restricting access to information on the Internet, hiding behind laws that come out faster than I publish articles.
There are 3 main authorities that are responsible for blocking sites: Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor = RKN), Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MIA) and The Court.
There is also one historical factor that affects the rules of the game: all the budget money that is allocated for the technical implementation of such laws is usually stolen. Therefore, almost all responsibility for the technical implementation of locks is shifted to commercial Internet providers.
Special RKN devices (“Revizor”) are placed on the main nodes of our network, all our traffic passes through these devices. By law, we are obliged to use the RKN list for blocking in order to automatically block access to any site or IP from this list. If their magic-shit-box will record, that there is access to prohibited sites, then we will be deprived of our license and the company will be closed.
We, Russians are not afraid of anyone, not the devil, not God, not even ourselves. We block everything that we want and when we want. I think even you have heard how our department fucked up when a couple of years ago it decided to block Telegram. It was an exclusively political decision, however… 40% of our clients were affected by this decision, and we only work with commercial organizations. Two weeks of complete lack of access to Amazon, Google and Microsoft services. The RKN blocked tens of millions of Ip addresses that were not even connected to Telegram, they just turned out to be neighbors in addressing.
Instead of using a sniper to eliminate the "criminal", we drop an atomic bomb on a metropolis with a bunch of civilians.
Well, many engineers in my environment laughed at the RKN actions. Look at what amateurs, billions of dollars and man-hours were lost, and they could not even fully block the culprit of the celebration. HaHaHa. But I was thinking, like many others: we're fucked. These people up there, they don't care, they understand what they did, but it didn't stop them. They really aren't afraid of anything. It will get worse further…
Got worse. Do you know what the biggest problem they had when they decided to block Telegram? Legal Costs. At that time, our law was still similar to the law. When the network lockdown occurred, the judicial system, the RKN and the MIA began to choke. Trying to maintain the appearance of legal blocking and justify themselves to the business that was affected by accident, they had to conduct everything according to the procedures.
Let's say we have a website of a guy from the United States named Randy, on which he conducts an online broadcast of growing cannabis in his basement, in Colorado. According to our government, this God-abominable website can harm our citizens. To block it, the following process is started:
Some granny from Saratov «accidentally» saw this obscurantistic site and wrote a statement to the MIA. the MIA creates a case of violation. The case is sent to the Court. The court appoints a hearing on this case: The MIA is the prosecutor, and Randy is the defendant. We all understand that Randy will not come to court. It is obvious that Randy from the United States doesn't even know about the trial of him in cold, distant Russia. Being stoned, Randy often doesn't even understand where he is…
Most of the episodes of this season are banned in Russia. This is drug propaganda. source
Excellent, the court was won due to the defendant's non-appearance, we can block it! The RKN receives a court decision, adds the site to the list of prohibited sites, we, as a provider, begin to block it and voila: We, here in Russia, will now not be able to see how Randy's cannabis grows in his basemen.
Do you have any idea how much work was done by our civil servants to protect us from just one bad site? And how many taxes? And how much effort and time was spent to respond to all affected businesses from blocking Telegram, why such a procedure was not applied to them? This had to be fixed in order to save taxpayers ' money - they told us, and fixed it.
A couple of years ago, they made a wonderful amendment to the law on blocking. Now they don't need to arrange this performance called the Court and waste their time. The RKN can add any site to the list of banned sites without a court decision, simply by receiving a request from the MIA directly, or from itself, or from the mother of the guy who works in the MIA. Or even at the request of that mad dog over there, who cares.
We have what we have, you see how simple it is. So, why is Hive blocked in Russia? Let's check whether the site address is actually in the block list. This is publicly available information that we can easily check here
The important detail is in the rightmost column. It states that access is restricted to a single page, and not to the entire site. However, this is not the case, Hive is completely blocked
And yes it's on the list. This means that the domain must be blocked on the network of each licensed Internet provider in Russia. When you try to go to this address, you will simply receive an unsubscribe "Blocked by the RKN". Or no notification if the provider was too lazy to put an information stub.
We will try to find out the reason. In this case, the blocking was made by the decision of the MIA, without a court. And was initiated on May 27, 2020. The basis for blocking -the regulatory act of the RKN # 15.1.
Well, this is a rather inaccurate wording, because this act includes several reasons for which a site can be considered dangerous and get blocked. Here are some of them:
- Child porn (unlikely. such content is censored even here)
- Information about drugs (how to make, where to buy, how they work, what effect you will feel)
- Suicide (how you can do this, how to look at someone else's suicide, how to discuss your suicide with others). In our country, the mention of suicide in any form is prohibited at the level of the law. This doesn't reduce the statistics, of course.
- Casinos and gambling. Well, the whole cryptocurrency is like a casino, why not.
- Advertising and distribution of alcohol. So I suggest that you immediately close all beer reviews.
Honestly, any of these topics could have been published here (except for the first one). How to understand what exactly is the reason? We have of the MIA decree number 2020-05-25-565 . And if we are lucky, we can find this resolution in the public domain.
In general, the MIA is not obliged to publish each of its decisions in open sources, but the defendant can do it. In this case, the problem is that there was no court when Hive was blocked, this is a direct request from MIA. I spent several hours, but all I could find was a similar case with a mention of the "hive" domain here.
This is not our case, because the site was blocked in August 2019, and they say about https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org
Reason: posting an article on the topic «Сomplete synthesis of amphetamine phosphate». However, we cannot exclude the fact that hive.blog was blocked because of this story, even after a year, believe me, this practice of "random" blocking by coincidence of domains is quite common.
I also managed to find another mention of the Hive block, here. Reason: propaganda or sale of drugs.
And so, we are not able to find out the specific post that caused the Hive to be blocked in Russia. Maybe once you ignored the article of a dude from Russia who worked in the MIA… Or, somewhere here there is an article that describes how to commit suicide if you are a minor who published porn with your participation when you was under amefetamines.
This may seem a little ridiculous, but this is the reality of censorship in which 145 million Russians already live. We were also funny when Winnie the Pooh became banned in China. The last giggles in Russia, among technical specialists, fell silent in March of this year. When Twitter refused to delete content at the request of the RKN, and the RKN threatened to slow down the work of the social network in Russia. The RKN fulfilled the threat, and twitter obeyed. In fact, this was the first combat testing of DPI, we are getting closer to China.
Hive can be accessed at hundreds of different front-ends with different URLs and even via completely unblockable IPFS methods such as this: ipfs://bafybeifbh7b6kxjmeccoxbztcgqwzdqjxsstqzo3gwb5c7rhybzu6ybniq/#/
You don't need to use hive.blog and a VPN.
A large number of the communities on Hive have their own front end and there are many general front ends too.
Its super easy to set up your own front end - just download condenser from Gitlab and spin up a front end which reads data from the blockchain.
All the actual content is on the Hive blockchain itself which is stored on thousands of anonymous servers all around the world.
Thank you for the workarounds, in any case, I'm used to walking through my vpn :)
I was able to perfectly appreciate the advantages of using blockchain in the Hive at the moment when I saw that https://peakd.com/ does not fall under the lock :)
In any case, for those who have initial technical skills, blocking from regulators does not cause problems. But let's be honest, most users are used to the fact that they get access to content using just a browser. So such rough locks perform their task on large masses :( On the other hand, it also pushes another part of users to improve their technical education :)
This history is repeating itself.
Yes, everything is cyclical. I remember how 15 years ago the fear for many was the onset of globalization and the fall of borders. Well, now you can't be afraid of this... nationalism and even more borders.
It all comes down to rule by force.
As long as we accept that these people get to use violence to control those people, and us, we will always be ruled by those most willing to use violence.