Моя заметка в блоге The Economist на тему рег.фильтрации #ru_cenz

Написал короткую заметку для тех.блога The Economist:

THIS summer Russians faced several state attempts to «filter» (selectively block) websites. And as in many other things, Russia has gone its own way with a slightly more complicated technique: regional filtering.

There are two ways to control the internet. You can influence the companies and bloggers who use the web, or you can muck with the architecture of the web itself to block or monitor traffic. China does both. Russia, so far, has leaned on websites and telecoms operators using its criminal code, and encouraged groups of like-minded citizens to nudge the online conversation in directions the Kremlin finds pleasing. Until now, few websites have been blocked altogether in Russia.

But this year three such cases were identified. In each, the site was blocked only within a certain region. On July 16th, the city court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur obliged Rosnet, a local internet provider, to ban YouTube and the Internet Archive, among other sites. The court was worried about far-right extremist material that can be found on the sites; it is the country’s first YouTube ban. The decision has not been enforced. For similar reasons in late July, a regional court in Ingushetia forced a local provider to block LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging site. And in August in the Tula region, the state-controlled local telecoms operator temporarily blocked the website of Tulksiye Priyanki, an independent regional news portal.

Остальное — на сайте.

И, кстати, раз уж речь зашла про публикации — вчера опубликовал статью про сообщества ЖЖ, как самодельные инструменты повышения транспарентности в обществе.
Russia: LiveJournal Communities as a Transparency Tool.

In the countries with low levels of transparency, new media often become the only arena for exposing violations made by the government. In the countries where the truly independent NGOs are often oppressed and it’s hard to establish transparency-related independent NGOs, new media come again to help. Russia is an example of a country with a high level of corruption and disregard for non-partisan NGOs. These two factors together with the popularity of LiveJournal as a main blogging platform explain why LiveJournal communities more and more often become spontaneous transparency tools.