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I've tried using a Russian VPN (almost surprised nobody else did?), and mil.ru redirects to pda.mil.ru, and eng.mil.ru just loads a blank page. I think I'll tak

by felurx 5y ago

I've tried using a Russian VPN (almost surprised nobody else did?), and mil.ru redirects to pda.mil.ru, and eng.mil.ru just loads a blank page. I think I'll take a further look once I'm home. For now, I think they wanted to make the site unavailable to western/NATO/European/..? countries and someone just made a joke out of it or whatever. Or maybe they wanted the site to appear as if it was hacked?

ehsankia 5y ago
> they wanted to make the site unavailable > I've tried using a Russian VPN I have a hard time believing their genius way of "protecting" the website from the west is to just block western IPs, which can be easily bypassed.
- sha256sum 5y ago
  You might, most HN users might, but really it only takes 1 reporter on Twitter, 0 verification, and a bunch of copycats to follow suit saying that “Anonymous has taken down the Russian military’s website”
- felurx 5y ago
  I very much agree that just blocking western IPs is far from a perfect (or even at all _good_) way, and I'm not saying that anyone there thinks that. I don't even think the goal is to perfectly block all westerners. It's just enough to stop the average Joe from reading around out of curiosity, whyever they want that. I mean, it's still a public facing website after all, it's not like they're going to put anything of significant strategic value or whatever on there. Also, to me the theory that they're doing this on purpose makes the most sense, because everything else would imply that somehow the IT team of the Russian military is somehow not able to fix this, and that some error or hacktivists caused this scenario, where western IPs get an almost unused HTTP status code and Russian IPs don't. Both just seems very unlikely to me.
somedude895 5y ago
I don't know enough about networking, but could this be effective in defending against DoS attacks from outside the country?
yurish 5y ago
Works for me (Russian, live in Russia)

by felurx 5y ago

ehsankia 5y ago

> they wanted to make the site unavailable > I've tried using a Russian VPN I have a hard time believing their genius way of "protecting" the website from the west is to just block western IPs, which can be easily bypassed.

sha256sum 5y ago
You might, most HN users might, but really it only takes 1 reporter on Twitter, 0 verification, and a bunch of copycats to follow suit saying that “Anonymous has taken down the Russian military’s website”
felurx 5y ago
I very much agree that just blocking western IPs is far from a perfect (or even at all _good_) way, and I'm not saying that anyone there thinks that. I don't even think the goal is to perfectly block all westerners. It's just enough to stop the average Joe from reading around out of curiosity, whyever they want that. I mean, it's still a public facing website after all, it's not like they're going to put anything of significant strategic value or whatever on there. Also, to me the theory that they're doing this on purpose makes the most sense, because everything else would imply that somehow the IT team of the Russian military is somehow not able to fix this, and that some error or hacktivists caused this scenario, where western IPs get an almost unused HTTP status code and Russian IPs don't. Both just seems very unlikely to me.

somedude895 5y ago

I don't know enough about networking, but could this be effective in defending against DoS attacks from outside the country?

yurish 5y ago

Works for me (Russian, live in Russia)