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tl;dr: Russian law enforcement required GitHub to block certain content in Russia. GitHub has complied and put up a list of the blocked URLs in this repo. From

by ge0rg 12y ago

tl;dr: Russian law enforcement required GitHub to block certain content in Russia. GitHub has complied and put up a list of the blocked URLs in this repo. From a short look at the linked/blocked documents, all of them are suicide instructions written in Russian.

cpks 12y ago
That actually doesn't seem unreasonable to prohibit...
- arpa 12y ago
  why? Would it be reasonable to burn/censor books dealing with such matter, maybe describing some methods of suicide? Homicide? Different political views?
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Suicide is a thorny issue, because while on hand there are free speech issues with it, and some people do think it through and have rational reasons for wanting to commit suicide (e.g. facing a protracted degenerative disease that causes lots of pain might be one), most people who are suicidal are most at risk as a result of temporary emotional states that they have little or no control over. Accordingly, adding very small roadblocks for people who are contemplating suicide can have substantial effects in reducing suicide (an example is the restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen that can be sold per transaction in the UK), and people who attempt suicide and fail often express relief afterwards. I'm not sure where the line ought to go, but that in any case puts it in a very different category from e.g. homicide or different political views. Censoring suicide instructions is probably by far the least objectionable part of Russian censorship.
    - pra 12y ago
      Do you really suppose that state-wide censorship machine is a justifiable and "a very small roadblock" for people contemplating suicide? Are you serious? Let's put the fact aside that these "instructions" are a joke; consider a wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods. Should this page be censored? Since when removing the definition of a word in a dictionary makes a thing disappear? Sure, suicide is an issue, sure, it's better not to have it, but to censor anything mentioning it sounds like a bad adaptation of Orwells' 1984. What's the problem with suicide prevention, suicide hotlines, destigmatisation of mental health problems? I'll tell you what's the problem - it doesn't help you instill an intellectual control system, censorship and, quite frankly, a form mind control (via media filters). A censorship by any other reason is still a tool of oppression. It is not a tool for solving problems. Also, could you please provide a reference to a single study published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal of psychology, which supports your claim that small roadblocks, and especially restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen sold per transaction helps prevent suicide. Coincidentally, paracetamol poisoning a retarded way to go - it is probably more painless to kill oneself by drinking a lot of water (6l per 3hrs is enough to kill you). Why aren't drinking water sales not limited then? In fact, why aren't we all absolved of our personal responsibilities and taken care by the state, like some kind of a nanny?
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      As long as you can get into your car, remove the seat belt and run 200 miles an hour into a bridge support the idea of censoring suicide is stupid. Of course the people who fail express relief - if they don't we might lock them up. The same goes for your blanket arguments about temporary emotional states, _when you threaten a man with prison (whatever the hell you want to call it) he is way likely to say whatever he thinks you want to get out_.
- binarymax 12y ago
  The problem with this position is that censorship is a very slippery slope. What happens when the boundaries keep getting pushed. Where do you stop? Who decides what is Ok and what is not? What may be amoral to one may not be amoral to another.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Even if it's legitimate to prohibit, it's even more futile than trying to stop file sharing. At least a copy of The Hunger Games doesn't fit in a 4chan comment.
- ge0rg 12y ago
  I am not so sure about it. Blocking/prohibiting information will only lead to increased interest, and it will never be possible to block all instances of that information. A far superior approach would be better social care for people who might commit suicide, but that would cost money and effort, as opposed to a symbolic act of prohibition. Besides, Internet filters always start with the really evil things, like suicide instructions or child pornography, and once established they are slowly expanded to cover terrorism, homosexual pornography, regular pornography, copyright infringement and finally political opposition. You really do not want to go down that slippery slope. One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/uk-isps-to-introduce-jihadi-and-terror-content-reporting-button http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/uk-isps-to...
  - vidarh 12y ago
    > One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda The article does not support your claim. EDIT: To clarify, as per the reply I gave further down: There is no country wide "UK porn filter". There are voluntary filters put in place by each of the largest providers that are wildly inconsistent in what they block, and wildly ineffective. Most of the filtering is also opt-in or opt-out for most of these providers, mostly apart from blocks targeting child porn. Outside of the top 5-6 providers, many smaller providers don't filter at all.
    - dsp1234 12y ago
      They have also agreed to ensure that terrorist and extremist material is captured by their filters to prevent children and young people coming across radicalising material.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        The point being there is no single government mandated "UK porn filter". Each of the biggest ISPs have individual filters. Many of the smaller ISPs don't have filters. EDIT: Maybe whoever downvoted might care to explain why? The comment is factual. There is no legally mandated filtering across the board in the UK. The only legally mandated filtering is a small set of specific court orders targeting a group of the largest ISPs, requiring them to filter specific sites (Pirate Bay being the main target).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ptico 12y ago
Example of "suicide instructions" (translated by @goruha): 1. Burn when entering the Earth's atmosphere Quaternary: probably open a few minutes. Availability: problematic - it is necessary to go into Earth orbit. Trustworthy: Trustworthy as much as you can do it. Notes: Exit into open space in low Earth orbit. Then turn down enough to get into the Atmosphere. You will witness of exiting view!
- arpa 12y ago
  Practical and well worthy of censorship.
- vegancap 12y ago
  An even better way, super glue your hands to your head, tie cheese wire around your neck, then jump off of a building so's it looks like you pulled your own head off. Might send them a pull request now actually.
  - arpa 12y ago
    Careful, you're treading on the verge of illegal now!
    - Muromec 12y ago
      Funny part about this law is that's not illegal to write such things. It only requires ISP's to block them on request.
  - dsirijus 12y ago
    You've got it in the wrong order.
    - vegancap 12y ago
      Haha very good point... I'll raise a hotfix.
- ivan_gammel 12y ago
gioele 12y ago
> tl;dr: Russian law enforcement required GitHub to block certain content in Russia. GitHub has complied and put up a list of the blocked URLs in this repo. I suppose we will soon learn what is the intersection of all free spech laws of the world. Should the original Wolfenstein 3d images be released as Creative Commons and put up in a GitHub repository, will GitHub be banned in Germany as well?
- Muromec 12y ago
  >I suppose we will soon learn what is the intersection of all free spech laws of the world. Yeah, something like ACID test but for governments. Ultimate pack of offensive material in different jurisdictions. Some nazi symbolics, some soviet symbolic, denial of Holocaust , Holodomor, some LGTB propaganda, something offensive for black or feminists, or Islam, or His Majesty the King of Thailand. And copyright infringement of course.
  - jarin 12y ago
    Sounds like a great idea, but who's going to decide what kind of porn should be included in the ACID test? Even within the US, certain types of porn are legal in some jurisdictions and not others (think various kinds of rape fantasy porn, things involving various bodily fluids, etc).
- iSnow 12y ago
  >will GitHub be banned in Germany as well? Not in the next few years since some years ago a push to implement DNS-level blocking met with an outcry by the German geeksphere that ultimately pushed the pirate party in elections. The plans then were dropped on fear of censorship like in GB and Australia. But of course, this could be resurrected at some time - and Nazi symbols would be high on the list.
  - hereonbusiness 12y ago
    I'm not really sure, don't they already block sites that contain all kinds of nazi propaganda even if they're hosted outside of Germany? If there were hundreds of accounts sharing nazi propaganda all over Github, wouldn't they be forced by law to block Github in Germany? As far as I can see it would not be against the Github terms of service to share such content as long as it doesn't violate any laws in your jurisdiction.
Tombone5 12y ago
This is a really strange phenomenon, and I feel like there is a bigger context in which this exchange between the citizens and the state should be viewed. Looking at the first takedown, there is the conspicuously named account "russian-suicide", which contains a fork of a blog. A cursory look reveals one post just like the other suicide lists, but it notably references a poem about how teenagers should just kill themselves because they have only shit to expect from growing up. (http://mudacek.livejournal.com/720.html http://mudacek.livejournal.com/720.html) The poem is prefaced by an assertion the author expects Roscomnadzor will take it down soon. It seems likely that they have been taking down anything with the word suicide they've come across. My guess would be some programmer reads these poems and started putting these silly suicide instructions into repos as a form of protest, and the authorities are trying to kill the protest as well.
- Muromec 12y ago
  If you speak about this one: https://github.com/russian-suicide/blog https://github.com/russian-suicide/blog, which is the fork of my blog, I can explain what's going on. >My guess would be some programmer got their blog shut down because it somewhere said something like "going to Ukraine is suicide" and the authorities used the censor suicide rule in their formal decision. There is no such phrase. Subject of abuse was another file in repo that contains satiric poetry about Roskomnadzor that I copied from somewhere in the early 2013 to my blog. It sure contains suicide instructions as well as story about entry site being blocked because of single file. In the early 2013 it looked funny, but now you can't really tell what is satire work and what is Russian government reality. Another repos that were added in September/October 2014 (after first github ban) by different people contained list of methods to kill yourself.
  - Tombone5 12y ago
    So is it your livejournal that is linked to in the "suicide.rst" post? What's up with the bans on suicide mentions? Is the topic growing because the public feels without hope as the poem seems to suggest, or is Roskomnadzor just tying to keep busy?
thomasahle 12y ago
I wonder if the fact that many of them, as far as I could see, mentioned "The Eternal Putin" as one of the reasons that the person might as well give up on life.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
andrey-p 12y ago
From what I can tell with my vague knowledge of Russian, they're not even meant to be serious. One of the ways to go is "nanobots". Even if I disagree with the censorship, I can sorta understand what the problem is if it the list was meant to be serious - but banning black humour is just ridiculous.
- rimantas 12y ago
  Well, some are "common sense" like crashing the car at 150km/h or throwing yourself under the train. There are however methods like programming some industrial robot to drill your skull and vacuum brains out… :/

by ge0rg 12y ago

cpks 12y ago

That actually doesn't seem unreasonable to prohibit...

arpa 12y ago
why? Would it be reasonable to burn/censor books dealing with such matter, maybe describing some methods of suicide? Homicide? Different political views?
- vidarh 12y ago
  Suicide is a thorny issue, because while on hand there are free speech issues with it, and some people do think it through and have rational reasons for wanting to commit suicide (e.g. facing a protracted degenerative disease that causes lots of pain might be one), most people who are suicidal are most at risk as a result of temporary emotional states that they have little or no control over. Accordingly, adding very small roadblocks for people who are contemplating suicide can have substantial effects in reducing suicide (an example is the restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen that can be sold per transaction in the UK), and people who attempt suicide and fail often express relief afterwards. I'm not sure where the line ought to go, but that in any case puts it in a very different category from e.g. homicide or different political views. Censoring suicide instructions is probably by far the least objectionable part of Russian censorship.
  - pra 12y ago
    Do you really suppose that state-wide censorship machine is a justifiable and "a very small roadblock" for people contemplating suicide? Are you serious? Let's put the fact aside that these "instructions" are a joke; consider a wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods. Should this page be censored? Since when removing the definition of a word in a dictionary makes a thing disappear? Sure, suicide is an issue, sure, it's better not to have it, but to censor anything mentioning it sounds like a bad adaptation of Orwells' 1984. What's the problem with suicide prevention, suicide hotlines, destigmatisation of mental health problems? I'll tell you what's the problem - it doesn't help you instill an intellectual control system, censorship and, quite frankly, a form mind control (via media filters). A censorship by any other reason is still a tool of oppression. It is not a tool for solving problems. Also, could you please provide a reference to a single study published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal of psychology, which supports your claim that small roadblocks, and especially restriction on amount of paracetamol/acetaminophen sold per transaction helps prevent suicide. Coincidentally, paracetamol poisoning a retarded way to go - it is probably more painless to kill oneself by drinking a lot of water (6l per 3hrs is enough to kill you). Why aren't drinking water sales not limited then? In fact, why aren't we all absolved of our personal responsibilities and taken care by the state, like some kind of a nanny?
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    As long as you can get into your car, remove the seat belt and run 200 miles an hour into a bridge support the idea of censoring suicide is stupid. Of course the people who fail express relief - if they don't we might lock them up. The same goes for your blanket arguments about temporary emotional states, _when you threaten a man with prison (whatever the hell you want to call it) he is way likely to say whatever he thinks you want to get out_.
binarymax 12y ago
The problem with this position is that censorship is a very slippery slope. What happens when the boundaries keep getting pushed. Where do you stop? Who decides what is Ok and what is not? What may be amoral to one may not be amoral to another.
icebraining 12y ago
Even if it's legitimate to prohibit, it's even more futile than trying to stop file sharing. At least a copy of The Hunger Games doesn't fit in a 4chan comment.
ge0rg 12y ago
I am not so sure about it. Blocking/prohibiting information will only lead to increased interest, and it will never be possible to block all instances of that information. A far superior approach would be better social care for people who might commit suicide, but that would cost money and effort, as opposed to a symbolic act of prohibition. Besides, Internet filters always start with the really evil things, like suicide instructions or child pornography, and once established they are slowly expanded to cover terrorism, homosexual pornography, regular pornography, copyright infringement and finally political opposition. You really do not want to go down that slippery slope. One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/uk-isps-to-introduce-jihadi-and-terror-content-reporting-button http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/uk-isps-to...
- vidarh 12y ago
  > One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda The article does not support your claim. EDIT: To clarify, as per the reply I gave further down: There is no country wide "UK porn filter". There are voluntary filters put in place by each of the largest providers that are wildly inconsistent in what they block, and wildly ineffective. Most of the filtering is also opt-in or opt-out for most of these providers, mostly apart from blocks targeting child porn. Outside of the top 5-6 providers, many smaller providers don't filter at all.
  - dsp1234 12y ago
    They have also agreed to ensure that terrorist and extremist material is captured by their filters to prevent children and young people coming across radicalising material.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      The point being there is no single government mandated "UK porn filter". Each of the biggest ISPs have individual filters. Many of the smaller ISPs don't have filters. EDIT: Maybe whoever downvoted might care to explain why? The comment is factual. There is no legally mandated filtering across the board in the UK. The only legally mandated filtering is a small set of specific court orders targeting a group of the largest ISPs, requiring them to filter specific sites (Pirate Bay being the main target).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

ptico 12y ago

Example of "suicide instructions" (translated by @goruha): 1. Burn when entering the Earth's atmosphere Quaternary: probably open a few minutes. Availability: problematic - it is necessary to go into Earth orbit. Trustworthy: Trustworthy as much as you can do it. Notes: Exit into open space in low Earth orbit. Then turn down enough to get into the Atmosphere. You will witness of exiting view!

arpa 12y ago
Practical and well worthy of censorship.
vegancap 12y ago
An even better way, super glue your hands to your head, tie cheese wire around your neck, then jump off of a building so's it looks like you pulled your own head off. Might send them a pull request now actually.
- arpa 12y ago
  Careful, you're treading on the verge of illegal now!
  - Muromec 12y ago
    Funny part about this law is that's not illegal to write such things. It only requires ISP's to block them on request.
- dsirijus 12y ago
  You've got it in the wrong order.
  - vegancap 12y ago
    Haha very good point... I'll raise a hotfix.
ivan_gammel 12y ago

gioele 12y ago

> tl;dr: Russian law enforcement required GitHub to block certain content in Russia. GitHub has complied and put up a list of the blocked URLs in this repo. I suppose we will soon learn what is the intersection of all free spech laws of the world. Should the original Wolfenstein 3d images be released as Creative Commons and put up in a GitHub repository, will GitHub be banned in Germany as well?

Muromec 12y ago
>I suppose we will soon learn what is the intersection of all free spech laws of the world. Yeah, something like ACID test but for governments. Ultimate pack of offensive material in different jurisdictions. Some nazi symbolics, some soviet symbolic, denial of Holocaust , Holodomor, some LGTB propaganda, something offensive for black or feminists, or Islam, or His Majesty the King of Thailand. And copyright infringement of course.
- jarin 12y ago
  Sounds like a great idea, but who's going to decide what kind of porn should be included in the ACID test? Even within the US, certain types of porn are legal in some jurisdictions and not others (think various kinds of rape fantasy porn, things involving various bodily fluids, etc).
iSnow 12y ago
>will GitHub be banned in Germany as well? Not in the next few years since some years ago a push to implement DNS-level blocking met with an outcry by the German geeksphere that ultimately pushed the pirate party in elections. The plans then were dropped on fear of censorship like in GB and Australia. But of course, this could be resurrected at some time - and Nazi symbols would be high on the list.
- hereonbusiness 12y ago
  I'm not really sure, don't they already block sites that contain all kinds of nazi propaganda even if they're hosted outside of Germany? If there were hundreds of accounts sharing nazi propaganda all over Github, wouldn't they be forced by law to block Github in Germany? As far as I can see it would not be against the Github terms of service to share such content as long as it doesn't violate any laws in your jurisdiction.

Tombone5 12y ago

This is a really strange phenomenon, and I feel like there is a bigger context in which this exchange between the citizens and the state should be viewed. Looking at the first takedown, there is the conspicuously named account "russian-suicide", which contains a fork of a blog. A cursory look reveals one post just like the other suicide lists, but it notably references a poem about how teenagers should just kill themselves because they have only shit to expect from growing up. (http://mudacek.livejournal.com/720.html http://mudacek.livejournal.com/720.html) The poem is prefaced by an assertion the author expects Roscomnadzor will take it down soon. It seems likely that they have been taking down anything with the word suicide they've come across. My guess would be some programmer reads these poems and started putting these silly suicide instructions into repos as a form of protest, and the authorities are trying to kill the protest as well.

Muromec 12y ago
If you speak about this one: https://github.com/russian-suicide/blog https://github.com/russian-suicide/blog, which is the fork of my blog, I can explain what's going on. >My guess would be some programmer got their blog shut down because it somewhere said something like "going to Ukraine is suicide" and the authorities used the censor suicide rule in their formal decision. There is no such phrase. Subject of abuse was another file in repo that contains satiric poetry about Roskomnadzor that I copied from somewhere in the early 2013 to my blog. It sure contains suicide instructions as well as story about entry site being blocked because of single file. In the early 2013 it looked funny, but now you can't really tell what is satire work and what is Russian government reality. Another repos that were added in September/October 2014 (after first github ban) by different people contained list of methods to kill yourself.
- Tombone5 12y ago
  So is it your livejournal that is linked to in the "suicide.rst" post? What's up with the bans on suicide mentions? Is the topic growing because the public feels without hope as the poem seems to suggest, or is Roskomnadzor just tying to keep busy?

thomasahle 12y ago

I wonder if the fact that many of them, as far as I could see, mentioned "The Eternal Putin" as one of the reasons that the person might as well give up on life.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

andrey-p 12y ago

From what I can tell with my vague knowledge of Russian, they're not even meant to be serious. One of the ways to go is "nanobots". Even if I disagree with the censorship, I can sorta understand what the problem is if it the list was meant to be serious - but banning black humour is just ridiculous.

rimantas 12y ago
Well, some are "common sense" like crashing the car at 150km/h or throwing yourself under the train. There are however methods like programming some industrial robot to drill your skull and vacuum brains out… :/