Blocking of news websites in Russia

[abdallahalsalmi]

Hi, it seems that the authorities in Russia have blocked BBC and German station DW a couple of hours ago.

We are witnessing a drop in traffic. I had a cron job running a simple curl of bbc.com using a Tor exit node and it's giving "Cannot be reached" messages. It was working fine since the beginning of the war.

Any testing of how the blocking is happening will be apprecited and help us find a workaround.

[wkrp]

Thanks for the report. I cross-posted to NTC:
https://ntc.party/t/bbc-deutsche-welle/1812

OONI has some measurements of bbc.com and dw.com from the past few hours. They are only HTTP, not HTTPS, and they are all failed. Unfortunately there are not non-blocked measurements to compare with.

https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2022-02-05&until=2022-03-05&failure=false&domain=bbc.com&probe_cc=RU&test_name=web_connectivity

date	AS	URL	result
2022-03-03 22:58	25513	http://bbc.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:00	8359	http://bbc.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:09	48124	http://bbc.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:16	8359	http://bbc.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:52	16345	http://bbc.com/	connection_reset

Similar for dw.com.

https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2022-02-22&until=2022-03-05&failure=false&domain=dw.com&probe_cc=RU&test_name=web_connectivity

date	AS	URL	result
2022-03-03 22:58	25513	http://dw.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:00	8359	http://dw.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:09	48124	http://dw.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:10	35816	http://dw.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:16	8359	http://dw.com/	connection_reset
2022-03-03 23:52	16345	http://dw.com/	connection_reset

I checked the Unified Register for bbc.com, www.bbc.com, dw.com, www.dw.com, and none of them was listed. Other domains have been blocked recently without appearing on the register.

@abdallahalsalmi, something you can do is trying your curl fetch with an IP address, rather than a domain name. You may have to use the --insecure option to disable certificate verification.

[wkrp]

I checked the Unified Register for bbc.com, www.bbc.com, dw.com, www.dw.com, and none of them was listed. Other domains have been blocked recently without appearing on the register.

@ValdikSS corrected my error in the NTC thread. www.bbc.com and www.dw.com do appear on the register, by IP address, domain name, and URL. They are marked with the same legal metadata, both dated 2022-02-24.

151.101.0.81 | 151.101.128.81 | 151.101.192.81 | 151.101.64.81;www.bbc.com;https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/news-russian-60504344;Генпрокуратура;27-31-2020/Ид2145-22;2022-02-24
104.75.59.232 | 2001:2030:15:19b::2d63 | 2001:2030:15:1af::2d63;www.dw.com;https://www.dw.com/ru/glavy-ldnr-poprosili-putina-pomoch-v-otrazhenii-agressii-ukrainy/a-60893356;Генпрокуратура;27-31-2020/Ид2145-22;2022-02-24

The two articles listed are:

• Россия напала на Украину. Москва наносит удары по целям в Киеве, Харькове и других городах / Russia has attacked Ukraine. Moscow strikes targets in Kyiv, Kharkov and other cities, 2022-02-24
• Война в Украине: Киев разрывает дипломатические отношения с Москвой / War in Ukraine: Kyiv Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Moscow, 2022-02-24

You can see the entries added in this commit, dated 2022-03-03 21:27:00 +0000:

• zapret-info/z-i@4f8dbf9#diff-e7c24c28215122ae1ea0461e2f85d97647ae2860f5cd326434c0e3ca3caf1f3bR4143
• zapret-info/z-i@4f8dbf9#diff-e7c24c28215122ae1ea0461e2f85d97647ae2860f5cd326434c0e3ca3caf1f3bR6407

If it's like the time that torproject.org was added to the registry, whoever manages the domain names might have received an email from Roskomnadzor, warning of the impending blocking.

[wkrp]

Meduza is tracking what news services have been blocked in Russia since the start of the war.

https://meduza.io/en/short/2022/03/05/the-day-the-news-died (English)
https://meduza.io/feature/2022/03/05/rossiyskie-vlasti-za-neskolko-dney-razgromili-ves-media-rynok-vot-kak-eto-vyglyadit (Russian, more complete)

The day the news died
Here are all Russia’s independent media outlets banned, blocked, or shuttered in just the past few days

5:49 am, March 5, 2022
Source: Meduza

In the past few days, Russia’s federal government has blocked or forced offline and off the airwaves virtually every remaining independent news outlet in the country. This crackdown has reduced Russia’s free press to less than it was even in the late Soviet period. Here’s the current list of targeted media outlets, though the censor is still busy at work.

Who's been blocked

• Meduza
• Dozhd
• Echo of Moscow
• The BBC
• TV-2
• Radio Liberty
• Current Time
• Voice of America
• Tayga.Info
• The New Times
• Doxa
• Deutsche Welle
• The Village
• Facebook
• Twitter
• App Store
• Google Play

Who's ceased transmission

• Dozhd
• Znak.com
• Echo of Moscow
• BBC
• Ksenia Sobchak's YouTube channel

Who's suspended and removed all war reporting

• Novaya Gazeta
• The Bell
• It's My City
• Republic

[wkrp]

From NTC, Roskomnadzor announced the blocking of Google News (news.google.com) since 2022-03-23. Perhaps related, at the same time people are reporting inaccessibility of TLS to the domain play.google.com (Google Play) on various ISPs.

https://ntc.party/t/news-google-com-play-google-com/2071

The symptoms of blocking are:

• Connection attempts time out, without a RST or a block page.
• Classification is by SNI: connecting to unrelated servers with an SNI of news.google.com or play.google.com results in a timeout, though another user reports that it only times out when sending such an SNI to a Google-owned IP address.
• @diwenx says that the apparent blocks are actually very low-rate throttling, like with Twitter at the start of the invasion.

https://ria.ru/20220323/roskomnadzor-1779754940.html (archive)

Роскомнадзор ограничил доступ к сервису News.Google из-за фейков о спецоперации на Украине

МОСКВА, 23 мар — РИА Новости. Роскомнадзор ограничил доступ к сервису News.Google на территории России в связи с доступом к публикациям, содержащим ложные сведения о спецоперации на Украине.

"На основании требования Генеральной прокуратуры России Роскомнадзор ограничил доступ к интернет-сервису News.Google на территории страны", — говорится в сообщении.

В ведомстве отметили, что американский интернет-ресурс предоставлял доступ к фейковым публикациям о спецоперации на Украине.

Там также уточнили, что в России предусмотрена уголовную ответственность за распространение ложной информации о Вооруженных силах (ст. 207.3 УК).

Roskomnadzor restricts access to News.Google due to fakes about special operation in Ukraine

MOSCOW, March 23 - RIA Novosti. Roskomnadzor has restricted access to the News.Google service in Russia in connection with access to publications containing false information about the special operation in Ukraine.

"Based on the request of the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, Roskomnadzor has restricted access to the Internet service News.Google in the country," the report said.

The agency noted that the American Internet resource provided access to fake publications about the special operation in Ukraine.

It also said that in Russia there is criminal responsibility for dissemination of false information about the Armed Forces (Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code).