Look here, my young internet enthusiasts, and get your websites ready to be blocked.
Because as of today, literally any website in the country is breaking the law and storing Russian citizens’ personal data “on American servers in California.”
As I wrote earlier today, there was a court hearing this morning, and the “Smart Voting” website was blocked. Anticipating this decision, we removed the collection of personal data from the site so that Roskomnadzor (Russia’s state communications regulator) would have no formal pretext to come after us.
The site was blocked anyway, and until the lawyers got back, I thought it was over the absurd charge of violating family privacy.
But reality outdid even the wildest imagination.
When our representative said in court that the site https://2019.vote does not collect personal data, the guys from Roskomnadzor, narrowing their eyes slyly, exclaimed: oh yes it does!
They then submitted two pages of code to the court, supposedly proving that the site was connected to the services Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica:
For those completely unfamiliar with this: these are just traffic counters. Any website owner wants to know how many people visit, where they come from, and so on. So you connect one of these counters. It’s a technical tool that exists on absolutely every website.
Here is the code accepted by the court as evidence.
The counter tallies the people who visited the site and records that data on a server. And that server is in California! That’s it, national security is under threat.
The bit about Yandex.Metrica is especially funny. If we have to be blocked for using a Yandex counter, then what should be done to Yandex itself? Blow it up? Shoot all the employees? Those fools still haven’t realized how illegal they are, and have even gone so far as to buy a plot of land for an office. What do they need land for when they should be preparing to turn themselves in.
Tell Volozh (Arkady Volozh, Yandex co-founder) that a sincere confession is a mitigating circumstance. (But it increases the sentence.)
So, great. Now any website can be blocked with a snap of the fingers. It doesn’t matter what you publish there, or which rules you do or don’t follow.
The major offensive against the internet has begun; we can see it in the tens of billions of rubles being allocated to new “even better” blocking systems. We just still don’t fully grasp the scale of this offensive.
Sign up for “Smart Voting.”
And we really need great developers who want to do a good deed and stick it to United Russia (the ruling political party), Roskomnadzor, and the whole gang. Here’s a post about the search for them, for anyone who wants the details.
We also specifically need great bot developers for Telegram and other messengers. More broadly, we really need specialists in this area who can advise us and explain what can be done there and how. Write to: django@fbk.info