What irritates me far more than the blocking of my LiveJournal blog is the whole issue of the broad—and growing—use of blocking in general. As usual, it started with “let’s protect the children,” and look where it has led. Did you know, for example, that today State Duma deputies approved blocking websites for criticizing banks? Could anyone have imagined something like this not long ago? The whole business of blocking, shutting down, and banning things has become wildly popular and is encouraged by Putin, so every idiot from United Russia rushes to use it for self-promotion. Here, for instance, some crank is proposing a ban on social networks. He may be a crank who belongs in a psychiatric ward, but he’s the head of one of Moscow’s municipal districts (and of course a United Russia member), writing to Zheleznyak, another fanatic just like himself. Why do you think this won’t find support from Putin? It will. So the use of blocking as a way to silence those who tell the truth will keep increasing. 100%. We don’t have even remotely independent courts here, so there will be no miracles like in Turkey, where the Constitutional Court overturned the Twitter ban. A year ago, a law blocking websites for criticizing banks would have sounded like a joke. It’s quite likely that in a year, a tweet like this will be considered extremist. Subject to blocking for criticizing state corporations.
In these circumstances, the task of all decent people is to understand what basic tools exist for bypassing blocks and to tell everyone about them. Millions of internet users need to adopt them. This post is about the simplest solutions available to anyone. Browser extensions. If you look at my LiveJournal statistics for the year, you’ll see that 80% of users are on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
There are some truly excellent solutions for these browsers. The friGate plugin http://fri-gate.org/ru/, which Anton Nosik writes about. One minute, two clicks, and blocks stop bothering you. Chrome and Firefox. Completely free. ZenMate for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zenmate-for-google-chrome/fdcgdnkidjaadafnichfpabhfomcebme?hl=en is also completely free and very easy to install. If you use Yandex Browser or Opera, it’s even easier. Turn on “Turbo” mode (sometimes called “Compression mode”)—it lets you bypass all blocks by working like a proxy, meaning it caches the pages you request on intermediary servers located outside Russia (so Roskomnadzor’s blocks do not apply there).
They have a couple of drawbacks: they don’t always work with corporate proxies (so they may not work from office networks), they cache every site indiscriminately, which means that sometimes when you visit a site you may not see the very latest content, and the plugins require registration and an email address. After RosKomCensorship started blocking this LiveJournal blog, an “internet special forces unit” appeared—Ruslan Leviev and Vlad. Many thanks to them for what they’re doing. These brave cyber-fighters created plugins (for now only for Google Chrome and Firefox, but versions for all browsers are coming). They don’t have those drawbacks: they require no registration or email address, they don’t cache the other sites you visit, and they do not alter your internet connection settings in any way (which is why they work even behind any corporate proxy). Our goal is broader than simply providing an accessible copy of Navalny’s blog. We are going to come up with and develop new plugin features, turning them into полноценные applications. For example, through the plugins we can notify users about new posts on Navalny’s blog, the release of a new newspaper issue (including a link to download it as a PDF), ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) mailings, ACF events, and so on. Other plugins don’t offer any of this. Here is the plugin on the official Google Chrome site When installing it, the plugin will request a permission described as “access to tabs and browsing history.” In fact, the plugin does not access browsing history; this can be verified in its source code, available at https://github.com/Leviev/UnblockNavalnyChrome. In reality, the plugin only needs access to tabs, but there is no way to request permission only for tab access separately—Google Chrome’s API does not provide for that. Access to tabs is needed to open the plugin’s settings page. Google Chrome downloads and installs plugin updates automatically, so users do not need to worry about that. A Mozilla Firefox plugin developed by a volunteer: https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/actualnavalny/ Its functionality is similar to the Google Chrome plugin, except that it has no settings page. And let me remind you that specifically for this blog there are also the services http://navalny.us/ and http://navalny.at/ I suspect that everyone reading this doesn’t really need advice like this—after all, if you’re reading it, then you’ve already managed to get around the censorship blocks somehow. So, as usual: it’s the responsibility of the more tech-savvy to help everyone else. Set up these plugins for your moms, dads, grandmothers, and grandfathers. Tell people about them on your social networks. Post instructions and a link. The cyberwar being waged against us by the Party of Crooks and Thieves is serious business, and everyone must do their part. P.S. A mirror of this post is available at http://navalny.us/921003.html While Alexei Navalny is under house arrest, his blog is being run by Yulia Navalnaya and ACF staff.