In Russia, trying to block Telegram: the owner promises millions of dollars for blocking bypass

The Tagansky court of Moscow 13 of April satisfied the lawsuit of Roskomnadzor about blocking the Telegram manager in Russia because of the failure of the social network to transfer encryption keys to the FSB. А Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that he will pay “millions of dollars” from his personal funds to support proxy services and VPNs. So far Durov is ahead.

Фото: Depositphotos

In connection with this decision of the court, the Office entered the messenger into the registry of prohibited sites and 16 of April started blocking it, but everything turned out to be not so simple, writes with the BBC.

To lock Telegram Roskomnadzor demanded that the operators block 7 sites and 9 thousands of network addresses of the messenger. But the team Telegram redirected user traffic to cloud services of American companies Amazon and Google.

Some users did not even notice the blocking, others Telegram malfunctioning.

16 April Roskomnadzor sent information on access restrictions to service providers. However, even in the evening, users could use the messenger without even using the means to bypass the block.

As of April 17, Roskomnadzor has blocked more than 16 millions of IP addresses trying to block Telegram, but the messenger continues to be accessible, writes TJ.

The owners of the three lock-by-pass services said that at least half of the users Telegram in Russia - 8 million out of 15 million - used VPNs (virtual private networks) and proxies (intermediate servers) to continue using the messenger. At first, these services could not withstand the influx of clients, but by the end of the day on April 16, the majority of them were restored to service.

As of 2013 year cloud service Amazon EC2 had 4,3 million unique network addresses. The main advantage of these addresses is their “elasticity”: in order to block a service that uses them, you need to undertake the electronic equivalent of carpet bombing the entire infrastructure. Roskomnadzor blocked 786 thousand network addresses Amazon and 1 million addresses Googlebut these Internet addresses were used by other Internet services, not only Telegram.

As a result, April 16 users complained about the anomalous number of messengers failures. Viber and “TamTam”, as well as online games, the operation of which is permitted in Russia.

Officially, the connection of these failures with blocking Telegram Unconfirmed, Roskomnadzor denies any involvement in these failures, but opened a “hot line” to check for error messages.

The head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, confirmed the massive blocking of network addresses Amazon and Google. He said that there was a “fight between the projectile and the armor,” and recalled that the department was implementing the court’s decision.

Zharov noted that Roskomnadzor “is taking and will take” all necessary measures to implement the court decision and limit access to Internet resources that allow Telegram continue to work. According to the ministry, not only Roskomnadzor, but also the owners of VPN and proxy services should restrict access.

Founder Telegram Pavel Durov reported that the instant messenger will use the built-in methods of bypassing locks, which will not require any actions from users.

At the same time, he admitted that due to the blockade, “the quality of life of 15 million Russians will worsen, as Telegram may not be accessible at times without a VPN."

“As part of the Digital Resistance - a decentralized movement in defense of digital freedoms and progress - I began paying Bitcoin grants to proxy and VPN administrators. Over the course of this year, I will be happy to donate millions of dollars of personal funds for these purposes,” wrote Durov on his VKontakte page.

“Although the Russian market does not constitute a significant share of the Telegram user base, it is important to us for personal reasons,” Durov added, calling on others to “join and participate - by setting up proxy/vpn servers or funding them.”

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