Skip Navigation

Posts
11
Comments
458
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Nah, because there are definitely projects Google started on there. The one OP mentioned is on there, and I remember Google Zeitgeist from back when.

    EDIT: Not saying that this is comprehensive, but only five entries reference being acquired from elsewhere in their description.

  • looks to see who the people in question are

    Autonomous movement against National Guard expansion in so called Michigan, defend the forest and decolonize the land

    I mean, running around trying to block military infrastructure while saying that the state doesn't exist does sort of seem like the sort of thing that might attract attention.

  • I bet someone has made a list.

    googles

    Yup.

    The first item on the field is a search field. The "all" category has 288 entries.

    https://killedbygoogle.com/

  • Honestly, r/ducks was one of my favourite subs. If not my favourite.

    Found the fox.

  • The Kremlin could maybe have something set up that looks for accesses to stuff inside Russia from outside Russia, then flag that IP as suspicious as being a VPN endpoint outside Russia.

    So, okay, take this scenario:

    • IP A, user inside Russia.
    • IP B, VPS outside Russia.
    • IP C, service inside Russia that state can monitor.

    User in Russia on IP A has an SSH tunnel to VPS on IP B with SOCKS that they control.

    That's fine as long as user is only browsing the Internet outside Russia. But if you're routing all traffic through the VPS and you use any sites in Russia, the Great Russian Firewall can see the following:

    1. IP A has a long-running SSH connection to IP B.
    2. IP B is accessing stuff in Russia.

    You could maybe also do heavier-weight traffic analsysis on top of that if you see 1 and 2, or gather data over a longer period of time, but seeing 1 and 2 alone are probably enough to block IP A to IP B connections.

    That can be defeated by using two external VPSes, opening an SSH tunnel to the first one, and then talking to SOCKS on the second (maybe with another SSH connection linking the two). But that's increasing complexity and cost.

  • Oh, okay, I gotcha. I figured that it was the other way around, that people spamming from outside Pakistan were targeting people inside.

  • I was talking to someone from the UAE in some thread on lemmy.blahaj.zone a month back. Apparently, because the UAE doesn't like LGBT stuff, they block images hosted on that server.

    I was seriously thinking there about what it would take to hide a VPN connection, and that BitTorrent Is actually not a terrible choice, as it generates a lot of bidirectional traffic.

    IIRC I went looking and some guy did a prototype as his masters thesis some years back.

    Lemme see if I can find it.

    googles

    Yeah.

    https://github.com/danoctavian/bit-smuggler

    China started killing VPN connections.

    watcha gonna do.

    bit-smuggler might be the tool for you. keep those pesky internet censors off your back, get your tweets through and read your wikipedia in peace.

    bit-smuggler is a tool designed to allow you to defeat internet censorship by tunneling your network traffic through what appears to be a genuine bittorrent peer connection, fooling censorship firewalls into thinking it's harmless.

    EDIT: Ah, now I remember. Wasn't that they block images, but that they block the server. Gay UAE dude could use a permissable Threadiverse server and federation would let him talk to people on lemmy.blahaj.zone. However, the image-hosting is not federated. If someone put a post with an image up, he could view the text on another Threadiverse server, but couldn't see the images, because the images don't propagate to federated servers. The browser still tries to talk to the original server for that.

  • I remember, back in the late 1990s, if I have the time right, when RealPlayer phoned home to check for updates, and there was enormous uproar over the privacy implications.

    Things sure have changed since then.

  • It has got to be better to just make phone authentication better than to hope that nobody in the country is going to spam and then block VPNs to the outside.

  • Yeah, I don't even really have a problem with RT, as long as it's labeled so that people understand that it's the Russian state speaking. But a lot of forums rely more-or-less on the idea that people are more-or-less good faith actors. Very large scale efforts to have people pretend to be someone else and make non-good-faith arguments is something that I think that a lot of our forums can't today handle well.

    Arguably, that's a technical problem that needs to be fixed in some way.

  • Fair enough. I mean, there are ways around that too, like some port knocking scheme, but I assume that this shadowsocks thing solves the same problem in a better way.

    But I do stand by what I was responding to on, the bit about the internal IP packets being encrypted and not readable.

  • guesses

    Russian restaurants in France?

    googles

    https://www.tripadvisor.com/RestaurantReview-g187147-d718634-Reviews-LaCantineRusse-ParisIledeFrance.html

    La Cantine Russe

    European,Russian, Eastern European

    googles for a wine menu

    https://cdn.eat-list.fr/establishment/menu/gallerymenu/75016-paris-16/la-cantine-russe267940b.jpg

    Yeah, they have Russian wines listed. Under the champagne section, but I'm assuming that that's a listing error, given that France has a bit of a spat with Russia over what constitutes champagne.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57733684

    France has hit back at a new Russian law ordering French champagne makers to label their bottles as sparkling wine.

    France has strict rules protecting its bubbly, meaning to be called champagne it must be from the French region that shares the name.

    But under Russia's new law, only local producers can call their drinks "shampanskoye" - the Russian equivalent of champagne.

    France's main champagne industry group called the law "unacceptable".

  • Yeah, true, but I wasn't trying so much to find whether there was a lot of alcohol being consumed. My aim was more to see whether Russia was a net importer or exporter, since the claim was that alcohol producers [outside Russia] would be upset with the Russian sanctions, that it would cut the producers off from the Russian market.

    However, if Russia were a net exporter and you are an alcohol producer, then it'd be removing more competition than it would be closing off markets; producers would likely benefit.

  • https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&queryLevel=location&product=833&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined

    This is for 2021; I suspect that a few numbers have likely changed significantly.

    • 42.75% of Russian wine exports went to Ukraine.
    • 11.52% to China.
    • 11.12% of Kazakhstan
    • 8% to Belarus
    • 5.22% to Latvia

    I'm gonna stop at 5%, but you can go look at the treemap if you want more detail (like I said, though, the entire exports in 2021 were $11.5 million, so it's not a whole lot...I would guess that the numbers could be pretty noisy from year to year).

  • Ehhh...I dunno. Russia also produces grain, and I bet that means that they produce alcohol.

    goes looking

    https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&queryLevel=location&product=837&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined

    https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&queryLevel=location&product=837&year=2021&tradeDirection=import&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined

    Okay, so based on liquors, in 2021, $212 million in exports, $832 million in imports.

    Beer is $141 million in exports, $361 million in imports.

    Wine is $11.5 million in exports, $842 million in imports.

    So, yeah, you're right, I guess -- unless I've missed some sort of category of drink -- that Russia's definitely a net importer of alcoholic beverages.

  • Osteopathy is pseudoscientific quackery.

    The US has a degree that includes real medicine. That does not legitimize osteopathy.

  • Andrew Wakefield

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AndrewWakefield

    Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born September 3, 1956)[3][4][a] is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world.

  • In all honesty, I would expect at least an organized troll farm to use VPNs ending outside Russia.

    Random people in Russia might just act directly, but it's a red flag that's easy to pretty-inexpensively eliminate.

    googles

    It sounds like at least the Internet Research Agency troll farm used VPNs.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43093390

    According to court documents, the IRA took several measures to hide its tracks, duping the technology companies who were unaware, or unable, to stop what was filtering through their systems.

    The key - and obvious - move was to hide the fact that these posts were coming from Russia. For that, the IRA is said to have used several Virtual Private Networks - VPNs - to route their operations through computers in the US. The operatives allegedly used stolen identities to set up PayPal accounts using real American names.