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Until Friday, millions more Russians were connecting to Western media channels to watch and get a select view of their highly partisan state news channels. Now it’s gone. Russia has embarked on an ordinary effort to establish a national firewall, making its relatively loose and open Internet edition increasingly resemble China’s. The websites of BBC Russia, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and Radio Free Europe were largely inaccessible to Russian users, according to various reports and network tracking services. Facebook has noticed a “degradation” of the service for Russian users who have trouble uploading videos to the site, Meta Platforms Inc. said. And then media regulator Roskomnadzor announced that it had blocked the site because Facebook had suspended Russian media accounts.
Russia’s state-run news firm TASS showed on Friday that a set of media sites had been blocked due to “false data about Ukraine. “a criminal sentence. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance Ltd. , has not noticed any effect on its facilities in Russia, according to a spokesperson.
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“The blockades are coming so fast right now that I don’t know what’s on the list right now,” said Kevin Rothrock, editor-in-chief of Meduza, an independent Russian news site that blocked through Roskomnadzor on Thursday, along with several other news sites. Rothrock has asked Apple Inc. to approve an update to Meduza’s app, which his engineering team said could help circumvent the block. Even if it works, it’s not clear how long it will be before it gets stuck. Once again.
“We’re going back to the days of the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It’s about sneaking away. “
The Russians are already in a kind of data vacuum, with most TV news channels controlled by the state. The propaganda device is so effective that, for example, a 25-year-old woman in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city attacked through the Russian group. Ammunition was reportedly unable to convince her mother in Moscow that other people around her were dying, or that she herself was in danger. The mother insisted that the Ukrainian government was killing its own other people.
According to Rothrock, the crackdown leaves only two independent Russian media corporations still publishing: Media Zone, which was created through two former members of Pussy Riot; and Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
It also turns out to have saved YouTube, for now. However, on Friday, Russian users reported that videos were slow to load on the site, according to Downdetector Russia, which tracks network traffic in the country, suggesting that the Kremlin could simply “limit” traffic as it does with Twitter Inc.
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This is a worrying progression as Russians rely much more on YouTube than facebook for information, entertainment and news. YouTube is the most popular online page of the moment in Russia after home search giant Yandex, according to SimilarWeb, a traffic tracking company. Facebook is ranked 12th). YouTube parent company Alphabet Inc. he did not respond to a request for comment.
About 22% of Russian internet users had access to a VPN (virtual personal network) in 2020, according to Top10VPN. com, a VPN equipment review site, meaning it’s possible for them to simply stop at Kremlin-blocked websites. (1) Last September, however, the Kremlin banned popular VPN equipment such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and IPVanish, and threatened to impose fines on anyone who used them. Only government-approved VPNs are legal in Russia. It’s unclear how many other people still have access to the VPN since the ban. which will make it even more difficult for Russians eager to circumvent the blockade to do so now. Another vital data channel for Russians is the very popular instant messaging service Telegram. “Zone of struggle,” says Rothrock, and is a source of videos that are then uploaded to other platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.
For now, Telegram remains as strong as ever, though its founder, Pavel Durov, has hinted at an imaginable self-censorship of the conflict. Telegram channels “are increasingly adjusting to an unverified data source similar to Ukrainian events,” he said on the website. app, adding that it can block some of the channels. But 30 minutes after issuing this statement, it turned: “Many users have asked us not to take into consideration the deactivation of Telegram channels during the era of conflict, as we are their only source of data,” he wrote. “We have made the decision not to take such measures into consideration. “
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The question now is how physically powerful Putin’s iron firewall will be. It is unlikely to have as many resources as China, where other people are used to a variety of opportunities on Western online platforms, from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Sina Weibo.
Instead, millions of Russians who have become accustomed to YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook will suddenly lose access to popular services. They can simply communicate or find alternative solutions. Nature of the Kremlin so far, it is unlikely in the short term.
The teenagers, aged between 16 and 18, were injured around 1 a. m. Saturday at a home in Socorro, a city on the Mexican border near El Paso, Socorro Police Chief David Burton said. No less than a hundred more people were present. Revelers said the shooting broke out after fighting broke out between two groups, Burton said.
The average value of a pint of beer in Britain rose to £3. 95 this year, up from £2. 30 in 2008, according to the FT cited by CGA. Barley to make beer increases with the pressures derived from the war in Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the government also released a promotional video as part of its attempts to replace its call to English. The video shows tourists from all over the world “Hello Türkiye” in prominent destinations.
Air traffic lost contact with the twin-propeller plane shortly after taking off from Pokhara and heading to Jomsom, a popular hiking destination in the Himalayas. The remains were discovered a day later, with 16 Nepalis, 4 Indians and two Germans on board killed.
A shallow 6. 1-magnitude quake struck a sparsely populated domain of Sichuan province about a hundred kilometers (60 miles) west of the provincial capital, Chengdu, CCTV reported. It followed 3 minutes later to a moment of 4. 5 magnitude quake in a nearby county where the dead and injured occurred, according to CCTV. Footage received through the station showed dozens of schoolchildren screaming and hiding under desks as their construction began to shake, before running out of the classroom with their arms over their heads.
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