LinkedIn is now officially blocked in Russia
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"10 years ago I was a alcoholic leprechaun but today I finally got that job working as a chimney sweep"
"Here's a picture of me with a homeless person I spoke to on my way to work today. It turns out they are people too."
"Don't you just love our military personnel/democracy/babies? One like to show you love these things. One share to show you don't hate them."
"Here's a pointless meme about mindfullness"
"Hey look at my dog wearing a santa costume" (actually that would be kind of cool)
I find it very convenient to have offers come-in out of the blue, only having to pay the cost of tweaking my profile once a year, and occasionally skimming/deleting random recruiter messages.
I see it as being open to opportunities. Usually, I would only look for a job when: 1) Unemployed, or 2) Unsatisfied at my current position. In both cases I would be motivated to solve the problem ASAP.
But being approached when happily employed gives you the upper hand during negotiations, allowing you to make demands that you would usually not be so confident to make. Not to mention becoming aware of good opportunities when your "job radar" is turned off.
Without LinkedIn I would never have gotten the offer, because my new employer would have had no chance of knowing that I no longer work for one of their customers.
It really isn't hard to build PYMK. It's basically just triangle closing on common friends and address book import.
But who thinks of LI as general purpose social media? I don't think anybody uses LI except in the strict context of finding new jobs, and making sure you can find new jobs in the future.
I don't get the criticism. It's like blaming the screwdriver for not being able to hammer in a nail.
It's a jobs site. And for that purpose it's pretty good. End of story.
I also use it as an up to date electronic rolodex of sorts. Is this person still working at Cisco? What's their current contact info? Let me LinkIn with you so I don't need to keep this business card, etc.
> “When collecting personal data, including through information and the internet telecommunications network, the operator is required to provide a record that the systematization, accumulation, storage, updating and retrieval of personal data of citizens of the Russian Federation, is held on databases located in the territory of the Russian Federation.”
I could imagine that complying to this regulation wont be worthwhile for most companies.
Edit: The interesting thing is, that the law seems not to forbid to store the data outside of Russia, it "just" dictates that the data has to be stored in Russia also.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/02/russia-moves-to-ban-online...
Russia's GDP has been reliably falling since then. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-per-capita-ppp
Sure, but reaching a critical mass isn't. And for Russian freelancers looking for work outside of Russia a Russian LinkedIn isn't helpful. Maybe the problems with this regulation will be more obvious if a service like Github is blocked.
The whole point of this Russian law is to remove this limitation.
This is only party relevant, but in the past few years the US started going after people solely based on the fact that they have some money in a US bank (and no other ties, i.e. 'presence'). So now you have the US Federal court in Brooklyn prosecuting the FIFA corruption scandal.
The original point stands, I think. If a state actor has interest in your affairs, they will find legal ways to spy on you, or create new laws so they can. Honestly, the NSA scandal, and the gross violation of personal privacy in the US after 9/11 should have taught people that. And the US is the bastion of modern democracy (saying this w/o sarcasm) to boot.
At any rate, US is not the bastion of freedom that Russia's actions should be compared to. Especially so when it involves three-letter agencies.
To clarify the distinction I'm trying to make - yes, US doing some shady shit, mostly trying to keep it in secret. Russia is explicitly legalizing such shady shit. And doing even shadier shit in secret.
The real alternative - startup MoiKrug.ru ("my circle"), that was launched in mid-2000s - was purchased by Yandex, made irrelevant by lack of clear strategy and finally sold to some other investor.
Correct! I was on a team trying to architect a solution for this and the requirements was really diffuse. We ended up doing a DB "replication" (via triggers) to a Russian cloud provider after the data had been committed in a european data center. The lawyers signed off on it but there were no clear guidelines from the Ministry of Communication (http://minsvyaz.ru/) on what was OK from an tech implementation view.
However, I feel that the best solution for solving it was to have all Russian traffic routed through something like a reverse web proxy which would first write the data to servers located in Russia or fail the request.
> Finally, any online service (including social networks, email, or messaging services) that uses encrypted data is now required to permit the Federal Security Service (FSB) to access and read their services’ encrypted communications, including providing any encryption keys.
It is not clear from this article also if you can encrpyt the user data and keep the key. But I guess that wouldn't be along of the spirit of this law.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/russia-asks-impossible...
So I just don't understand, why it's such a news after all.
[0]http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-tr...
In all likelihood, a crony-backed service handling this for foreign tech companies doing business in Russia will emerge.
However some providers, who had no smart hardware, may block by IP instead of URL, and https version will be blocked as well (not my case).
I found it's alarming that LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. Blocking LinkedIn significantly reduces chances to find a job in Europe.
But I expected that since I watched closely on new laws restricting internet freedom in Russia.
Official motivation behind this law is to prevent US spying on Russian citizens (this law was proposed after Snowden's scandal).
Of course, this motivation was a lie as everything else which came out of dirty rotten mouths of nasty Kremlin bastards.
The real motivation is that the Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time.
The problem is that these anti-freedom laws do bother only very small percentage of Russians. The rest of Russia won't even notice if Kremlin completely shuts down access to the global internet. Heck, the majority of Russians doesn't even bother to learn elementary English!
Stupid people buy everything Kremlin tells them, including version about protecting Russian citizens from US NSA.
The general principle is that any government is constantly trying to expand itself and limit citizen's freedoms. The only force which can prevent government from endlessly limiting citizen's freedoms is the majority of citizens (definitely not a minority of non-rich citizens). Every freedom above what masses asking for is only at mercy of the government's bueracrats.
It means that in absolutely any country masses fully deserve their government.
I wrote more details about this principle here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-living-in-totalitarian-s...
So I consider myself as a part of absolute tiny minority of Russian citizens which has no voice at all (thanks to backward masses).
That's why I left Russia and I hope forever!
I think LinkedIn could be unblocked if LinkedIn agrees to meet these crazy requirements. Even if LinkedIn would be unblocked, it won't change sad state of freedoms in Russia.
P.S. I hope to get rid of toxic Russian citizenship in the future.
This doesn't prevent or help Russia from spying on its own citizens.
I get that you are anxious. But the traffic that travels from your computer to servers outside of Russia is just as easy to spy on for Russian intelligence services as the case where the servers are located inside the country.
It does, however, make it more difficult for the US to spy on Russian citizens, which it has been caught trying to do.
If this were true, I would feel very comfortable speaking about politics in Russia, as in the United States all consumer-grade encryption is being broken by our intelligence services.
There have been some attempts by the ISPs to enable MITM, but it's very crude - they basically block SSL, except for their own custom root certificate that they explicitly require you to install, and then they use that to MITM you. It's all very blatant, and I think there was only one ISP actually trying to do it.
Also, I'm not aware of any cases of dissenters caught because their encryption was broken. Most people who get persecuted for their views said all the things they did out in the open, either to make a stand, or because they were careless.
Ehh.. no? TLS protects the data against snooping, but only borders protect you from warrants. Russia based servers are subject to Russian law and warrants.
I see that the tacit assumption in this thread is that the FSB can't defeat simple consumer encryption.
The certificates in Russian citizens' browsers allow the Russian government to intercept their communications. This is just one of hundreds of weaknesses to that belief.
And while you are at it you could also tell us how this regulation
> make it more difficult for the US to spy on Russian citizens
???
> everbody wants to know now how those certificates are included in Russian citizens browsers.
Included in the builds.
> And while you are at it you could also tell us how this regulation make it more difficult for the US to spy on Russian citizens
The traffic will stay inside of infrastructure controlled by the Russian government through its domestic ISPs, rather than exiting the country to ingestion nodes disclosed by Snowden to be used to surveil on internet traffic.
Russian citizens download and install specially crafted builds instead of the officials ones? Are they forced, or do they they trust those FSB builds more?
> The traffic will stay inside of infrastructure controlled by the Russian government through its domestic ISPs, rather than exiting the country.
I guess we are not talking about the same, because the the regulation doesn't dictate this. It "just" says, that there has to be a copy of the data in Russia. The server can still be outside of Russia.
This whole conversation is just not going anywhere. The Russian government can't snoop your tls data if it leaves the country, end of story. That's the reason for this law and the article to begin with!
You aren't claiming that they couldn't compromise a CA, are you? That's pretty much the only thing that would make such an assumption unreasonable.
There are no government certs in Russian citizens' browsers at the moment. Furthermore, government mandated hardware, that ISPs have to install, is not installed in a configuration permitting any kind of MITM, it only sees mirrored traffic.
> Kremlin loves to spy on its own citizens. And they already did that for a long time.
Most of the governments do love to spy on its own citizens, for obvious reasons.
VPN is only temporary cure. I think soon or later Kremlin will try to crack down use of VPN when it becomes popular.
> Most of the governments do love to spy on its own citizens, for obvious reasons.
And I'm not fond of most governments and even notion of big intrusive government.
Correct, but VPN would allow you to use Linkedin until you have not managed to get rid of the Russian citizenship
> P.S. I hope to get rid of toxic Russian citizenship in the future.
Also, LinkedIn seems to have several IP addresses, some of them may not be blacklisted yet.
The main problem is in tendency itself: the government writes crazy laws and trying to enforce these laws in real life.
It's good that these laws still are not very effective (I mean it's still possible to bypass them) but looking over last 4 years, I see how significantly internet freedom is deteriorated in Russia (i.e. before 2012, there was no such thing is Russian firewall which maintained at federal level by the government).
> dirty rotten mouths of nasty Kremlin bastards
> Heck, the majority of Russians doesn't even bother to learn elementary English!
> Stupid people buy everything Kremlin tells them, including version about protecting Russian citizens from US NSA.
> thanks to backward masses
> P.S. I hope to get rid of toxic Russian citizenship in the future.
I think the only thing toxic here is how you write and view other humans and your fellow countrymen as inferior beings.
I have no Russian heritage, but I lived in rural cities around Russia for a year and was there another 6 months in Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is definitely much different from the Western world and there are a lot of things I disagree with, but I would never call anyone stupid for supporting Putin or the government.
Calling folks stupid and backward for supporting stuff you dont support is just you thinking you are better than everyone else when you are not. Don't be a dick because some people are less fortunate than you and didn't have an opportunity to learn critical thinking. Even people much smarter than you might support what you don't like. The world isn't black and white.
You are in for a rude awakening if you believe that other governments don't lie to their citizens. Whatever government you currently support and get your new citizenship from, you are a pawn and part of the "backward masses" for whatever fucked up scheme that government is cooking up to screw you over.
So in short, the majority asks me to sacrifice myself for their sake because I'm in minority and they are in majority.
If so, f##k them!
The fact that you've left Russia is not making you `special` or `elite`. There are bad and stupid people everywhere, as well as good and smart and awesome people. World is not black and white.
In a free society, the rule of the people is only one of the pillars of freedom. Other pillars include the rule of law, certain inalienable rights, etc. Without these, the rule of the people descend into majoritianism or ochlocracy.
The textbook example of ochlocracy is the French Revolution between the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 and the Thermidorian Reaction.
This is why the US government was set up with various undemocratic features. This is why there are things like constitutions that require supermajorities to modify.
Protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority is one of the main purposes of good governmenance.
Democracy screws folks over very easily.
When you live with such people long enough but still can't understand what the flying fuck is everyone thinking, then it's either you're insane or them.
Sometimes it turns out it's them. 50% of the world's population is literally dumber than the average.
I mean no one has IQ of -5.
Eh, might be toxic. Might be a natural human response to seeing the majority of his countrymen accept propaganda without question. You don't know this guy. For me his comment read more like a frustrated individual than someone that thinks he is superior.
I imagine similar trends can be found in many countries, including the US. The desire to belong is strong, and sometimes it's in our best interest to think less and cheer more.
This is just a bit more polite way of calling them stupid.
I'm not necessary disagreeing, but why should they? I mean, it is obviously useful, but it doesn't directly translate to quality of life improvement.
It IS useful if you work in IT and have to read docs, but basic English is enough for that.
For example, want to open up some business in Germany? You're going to have an easier time speaking either German or English than if you just speak Russian. Swap in Chinese/French/Spanish/Arabic if you like, but all of these still take a back seat to English (at the moment).
Internet is indeed very beneficial in a sense that it provides a tangible reward path at least for learning basics.
Pretty much.
That's why they have passed a law whereby private data from social networks about its citizens has to be stored within Russia and must not be transmitted to any other country.
Linkedin knew that but they ignored it, probably because it didn't make economic sense for them
You can argue if it is acceptable or not for a government to step in and prevent foreign governments from acquiring such data about its population, but calling people stupid like you did frankly makes _you_ look stupid.
Here it's hard to say if it is justified as I do not know what the US secret services and the US military might be able to do with this kind of data in a conflict. (having the passwords of XX million Russians could be devastating in a cyberattack as many will do the stupid thing and reuse the same password everywhere)
Which is a good reason to let them continue collecting them indefinitely?
> Also, Russia doesn't and won't force any company to store users' data exclusively under their jurisdiction, as this would not allow any foreign company to operate in Russia, making your arguments incorrect.
You state this as if it was a fact, but there is great uncertainty among lawyers and businesses if the law requires data to be stored exclusively in Russia or if that's not the case. In any way you'll have to ask for permission which they might never grant you if you are a company like Facebook that's storing very sensitive information.
Which is not something your government can forbid or even verify, they have no way of enforcing anything under other jurisdictions. Whatever company says it did or didn't do there - the government has no choice but to believe them.
I can't say with the little information I've got if it is necessary or not but I understand the rationale whereby someone might implement this because they are not willing to bet the survival of their people or their nation on the goodwill of others.
Take a look at this experiment, it shows that what is self-evident to you may not be as self-evident to others.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/83l/overcoming_the_curse_of_knowledg...
"In 1990, Elizabeth Newton did a fascinating psychology experiment: She paired participants into teams of two: one tapper and one listener. The tappers picked one of 25 well-known songs and would tap out the rhythm on a table. Their partner - the designated listener - was asked to guess the song. How do you think they did?
Not well. Of the 120 songs tapped out on the table, the listeners only guessed 3 of them correctly - a measly 2.5 percent. But get this: before the listeners gave their answer, the tappers were asked to predict how likely their partner was to get it right. Their guess? Tappers thought their partners would get the song 50 percent of the time. You know, only overconfident by a factor of 20. What made the tappers so far off?
They lost perspective because they were "cursed" with the additional knowledge of the song title.Chip and Dan Heath use the story in their book Made to Stick to introduce the term:
"The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult or us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.""The fundamental issue affecting all governments and organizations is that they select for Machiavellian or power-growing behaviours. An individual not maximizing power would lose to one who does, as greater power can buy more allies and followers.
There is a reason we see these outcomes in almost every country. It is emergent behaviour. Blaming the people - or even the politicians - will not help. It is our structures that are inherently flawed; you can't expect people to act against their own interests.
If you would like to know more I'd recommend starting with CGPGrey's video, rules for rulers, or visiting my prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880180
This is a fundamental force that affects the entire world. Its impact on our lives is greater than any new technology.
All the 'bad actions' by governments are understandable in this framework. Actions on climate change, freedom, privacy, etc.
We need to solve this.
LinkedIn is quite popular among international HRs hiring software developers in Russia. HRs may still have access, but the workforce now does not. What was the point not to comply with regulatory requirements? Too small market? Too hard to throw some user data to a server in some Moscow datacenter for persistent storage?
«A vendor going by the online handle of “saul_berenson” is selling 57 million Mail.ru accounts on darknet in BTC 1.0000 (628.78 US Dollar).
The sold data includes emails and MD5 passwords of Mail.ru users. According to the seller, “these passwords are very easy to crack.” Remember Mail.ru was hacked twice, one in July and August 2016 when 27 million accounts were stolen and before that in May 2016 when 57 million accounts were stolen. We suspect that the stolen data is from May 2016 breach.
Yandex is another Russian Internet giant serving as the country’s largest search engine and like Mail.ru the corporation has been under attack by hackers numerous times. However, now, a vendor is selling 6.5 million Yandex accounts containing emails and passwords. The total number of sold accounts is 659,5756 with both hashed and clear-text passwords.»
The whole idea of an government operation, like that, is to put finger first, then whole hand. When data will be in Russia, government will demand 24x7 access to it. Then data will be copied somewhere, then sold.
[1] https://www.hackread.com/utorrent-forum-mailru-yandex-data-d...
Seriously? I can give you free access to credentials from 164,611,595 LinkedIn accounts right now. This data has been copied and sold many times over with zero help from any government.
If you wanted to insult them, show them you didn't take them seriously and didn't make a plan to comply with their laws, I can't think of a better way to do it than going to them on the last day to ask for more time. If I were those bureaucrats I would take especial relish in cutting them off. (And that's aside from the fact that it's a worthless site in the first place.)
Sometimes when you get Tased it's because of crooked cops, but most of the time it's because you're being an ass, disregarding the laws of the people, despite many warnings, and not taking simple steps to comply.
However, when the Russian Federation does - on the surface - almost the same thing, it suddenly has a very different impact...
The EU doesn't block websites. It doesn't control the media. It ensures freedom of speech. It makes it possible even for US companies to do business in the EU, without the fear that their servers are seized whenever some corrupt regime decides to. The EU doesn't go after dissidents... and the list goes on and on...
I'll argue some of your points for fun.
> The EU doesn't block websites
Really? What about all the torrent sites being blocked? Same as Russia, EU has their own agenda for blocking websites. It doesn't need to be for the same reasons or the same websites.
> It doesn't control the media.
Really? Pretty sure any newspaper/tv station has an affiliation/bias with one party/view or another. Also, same as Russia having state owned media, other countries in Europe have that too, for example the public national televisions and radios. Then there is the social media. Try posting something illegal on facebook and see if it is controlled or not. Try calling for a protest against something. You might get a visit from the police [1].
> It ensures freedom of speech
What exactly is freedom of speech? No country has 100% freedom of speech. How much does Russia have? How much do other countries have? How do you measure it? Let's say in Russia I can't insult Putin (although probably you can), in UK I can't insult the queen, in US I can't insult the FBI. Is there a difference? Insulting can mean different things in different countries.
> It makes it possible even for US companies to do business in the EU
Of course they do, EU is almost like another part of the US. In collaboration with the US they also use these tech companies to spy. But still, not all US business is welcomed. Some countries protect their own interests. That is why this EU-US free trade treaty is hard to get signed.
> without the fear that their servers are seized whenever some corrupt regime decides to
Yeah, US companies definitely do not fear their servers being seized because the US is doing all the seizing. In any case, this is a mutual benefit deal. But recently there is a shift against big US companies and their tax practices. So far, there was no seizing, but let's see what happens next.
> The EU doesn't go after dissidents
What about Snowden, what about Assange? Pretty sure Assange would go to Russia if he could. Of course, EU encourages and protects dissidents of countries such as China and Russia. In turn these countries do the same. But nobody is better.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/online-anti-refugee-posts-lead-to-offli...
Does anyone get any other value out of it?
That's pretty much it, right? That, and very easy job applications. Nowhere have I had an easier time applying for a job.
It's not social media. That's Facebook, etc.
At least that's how I see it.
I use it for recruiting to see backgrounds, how peeps career developed etc.
I use it for making business deals. Occasionally I'll reach out to another person where I can see the opportunity to partner on something. How well this is received surprised me at first. I assume it's because I'm not a sales person trying to sell something approach, and it shows people do read their messages.
I use it to keep an eye on what friends and colleges in are doing.
People us it to approach me, often spam but I get much more on email and occasionally get useful introductions.
I use it to look at other companies if I'm thinking of working with them. E.g you can get an idea of if a company is growing/shrinking via their headcount and other things like that.
I've used it to escalate issues I'm having with a business to senior guys that can sort problems. And once used it to flag a database breach I found to a CEO after their IT guys hadn't responded to my emails.....for 6 months...
So it is plenty useful in my user-case and I'm happy for them to show me some ads in return.
The law itself is more or less reasonable, but very poorly done and applied, like almost all recent Russian internet laws.
Probably because they keep getting fucking hacked: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkedin-data-breach-find-out...
And Russia is tired of Russians getting fucked by shitty American software engineers.
I haven't sent out a direct message or "added" anyone in months, and the only recently posted content was this blog:
https://lolware.net/2016/11/17/requesting_bank_login.html
Despite not being able to log in, I've received two separate emails from them. I have a feeling I'll be letting LinkedIn go.
Not the worst rationale. Keep in mind that countries such as Canada and EU countries also have different privacy laws that US corporations have ran afoul of from time to time.
So what is my best bet to rollout a Twitter clone fast and host it in-house? Impossible?
/s
We should be asking him tough questions, not just joining in praising him to be some sort of hero, who is cozying up with criminals in Kremlin.
If you'd bothered to look up, you'd know he has.