"The Anonymous declaration of cyberwar was a top news story despite no evidence," writes cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler (an American who worked in Kyiv for the last 10 years — until fleeing in February to Poland). To investigate, Fowler performed a random sampling of 100 exposed Russian databases — and discovered that 92 of them had indeed been compromised. "Anti-Russian hackers used a similar script to the infamous 'MeowBot' that changed the name of folders and deleted the contents of the files. " (For example, renaming the folders to "putin_stop_this_war".)

And that was just the beginning, reports CNBC: Anonymous has claimed to have hacked over 2,500 Russian and Belarusian sites, said Fowler. In some instances, stolen data was leaked online, he said, in amounts so large it will take years to review. "The biggest development would be the overall massive number of records taken, encrypted or dumped online," said Fowler. Shmuel Gihon, a security researcher at the threat intelligence company Cyberint, agreed that amount of leaked data is "massive."

"We currently don't even know what to do with all this information, because it's something that we haven't expected to have in such a short period of time," he said....

The more immediate outcome of the hacks, Fowler and Gihon agreed, is that Russia's cybersecurity defenses have been revealed as being far weaker than previously thought.
Fowler's report argues that Anonymous has "rewritten the rules of how a crowdsourced modern cyberwar is conducted" — with the group also offering penetration testing to Ukraine, "finding vulnerabilities before Russia could exploit them." But in addition, Fowler writes, Anonymous's efforts have also "transformed into a larger operation that spread far beyond the Russian government, companies, or organizations, and included an information campaign aimed at Russian citizens."

Some examples: Hacking Printers — Russian censorship has blocked many inside the country from knowing the true scale of the war and Russian losses. Anonymous hacked printers across Russia and printed uncensored facts or anti-propaganda and pro-ukrainian messages. The group claims to have printed over 100,000 documents. This also includes barcode printers at grocery stores where prices were changed and product names were changed to anti-war or pro-Ukrainian slogans....

RoboDial, SMS, and Email Spam — Almost everyone on earth has received some form of spam in the form of a phone call, text, or email message. These usually try to sell a service or scam victims out of money. Now this same technology has been used to bypass Russian censorship and inform citizens of news and messages they are forbidden to learn on state sponsored propaganda channels. Anonymous affiliated Squad303 claimed to have sent over 100 million messages to Russian devices.

Last year, Roblox launched a version of its game in China called LuoBuLeSi. Like other Western gaming companies that have entered the lucrative but heavily regulated Chinese market, it had to partner with a Chinese company, Tencent, who would operate the game in the country, and Roblox had to host user data on local servers, as required by law. But newly released internal documents reveal that Roblox assumed and prepared for the possibility that any Chinese partner it worked with could try to hack Roblox. From a report: On top of that, Roblox expected Tencent to copy the game and create its own version of it. "Expect that hacking has already started," one slide in a presentation from 2017, called "China MVP Ideas from Aug Trip; CONFIDENTAL," read. The slide dates from before Roblox ultimately announced a partnership with Tencent. "Expect it to ramp up after a deal is signed, possibly even by partner."

The documents also show the steps Roblox had to take in order for its game to comply with Chinese censorship laws: any maps created in the game had to "respect the integrity of the country and not misrepresent the Chinese territory," including by recognizing Beijing's claim of self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, according to a presentation given to Roblox by Tencent. Users and developers also "must not tamper with historical facts' and "must not appear any images or names of national leaders." There is no evidence that Tencent did target Roblox. The documents were originally obtained and then published online this month by a separate, criminal hacker who attempted to extort Roblox. Motherboard is publishing details from the documents despite them being obtained by a criminal hacker because of the overriding public interest in understanding the highly controversial steps major companies might take in order to break into markets in authoritarian countries. Roblox also expected a group of hundreds of people to be working on reverse engineering any code that the company placed on Chinese servers.

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It's nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost. This is what happened in June to a Chinese novelist writing under the alias Mitu. From a report: She had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of "spying on and locking my draft," citing the presence of illegal content.

The news blew up on social media on July 11 after a few prominent influencer accounts belatedly picked it up. It became the top trending topic on Weibo that day, with users questioning whether WPS is infringing on their privacy. Since then, The Economic Observer, a Chinese publication, has reported that several other online novelists have had their drafts locked for unclear reasons in the past. Mitu's complaint triggered a social media discussion in China about censorship and tech platform responsibility. It has also highlighted the tension between Chinese users' increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies' obligation to censor on behalf of the government. "This is a case where perhaps we are seeing that these two things indeed might collide," says Tom Nunlist, an analyst on China's cyber and data policy at the Beijing-based research group Trivium China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Tor Project team has announced the release of Tor Browser 11.5, a major release that brings new features to help users fight censorship easier. [...] The updates in Tor Browser 11.5 focus on circumventing censorship, a process that started a year ago in version 10.5 with improving the Tor connection experience. In the new version, users no longer have to manually try out bridge configurations to unblock Tor.

Tor Browser version 11.5 comes with a new feature called "Connection Assist," which assigns automatically the bridge configuration known to work best for the user's location. "Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent)," explains the release announcement. "It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from torproject.org." Since Connection Assist is still in an early stage of development (v1.0), the Tor team welcomes user feedback and reports, which would help them iron out any kinks and improve on the system.

Another important new feature in version 11.5 is making 'HTTPS-Only Mode' the default browsing mode, so that the connection is through a secure tunnel. This ensures that all data exchange between the user and the server hosting the website will be encrypted, to defend against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and to protect users from SSL stripping on malicious exit relays. [...] The third significant improvement in Tor Browser 11.5 is a heavily revamped Network Settings menu, now called "Connection Settings," which should make it easier to find and understand specific settings. Most notably, bridge configuration and connection options have been redesigned to enable quick and easy review and management. Using emojis on the saved Bridges, the new interface offers visualization for the configuration for the first time, making it easy to identify the right bridge and select it when needed. You can download the latest Tor Browser from the official download portal.

Most internet users trying to get past China's Great Firewall search for a cyber tunnel that will take them outside censorship restrictions to the wider web. From a report: But Vincent Brussee is looking for a way in, so he can better glimpse what life is like under the Communist Party. An analyst with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Brussee frequently scours the Chinese internet for data. His main focus is information that will help him understand China's burgeoning social credit system. But in the last few years, he's noticed that his usual sources have become more unreliable and access tougher to gain.

Some government websites fail to load, appearing to block users from specific geographic locations. Other platforms require a Chinese phone number tied to official identification. Files that were available three years ago have started to disappear as Brussee and many like him, including academics and journalists, are finding it increasingly frustrating to penetrate China's cyber world from the outside. "It's making it more difficult to simply understand where China is headed," Brussee said. "A lot of the work we are doing is digging for little scraps of information."

Long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank shares a report from Gerona: China has enacted new regulation for the live-streaming industry, listing 31 prohibited conducts and raising the bar for influencers to speak out on specific topics, in the government's latest effort to regulate the booming digital economy. The 18-point guideline, released Wednesday by the National Radio and Television Administration and the Department of Culture and Tourism, requires influencers to have relevant qualifications to cover some subjects, including law, finance, medicine and education discuss, although the authorities have not specified the necessary qualifications.

The 31 prohibited conducts during live-streaming sessions include posting content that weakens or distorts the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist system, or the country's reform and opening-up. Other prohibited behaviors include using deepfake technologies to manipulate the images of party or state leaders and intentionally 'building up' sensitive issues and attracting public attention. Live streamers are also prohibited from showing an extravagant lifestyle, such as showing luxury products and cash, the policy said. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post.

China is fine-tuning its censorship machine, this time proposing changes in how to regulate the billions of online comments posted in the country every day. From a report: On June 17, the internet regulator Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) published a draft update on the responsibilities of platforms and content creators in managing online comments. One line stands out: all online comments would have to be pre-reviewed before being published. Users and observers are worried that the move could be used to further tighten freedom of expression in China. The new changes affect Provisions on the Management of Internet Post Comments Services, a regulation that first came into effect in 2017. Five years later, the Cyberspace Administration wants to bring it up to date.

The U.S. government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, Reuters is reporting, citing five people familiar with the situation. From a report: The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) -- nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern -- and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said. VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology. Reuters spoke to executives at all three U.S. government-backed VPNs and two officials at a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing -- the Open Technology Fund (OTF) -- who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24. Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in U.S. funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Jack Dorsey's beef with Web3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 -- blockchain boosters' dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future -- has become just as problematic as the Web2 which preceded it. Now, he's out with an alternative. From a report: At CoinDesk's Consensus Festival here in Austin, TBD -- the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey's Block (SQ) -- announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web5. TBD explained its pitch for Web5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: "Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual's applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals."

While the new project from TBD was announced Friday, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date. A play on the Web3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web5 is built on the idea that incumbent "decentralized internet" contenders are going about things the wrong way. Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the numeral 5, TBD lead Mike Brock explained that Web5 -- in addition to being "two better than Web3" -- would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience. "This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don't think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications," Brock said. He continued: "I think what we're pushing forward with Web5 -- and I admit it's a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet -- really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [etc]." The full presentation is here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in March of 2017, this strange note first appeared at the end of a paper in the journal Nature: "Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations." I looked over the paper, and it didn't have any maps in it. None of the authors had unusual affiliations, just the normal university departments. Why the disclaimer? Before answering this question, let's dig a bit deeper. This notice first started appearing in mid-March of 2017, when it was attached to every single research paper in that issue. I cannot find any papers prior to that with the "Publisher's note." Ever since then, Nature has put this notice on every paper in all of their journals. For example, the current issue has a paper on mapping sound on the planet Mars, by an international team of astronomers and physicists. It does contain maps, but they don't describe any features on Earth. Nonetheless, it has the disclaimer at the end about "jurisdictional claims in published maps."

(Nature has done it to me too, for example in this 2018 paper led by a former Ph.D. student of mine. I didn't yet know about the weird disclaimer when that paper appeared, and I didn't catch it until later.) It's not just Nature, but apparently all of the many journals published by the Nature Publishing Group, which today number in excess of 100 publications. I looked at a few randomly chosen papers in Nature Biotechnology and Cancer Gene Therapy, as a test, and they all have exactly the same Publisher's Note. None of these papers, I should add, have any maps in them. I couldn't find anything odd about the institutional affiliations either. Nature is one of the oldest and most-respected journals in all of science, dating back to 1869. Just a few years ago, in 2015, Nature's publishing group merged with Springer, the second-largest for-profit scientific publisher in the world, and they changed their name to Springer Nature. We'll see why this is relevant in a minute.

I should also mention that the papers appearing in these journals, especially Nature itself, are rigorously peer-reviewed. Any map that appears undergoes the same peer review. The reviewers also see all the authors' institutional affiliations. Normally, the publisher has no say over any of this content: if it passes peer review, it's published. So what happened? Springer Nature, it seems, added this note because of pressure from the Chinese government. The Chinese government doesn't want any maps to show Taiwan, and it doesn't want any affiliations to from scientists in Taiwan unless they show (incorrectly) that Taiwan is part of China. I admit that I'm speculating, but we have very clear evidence that SpringerNature has succumbed to Chinese demands on related matters. In late 2017, the New York Times reported that Springer was "bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website." [...]

The BBC reports: A Persian-language content moderator for Instagram and a former content moderator have said Iranian intelligence officials offered them money to remove Instagram accounts of journalists and activists....

Both content moderators also accused some Iranian colleagues of exhibiting "pro-regime bias" when reviewing posts on the photo-sharing service. They spoke to the BBC after many Iranian Instagram users complained that posts about recent anti-government protests in their country had been deleted. Instagram's owner, Meta Platforms, and the third-party company it uses to moderate content said there was no validity to the claims....

The protests received very little coverage on Iranian state media, meaning that Iranians had to rely on Instagram and other social media sites to learn what was happening on the ground. As the unrest continued, users noticed that some videos posted on Instagram were being removed....

The former content moderator told the BBC that he "personally knew some reviewers who supported the Iranian regime and received instructions from Iran"....

All three interviewees said it was likely that some videos of the protests were removed because they included people shouting: "Death to Khamenei".

Meta has previously said that its guidelines around incitement of violence prohibit calls for the death of a head of state. However, in Iran the phrase "Death to..." is commonly chanted at protests to express discontent with something or someone, rather than to express an actual threat.

Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor said on Friday it had opened administrative cases against Alphabet's Google and six other foreign technology companies for alleged violations of personal data legislation. From a report: Moscow has clashed with Big Tech over content, censorship, data and local representation in a simmering dispute that has erupted into a full-on information battle since Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russia fined Google 3 million roubles ($46,540) last year for not storing the personal data of Russian users in databases on Russian territory, and on Friday said it had opened a new case over what it called Google's repeated failure to comply with Russian legislation.

This week New York's attorney general announced they're officially "launching investigations into the social media companies that the Buffalo shooter used to plan, promote, and stream his terror attack." Slashdot reader echo123 points out that Discord confirmed that roughly 30 minutes before the attack a "small group" was invited to join the shooter's server. "None of the people he invited to review his writings appeared to have alerted law enforcement," reports the New York Times., "and the massacre played out much as envisioned."

But meanwhile, another Times article tells a tangentially-related story from 2019 about what ultimately happened to "a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand." For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to "Share THIS...." Online writings apparently connected to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman's tactics were so easy to emulate.

In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman's 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to the Times' review. Three of the videos had been uploaded to Facebook as far back as the day of the killings, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted as recently as this week. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments banded together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and violent extremist content online. Yet even as Facebook expunged 4.5 million pieces of content related to the Christchurch attack within six months of the killings, what the Times found this week shows that a mass killer's video has an enduring — and potentially everlasting — afterlife on the internet.

"It is clear some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a kind of world where these videos will never be scrubbed completely from the internet," said Brian Fishman, a former director of counterterrorism at Facebook who helped lead the effort to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the site in 2019....

Facebook, which is owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only an estimated five were of terrorism-related material. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violated their rules and they were continuing to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment
For what it's worth, this week CNN also republished an email they'd received in 2016 from 4chan's current owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. The gist of the email? "If I liked censorship, I would have already done that."

But Slashdot reader Bruce66423 also shares an interesting observation from The Guardian's senior tech reporter about the major tech platforms. "According to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren't financially motivated to invest resources into developing it." Farid's work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded...

Farid: It's not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe... The core technology to stop redistribution is called "hashing" or "robust hashing" or "perceptual hashing". The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it's illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it's called.... That's actually pretty easy to do. We've been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly.

So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we've identified a terror attack that's being live-streamed. We're going to grab that video. We're going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution.

It's a problem of collaboration across the industry and it's a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I'd understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It's not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology's going to be perfect. It's battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks.... This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint.
"These are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively," Farid points out later. "How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

A remarkably literary critique of the internet appeared recently in Damage magazine — a project of the nonprofit Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry funded by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation. "There are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon..." argues writer Sam Kriss.

"We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another — but in a sense, we're not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through." Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they'll say valid or based, or say y'all despite being British....

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there's a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it's not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels....

The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. "The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you're training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don't vanish once you look away from the screen.... many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don't like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all.

"For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."

So while recent books look for historical antecedents, "I still think that the internet is a serious break from what we had before," Kriss argues. "And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seeking Alpha: Microsoft shares remained near their breakeven point in late trading, Thursday, amid a report that the company has started censoring Bing searches in the U.S. for certain Chinese names considered to be politically sensitive. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cybersecurity research organization Citizen Lab found that Microsoft's Bing search engine had been adjusted to not automatically fill in suggestions for the names of some prominent Chinese dissidents, and national political leaders.

The autofill feature is common on Bing and other search engines and makes suggestions for terms after a few letters have been typed into a search query field. Citizens Lab said it first noticed the issue last fall when names such as that of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo failed to automatically fill in in either English or Chinese in Bing searches. The Journal reported that Microsoft had corrected the issue, which it attributed to a "technical error."

Department of Homeland Security said it will pause on the agency's weeks-old Disinformation Governance Board. From a report: The board -- which had stated it's intended goal was to "coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security." -- was widely criticized by Republicans and right-wing media outlets. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to Axios that the board was "grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner. It was designed to ensure we fulfill our mission to protect the homeland, while protecting core Constitutional rights. However, false attacks have become a significant distraction from the Department's vitally important work to combat disinformation that threatens the safety and security of the American people." DHS tasked the Homeland Security Advisory Council to conduct a "thorough review and assessment" of the board's ability to deal with disinformation "while protecting free speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy."

After Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, "VPNs have been downloaded in Russia by the hundreds of thousands a day," reports the Washington Post, "a massive surge in demand that represents a direct challenge to President Vladimir Putin and his attempt to seal Russians off from the wider world.

"By protecting the locations and identities of users, VPNs are now granting millions of Russians access to blocked material...." Daily downloads in Russia of the 10 most popular VPNs jumped from below 15,000 just before the war to as many as 475,000 in March. As of this week, downloads were continuing at a rate of nearly 300,000 a day, according to data compiled for The Washington Post by the analytics firm Apptopia, which relies on information from apps, public data and an algorithm to come up with estimates. Russian clients typically download multiple VPNs, but the data suggests millions of new users per month. In early April, Russian telecom operator Yota reported that the number of VPN users was over 50 times as high as in January, according to the Tass state news service.

The Internet Protection Society, a digital rights group associated with jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, launched its own VPN service last month and reached its limit of 300,000 users within 10 days, according to executive director Mikhail Klimarev. Based on internal surveys, he estimates that the number of VPN users in Russia has risen to roughly 30 percent of the 100 million Internet users in Russia. To combat Putin, "Ukraine needs Javelin and Russians need Internet," Klimarev said....

In the days before the war, and in the weeks since then, Russian authorities have also ratcheted up pressure on Google, asking the search engine to remove thousands of Internet sites associated with VPNs, according to the Lumen database, an archive of legal complaints related to Internet content. Google, which did not respond to a request for comment, still includes banned sites in search results.... Although downloading a VPN is technically easy, usually requiring only a few clicks, purchasing a paid VPN has become complicated in Russia, as Western sanctions have rendered Russian credit and debit cards nearly useless outside the country. That has forced many to resort to free VPNs, which can have spotty service and can sell information about users.

Vytautas Kaziukonis, chief executive of Surfshark — a Lithuania-based VPN that saw a 20-fold increase in Russian users in March — said some of those customers are now paying in cryptocurrencies or through people they know in third countries.
One 52-year-old told the Post that downloading a VPN "brought back memories of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, when he used a shortwave radio to hear forbidden news of dissident arrests on Radio Liberty, which is funded by the United States."

"We didn't know what was going on around us. That's true again now."

An anonymous reader writes: Sony struck a major blow against censorship after defying a Chinese government demand to delete the Statue Of Liberty from "Spiderman: No Way Home" ahead of its release. The bombshell rejection was revealed by "multiple sources," per a recent article by Puck. According to the piece, Chinese regulators had asked if the Japanese entertainment giant could "delete the Statue of Liberty from the ending of the film." Sony unsurprisingly declined the demand given the prominence of Lady Liberty in the climax in which the three spidermen swing around the iconic symbol of freedom while battling supervillains, Puck reported. Undaunted, China then inquired if the monument could be "minimized," according to the report. Specifically, they'd wondered "if Sony could cut a few of the more patriotic shots of [Tom] Holland standing atop the crown, or dull the lighting so that Lady Liberty's visage wasn't so front-and-center," per Puck.

Chess.com, writes in a blog post: Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the "Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media." Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia's war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International. According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: "On The Invasion of Ukraine" which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and "Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War" which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com's apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the Internet got a much better look at military facilities across Russia. Google Maps stopped obscuring the sensitive locations due to Russia's ongoing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the end of Google's censorship of Russia's bases on Twitter. Thanks to former US President Donald Trump, we know that the 0.5 m per pixel resolution available on Google Maps' satellite view is a far cry from the images available to the US government. But it will be invaluable to the growing mass of open source intelligence analysts. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the OSINT community on Twitter has been cataloging Russian losses by geolocating images of destroyed tanks, fighting vehicles, aircraft, and cruise missile attacks.

Twitter users have already identified some interesting sights. Images taken of a Russian airbase at Lipetsk show partially disassembled MiG-31s (or perhaps MiG-25s). Another shows several Sukhoi fighter jets painted in patriotic colors, at least one of which is also missing its wings. Zhukovsky Airport near Moscow shows some oddities parked outside thanks to its role as a test flight center, including a Buran shuttle and a Sukhoi Su-47 technology demonstrator. UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the company hasn't changed anything with regard to blurring out sensitive sites in Russia, so perhaps none of us were looking closely until now.