This is a weird post and I honestly did not know where to post it so its going here for now.

I’m writing a paper where I have to compared Putin and Xi Jingping on multiple factors, one of them being how does each president respond to regional threats. I was able to get access to the Chinese Ministry of Defence website very easily, just clicked on the link and I’m golden. When I did the same for the Russian Ministry of Defence I was give a screen saying access was denied, or when using a different app the servers don’t respond at all. When I briefly looked it up the answers I am getting are Kyiv did some sort of hack which may have made the Ministry respond with denying access to non-Russian citizens, or Russia made the Ministry of Defence website inaccessible to unfriendly nations in general.

I was told using the government’s official websites (the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) was a “scholarly” source so I figured using their defence ministry’s information could be good to use when talking about how they deal with threatening behaviour. I will most likely have to talk about specific situations being dealt with but I thought the Ministry would be the best place to start.

Is anyone else facing this problem? Is there anyway I can get around it? I know I should be using a VPN but I’m hesitant to commit to one right now (I’m not that tech savvy).

  • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
    22·
    8 months ago

    The sites work for me. Lots of western countries and ISPs block non-aligned government content, you can get around it with a VPN or often just a different DNS server. Switching your DNS server just takes a minute and doesn’t cost anything, worth a try.

    • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.mlOP
      16·
      8 months ago

      Well I caved and got a VPN (Mullvad) and yeah, that worked. I don’t know how to mess with my DNS server so VPN it is. Either the Canadian government is blocking the site or the Russian government is, either way I can access the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs without a VPN so it’s weird how its just the one website…

      • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
        21·
        8 months ago

        I’ve noticed a bunch of DNS level blocks on websites coming from EU and German censorship. Mostly Russian and Iranian websites, RT and PressTV come to mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Canadian government has agreements with the telecom cartel to block sites for people in Canada.

        • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
          16·
          8 months ago

          I was gonna say the same thing. The EU most definitely blocks a bunch of Russian sites so it’s not inconceivable for Canada to do the same.

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          16·
          8 months ago

          It’s awful

          A few months ago, a Russian OpenBSD user offered me some CPU time on exclusive hardware (big Russian-made arm64 SBC with like 8 processor cores flop-pog) so I could fix some issues in the OpenBSD kernel without having to wait a million years waiting for compiles to finish on emulated hardware but I couldn’t reach it over the network cuz there was some kind of blocking going on :(

          I’m not sure who was doing the blocking but we did see that I stopped getting responses from ISP routers somewhere in Russia when doing a traceroute

            • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              8 months ago

              Not really, I’m just an OpenBSD appreciator who likes to use weird hardware so I often have to fix neglected software lol

              People assume too often all computers are 64-bit PCs with an Intel or AMD processor

              Although I guess I technically will be if I ever clean up some of the fixes I’m running and submit them