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).
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.
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…
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.
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.
Western countries are the ones blocking Russian pages.
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
) 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
are you an openbsd developer?
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
Lol the university I’m at blocks all .ru websites, rt.com, and lemmygrad. Oh and all Chinese social media apps. What a bastion of free speech and inquiry
How would you research extremism if you couldn’t access the grad, though?
Welcome to the Great Firewall of the West
Honestly, for a firewall it isn’t very consistent. I can still access the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and RT with no problems.
It’s fairly spotty so far, but I expect that we’ll see censorship become increasingly more aggressive in the coming years.
URL?
Can confirm, it denies access
UU access denied, and it looks like it was done from Russia’s side because I see lots of Cyrillic that I cannot read
Yeah, the Cyrillic really should have tipped me off as to who was doing the blocking. I don’t blame them, but it is annoying lol
I think, though I am not 100% sure it was in responce done by a DDOS attack done at the begining of the war
When I was looking up why access was denied there were news articles about Ukraine hacking into the Ministry of Defence. These articles are dated from only a few days ago so I guess there was a more recent attack, unless the articles are lying…
Very possible
Works for me (residental UK connection)
I’m surprised the UK hasn’t been blocked yet considering the Prime Minister is threatening sending troops. Maybe Canadians are just more annoying.
I guess because nobody goes there. We do block Russia Today since that was actually popular, and we can’t have that.
Canada isn’t blocking Russia Today, such a strange situation tbh… oh well.
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This access denied is on the Russian side. It seems as though almost all Canadian IP addresses are blocked.
I can’t believe the Russian government won’t make an exception for little ol’ me. Oh well, the VPN is helping me get access, maybe one day Canadian IPs won’t be blocked.
You could probably also have used Proton or Opera’s VPN for free
I am not VPN savvy at all so I had no idea these options existed, I’ll look into it though. Thanks for letting me know!
I wonder how many xi bucks it costs to be white listed!
“Xi Jingping if you can hear us, please. Xi Jingping, please save me. Please save me Xi Jingping. Please. I’m asking you, please save me. Please save me, please get these people away from me!”
IYKYK
It’s the western governments banning Russian pages, not the other way around.
Considering the access denied page was in Russian and said to request access, contact this email ending in a .Ru address, I would say that’s blocking on the Russian side. If the DNS didn’t resolve then I would say the blocking is on the Canadian side. This case may be different for other countries.
