Russia's fumbling, heavy-handed Telegram ban is a perfect parable about the modern internet's promise and peril

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/18/solidarity-hostages.html

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The more they try to control it, the stronger it grows. Funny how that happens, ain’t it.

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And when crippling their infrastructure doesn’t stop it, they start publishing BGP routing updates that trash the entire planet.

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But Google and Amazon are hardly the only clouds in the firmament. Haven’t I seen ads for eleventeen different clouds? Are they all just front ends for Google?

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HACK THE PLANET!!!

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image

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Russia can go on blocking ever-larger swathes of the internet as Telegram uses a wider range of services to carry its traffic. Eventually, Russia will have cut off its entire domestic internet from critical online infrastructure that its own industry and services are reliant upon.

Including international banking. The oligarchs may pay lip service to the Russkiy Mir nationalist go-it-alone vision but there’s no way they’d accept a Russian version of the Great Firewall of China cutting them off completely from a way of moving their money to the West.

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That is…AMAZING!

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It widely varies. Yes, you can farm out Google cloud and make money, if you buy enough/make a good enough deal, but remember also, ANYONE (including the Mafia, Mob, CIA, NSA, Moosad, and KGB) can set up and market “cloud” solutions. For organized crime, it can serve as a great money-laundering device + very useful services that can be sold at a good price. For both intelligence services and organized crime, it also happens to be absolutely wonderful for intel/industrial and civil sabotage/blackmail ^^’.

“Yes, comrade, our service is most heavily encrypted, end to end, of course…”

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The American regime has a much easier time blocking all political commentary from Russia, since American oligarchs have monopoly control of the Internet infrastructure.

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via Imgflip Meme Generator

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The more I read about this, the more I want to use telegram.

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Use signal.

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If Putin decides that’s what he wants, he’s either going to create exceptions for them or execute them.

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