Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
I'm sure you have good reason to feel the way you do, but please, no more of this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places as well, and we've already warned you once. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Just food for thought: what makes you to feel so entitled to judge people place of living? You know how we are not choosing where to be born and our mobility is restricted a lot of times? Is your separation for man and women comes from religion or other bias to categorize them?
And I sincerely hope that you will never have to know what it's like to flee your own country, first hand. Peace.
And graduates working for the Belarussian state, why is that acceptable and not considered as "conspiring with the war criminals" in your eyes? What other barriers are there that you have in your mind we don't know about, for someone who's worked as expected, and fled the country afterwards?
Have a bit of compassion, would ya?
My childhood crush is in Ukraine (I mean, he's Ukrainian), my dear friend (Ukrainian) had to leave everything and seek refuge in NL. My friends (Russian) are under a constant threat of getting imprisoned for 10+ years because they still help support queer and trans people in Russia.
Compared to them I feel very privileged, because I was able to GTFO on my own. But if you think that all Russian citizens must be deported, you're either a troll or a madman. Besides, this is exactly what, for example, Stalin did to Chechens, or think about what the USA did to the Japanese.
Did it help someone? No. Did it ruin millions of lives? You fucking guess.
upd: made it all clearer, and sorry for all the profanity
If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.
The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).
The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).
Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
I think you mean steganography[0]. Stenography is shorthand, used for transcription.
In a nutshell:
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]
[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
1. Many Russian IP addresses are now registered to foreign offshore companies to avoid confiscation in the next package of EU sanctions. Being Russian, they were registered through RIPE, which created a risk. The same IP which was Russian a year ago, now can be listed as Moldavian or Mongolian remaining physically in Russia.
2. Cloudflare is a biased internet: the most traffic-heavy sites using Cloudflare are porn sites. That is, we can only draw conclusions here about changes in the structure of porn content consumption in Russia. High-traffic western websites blocked in Russia - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ... - are not on Cloudflare anyway and not contributed to this chart.
1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w
the war definitely changed those flows and targets; e.g. they now flood reddit with pro-Ukranian posts.
most of Russian agit-prop now flows out of "marketing" contractors in India, Pakistan, or Nigeria.
There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.
The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.
What a take... Only on HN.
This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.
Of course they may not, but the option is there unlike autocratic government censorship.