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Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons to Circumvent Russia Censorship
  • If Mozilla gets blocked, people would just install some other browser (probably, something from Russia). I do not see how this helps anyone but the government itself. And departure of hundreds (if not thousands) of western companies did nothing to the Russian government, some problems with a browser with almost non-existent userbase would have the same effect. It should be quite clear by now that such tactic simply does not work.

  • Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start
  • Well, I know it used to be available and officially supported through available installation script. I do not have bazzite installed right now and their website does not have a proper documentation, so I can not check if it is available now.

  • Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start
  • Fortunately, it does not usually cause high load, but it still exists. The only thing I can recomend here is to always check if the dependencies of any package you install in container require to run in the background and avoid those which do.

  • Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start
  • Maybe, I do not use bazzite and cannot check. But it used to be a feature. You can, of cause, start distrobox at startup, but literally running almost two operation systems might not be the best for performance and RAM usage.

  • Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start
  • Sorry for giving a rather useless advice. Of cause, you know about native packages, but since you are asking about flatpak, you, probably, have a reason to chose it. So, my original message was mostly intended as a joke, for which I am sorry.

  • Stay on Fedora or Switch to Void?
  • Well, it's up to you to decide if advantages of a distro are more significant to you then disadvantages.

    I would argue that the best part about void is not actually runit and xbps, but minimalist dependencies.

    I wouldn't care about unofficial status of hyprland package, since it is unofficial in most distros.

    And about the lack of some software. There is a thing, called xdeb, that allows you to automatically convert any deb package to xbps package (with correct dependencies). You can even automatically install them from any deb repository via xdeb-install tool.

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • As I said earlier, it is only somewhat similar to TLS-in-TLS blocking. I do not have exact articles right now, and it is not easy to google them, since almost all of them are in Chinese.

    But here is for example, a proof of concept of a tool, that detects TLS-in-TLS: https://github.com/XTLS/Trojan-killer

    It is incomplete and I do not know if it uses the same methods as Chinese censors, but it still proves the possibility.

    If you still require more concrete proff, then, I will try to find an article in my free time and if I do, I would reply to your comment again after that (it is not going to be in the nearest future.

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • Please explain how are you imagining that

    I do not have right now links to articles about that exactly, but here is an old article about somewhat similar tactics that China uses to block encrypted proxy protocols like shadowsocks, for example: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • I'm talking about encapsulating traffic in an encrypted tunnel.

    As I I have previously mentioned, if you are encapsulating all traffic in an encrypted tunnel, then most of the data would have two layers of encryption. This can be detected, and, in fact is being detected in China and, experimentally, in Russia.

    The beautiful website I've imagined for a situation where some DPI robot will, say, visit it to check that there really is a website there.

    That is a good protection against active probing, but active proving is not the only detection method, available for censors.

    You also seem to be mixing up such entities as VPNs, proxies and encapsulation.

    How did you come to this conclusion?

    BTW, I'm using VPNs in Russia from time to time. Something doesn't work, something does.

    What are you trying to say here? What does work? What does not?

    I'm describing a specific kind of encapsulation.

    What I understood from you is that you are talking about encapsulating TLS-encripted traffic in https, TLS-encripting it again. If I understood you wrong, please correct me. There are countless software solutions for that, but they are not panacea, because double layer of encryption can be detected and your beautiful website does not need encryption-on-top-of-encryption. It is obvious that you are reaching something else.

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • It is going to show the censor that you are trying to reach different banned websites (and, probably, google, facebook, etc), all hosted on your server. Your beautiful website is all fine, but in clienthello there is still google.

    It is not necessary fingerprinting of clients, you can fingerprint the server as well. GnuTLS for this particular purpose is used only by Openconnect and that is just an example. This tactic is very effective in China and Russia and collateral damage is insignificant.

    And various western anti-censorship organizations wrote articles, that such methods are not possible in Russia as well, but here we are. China's yesterday is Russia's today, American tomorrow and European next week. Here it all started in the exact same manner, by requiring ISPs to block pirate websites. And between this and blocking whatever you want for the sake of National Security (for example, against Russian hackers) is not such a long road as you think it is.

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • At first, please, be a little bit more patient and no, I am not a LLM.

    All https traffic is https-encapsulated by definition. And you can look inside https just fine. The problem is that most of data is TLS-encripted. However, there is so-called "clienthello" that is not encripted and can be used to identity the resource you are trying to reach.

    And if you are going to https-encapsulate it again (like some VPN and proxy protocols do) data will have TLS-encription on top of TLS-encription, which can be identified as well.

    And about libraries: VPN protocol Openconnect, for example uses library gnutls (which almost no one else uses) instead of more common openssl. So in China it is blocked using dpi by this "marker".

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • Https does not actually make difference here. You can still detect VPN usage by unencrypted clienthello, encryption-inside-encryption, active probing, obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on, etc.

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
  • VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow "rules". I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.

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    khorovodoved @lemm.ee
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