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Putin Outlaws Anonymity: Identity Verification For Online Services, VPN Bypass Advice a Crime * TorrentFreak

https://torrentfreak.com/putin-outlaws-anonymity-user-id-verification-for-online-services-vpn-bypass-advice-a-crime-230801/

Putin has signed new laws that will decimate online anonymity by denying access to online services pending state-approved user ID checks.

82 comments

Aikawa

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Blackmist

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It seems there's two big rabbit holes online.

"Do COVID vaccines have side effects?" leading to thinking abortions should be illegal, atheists are the devil, Trump is your saviour, and that Russia is justified in invading Ukraine.

"Is capitalism unfair?" leading to tankies, thinking communism would be good for the proles, and thinking Russia is justified in invading Ukraine.

Almost like Russia is spreading both trails of bullshit.

mcgravier

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Remember: If you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide! Cryptocurrencies and VPNs are used only by criminals xD

JonsJava

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I know I could Google it, but I'll ask here, because others may be afraid to ask: what is a tankie? I'm seeing that phrase a lot, but I guess I'm getting old, because I missed the rising of that phrase.

Aikawa

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Holzkohlen

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Communist Fascists basically.

Gestrid

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I'd assume it's someone who supports communism. It's likely a reference to the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, when the Chinese government used tanks to suppress protestors in the square.

The reason it's prominent on Lemmy is because the main dev of the software used to run Lemmy apparently supports communism.

It should be noted, though, that that last sentence ultimately doesn't matter since the the software is open-source. Should the software become an issue, someone else can simply start developing the Lemmy software instead. Additionally, because it's open-source, everyone can create or join a Lemmy instance instead of using the dev's own lemmy.ml instance.

EuroNutellaMan

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Not really, it's more people who identify as Marxist-Leninists or leftist in general who deny, downplay, or outright praise the genocidal actions of totalitarian regimes like the USSR, the PRC, etc, and/or who today will support countries like Russia in the ukraine-russia conflict (explicitly or more overtly) simply because they hate the US and NATO.

The origins actually predate Tiananmen square, but I can't exactly remember if it was people who praised the actions of the USSR during the Prague spring or the Hungarian revolution.

Gestrid

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Ah, thanks for the correction. I just knew that Marxist-Leninism was somehow related to Communism, and that Communist China used tanks to suppress the protests in Tiananmen Square.

CCatMan

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Think of the children

pm_boobs_send_nudes

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Has already happened with laws requiring identification of users who want to visit porn sites (Utah)

Generic_Handel

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The paranoia is starting to ramp up, now with drones and missiles hitting inside Russia.

My guess is they will crack down hard on anyone trying to talk about the actual reality of what's going on vs the party line.

TheRaven

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They already do. This just removed more ways to hide.

Lettuceeatlettuce

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A classic move by authoritarian tyrants, suppress the spread of information, outlaw the free exchange of ideas.

This is why Tor and other privacy preserving technology is so important. People's lives and wellbeing depend on them. We must not forget there are people in this world who are being harassed, tortured, and killed because they dare to question their government, dare to criticize their leaders, dare to think for themselves.

"While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power." -V for Vendetta

mcgravier

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Actually this isn't much different from extreme control over financial transactions in civilzed parts of the world. Rather it's just natural extension of that control, which is scary

CookieJarObserver

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Lmao Russia moment.

nostalgicgamerz

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Afraid of a civilian uprising. Also RIP classic warez “.ru” pages like old-game.

Endorkend

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Bwah, plenty of them have alternative domains and hosting not in Russia.

nostalgicgamerz

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Old-game has a fuck ton of ancient abandonware and not so abandoned but still ancient warez.

masterairmagic

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I expect Western governments are looking at this and saying "gee, I wish we had that".

UsernameLost

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The US is already trying to do it with KOSA

bappity

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welp. they have to catch up with north korea eventually

eleitl

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Expect this to come to the EU in a few years.

tryptaminev

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But you see, it is only bad if it is done by authoritarian regimes, but we are states of law and democracy, so there is nothing bad about it. And we are states of law because trust me bro

-European conservatives and "social democrats"

echodot

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The UK conservatives aren't even trying to hide it anymore. They have now just gone full on dictatorship energy.

Fortunately they are a bunch of incompetents who fight amongst themselves like a sack of cats. Otherwise they might actually represent threat.

Necronomicommunist

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While I agree with your distaste, I hope you remain wary. Their incompetence seems to have the outcome of enriching them and their sponsors. Can you still attribute incompetence when they are benefitting?

Regarding dictatorship, the conservatives right now are setting up a lot of things like anti-protest laws that seem toothless because they haven't been used to the fullest extent, but the groundwork is there. It won't take long (likely one election cycle) and I'm sure we'll see them use it in the fullest extent.

SmoothIsFast

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Becareful that's what everyone in the US thought, and then we got Trump and the Q brigade taking down our democracy.

IDe

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Why? If anything the EU tends towards pro-privacy/anti-authoritarianism and has mostly avoided this kind of security theater seen in other countries.

Ebsku

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Chat control though

sphfaar

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It will happen first in the USA, UK and Australia before all the EU countries approve such bullshit.

echodot

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I don't understand why we're constantly told that Russia and China are the biggest threats to democracy, because we keep stealing their ideas.

TwoGems

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Republicans would love the freedumb of living in Russia

riley0

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That's gonna truly suck. VK has good videos unavailable elsewhere. I've had an account there for a long time. I wonder what that'll mean for access to rutracker. edit: whois says rutracker is registered in the Bahamas :)

JeffCraig

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Man, this makes me rethink my whole idea of online anonymity.

There's a lot of reasons why requiring identity verification could be a good thing, but holy shit now I realize how quickly something like that could slip into authoritarianism.

I still think we need a identity verification service for things like online games and social media (to thwart ban evasion), but it has to be something decentralized.

mcgravier

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It doesn't have to be decentralized, it has to be anonymous. You want to have an online identity in the number of one per citizen, but not tied to the real identities.

There's a way to do this by using regular digital ID and anonymizing it with zero-knowledge cryptography, but AFAIK noone tried this yet

volodymyr

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It may need to be in some way decetralized though, even if some kind of certification authority needs to be in some coherent trust chain.

It makes me think of inrupt solid, although it's not quite the same.

Also I seem to remember some dutch (or used in there) online idenity management infrastructure which allows to make some authorithative claims without getting entire identity revealed. Sadly I can not find it now.

Potato

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Eh, then if your online ID is compromised you're in trouble. Can't just burn it and start over.

darthfabulous42069

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🤔 A blockchain with a private key tied to your palm print would work. It would guarantee proving uniqueness in a way that no human could differentiate who is what, only the blockchain itself could, and because palm prints are extremely difficult for other people to fake, it would guarantee the ability for websites to actually enforce rules in a meaningful way.

QuaternionsRock

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While decentralized identity verification is a good idea, this approach is not.

Your identity would be permanently compromised as soon as your palm print is stolen. It can also be stolen without you noticing, unlike well-kept passwords. Much less secure than, e.g., a memorable 30 character password.
People lose parts of their palm print all the time. Touching a cast iron pan for a second shouldn’t lock you out of your accounts for a month.
This requires quantizing the human palm print in a way that is not currently possible. Hashing algorithms require the “butterfly effect” to be effective at hiding the private key, meaning a small change in inputs should result in a large change in output. This is a problem for palm prints, where you’re unlikely to make the exact same measurements repeatedly.

VonReposti

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Palm prints and fingerprints are actually produced at the absolute lowest levels of the skin so you'd have to fry your hand all the way to the meat to permanently damage your prints. Otherwise it'll regenerate fine with time. The biggest risks to your fingerprints is actually aging.

Not that I think basing such stuff on prints are a good idea, but I just wanted to clarify the resilience of them.

acockworkorange

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People working in citrus orchards are known to temporarily lose their prints. Imagine having no digital access for over a month. It's a huge contingent of people.

Other people are known to lose limbs.🤷‍♂️

Whatever we think of, it's got to be some 3 or 4 possible systems to cover 99.9% of the cases. And then you're still left with a lot of marginalized edge cases; and a system that can be exploited by creating multiple disconnected identities using the different systems in isolation.

I hope I'm wrong and it's just my own limitations in creativity, but I don't see a light at the end of this tunnel.

VonReposti

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Completely agree, I was just addressing the durability of prints as it was misrepresented in OPs comment. Burning yourself on a cast iron (or working with citrus and the like) would at most give you temporary problems with scanning the prints. But a severed finger is definitely impossible to read. For most people the problem though first occurs with aging which affects the elasticity of the skin, making prints hard to read.

QuaternionsRock

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By “for a month” I meant to imply that it will grow back. it’s not very common for people to permanently lose their prints, but we have to consider things like cuts and burns here as well. You won’t be able to verify your identity through a system like this until it regrows, which is an obvious problem.

crystal

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prosp3kt

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Piracy is allowed there anyway since the war the will not punish it, they even promote it with an emergent law

ReallyActuallyFrankenstein

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This particular law is not meant to discourage piracy. But actually, for an authoritarian state, it's better if everyone is both breaking the law and if they can easily track those people doing so. That means they can simply arrest anyone under the pretense of legitimate law enforcement.

gjghkk

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piracy is not discouraged, because with games and such it helps easily to escape the war and have easy fun without paying.

Henry

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Basically what China has done.

zbynaCool

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I think this will lower hacker problems by half atleast lol

julian

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I doubt that. They'll probably get a free pass, just like the north korean ones.

Pancito

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North Korean hackers don't have a free pass. They straight work out of government offices

nicerdicer

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This will have a huge impact on free speech in Russia. Also, information we receive from Russia may not be genuine after this measurement will be implemented, as it will be politically in terms of Russia - as we know it from China right now. In order to spread the REAL things that are going on, people will need to risk their freedom.

MaxPower

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Are there identities of russian Babushkas for sale anywhere?

/s but not really

radioactiveradio

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No, all the babushkas use TOR

J12

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Ban them from Twitter while you’re at it

Akasazh

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Nah the head honcho is a big fan of ol' Puuts

Thorny_Thicket

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What are you basing this on? At the start of the war he was challenging Putin for a MMA match and he lets Ukrainians use Starlink. Am I missing something?

Goathound

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Starlink has already cut access to front line Ukrainians before, forcing them to hold off on advancing due to lack of communication.

Starlink has benefitted immensely from the war, so it's not a purely humanitarian desire to help Ukrainians. Free publicity and a guaranteed market share when only a handful of people ever even heard of Starlink is what they were after, IMO.

Thorny_Thicket

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This still leaves my question unaswered. What has he done to indicate that he's pro-Putin? I'm genuinely asking.

pm_boobs_send_nudes

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forcing them to hold off on advancing due to lack of communication

That's not why. They were stretching the Russian defences and resources and now have launched their main attack. In any case, Russia can jam starlink. It's not some wunderwaffe.

emerging_obscurity

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sunbeam60

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Given how easy it is to set up a Docker-based wireguard server on a small remote VM, I suspect this will achieve very little.

axzxc1236

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Deep packet inspection is a thing, AFAIK people in China uses a software called v2ray to counter that.

deeznutz

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You can't inspect encrypted packets, what China does is network traffic analysis - examining headers and figuring out patterns based on metadata. They don't care much about what's being transmitted if using a VPN alone is enough to land you in trouble.

Gailthesnail

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i think US carriers do the same thing to counter unauthorized hotspotting so even using a VPN didnt help

snake

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Excuse my ignorance, but in this case what would be the benefit of having the wireguard server run inside a Docker? Wouldn’t running the server directly on the remote VM achieve the same result?