Technology

Russia trying to ban Telegram is a whole epopeya that produced a lot of memes and animated videos back in the days.

Now it's a piece of history.

A story about what heppened (it's hilarious, read it):

Essentially, there's a gov agency called Roscomnadzor (from Russian communication surveillance) that is responsible for "keeping the internet a safe space", so to say.

After another law, wanted by nobody, was passed, it allowed for Roscomnadzor to request the encryption keys from all social media. Since Telegram "doesn't have those", Roscomnadzor took it to court for non-complience.

Telegram lost the case and was ordered to pay 1mil rub (about 17000USD at the time I believe) and to provide the keys. The society started joking about how that's the cheapest PR a company could get for such outreach. Overall sentiment was "Not only do they get so many people to hear about Telegram for pennies, but they also make Telegram look like a safe place to chat" (which is debatable, but w/e, that's what people thought, mind you Telegram was a very new product then)

It's also important to note that Telegram's creator, Pavel Durov, is also the creator of largest Russian social medial called VKontakte (tl. InContact) which he was robbed of and forced to leave the country.

And so, once Roscomnadzor started trying to block Telegram for, yet again, non-complience, people started beeing dissatisfied and set up a date to let paper planes out of their windows to show their support for Telegram.

Now starts the fun part.

Just in one week over 18mil IP adresses were blocked. Whilst trying to block Telegram, Roscomnadzor managed to accidentially block: Viber, some paying services, some services for selling airplane tickets, a service selling OSAGO (mandatory car insurance), ResearchGate, central repository of Java, Skolkovo Tech websited (aka Russian Silver Valley), a lot of universities' websited (including the biggest ones), some scientific archives.

They even managed to block some of Google's services, like YouTube or it's main page, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki (Russian social media for boomers and country bumpkins, tld as "Classmates"), Yahoo, Some Russian gov sites and I believe even it's own website.

What did you not see on that list? That's right! Telegram is still fully operational.

This has caused a massive surge of memes and videos portraying Roscomnadzor as an anime character Roscomnadzor-chan trying to block all of the wicked stuff off the net, but ultimately failing all the time. She has goons, which look kinda like those half life solders, which are all secretly into all that stuff they block.

Roscomandzor also acquired a new nickname, "Roscompozor", where "pozor" means "disgraceful", think "I"m ashamed of you and I mean it" kind of meaning.

Since then Telegram was finally blocked, but through use of VPN many people still accessed it. Including government officials (a lot of them). In fact, it was used so much that some years after they striked a deal (involving giving users' data to Russia ofc) where Telegram was fully unblocked and still is to this day.

Not being end to end encrypted by default is the opposite of privacy.