The Real Russia. Today. Russia's Telegram cluster...fudge continues, and Moscow says the British poisoned a comatose Yulia Skripal

Thursday, April 19, 2018

• As Telegram fights for its life in Russia, Google discontinues a practice that was vital to circumventing censorship
• Roskomnadzor reportedly holds a secret powwow
• Russia blocks DigitalOcean IP addresses
• Meduza speaks to online business disrupted by Roskomnadzor's war on Telegram
• A Putin advisor says Roskomnadzor should apologize
• Lots of state officials are still logging into Telegram
• The Kremlin says it has no plans for a “Great Firewall” of its own
• Russia launches a new military satellite
• Syria allegedly hands over two unexploded U.S. cruise missiles to Moscow
• Russia's UN rep says the Brits injected a toxin into Yulia Skripal while she was in a coma
• A former Moscow cop invents his own court orders to get telephone records

Telegram block censorship Internet mania 💥

🤭 Et tu, Google?

“App developers won’t be able to use Google to get around internet censorship anymore. The Google App Engine is discontinuing a practice called ‘domain-fronting,’ which let services use Google’s network to get around state-level internet blocks. [...] A recent change in Google’s network architecture means the trick no longer works. [...] While never an explicit feature of Google’s App Engine, domain-fronting had been widely publicized since it was publicly adopted by Signal in 2016. The technique was also used by state hackers: According to a recent FireEye report, the Kremlin-linked APT29 used domain-fronting to smuggle information out of targets for as long as two years.”

• Read the full story at The Verge.
• On its official social media accounts, Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, shared the news about Google’s decision, linking to a news article that also mentions Russia’s efforts to block Telegram.

🏈 Let's huddle up, boys

The agency denies it, but the newspaper Kommersant has several sources who say Russia’s federal censor held a secret meeting with representatives from the country’s biggest Internet service providers to discuss their failure to block Telegram. According to several industry insiders and an unnamed state official, Roskomnadzor wanted to find more effective ways to block access to the instant messenger, which has so far managed to remain accessible to most users, despite the blocking of millions of IP addresses. Kommersant says the meeting also acknowledged that Roskomnadzor’s aggressive approach has even knocked out “Revizor” (the agency’s own service for blocking websites), which officials have denied.

👋 Do svidaniya, DigitalOcean

On Wednesday, Roskomnadzor also blocked tens of thousands of IP addresses owned by the U.S.-based cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean. According to a copy of Roskomnadzor’s “out-load” list, late on April 18, the agency ordered Russian ISPs to start blocking the subnets 167.99.0.0/16 and 206.189.0.0/16, each of which masks 65,000 IP addresses.

Multiple IP-identification services attribute the IP addresses contained in these subnets to DigitalOcean. On Twitter, the company says it is “monitoring the situation,” while acknowledging that “there is no direct action” it can take as a provider “if a national government decides to block [its] IP addresses for their citizens.”

According to the company Netcraft, DigitalOcean is the third most popular cloud infrastructure provider in the world. The Google-owned service Outline, which allows journalists and activists to create and run VPN servers, recommends by default that users rely on DigitalOcean.

🤕 Doing business as collateral damage

On April 16 and 17, as part of its ongoing efforts to cut off access to the instant messenger Telegram, Russia’s federal censor blocked millions of IP addresses belonging to cloud services operated by Google and Amazon, inadvertently disrupting a variety of Russian businesses, from online schools to courier delivery services. The owners of several affected websites spoke to Meduza about becoming collateral damage in Russia’s war on a chat app.

• Read the whole story: “‘It's simple negligence’: Russian business owners talk about becoming collateral damage in the federal censor's war on Telegram”

🙏 Just say you're sorry, man

German Klimenko, President Putin’s advisor on Internet development, said on Thursday that Roskomnadzor should issue an apology to the tech companies and online businesses whose services have been disrupted because of the millions of IP addresses blocked this week in the government’s efforts to cut access to Telegram. Speaking on the television network NTV, Klimenko called on Roskomnadzor to act more carefully. The agency, meanwhile, still denies that its actions have caused any online collateral damage.

📱 Can't stop, won't stop

According to the magazine RBC, many state officials in the Kremlin, the State Duma, the Federation Council, and other government agencies are still logging into Telegram, despite Roskomnadzor’s ban. Technically, this is legal, given that no Russian court has banned individuals from accessing the instant messenger, but it raises some ethical questions, German Klimenko says.

🇨🇳 No plans for a Russian Great Firewall

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Thursday that the Kremlin doesn’t intend to create a national firewall to block Telegram modeled on China’s “Great Firewall.” On Thursday, Peskov told reporters that he knows of no such plans in Russia, and defended Roskomnadzor’s efforts against Telegram as a long-term process. He also said that the blocking of Telegram shouldn’t disrupt any other legally operated online services.

Military, go! 🚀

🛰 An Internet boost

Russia’s federal censor might be busy crippling parts of the Internet for much of the country, but the Defense Ministry launched a new military satellite on Thursday that is designed to boost Russia’s high-speed Internet access, while also transmitting other data, telephone service, and video conferencing service. The satellite was carried into orbit by a Proton-M rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan.

🇸🇾 Friends give gifts

A source in the Syrian military told the news agency TASS that Damascus has transferred two unexploded U.S. cruise missiles to Moscow for study. The rockets were apparently fired in Washington’s attack on April 14. Russian officials have not verified these reports. Moscow previously claimed that Syrian air defense forces successfully shot down 71 of the 103 missiles fired by the United States. President Trump, on the other hand, says every American missile hit its target.

How could you, Britain? 🇬🇧

Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday that the British authorities apparently injected Yulia Skripal with a “toxic substance” while she was in a coma. Nebenzya based his accusation on a report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which he says shows a “undissolved toxic chemical” in Yulia’s blood samples 18 days after the poisoning, while this apparently wasn’t observed in the blood of Sergey Skripal, whose poisoning was more severe.

Earlier on Wednesday, Russia’s delegation to the OPCW accused Britain of forcing Yulia Skripal into a coma, in order to “manipulate” her health. London denies these charges.

The OPCW recently concluded an investigation into the poisoning of the Skirpals and determined that the British authorities correctly identified the nerve agent used in the attack. The organization’s report does not name the origin of the nerve agent, however, and the word “Novichok” does not appear in the declassified pages of the document.

His own personal court system ⚖️

A former police inspector in Moscow has been charged with forging roughly 300 court orders to obtain telephone call records illegally. According to the newspaper Kommersant, Oleg Vasilenko counterfeited the official seal used by Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court and used it to file 300 fraudulent court rulings requesting telephone records, which he then sold for as much as 100,000 rubles ($1,635) each. Vasilenko later turned himself in, the newspaper says.

On April 17, the Moscow Investigative Committee said it had opened a case against privacy violations, violations of secret correspondence, and the forgery of documents and official seals.