YouTube is reportedly throttled to near unusable levels too¹, although that seems to be done with enough deniability to back-track should it cause too much problems for the economy.
This flurry of social media ban might signal the start of the end of Putin's regime, with sudzha's fall by Ukraine. Right now Ukraine can seize artillery storage and destroy rail lines anywhere behind the frontline with ease, and Russia seems paralyzed. If they soften any of the frontline to reinforce the interior, that frontline will collapse.
This is more complicated than that. First, you have alternative railroads, so while Ukrainians can (and will) make logistics harder, the won't be a big problem (seized munitions and fuel is though). Another issue are power plants.
They do have reserve troups. The main issue is that those cannot be redeployed that fast, the redeployment will show weakness and be costly, at least politically.
Also, they have to move their S400 first (which are easier to move than patriot system to be fair, but will have to be recalibrated). Which is why the Falcons are a huge deal and their arrival probably unlocked the offensive (depending on their payload they could also be useful as more than a threat).
Russian here. Just to give you an idea of how aware of VPNs the general public is: I have a friend, she's 30 and she's never been tech-savvy or nerdy. A typical stay-at-home single mom focused on raising her kid. Today she asked me if I know of any good routers with built-in VPN support, and we had a chat about VPN protocols.
Russian government is very concerned about the brain drain over the past two years. Fortunately (for the russian government), western sanctions on Russia make it much harder for educated professionals to relocate.
Hard to say for sure obviously. The timing is pretty convenient, if the government is doing a poor job responding to an invading force they have good reason to limit communication among the public to tools they can control.
Yes. They, amazingly, discussed it already on state propaganda TV - how much should people know?
The regime really is concerned about controlling the narrative before it gets out of control. Neither panic nor clamoring for nuclear holocaust helps them here.
This won't do much to stop the flow of information into Russia, but might hamper the flow within. I don't think it's meant to just affect the battlefield (and in that case it could have just been regionally limited.)
It's more likely to be a preparatory move. I have a feeling that the risk of a nuke being used just went up.
I think you mean to say Russia will not accept platforms controlled by NATO/US. Decentralized protocols such as XMPP, Matrix, Simplex, Session.. work fine and are not targeted for blocking.
Readit News
In that respect StackOverflow is probably safe.
1: (Dutch) https://nos.nl/artikel/2532565-met-het-beperken-van-youtube-...
This flurry of social media ban might signal the start of the end of Putin's regime, with sudzha's fall by Ukraine. Right now Ukraine can seize artillery storage and destroy rail lines anywhere behind the frontline with ease, and Russia seems paralyzed. If they soften any of the frontline to reinforce the interior, that frontline will collapse.
Youtube has excellent documentaries, movies, news and commentary if you go beyond the default Mr Beast sloppa.
They do have reserve troups. The main issue is that those cannot be redeployed that fast, the redeployment will show weakness and be costly, at least politically.
Also, they have to move their S400 first (which are easier to move than patriot system to be fair, but will have to be recalibrated). Which is why the Falcons are a huge deal and their arrival probably unlocked the offensive (depending on their payload they could also be useful as more than a threat).
Those are all technological alternatives, but they lack the one thing what this is about: massive amounts of content uncensored by the Russian state.
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The regime really is concerned about controlling the narrative before it gets out of control. Neither panic nor clamoring for nuclear holocaust helps them here.
It's more likely to be a preparatory move. I have a feeling that the risk of a nuke being used just went up.
There are also rumors of Signal being operated by them too
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-faci...
Whoever claims total anonymity in the US is full of crap
https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-goog...
All it takes is one backdoor or one engineered flaw
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/signal-downpl...
Likewise, whoever promotes that kind of messaging tool overseas is complicit
Whatever stuff you want to see, you may consume there.
Indeed, news on the web are going the way of newspapers.
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