Hm, so there is basically easy way to use filters to block any website (at least temporary) for the Russian segment of the Internet? I don't see how it might go wrong.
This seems a bit useless to me. Its trivial for Russian networks to block out foreign requests before it reaches the sites. So effectively those sites would not be accessible from outside of Russia but inside , business as usual.
Do you have examples for Europe blocking Russia? Because all I have seen is DNS providers omitting certain sites (i.e RT), but their apps still work (plus URLs when using other DNS). An nothing of that coming from the nation states as all seems to be due to the activities of private companies doing these things.
Russia mostly prefers to block websites instead of prosecuting their creators. E.g. btc-e.com (but not btc-e.nz) was blocked in Russia but they didn't care about its owners.
The the site is blocked in Russia? Can anyone else confirm? It may just be poor connectivity. Hackerfactor would be an interesting addition to the known Russian blacklisted sites[1] though.
Not as of yet. Actually, if you use tor (with out-of-Russia exit nodes, which I think is the default when using it from Russia?), you can already freely access all the sites blocked in Russia, non-onion ones. But, obviously, tor and VPNs are good solutions only for people willing to go an extra mile to get to the prohibited content.
It's part of the EU sanctions, EU ISPs are required to block certain Russian sites. But they didn't specify how, that's left up to the countries to figure out afaik. But as you say, some of the what has been done barely qualifies.
Here's my personal experience with this:
Germany does exactly what you describe, the bare minimum to say "we're blocking" --- DNS omitting certain sites.
Spain is doing deep packet inspection, blocking DNS requests that lookup RT, so DNS over HTTPS or through a VPN is a must. Additionally, they're also reading the SNI in TLS requests and blocking that way. If you try accessing RT in pure unencrypted HTTP you're get some fortigate blocking message back.
So Russia's censor meets your stated requirements, I think. There is an official publicly visible blocklist that includes a justification for each blocked site: http://blocklist.rkn.gov.ru/
There is a procedure for challenging a decision to block. All the content on that list is blocked in accordance with some law, it's just that the laws themselves are questionable...
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