US Targets Russia With Tech To Evade Censorship of Ukraine News (reuters.com) 92
The U.S. government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, Reuters is reporting, citing five people familiar with the situation. From a report: The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) -- nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern -- and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said. VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology. Reuters spoke to executives at all three U.S. government-backed VPNs and two officials at a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing -- the Open Technology Fund (OTF) -- who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24. Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in U.S. funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
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like all government meddling, it is only for the greater good when they are doing it.
Sure, because Putin is a benevolent autocrat who is being unfairly victimised by the evil democrats of the west.
Re:So now Tor is good? (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that TOR was a US Navy project [torproject.org] right?
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The truth according to Russian media is that the Jewish Zelenskyy of Ukraine is a Nazi and that the Great Putini is the second coming of Peter the Great. I think we can dismiss Russian media.
Re: So now Tor is good? (Score:2)
Re: So now Tor is good? (Score:2)
Re:So now Tor is good? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a well established historical precedence of what appeasement eventually gets you. Ukraine is doing the right thing by resisting force with force, and the majority of the world is doing the right thing by supporting them as best we can.
I'm not sure what magic you think the US could employ to make the belligerents stop fighting and start talking. But more importantly, what exactly is there for Ukraine to talk about except "please get the fuck out of our country?"
And I have no idea what your point is that US citizens are concerned about inflation and the price of gas. I mean, of course people are. But ask people if you think we should support Ukraine and economically punish Russia, and people are on-board.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re:So now Tor is good? (Score:4)
So, Ukraine should surrender? Russia is stealing their land, destroying their cities, killing, beating, and kidnapping their civilians, and Ukraine is just supposed to look away? Remember when it was pretty certain that Germany would prevail in WWII and keep its stolen territories and it was highly unlikely that Britain and France would prevail, much less the smaller countries? Only when US and Russia were pushed into the war that the situation changed.
Yes, war is hell. But in this particular hell, Putin is playing the role of Satan. The West is not causing the killings, the destruction, the torture, the war crimes, or the blockades of food shipments to the rest of the world.
The price of freedom is more important than the price of gas.
LOL Luckyo (Score:1)
Russian media has a bit one sided view
LOL. You win the understatement of the year. Luckyo.
Western population including myself is more concerned about high inflation and high prices of gas.
So how many of your 'western states' are you willing to hand over to appease Putin and bring gas prices down?
Until the next time Putin wants more anyway.
You know if it works once, he'll just keep on doing it.
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Which Russian media? RT, Pravda, or other sources? It is like saying that Reuters and InfoWars are both "US News" sources. There is a huge difference between the two... same with Russian news sources.
If you think the West is the top of hiding stuff, you are deluded. Think a website like WikiLeaks would exist if they went after China or Saudi Arabia? Definitely no. The reason why the US is known to suck is that they are low hanging fruit. Other countries, people doing that would "un-exist".
So, feel to
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The Russians find the lies transparent, and much of the dishonesty vastly entertaining. Rather like watching a soap opera about a bunch of dysfunctional criminals who are forever hatching plans to lie, cheat and steal - from themselves and others, without much distinction.
So that's why Russian state TV is popular. Thanks for the explanation, I was already wondering who'd take that drivel seriously, now I know it's watched for its entertainment value.
Kinda like Weekly World News and similar "newspapers".
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That's a nice myth, but clearly a lot of people do believe it. Believing that would be the same as believing that cuckservatives watch Faux News and the like for entertainment. I assure you that they do not, they lick that shit up like good dogs. When I started having to deal with a coworker who watched it, I started having to pay attention to what they were saying because he would be saying the same stupid shit, and I like to have my argument laid out ahead of time so I don't have to think too hard about b
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You do realize that Tor was the brain child of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, yes?
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Re: So now Tor is good? (Score:2)
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How many wars have your country been in? Honestly how many wars have the US gotten into the last few decades?
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Lessee, stopping Hussein from eating Kuwait, stopping the Taliban for awhile making their alleged country into a prison for women, dismembering Hussein and giving Iraq a chance to have their own freely chosen government, stopping those nice Daesh from killing everyone not Sunni Muslim, stopping Serbia from dismembering Kosovo.
And lately, attempting to stop the reborn USSR from eating Ukraine.
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I would argue that killing Saddam was a mistake which created a power vacuum leading to the formation of ISIS. Saddam was by no means a good guy but he kept the region stable.
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Killing Saddam was a huge mistake. No attempt was even made to negotiate with him. Iraqis didn't want their houses bombed.
There is a real chance that you could work with Saddam to slowly move the country towards democracy. But that would have been slower, and Bush and his men thought they could do better.
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And lately, attempting to stop the reborn USSR from eating Ukraine.
It's not the reborn USSR. It's the reborn Russian Empire. Putin hates Lenin and admires Tzar Alexander III.
Putin hates Lenin because he doesn't want another revolution to happen right now.
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Such as Russia saying it's only lost 1,300 troops and their last update was in March, right? Considering Urkaine has that many dead Russian soldiers on ice around the country which Russia refuses to take back, your comment about people seeing "both sides" doesn't hold water.
But then you knew that and are simply playing the "both sides" fallacy argument because that's all you can do.
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It would be nice if the people of the United States understood that they could benefit from similar tech to sidestep CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC and other corporate media.
There is something preventing you from accessing the YouTube channels of Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, NewsMax, etc... and streaming their sewage straight into your brain?
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How about dodging both sides and getting accurate news reports from Reuters, or news reports from countries that have their own agents? The CBC, BBC, and many other sources are out there. Many Americans are tired of the politicizing of news and wind up reading foreign sources, just because the Dem/Rep bias isn't there, and the view of the US is through someone else's lens.
I trust government-backed media like the BBC or CBC far more than I do media that has a drum to beat politically. Exception is media w
Media bias (Score:3)
BBC [mediabiasfactcheck.com], NPR [mediabiasfactcheck.com], and CBC [mediabiasfactcheck.com] all trend a bit left. Now to be fair, these are general ratings and it can be hard to create an objective analysis of bias in an organization with many reporters doing many stories.
However, I can say personally that I listen to NPR on the way to and from work, and their bias is apparent in what they choose to report and how they choose to report it: you typically hear stories t
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What is ironic is that a few decades ago, there was a law requiring news sources to cover both sides, exactly as mentioned, where one side states "xxx", the other states "yyy". Now, people just assume bias to the point of untruths is just part of the coverage, which pretty much means you have to read a few sources to actually figure out what really happened if the event has any political controversy.
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That was derivative of "the airwaves are public property, and are limited in speech transmission capacity, and therefore not protected fully by the First Amendment."
It was a sketchy doctrine at best, as most places had NPR and at least one talk radio channel, which tended to be conservative.
Such limitations do not exist in cable channels, much less wireless with insane modern compression techniques and the ability to stream multiple HD movies, where text and even audio vanish into the tiny decimal places of
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The reporters tend to note all the negative effects it would have on female reproductive freedom and well-being without noting any of the ethical concerns raised by proponents of the leaked ruling.
That's because the people running NPR don't worship magical sky daddy.
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They replace "for God" with "for The People" and "I will make yourblifd better after you die" with "I will make your life better after my 5 year plan."
Otherwise it's the same scam, give them money and power, they get rich taking kickbacks getting in the way, selling forgiveness for your sins.. against them, I mean, God or The People.
Otherwise, sure!
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In short, getting rid of the meme justification and replacing it with another, while leaving the rotten framework in place, solves nothing. The problem wasn't a fanciful sky daddy. It was what was done with the power under it.
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I have been beating this drum for 15 years now. Inaccurate facts are bad, but not the bias per se. Bias is the choice of stories to harp on all day, every day, year after year.
NPR in the late 1990s and early 2000s was Naughty Priests Radio. Fox News was the Benghazi channel for four years from 2012 to 2016, to keep Hiary problems on the f
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Who is more likely to contribute to the common good? NPR is run almost entirely on donations. Guess who they play to?
I like the google aggregate news because it has a ton of sources and yes Reuters is generally pretty good.
P.S. There is no left in the U.S. There is right of center ("The Left") and foaming at the mouth far right fascists. Rupert Murdoch and co have done an absolutely fantastic job of moving the narrative so that even "The Left" is actually mostly on the right - That's how you got Obama a
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+1
Even Biden is far right [politicalcompass.org]. At this link, scroll down a little over halfway and you'll see that even Bernie Sanders is center-left. "Radical left" in the USA is just a myth, a hoax.
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interesting how you omitted MSNBC and CNN. those are most definitely ALSO low-grade sewage.
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Americans are so thoroughly under the spell of corporate propagandists they can't bear even the mildest criticism about their increasingly dystopian, undemocratic society.
I wish this were secret (Score:2)
It would be nice if the U.S. government would not comment when it meddled with another country's censorship apparatus. Just do it, and don't talk about it. That way, when the same tools are used in China or a "friendly" Middle Eastern country, there is deniability
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You forgot the US is supposed to be the good guys. That means transparency. You also forgot that everyone knows everything these days. There's no deniability.
People keep assuming they know more about US psyops than the government. What is announced and when is all part of the operation.
DK in the house!
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Propaganda (Score:1)
Russians view western media as propaganda, and their own media as factual. This has been ingrained into the culture since the USSR existed. So, I'm not sure what good this will do.
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Russians view western media as propaganda...
Accurately. As far as foreign and political news and opinion are concerned, anyway. Some of the sports and local news may be fairly accurate.
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Russians view western media as propaganda, and their own media as factual.
The bulk of everyone does this. The problem is that it's wrong for some people, like Russians and Chinese by a whole lot, Americans by damned near as much (some good, some bad, but the most popular news network is complete dogshit) and so on. Among the English speakers the British have had it pretty good for a long time, and their news institutions (Reuters and CNN) have long been the [English-speaking] world standard, despite clearly also not being perfect.
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So that's why everyone in the GDR was hellbent on trying anything and everything to receive the Western TV networks?
Foreign Influence Operations (Score:1)
Are good when good people do them and bad when bad people do them
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Pretty much. Dictatorships are giant hostage situations. Conscious decisions to deal with them peacefully are due to practical considerations, not ethical ones.
Can we stop fucking around globally? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Jefferson doctrine: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none."
If Russia or Ukraine or anyone wants to throw their weight around, let them fucking do it. Sell to everyone, but let them all bury themselves.
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The Jefferson doctrine: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nationsâ"entangling alliances with none."
That's a shitty doctrine. Without alliances the strong just push the weak around, and that has negative ramifications for everyone.
If Russia or Ukraine or anyone wants to throw their weight around, let them fucking do it.
Your deliberate attempt to conflate Russia and Ukraine has been noted.
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It's an unfortunate reality that every time the US tries isolationism (a splendid policy), the rest of the world goes crazy and drags us into it.
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It has always been US policy. The US involved in 2 wars at the moment, Somalia and Yemen. We bomb the fuck out of people yet cry when someone else does. Ethnic Russian people were being killed in Ukraine wereas we had no such justification while we bomb Somalia each night.
Except they weren't, except in the occupied regions where they were being murdered by Russians [zmina.info] (or the Russian-backed gangs serving as 'separatist governments').
Of course, you're free to believe Russian media as opposed the people of Russian ethnicity living in Ukraine.
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The Jefferson doctrine: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nationsâ"entangling alliances with none."
That's a shitty doctrine. Without alliances the strong just push the weak around, and that has negative ramifications for everyone.
Alliances suck you into wars. You don't seem to be concerned about that, as you obviously don't plan to actually risk your own life for these glorious causes. But you seem to be happy to make others take those risks. Jefferson was right, and you're wrong.
If Russia or Ukraine or anyone wants to throw their weight around, let them fucking do it.
Your deliberate attempt to conflate Russia and Ukraine has been noted.
Suck a dick. If you want to play Ernest Hemingway, hey, your Spanish Civil War is waiting for you over in Kiev. YOU go risk YOUR ass. Quit demanding that others die for your glorious cause.
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The Jefferson doctrine: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none."
If Russia or Ukraine or anyone wants to throw their weight around, let them fucking do it. Sell to everyone, but let them all bury themselves.
Replying because I accidentally modded your indirect Russian apologetic as "underrated" instead of "overrated" and this is the simplest way to undo that travesty.
As drinkypoo said, everyone keeping to themselves just lets bigger countries like Russia build themselves empires... which are alliances in a way though apparently not strong enough to convince Lukashenko to drag Belarus into Ukraine.
As for the rest I wasn't aware that Ukrainians trying to have their own country with their own language, culture, an [ndtv.com]
Re: Can we stop fucking around globally? (Score:2)
Also Jefferson:
"I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer."
Suck it Russia.
Meanwhile, the West will be shocked... (Score:2)
When the same media that has been telling them "the Ukrainians are all but ready to march on Moscow after exterminating the Russian Army" starts reporting "3/4 of Ukraine has fallen to the Russian Army and Kiev is under siege by four divisions who are supported with unrelenting CAS and long range artillery."
And if you've been following the changes in the media narrative in the US, you know it's coming. In the space of two months they've gone from mocking the Russians to "oh shit, the Russians are monkey sto
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Who the hell said anything about Ukraine invading Moscow? Hyperbole much?
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I just didn't think the West would be shocked by anything Russian propaganda spouts, to be honest. I kinda doubt anyone outside the Russian Reich takes that drivel seriously.
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When the same media that has been telling them "the Ukrainians are all but ready to march on Moscow after exterminating the Russian Army" starts reporting "3/4 of Ukraine has fallen to the Russian Army and Kiev is under siege by four divisions who are supported with unrelenting CAS and long range artillery."
It's reasonable to think that the media is inaccurate, it most assuredly is.
But if Ukraine is losing so badly, then why have they taken more territory than Russia in the last month?
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When the same media that has been telling them "the Ukrainians are all but ready to march on Moscow after exterminating the Russian Army"
Never heard that. Did you invent that strawman yourself or hear about it second hand?
starts reporting "3/4 of Ukraine has fallen to the Russian Army and Kiev is under siege by four divisions who are supported with unrelenting CAS and long range artillery."
Possible... but seems very unlikely.
And if you've been following the changes in the media narrative in the US, you know it's coming. In the space of two months they've gone from mocking the Russians to "oh shit, the Russians are monkey stomping Ukraine's balls in the Donbas region."
In the first month is was "wow, we expected Russia to roll over Ukraine since they have such a massive equipment advantage but instead they're being driven out of Kyiv (though the terrain isn't as favourable in the east). We don't understand why they don't use their typical playbook of just hammering the enemy with artillery".
Now it's "the Russian army is still a joke with completely demo
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In the space of two months they've gone from mocking the Russians to "oh shit, the Russians are monkey stomping Ukraine's balls in the Donbas region."
What's this all comes down to is Washington and Brussels demanding that Western war propaganda flow freely to Russia. "Censorship", LOL. The Western press has been claiming that the Russian Army is ready to collapse for months. It's blatant gaslighting. We're reaching "They're tossing babies from incubators!!" levels of bullshit in the Western media. It's not news. It's Rah Rah.
So when do US citizens get to sidestep censorship? (Score:1)
So while the US develops it's Ministry of Truth to censor free speech in the US, the US also words to help Russians sidestep government censorship.
Oh Good (Score:1)
Oh good, access to western media, sadly still no access to the truth.
Soviet Union (Score:1)