A Russian ISP confirms Roskomnadzor’s Twitter-blocking blooper
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This is https://speed.gulag.link/, a speedtest application that demonstrates Roskomnadzor throttling to Russian users it impacts. [credit: Jim Salter ]
Last night, a confidential source at a Russian ISP contacted Ars with confirmation of the titanic mistake Roskomnadzor-Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media-made when attempting to punitively throttle Twitter's link-shortening service t.co.
Our source tells us that Roskomnadzor distributes to all Russian ISPs a hardware package that must be connected just behind that ISP's BGP core router. At their small ISP, Roskomnadzor's package includes an EcoFilter 4080 deep package inspection system, a pair of Russian-made 10Gbps aggregation switches, and two Huawei servers. According to our source, this hardware is "massive overkill" for its necessary function and their experienced traffic level-possibly because "at some point in time, government planned to capture all the traffic there is."
Currently, the Roskomnadzor package does basic filtration for the list of banned resources-and, as of this week, has begun on-the-fly modifications of DNS requests as well. The DNS mangling also caused problems when first enabled-according to our source, YouTube DNS requests were broken for most of a day. Roskomnadzor eventually plans to require all Russian ISPs to replace the real root DNS servers with its own, but that project has met with resistance and difficulties.
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