1920.in, the brilliant tool to circumvent censorship in Russia and inform the population

Because Vladimir Putin has decided to censor social networksbut also the local and foreign press with the threat of a 15-year prison sentence each time the terms “war” or “invasion” are written or spoken, how can the population be informed of the reality in Ukraine?

Developers came up with the idea of ​​creating a website that allows random text messages to be sent to a Russian resident. The goal is obviously to use his text messages to report on the war in Ukraine and to give accurate and verified information on the situation.

Tens of millions of possible recipients

This service is called 1920.inand it takes its name from a unit of Polish World War II pilots who had joined the Royal Air British force to continue the fight against Hitler after the annexation of Poland. According to wall street journalit relies on a directory of 20 million mobile phones and 140 million e-mail addresses belonging to Russian individuals and companies.

The group Squad303close to anonymous, got their hands on this immense repertoire, and their little application generates random numbers or emails from this database. Anyone in the world can therefore send a message, without knowing the recipient, and you can either write your own message, provided you write it in Russian, or send an already prepared text.

A pre-written message in Russian

If you want to participate, log on to 1920.in from a computer or mobile. A window Cloudfare takes care of protecting the shipment, avoiding attacks DDOS of Russian hackers. Enter the number you see at the top of your screen in your texting app, then click the “Copy text” button. » to copy the message already translated into Russian that you are going to send. Since Monday morning, Google has blocked the translation of texts into Russian, and you can check the content of the text with another tool, such as Deepl for example. In our example, here is the message: Dear Russians, your media is censored. The Kremlin is lying. Discover the truth about Ukraine on the free internet and on the application Telegram. It’s time to overthrow dictator Putin! »

All you have to do is press “Send” to reach your recipient. To send an email, you must log in to mail.1920.in and it is the service that sends the message for you. For WhatsAppyou have to connect to wa.1920.in.

Obviously, we do not know who will receive the message, and if this person will be sensitive to it. It is also not known, even if the messages are end-to-end encrypted on Whatsapp, if the Russian services will intercept them. One thing is certain, today it is one of the few ways to alert the population, and the Squad303 group celebrated the 20,000^and message sent.