How the Russian population manages to circumvent censorship to inform themselves

As google, Cloudflare has not left Russia, but this web giant has a good reason to maintain its activity. In particular, he remains on site to protect official Ukrainian websites from attacks by Russian hackers. Little known to the general public, CloudFlare hides behind the operation of the sites Internet the most popular, both for its CDN functions (content delivery network), a cache system that allows very fast access to a website from anywhere in the world, but also for its security functions.

Since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, Cloudflare has thwarted numerous attacks and now protects government sites around the clock. “ We continue to work to protect a growing number of Ukrainian government websites, news sites, banking sites, also non-profits, and we have protected the Ukrainian top-level domain (.ua) to help maintain the presence of Ukraine on the Internet », Explains a manager of the company.

How to maintain a link with the outside world?

Across the border, Cloudflare made several observations. First, that the Russian government has taken steps to strengthen its control over the infrastructure and content of the Russian Internet. The Russian authorities have thus blocked sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitterbut also Russian-language media based outside the country.

Following these measures, assimilated to censorship, part of the population reacted by turning to utilities and apps that maintain access with the rest of the global internet, and Cloudflare specifically finds that Russians seek out non-Russian news sources.

An audience multiplied by five

Thus, in March, applications mobiles the most downloaded in Russia were VPN-type tools, encrypted messaging Telegram and “Warp/1.1.1.1” by Cloudflare, a tool that allows you to confidentially connect to a server remote to access a foreign site. WARP prevents the queries DNS from being monitored by ISPs. ” If we go back to the beginning of February, we see that Cloudflare’s Warp tool was little used in Russia. Its use took off from the first weekend of the war and reached its apogee two weeks ago “, reveals the company.

Analyzing Warp’s usage statistics, Cloudflare therefore saw an increase in its usage in Russia, starting in early March, and most of the searches were for major French, UK and US newspapers. Supporting graphs show that, since the beginning of March, traffic DNS quintupled compared to pre-war levels, which indicates that the Russians are trying to access this source of information, and therefore to circumvent the blockages put in place by the authorities.

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

Close to Anonymous, developers have created a service that allows Westerners to send SMS to Russians to warn them of the real situation in Ukraine. It relies on a database 20 million mobile numbers, and 140 million email addresses.

Posted on 03/14/2022 by Fabrice Auclert

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 Squad303, close to anonymous, got their hands on this huge directory, and their little application generates numbers or emails drawn at random 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 blocked the translation of texts into Russian, and you can check the content of the text with another tool, like 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.