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Russian programmers coordinate in chats, at hackathons to

outfox

censors

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Moscow has banned foreign social media sites, opposition

media

outlets

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Programmers build on anti-censorship tools developed in

China,

US

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Restrictions have been ramped up since invasion of Ukraine

By Lucy Papachristou

LONDON, April 25 (Reuters) - When Antony Rudkovsky was

about 15, he began to teach himself how to build virtual private

networks (VPNs) to access Internet content unavailable in

Russia.

At first, the young programmer just wanted to listen to

music on the Spotify streaming app in his bedroom in Nizhny

Novgorod, a city roughly 270 miles (430 km) east of Moscow.

Three years later, Rudkovsky, now 18, snagged $1,200 - the

biggest share of the prize money - at a competition last month

organised by a civil society group to design a VPN to evade

Russia's censors.

He's part of a growing ecosystem of freelance programmers

and VPN companies involved in what some of them describe as a

"cat-and-mouse" game with authorities to bypass controls on what

Russians can access online.

"I'm not a very political person by nature, but I don't think

that violating basic human freedoms - the freedom to express

oneself and get information - is the right thing," Rudkovsky

said in an interview from Gdańsk, Poland, where his family moved

shortly before the war began. "People will get further and

further from reality."

Reuters spoke to six programmers who are preparing for

tougher blocks on VPNs in Russia, some of them employing

techniques learnt from Chinese hackers' efforts to evade the

even more stringent 'Great Firewall' there.

Many of the programmers now work from abroad due to safety

concerns: coordinating in group chats, at virtual hackathons and

on collaborative web development platforms. Several would not

disclose their location to Reuters, and others asked to be

referred to by their first names in order to speak freely.

Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor has been putting

opposition media websites on blacklists and has banned several

foreign social media platforms in a crackdown it casts as part

of an information war unleashed by the West following Russia's

invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin accuses some

Western news and social media sites of spreading negative

propaganda about Russia to stoke discord in the country and

ultimately overthrow the government.

Demand for such services in Russia skyrocketed after

Moscow's invasion of Ukraine sent millions searching for

independent information.

An estimated 33.5 million people downloaded a VPN in Russia in

2022, up from 12.6 million the year before, according to a

global index maintained by Atlas VPN, a service provider.

Some programmers are gearing up for what they expect to be

an era of tighter controls after President Vladimir Putin

secured a mandate until at least 2030 with a landslide win at

elections last month. Pro-Kremlin lawmakers want to restrict

internet access further as part of a broader fight to protect

what Putin refers to as Russia's "traditional values" - based on

family, nation and Orthodox Christian faith.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked about the government's

stance on the use of VPNs, said he was not aware of any planned

sanctions. "Roskomnadzor is making efforts to block certain VPN

services, and these efforts will continue in order to reduce the

possibility to circumvent blocks," he said.

Roskomnadzor currently blocks about 150 popular VPNs,

Evgeniy Zaitsev, its head of department for control and

supervision of electronic communications, was quoted by state

media as saying at an internet safety forum in Moscow this week.

The regulator did not respond to a request for comment for this

story. It has long said it wants to eliminate VPN services

altogether.

There are signs that the crackdown is gaining strength.

Last month, Russia banned the advertising of VPNs used

explicitly to access "blocked or illegal content," and

Roskomnadzor has so far blocked roughly 700 webpages that spread

such "propaganda", Zaitsev said.

One Russian VPN provider as well as a civil society

organisation that helps rights groups access VPNs told Reuters

their clients were reporting problems with services that worked

fine a year ago. Both sources asked to remain anonymous as they

still have staff or exposure in Russia.

Many Russians use VPNs to access banned U.S. social media sites

such as Facebook and Instagram - both owned by Meta Platforms

Inc ( META ) - to post photos online and keep in touch with friends and

family at home and abroad.

While nearly all Russian-language independent media are

blocked, Western news sites are not. Irina Borogan, a

non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy

Analysis (CEPA) who co-authored a book on Russian digital

censorship, said that so few Russians speak other European

languages that there isn't a need to restrict such content.

The vast majority of people who speak just Russian and don't

have a VPN can only access Kremlin-controlled news, Borogan

said.

FOOLING THE CENSORS

Several programmers are building on anti-censorship tools

developed in China and the United States to stay ahead of

Roskomnadzor.

One developer, who asked to be referred to only by his first

name, Evgeniy, has developed a simplified version of a

well-known Chinese circumvention tool, Xray. His "easy-xray"

application diverts web traffic to a rented server abroad via a

complex process that he says masks user traffic from

Roskomnadzor.

Up to 20 people at a time can comfortably share one virtual

server, which users can rent for a few dollars a month, he said.

"We tested easy-xray on two servers and saw no big problems

during Russian blocking," said Evgeniy, 38. The service isn't

commercially available yet.

Much of the programmers' work centres around strengthening

what are called "protocols," or the set of rules that govern how

data is transferred from a user's laptop or smartphone to a VPN

server.

Rudkovsky's prize-winning VPN prototype switches users

between two protocols in the event one of them is blocked,

essentially "detecting blocks on the go," he said.

Vitaliy Vlasenko, a 37-year-old programmer, has designed a

similar system.

It works by dozens of Internet users installing his

application, which he calls a "sensor," onto their laptops or

cheap microprocessors. These "sensors" then establish

connections to many kinds of protocols, so that if one is

blocked, others are available for use. The more people download

the "sensor," the more robust the system.

Vlasenko moved to Thailand in June 2022 from the Siberian

city of Novosibirsk, where he had volunteered for the late

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Born in the Ukrainian

city of Dnipro, he said he left Russia because he could no

longer live in a country "that is bombing my homeland."

Vlasenko developed the "sensors" project last year at the

same online hackathon in which Rudkovsky recently participated.

Called Demhack, the hackathon gives participants three days

to solve a set of challenges related to internet freedom issues.

Rudkovsky won for the design of a VPN for mobile phones.

Vlasenko says more collaboration like this is needed to

combat rising censorship.

"Roskomnadzor's methods have become much more technological.

Now, hackathons are needed to find a solution; a simple

installation of some VPN-client will not do."

SHARING CODE FOR GREATER GOOD

Amnezia VPN is trying to foster just such a collaboration.

One of Russia's largest free VPN services with 200-250,000

active users, at least two-thirds of them inside Russia, Amnezia

is an open-source application, meaning anyone can copy and

modify its computer code to build their own projects.

"I am shocked at how much the project has grown," said

operator Mazay Banzaev. "Hundreds of IT specialists and

developers began to gather around us."

In a group chat on the Telegram app called "Amnezia VPN

Development," over 400 programmers trade dozens of messages

every day, sharing lines of code copied from Amnezia's

technology to test new ideas and troubleshooting together when

problems arise.

"Friends, why is there such a low incoming speed?" one

programmer asked in the group chat in March, requesting help

with his VPN.

Another sought assistance to configure a type of protocol

onto his phone, trading messages and lines of code back and

forth with a chat member for over an hour until the two had

solved the problem.

Banzaev's team is working around the clock to develop its

own protocol that will disguise VPN traffic and fool censors

into thinking users are surfing the web normally.

"This whole cat-and-mouse game with VPNs will lead to

regulators wanting to limit communication with the outside world

at all costs," he said.

Banzaev keeps an eye on China and Iran, where internet

controls are much stricter than in Russia. He believes it is

only a matter of time before Moscow follows suit.

"We aren't waiting. We have begun to develop new VPN

protocols that will be stable in these new conditions," he said.

VPN usage is criminalised in Iran, while in China the state

employs an army of human censors to excise anti-Communist

content and uses artificial intelligence to monitor what people

view online.

Western nations have comparatively few restrictions on access to

the internet, experts say, although some governments are

increasingly concerned over related issues including privacy,

data security and sovereignty. The United States passed

legislation this week to force TikTok's Chinese owner to sell

its U.S. assets or face a ban there, amid disquiet over possible

Chinese access to Americans' data.

Unlike China, Russia didn't impose restrictions when it

first constructed its Internet architecture in the 1990s, said

Andrew Sullivan, president of the Internet Society, an American

advocacy group that promotes online freedoms.

"Russia has a history of pretty good connectivity," Sullivan

said. "It's been very painful to watch the Kremlin undermining

that."

RISKS FOR RUSSIA

Six experts say Moscow's efforts to ban all VPNs would risk

harming other functionalities of the internet - at least

temporarily - such as government websites for tax payments or

online banking services.

"The internet wasn't invented to be filtered, to be

dissected into sovereign parts," said Borogan of the Center for

European Policy Analysis.

"So when you try to ban something or block IP addresses, it

means you can disrupt the whole system."

In contrast to Iran, Russia maintains strong connections to

the global economy, despite current Western sanctions, making it

potentially risky to disrupt critical online services.

Aggressive blocking could also lead to more internet blackouts,

of which there have been several in Russia in recent months,

said Sullivan of the Internet Society.

"Russia has become increasingly willing to tolerate this

type of internet degradation if it means preventing people from

accessing certain information," he said.

Some internet freedom advocates say developers need to think

beyond VPNs and build other tools to evade censorship, like

encrypted messengers or web browsers.

"There won't be a golden bullet solution for everything,"

said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now, a global

digital rights non-profit. "We need to be thinking long term."