russia
Via the BBC comes the story of how a Norwegian computer expert has set up a website to allow people to mail random Russians to tell the story of the Ukraine war from a perspective not being covered in the Russian media. The website allows users to receive a random sampling of 150 Russian email addresses from a list compiled by the website operator, and it provides an email message for the user to send to those address, starting with the subject line “Ya vam ne vrag,” meaning “I am not your enemy,” and it goes on to explain the war from the perspective of most of the rest of the world, information Putin is not keen on Russian citizens having easy access to. Click through to read the story.Is it spam? Essentially, yes. Is it bad? That’s a more difficult judgement for me to make.
Over on his blog, John Levine explains why we couldn’t just delete all .ru domains (or .su domains or Russian IP addresses) from the internet. His is the practical take; why the generally open nature of internet routing and DNS means that any attempt to lock out Russia at that level would be nothing more than a very temporary and possibly only minor annoyance.