Not too long ago, despite the protests of several sites, Russia passed its own little version of SOPA. It did so for the typical "for the children" reasoning. Even though this new censorship power is only a couple of weeks old, the Russia government wasted no time in taking advantage of it. In what could only conceivably be an act of celebration, perhaps after a vodka binge, the government decided to block all of LiveJournal.

It began by blocking the entirety of LiveJournal, the country’s largest blogging community, to the city of Yaroslavl and part of surrounding Moscow from July 18 to 20.

Wait. All of LiveJournal? Why? What could possibly go through the minds of these government officials that would cause them to block an entire network of blogs, most of which were not doing anything illegal?

On July 18, local law enforcement informed a Yaroslavl court about pat-index, a neo-Nazi blog it had found on LiveJournal during a sweep. The blog’s hateful message violates Russian federal laws against extremism. Because of Bill 89417-6, the court now has the power to stamp it out completely and immediately.

The court ordered Internet provider Netis Telekom to block, among other illegal sites, this blog’s IP. The court order shows the IP to be blocked as 208.93.0.128.

You see, the court order demanded the blockage based on the IP of the blog in question. What could possibly go wrong with such a simple open and shut use of such an easy to use identification source? Oh, right. All of LiveJournal uses the same IP address. So when the government officials got their court order to block those few illegal blogs, they took out just a few extra. Kind of reminds me of when Homeland Security, here in the US, took out over 84,000 websites in a similar action.

This reminds me of the debates around SOPA. You know, when we and other people, who actually understand the dangers of the legislation, warned repeatedly that such legislation would result in collateral damage of this nature. This collateral damage is also part of the reason why this Russian bill was protested. Legitimate speech was censored for several days. That is not acceptable. It should be a wake up call to the legislators that passed the bill. Unfortunately, too many people in power are unwilling to relinquish the ability to censor speech once they have it. Hopefully, the citizens of Russia will take note of this unacceptable abuse of power and demand the law be repealed.

Denial of service attacks are a pain, but they happen. In many ways they're becoming one way that people protest against powerful people and organizations -- and some have discussed how many are effectively the equivalent of a digital sit-in. Of course, it's no fun to be on the receiving end of a DoS attack, and if you're in a position of power, it isn't surprising to react angrily to such an attack. But it does seem a little out of proportion for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to demand that Russian law enforcement officials look into the reason why his LiveJournal blog was taken offline for a whole hour due to a denial of service attack.

"I have received many appeals in connection with the ... attacks on LiveJournal. As an active user of (LiveJournal) I consider these actions revolting and illegal.... What has occurred should be examined by LiveJournal's administration and law enforcement agencies."

Of course, it does seem a bit strange that he's only concerned about denial of service attacks when they impact him personally. Also, LiveJournal? Isn't that kinda like if President Obama had a blog on Blogspot? It's not that hard these days to have a blog on your own domain...

You may or may not remember, many years ago, that one of the "tricks" used by adware was to hijack affiliate fees. Basically, the way it would work is that the adware would watch where you were clicking, and if the URL was for an online store that had an affiliate program or affiliate link, the adware would swap in its own adware account info, allowing the adware company to collect the affiliate fees rather than the company/individual who actually earned it. Sneaky.

However, now there are some claims that popular blog/community site LiveJournal is doing the same thing itself. Shawn Tutt points us to a story claiming that LiveJournal is redirecting outbound links from users such that they appear to strip any affiliate codes and add LiveJournal's own affiliate codes to a long list of popular e-commerce sites. It's hard to think of a better way to piss off a bunch of your own users than to replace their own affiliate codes with your own. Once people started complaining about this, it looks like LiveJournal stripped out the code. Still, it does raise some really big trust questions about LiveJournal, if it thought this was a good idea in the first place.