This is a weird post and I honestly did not know where to post it so its going here for now.

I’m writing a paper where I have to compared Putin and Xi Jingping on multiple factors, one of them being how does each president respond to regional threats. I was able to get access to the Chinese Ministry of Defence website very easily, just clicked on the link and I’m golden. When I did the same for the Russian Ministry of Defence I was give a screen saying access was denied, or when using a different app the servers don’t respond at all. When I briefly looked it up the answers I am getting are Kyiv did some sort of hack which may have made the Ministry respond with denying access to non-Russian citizens, or Russia made the Ministry of Defence website inaccessible to unfriendly nations in general.

I was told using the government’s official websites (the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) was a “scholarly” source so I figured using their defence ministry’s information could be good to use when talking about how they deal with threatening behaviour. I will most likely have to talk about specific situations being dealt with but I thought the Ministry would be the best place to start.

Is anyone else facing this problem? Is there anyway I can get around it? I know I should be using a VPN but I’m hesitant to commit to one right now (I’m not that tech savvy).

  • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.mlOP
    16·
    9 months ago

    Well I caved and got a VPN (Mullvad) and yeah, that worked. I don’t know how to mess with my DNS server so VPN it is. Either the Canadian government is blocking the site or the Russian government is, either way I can access the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs without a VPN so it’s weird how its just the one website…

    • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
      21·
      9 months ago

      I’ve noticed a bunch of DNS level blocks on websites coming from EU and German censorship. Mostly Russian and Iranian websites, RT and PressTV come to mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Canadian government has agreements with the telecom cartel to block sites for people in Canada.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
        16·
        9 months ago

        I was gonna say the same thing. The EU most definitely blocks a bunch of Russian sites so it’s not inconceivable for Canada to do the same.

      • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        9 months ago

        It’s awful

        A few months ago, a Russian OpenBSD user offered me some CPU time on exclusive hardware (big Russian-made arm64 SBC with like 8 processor cores flop-pog) so I could fix some issues in the OpenBSD kernel without having to wait a million years waiting for compiles to finish on emulated hardware but I couldn’t reach it over the network cuz there was some kind of blocking going on :(

        I’m not sure who was doing the blocking but we did see that I stopped getting responses from ISP routers somewhere in Russia when doing a traceroute

          • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            8 months ago

            Not really, I’m just an OpenBSD appreciator who likes to use weird hardware so I often have to fix neglected software lol

            People assume too often all computers are 64-bit PCs with an Intel or AMD processor

            Although I guess I technically will be if I ever clean up some of the fixes I’m running and submit them