26.08.2015 - 11:36 [ Techdirt ]

As Part Of Its War On Encryption, Russia Briefly Blocks All Of Wikipedia Over One Weed Reference

The country recently thought it would be a great idea to ban all of Reddit because of one thread on growing hallucinogenic mushrooms. Reddit complied and was unbanned after deleting the content, since complying with country-by-country censorship requests (sometimes reasonable, sometimes not) is something Reddit‘s ok with these days. This week, Russia briefly banned all of Wikipedia as well because of one entry on charas (an Indian version of hashish). Instead of censoring the entry in question (like Reddit), Wikipedia refused and only changed the URL of the entry so it technically adhered to Russian law: