Russia Plans "State VPN" to Let Local Devs Access GitHub
Russia’s internet censor, Roskomnadzor, has a brilliant new plan: after spending years blocking the global internet, they now want to build a government-approved 'State VPN' so local developers can actually do their jobs. Peak comedy.
Officials from Roskomnadzor held a closed-door meeting with local tech companies to figure out how to keep Russian IT alive while completely isolated. The genius solution on the table is to create a unified "State VPN" with a highly complex structure and kindly "recommend" that all developers route their traffic through it to reach foreign services.
This magnificent digital corridor is supposed to solve the ongoing struggle with foreign repositories. Local IT associations are reportedly showing zero enthusiasm for the idea of having the state security apparatus babysitting their every push command, which is totally shocking.
Simultaneously, telecom operators like Beeline and T2 have been lobbying for "white lists" of VPNs. They want the government to allow direct, VPN-free access to Western platforms that haven't been officially banned but voluntarily geoblocked Russia, such as Netflix and various AI tools, because writing code without ChatGPT has become too painful.
Meanwhile, the censor agency spent the last month frantically denying any involvement in blocking GitHub. Russian developers had complained that raw code files from raw.githubusercontent.com were taking ages to load, to which the government responded with official statements claiming everything is perfectly fine and working in "normal mode."
Building a massive firewall only to immediately engineer a government-controlled backdoor for your own developers is the ultimate self-own. It turns out you can ban the Western imperialist internet, but you still need their open-source code to keep the domestic digital illusion running.
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