Glasgow team urge Exeter fans not to wear Indian headdresses at Champions Cup soccer match

An American neurosis comes to Britain

Glasgow Warriors have asked Exeter Chiefs fans not to wear Native American-style headdresses, or sing their trademark “Tomahawk Chop” chant, during Saturday’s Heineken Champions Cup match at Scotstoun.

Exeter are expected to ditch their Native American branding after a majority of their supporters backed changes. Exeter are also thought to be reviewing the use of their nickname, having announced a decision on future plans “within the next few weeks” at the end of November.

The National Congress of American Indians has previously urged the Premiership side to drop their “Chiefs” moniker, while Wasps have asked travelling fans not to wear headdresses to matches between the teams at the Coventry Building Society Arena.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/dec/13/rugby-union-glasgow-warriors-exeter-chiefs-champions-cup

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Russia’s Internet Censorship Machine Is Going After Tor

Tor is used by people worldwide to mask their activity on the internet, sometimes for illicit activity but more often than not to evade censorship in authoritarian or autocratic countries. A 2020 study found 93 percent of Tor users accessed the network for the latter reason, rather than for illegal reasons. And in Russia, whose population are the second-biggest users of Tor after the United States, people use the service to subvert government restrictions.

On December 1, OONI noticed 16 percent of connections to Tor in Russia recorded some kind of anomaly. A day later, it was one in three. On December 8, it was back to 16 percent. The anomalies seem to vary depending on which ISP and which user is trying to access Tor. Some people are being sent to a blocked page instead of the Tor Project website. Others appear to be subject to a man-in-the-middle attack over their TLS connection, which secures data sent over the internet end-to-end, when trying to connect. More still are finding their connection reset repeatedly when the TLS handshake is initiated, attempting to frustrate their access. That latter method would indicate Roskomnadzor utilized deep packet inspection (DPI) to filter packets headed for Tor, suggesting they’ve been sniffing traffic as it passes through ISPs, say OONI. (Roskomnadzor has been contacted for comment on this story.)

The situation was messy, but it all added up to one conclusion: Something was up. “We realized on December 2 or 3 that Tor was being blocked,” says Gus. The Tor Project began contacting reliable contacts in Russia and those outside the country to understand more. Slowly, the project began putting together the pieces of the puzzle, identifying what was going on. The final piece slotted into place on December 6, when the project received an email purporting to be from Roskomnadzor, saying that the Tor Project domain would be blocked. “At first, some of us thought it was a spam email,” admits Gus. “We didn’t think it was a real communication from the government.”

But it was. Torproject.org had been added to Roskomnadzor’s blocked list. “Tor has been a symbolic target because it’s not just a commercial technology used to bypass or circumvent blocking or filtering,” says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and author of books on Russia’s internet, “but because this project was developed as a political—or noncommercial—project.”

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-block-tor-censorship/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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