October 3, 2014 at 19:34

Blocking a run on the Baka-Tsuki site

    [logo]At https://antizapret.info/?search=baka, it’s easy to verify that the Baka-Tsuki site (whose logo I’ve shown on the right; this is one of the largest repositories of unofficial Japanese ranobe translations in the world) since August 1, 2014 in Russia was blocked at the direction of Roskomnadzor. Officially, the blocking concerns four URLs, but in reality, many large providers (Rostelecom, for example) block the entire site.

    What is ranobe? This word (as you can read on Wikipedia ) refers to Japanese entertaining stories for teenagers and youth - these are small books, the text of which is interspersed with illustrations, the style of which resembles a manga or anime.

    That’s the blocking of the Baka-Tsuki siteIt is connected not, for example, that the composition of the translation of the ranobe without the consent of the authors can be perceived by the authorities as “piracy” - but only by the fact that the painting in the manga style in some cases can be perceived by the authorities as “pedophilia”. (Both words have to be put in quotation marks: under the habracat I’ll try to list the signs that these drawings have as much distant relation to sex with children as the translation of the book they illustrate is far from the attack on the sea vessels.)

    We are still spinning the flywheel. repression aimed at hindering access to information for consumers of Japanese visual culture on the Internet. (For simplicity, I’ll talk about animeshniki here ,although we are talking about fans of not only anime, but also manga, ranobe, visual novels, danmaku, mini-sculptures, dakimakur, and so on.) The excuse for blocking sites (and, possibly, their ultimate goal) is defamation animeshnikov as “pedophiles”.

    We discussed the two previous turns of this flywheel on Habrahabr last year: it was blocking some kind of anime (June 14, 2013, “ Roskomnadzor recognizes hentai as child porn, calls for complaints, promises to replenish the registry of prohibited resources on the Internet ”) and then some manga (September 24, 2013, “ Roskomnadzor prohibits twenty-nine Japanese manga comics, equates to having sex with children"). What kind of anime was that manga? But who knows! - in both cases, unfortunately, the readers of Habrahabr (including ≈37% of animeshnikov ) did not have a list of names of specific blocked works and therefore could not independently evaluate the fairness of the decisions taken by Roskomnadzor; we could only shudder at the obviously excessive assessments published throughout the country from the words of one or another expert (“ consumers of this kind of content are psychopaths ”, “ they can be called esthetes from perverts ”, “manga” we consider as a kind of creative activity that gave the beginning of the development of "hentai" ”, that's all in Izvestia alone).

    With the Bak-Tsuki blocking, the situation is much better: the exact addresses of the blocked materials have become known - therefore, we also have the opportunity to draw independent conclusions about them. Let's get down to this lesson.

    At https://antizapret.info/?search=baka, we see four URLs. We number them for the convenience of further reference:

    The Baka-Tsuki site is a wiki (powered by the MediaWiki engine) that stores history of edits and other metadata. This means, for example, that blocking the entire wiki impedes the participation of Russian translators (or, for example, proofreaders) in translating a run like yesterday’s blocking of the entire Github prevented the participation of Russian programmers (or, for example, documentation authors) in creating open and free source code - and even more so, because instead of DVCS (Git), the Baka-Tsuki site uses a single central repository of edits. But it also means that address No. 3 does not make sense to consider separately from address No. 4: this is one and the same illustration, for which No. 3 is the metadata address and No. 4 is a direct hyperlink to JPEG.

    And the appearance of such a set of forbidden addresses may mean that the direct authors of the ban did not have a perfect understanding of the MediaWiki technology, or else the prohibitions of address 1 (direct hyperlink to JPEG) and address 2 (metadata pages) would also be accompanied by prohibitions of neighboring pages, like No. 4 for No. 3.

    There is another, more ominous oddity: for some reason, the ban applies only to https addresses, although nothing prevents us from opening the Baka-Tsuki website via normal HTTP (forcing the Baka-Tsuki website to redirect to an HTTPS addressdoes not commit). But, as we all know, it is the ban on HTTPS (that is, a protocol that encrypts traffic interception and analysis) that is a reason (or even a hint) for many providers to block access to the entire site.

    As a result, it is not difficult to observe a situation where, for example, MegaFon currently does not allow HTTPS to open even the Baka-Tsuki homepage - but it will open any of the four forbidden addresses above if you replace “https” with “http ". Well, Rostelecom (as I mentioned above) does not follow the letter of the ban, but the spirit of the hint contained in it, that is, it closes access to the entire Baka-Tsuki site as a whole, and closes according to either of these two protocols.

    [cover]All four addresses (all three forbidden illustrations) refer to the same Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance (精 霊 使 い の 剣 舞) runaway, whose abbreviated designation (STnBD) appears in the addresses of the illustrations. Fragment of the cover of the fifth volume is located at address No. 1; at address 2, one of the initial color spreads of the thirteenth volume; at address 3 or 4, one of the initial color spreads of the ninth volume. For clarity, on the right, I will give the cover of the tenth volume of the same wound, not yet banned in Russia.

    The name of this ranobe is translated into Russian as “Dance of the Blades of the Elementalists”, where the word “elementalist” means a wizard who has contracted with the spirit of a certain element or object (for example, a sword). I must say right away that (as in Wikipedia, it’s easy to read )Japanese nouns do not have a gender category, so when we talk about wizards, we also talk about sorceresses (in the STnBD story, elementalists are the rule and elementalists are a rare exception), and when talking about spirits, we also mean feminine spirits.

    All three forbidden illustrations depict the same character named Est; she is the spirit of a powerful magic blade, on which the Latin inscription “terminus est” is engraved, the end of which Est made her name. (There is nothing unprecedented in this way of choosing a character’s name for Japanese ranobe plots; for example, in the Shakugan no Shana ranobe, the owner of the Nietono no Shana blade gets the name “Shana.”) Thus, we see an overlay on the entire site librarya complete blockage about only one of the books on it - and even just one of the characters in this book. And how did Est deserve such attention of Roskomnadzor? Is there anything in her images that looks like sex with a child?

    How old is est? Supernatural beings do not age like mortals. In the second part of the eighth chapter of the second volume, Ranobe Est clearly recalls the events of the distant past - at least several centuries - by which she was a witness. Thus, here we are again dealing with the problem that I pointed out to Habrahabr on July 12, 2013 : the pedophilia is charged with artistic images of characters who, by the standards of the work, are , firstly, not children, and secondly,are not human at all.

    Is any of the three illustrations depicting sex, penetration, rubbing, scourging, spanking, kissing, nibbling, licking, or something like that ? Bypass the ban of Roskomnadzor by any of the methods known to you, look at these pictures - and you will not see anything there. In illustration No. 3 (aka No. 4), Est is shown lying behind the elementalist, just hugging him; illustrations No. 1 and No. 2 show only Est, holding out an open palm towards the viewer.

    Is there a full nudity of the character on any of the three illustrations - or not full, but providing at least the appearance of intimate organs? Also no. In all three illustrations, Est is dressed in at least stockings that extend to the middle of the thigh; in illustration No. 2 on Est there is also something like a combination (underpants and a bra) and gloves to the middle of the shoulder; in the other two illustrations, the angle and pose exclude the appearance of the groin, anus, nipples, and so on.

    [Amur]After that, it is not noticeable that in the comments on antizapret.infovisitors express the extreme degree of their surprise at the prohibition received from the supervisory body (“Pornography? Addicts or something?”, “You can equate children's dolls with the production of sex shops with the same success,” and so on). This reaction is understandable: if in Roskomnadzor there are such experts who are able to see “child porn” in a half-naked supernatural creature, then they have, for example, traditional European images of winged babies (“cupids” and “cupids” of pagan paintings and sculptures, “ angels ”of Christian paintings) will be perceived as something pedophilic, because both nudity is much more complete, and the apparent age is even more infantile.

    Seeing such precarious grounds at the ban on the Baka-Tsuki site ,can there be no doubt about the grounds for banning dozens of manga and anime in 2013? For example, in Japan, the first three volumes of “Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance” were filmed this year in the form of a twelve-episode anime (the last series was shown just this Monday - September 29). If they had reached the same expert who forbade illustrations from subsequent volumes of the same wound, wouldn’t he have seen “psychopaths” and “perverts” in the audience of this anime, and not just in the readers of the original source? It is very likely that I would see.

    My conclusion is this: in the evaluation of the works of Japanese visual culture, there is some arbitrariness and a sad absence of any publicity. It is scary to think about who and why such an organization of this business and such results were needed. (Didn’t they just want to fulfill the meaning of the logo ? ...) I have two political versions and two racist; I will not announce a single one on Habrahabr (because it would be against the rules); I can only say that the obvious conclusions for each of these versions sadden me.
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