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13 May 2018, 11:06

Russian telecom watchdog unlocks over 8,000 IP-addresses of Alibaba’s subnetwork

The subnet has been unlocked for providing correct operation of third-party Internet resources, the regulator said

MOSCOW, May 13. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media has unlocked Alibaba's subnetwork locked earlier over a large-scale blocking against Telegram messenger, the regulator’s press service reported Sunday.

"As part of a set of measures to enforce the court decision regarding Telegram, Roskomnadzor unlocked a subnetwork of Alibaba (around 8,200 IP-addresses). Meanwhile, IP-addresses of Telegram within this subnetwork have been fully identified and blocked," the federal service said.

The subnet has been unlocked for providing correct operation of third-party Internet resources, the regulator said, adding though that it would continue monitoring unlocked networks being used by the blocked messenger.

On April 13, Moscow’s Tagansky court blocked access to the cloud-based instant messaging service Telegram in Russia over its failure to provide encryption keys to the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The court satisfied the lawsuit by Russia’s telecom watchdog filed on April 6. Telegram said those demands would be impossible to implement since the keys were stored on users’ devices.

The federal service began blocking Telegram on April 16, but the messaging service began using the resources of cloud hosting providers Amazon and Google. The Russian media watchdog responded by blocking entire subnets of IP-addresses, and innocent services that also used it were blocked.

In July 2017, the FSB demanded that Telegram provide the keys to decrypt user messages citing its own administrative order, which established the procedure for providing the encryption keys. Telegram’s top officials said that this requirement was impossible to meet technically and tried to challenge it in several court battles, but to no avail. On March 20, 2018, Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the company’s lawsuit. After the court ruling, the Russian watchdog said the messaging service had 15 days to provide the required information to the country’s security agencies.