How we drove drug dealers out of the runet

Today I would like to tell you a story about how we defined sites selling drugs in RuNet, about the scale of the problem, about the experience of interaction between an IT company and Roskomnadzor, deputies, various chambers, and why this is no longer enough evil.

It all started with an article on Habr last year, in which we scanned the list of sites banned in the territory of the Russian Federation, compiled a frequency dictionary for them, tried to figure out what is actually happening in the topic of Internet regulation. An interactive visualization of the dictionary is now available on our website, screen:


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The results, to some extent, even surprised us. The overwhelming majority of the locks had nothing to do with the persecution of unwanted ones: drug trafficking, pornography, and gambling. Looking at the zones in which all this stuff is located, they set themselves the goal of ridding the .ru zone of drug dealers.



We finalized the dictionary taking into account the specifics: only the necessary subject, plus words, minus words, identified a bunch of additional features, conducted their scoring, and taught the system to build a graph of connectivity. As a result, we received a tool with a thin thematic classifier, which, starting from the button, unfolded the cluster, scanned all existing domains in the .ru zone, cheated all this, built visualization and generated a report. Here's what it looked like:




All this was done at their own expense, without a drop of grant-eating. This time, the results, to put it mildly, struck us. More than 5,000 sites , brazenly, insolently, fearing no one, without getting into any Torah or Darkweb, traded in drugs directly in the .ru zone (and are now being sold, are available without any anonymizers and VPN), examples:




Gathering our thoughts, we sketched the presentations and made contact with various authorities. We understood that people hardly understand how the Internet is arranged, chewed information like children. God, we invented a merketing strategy for them to extract political dividends under the slogan “we will rid the runet from drug dealers”, if only someone would be engaged in business. They explained that it is possible to zakoshmarit zone so that the huckster will not have time to register domains, especially not asked for anything in return, maximum - mentioning us as a company able to bypass and analyze all registered domains of the world in a day.

Politicians took 100-200 links to the “test”, worked them out through their own internal affairs channels, extracted the same political dividends, promised some mythical contracts (just give some more links), and stupidly merged, forgetting to mention the company in closed meetings. Our bodies, by virtue of the formal blocking process by court decision, are not able to work out more than 100-200 links per month and the material for which we filled politicians was enough for long-term public relations, there was no talk of a real struggle.

What the hell do you think have contacted politicians, you ask? And I will answer. Fucking goat (sorry) you will not go into any high office. We have, in any case, failed. Politicians were proxy. True, we tried to change something in this country, had a lot of meetings, spent a huge amount of money and time, in the hope that one of them would catch on and actually work out the topic. According to the results, we had to temporarily change the country of residence, so that those who we still managed to spoil the business did not run pipes over the kidneys at the entrance.

Now this project is closed and we no longer plan to launch it on our own initiative. Do not repeat our mistakes. So it goes.

UPD: in addition to the article I will quote in part my comment for those who think that we decided to regulate the Internet:

I only welcome the fact that you have an alternative point of view on the issue of locks. Perhaps you are 100% right and everything needs to be done exactly as you say it, I do not know. Only these sites right now, according to current legislation are prohibited . If you want to change the situation with blocking - change the law, change it with civilized methods. Go to the Public Chamber, take part in the round table, defend your position, the main thing - do it . I went, took part. And I can say that, contrary to public opinion, not completely stupid people are sitting there, and most importantly - in any case, they are doing something. Bad, well, quite another question, but they do.

PS We are not fighters against drugs or something forbidden, we are an IT company that knows how to handle all existing Internet domains in the bigdat and scan. We conduct research of technologies, markets, brands, develop antiphishing systems, analyze content. In this case, yes, we believe that the sites selling drugs do not belong in the public domain. The presence of a tool that allows detecting drug shops in a clewweb with high completeness and accuracy inspired hope that we can not only state our position, but also propose solutions for this. The article is mostly about how we created this tool, but did not find among the "fighters" who want to use it.