PeterZhizhin

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  Location: Moscow, Russia
  Remote: No (prefer in-person work)
  Willing to relocate: Yes, English-speaking countries are in preference
  Technologies: Natural Language Processing (including state-of-the-art models like BERT), Machine Learning, Statistics, Python, C++, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, Scikit-learn, SpaCy, Gensim, FastText, NLTK
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PeterZhizhin/resume/releases/download/latest/zhizhin_petr_resume.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

I have recently graduated from a machine-learning oriented program in my university. Looking for a Data Scientist/Data Analyst/Machine Learning position. I am interested in NLP-related positions, Recommendation Systems, Computer Vision. I had 3 internships at Google, and thought I would work there. Due to COVID, things slowed down a bit in a lot of places so I am looking for work right now :)

Thank you for your opinion. Great point.

When I see these types of research, I wonder if it is a short-term or a mid-term effect of marijuana legalization. There was a time when Heroin was a legal trade-mark that was available over-the-counter... It was thought that only weak could get addicted to it while short-term effects were recognized.

This situation really pissed me off. FSB (Russian FBI) had problems with receiving bomb threats coming from Protonmail addresses. So, they secretly ordered (with an almost classified order) major ISPs to block Protonmail bypassing Russian's existing website/IP addresses blocking scheme.

Even worse, they ordered to __BLACKHOLE__ traffic coming to Protonmail. It means that ISPs were ordered to silently drop all traffic coming to Protonmail addresses. This raises problems not only for Russians, but for potentially for other countries as well. So, for example, someone connects from Japan to Protonmail (server is located in Europe, for instance). So, if traffic decides to go through Russian channels, for a client in Japan it will be just like Protonmail is not just responding because a Russian ISP in the chain silently drops traffic.

Again. I want to repeat this once again. FSB had problems receiving bomb threats to their addresses. Instead of configuring their mail servers to ignore Protonmail incoming mail, they ordered major ISPs in Russia to block Protonmail for EVERYONE in the country. That's so dumb.

Moreover, another recent leak coming from another Russian ISP indicates that FSB also ordered to block sending and receiving mail for certain mail addresses regardless of their domain. They ordered an ISP to block Email for certain addresses. Like, they ordered to ban all Email going from/coming to Emails starting with "putin666", like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], any email coming from an email staring with "putin666".

It's so dumb, oh god. They cannot configure their mail servers, but they have power to threat ISPs to ban Email for the entire country.

I think that the Internet as a decentralised system doesn't require any regulation. This a self-regulatory system.

On the second question though... I don't see any future for me in Russia. Thankfully, it will be relatively easy for me to emigrate.

Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was banned here but it still works. I guess that they frequently change IP addresses and use multiple cloud providers. When Roscomnadzor tried to ban the messenger, they added significant number of IP subnetworks (I think that the largest blocked subnet was 52.192.0.0/11 used by AWS). This lead to all sorts of different problems because it turned out that some banks and large companies were paralysed for months as their websites were blocked.

After a year of of trying to block the messenger, they just decided to pass this law. All ISPs that handle inter-counties exchange must install a government backdoor that could shut down all outgoing and incoming connections outside from Russia.

Also, some websites now are blocked by their DNS record, not by their IP. This lead to other problems. Imagine there was a website X that was blocked in Russia. The X company decides to change the domain and abandon X. Now, someone else buys the banned domain and adds any IP addresses to the DNS (like, government authorities websites). Whoala! These websites are banned in Russia as well. This happened multiple times and lead to Google, YouTube and other websites being inaccessible here.

The legislation proposes a separate national DNS system that differs from the ICANN one. Similarly to how North Korea does this in their country. This way no-one could buy an abandoned blocked website and add a bunch of valuable and valid IPs there.

They claim that this will increase the stability of the Russian Internet. People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. They also believe that they could shut down the Internet in any country at this point of time. They say that this has already happened in Syria once and we need to prepare for this.

They don't actually explain that the thing that happened to Syria was possible only because they had a single ISP. And their centralised system was hacked.

I believe that if we decide to install a backdoor to all of our ISPs, then someone else from the outside could pull the switch.

Yes. Except that in Russia this works a little bit different. You need a permission (not approbation) from the authorities for any political gatherings. Otherwise, everyone gathering risks spending 15 days in jail (or $500 fines, median monthly salary after tax $300) for gathering illegally. Usually they forbid them, so that was an exception.

These websites are controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Russian government. They usually don't mention opposition meetings. I think that they don't want anyone to know even about their existence.

Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.