I’m not tech savvy and have noticed that many streaming sites are .ru, and as someone located in Finland, I want to make sure if they are dangerous to use.
It’s just a domain name, it has nothing to do with sites being safe. Just as any other site, they may be malicious, may be not, depends on who runs the site.
While that is true, the missing part is the following. As I understand registration process in zone .ru / .рф is done by a russian legal entity (Coordination Center for TLD RU) and under the jurisdiction of russian courts. As a citizen of Russia I can say that russian courts are far away from the Rule of Law and under the strong pressure of russian government. So, even if the actual website may be hosted anywhere, russian court may make a decision to take back a registration and, theoretically, the row in DNS may be replaced (the link will be the same but may tend to a different, potentially unsafe hosting). That is the risk that I see.
As a citizen of Russia I can say that russian courts are far away from the Rule of Law and under the strong pressure of russian government.
As a citizen of Russia I agree and want to point out that Finnish goverment is unlikely to listen to Russian court, especially when it comes to citizen of Finland that never was in Russia.
.ru is the domain for Russia, but anyone can use it. It says nothing about the safety of the site.
They’re probably just as dangerous as .com sites.
I mean statistically .ru sites are more often malicious than .com sites.
Ok maybe not, couldnt find any evidence, altho I heard that years ago. So that might have changed, maybe because of all those new non-country-domains.
Depends on the sites content. The Top Level Domain doesn’t say much about a sites safety.
Every website is safe or not safe on its own merits. Their location makes little difference as far as you’re concerned despite the people here replying that Russia can redirect you (news flash: every government on the planet can; it’s how DNS works). Russia is far easier of a country to pirate from. And that’s the most important part to you: how a government treats piracy. The US is a far less safe place because they favour corporate greed above all else. Russia, not so much.
I’m sure there are some here who could debate this endlessly but you need to treat every website as its own sovereign space. Failing that, you also need to take the area it’s in into consideration should you have any legal disputes. For example, let’s say a website is hosted in a country that has a lax view of cyber law enforcement and this site is selling images you took as photographer. You send endless DMCA notices but because they don’t really have a governing body to handle this crime, your photos are never taken down. Contrast this to the US, which actually does enforce such laws and will actively penalize and even shutdown hosting providers, your DMCA notices are taken much more seriously.
None of this impacts piracy. And if you give out your CC number to any pirate site, US, RU, CA, you run the risk of it being compromised. The rest really doesn’t concern you.
Some have claimed that Russia redirects websites, etc. but again, that has nothing to do with piracy. And they certainly don’t steal every website and send you to their own versions via DNS redirects. That’s insane. Now if you want to say that disproportionately, Russia has more scam websites, I can believe that. Or that their country doesn’t really use the advanced encryption and security measures to protect your private details (CC, name, phone number etc.), I can believe that too. But to claim that Russia itself is doing a ton of shady shit to trap you seeding a torrent and then sending the KGB to assassinate your family… that’s some real tinfoil hat stuff.
Just use the standard protective measures you would use anywhere else (VPN, never give out CC or real name, etc.) and you’ll be fine.
I prefer yandex for piracy. If you search “Furiosa x265 torrent download” you get pages and pages of hits. Run the same search on DDG (Bing) or Google and there won’t be a single torrent hit because their search engines have long removed any pirate related content and monitor for it to protect their investors.
