Russia trims Internet blacklist

Twenty-one links and IP-addresses are no longer being blacklisted in Russia, the country's telecommunication watchdog said Wednesday. Roskomnadzor announced that it has deleted the 21 links after the owners of the links responded to issues the agency raised, the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported. Among those removed from the blacklist were Lurkmore.to, rutracker.org and links to individual pages in the social networking site Vkontakte. The government site zaperet-info.gov.ru states that the goal of the blacklist is to limit public access to child porn, suicide guides and drug recipes. Since Nov. 1, the register of banned domain names, pages and URLs has been increasing, triggering public debate.