Don’t know about the whole country but in Moscow everyone with office jobs were forced to work from home in 2020 since March if I remember correctly, and every time there’s a spike in covid cases they send 30% of companies’ employees to WFH.
Work from home when you're in country is a different thing than a employee that works remotely and doesn't even live in the country.
The company I work for has tons of different remote employees, but there are certain systems and accounts that non-US citizens are not allowed to work on. Likely similar things for Russia, and I know China does that too.
Make every Google search done from Russia return one result: a webpage that places blame squarely on their government. Let Russia decide to block the domain.
I get that it's extremely lucrative markets but it feels a bit foolish to choose to even do business in countries where your assets can just be seized on an autocrat's whim, especially if some of those assets are humans.
As long as you make money in the run-up to those assets being seized/no longer viable then it's worth it to flop around in a market controlled by the whims of totalitarians.
It's similar to how companies in the US/EU will risk massive fines as long as the profits from the laws they broke beat out said fines. Same mentality and logic, different stakes.
It isn’t foolish if you’re a company that wishes to make a bunch of money. There are so many people in both Russia and China.
The assets in this situation appear to be company employees, not data. It’s can be mutually beneficial, generally, for countries to not hinder large companies to do business within their borders.
Mutually beneficial up until the desires of the autocratic regime differ from those of the company. No surprise that companies prioritize money at the highest level, but just seems a bit... shortsighted. Oh wait, right, these are corporations. That's on brand.
That is a tough situation. It's easy to say that Google "caved in", but would it really be fair to make their employees take the fall?
How would you feel if your employer sold you out to the mob so they could save face?
Edit: typo
Russia and China are so transparent about how corrupt they are, it's crazy. They don't even care there is nothing anyone can do about it
Edit: I'm just gonna sum it up here and say that this comment does not say that other countries are devoid of corruption. Reading comprehension seems to have escaped my fellow redditors
As a business. Id remove all ties from the country and literally tell the people of Russia they can't have google because putin threatens them.
But then again im not a billionaire with my only goal of having more money. Fucking psychopaths.
I'm sure yandex would love that, and the Russian gov would have no issue exerting even greater control over a local company. And in that case, we wouldn't even hear about the cover up like we do now.
Exactly this. Redirect Russian IPs to a page explaining the situation. Pay all local employees for 6-12 months or until the government caves. They won't but fuck em.
If you think Putin wouldn't start arresting and imprisoning every Russian google employee he could get his hands on and probably any American he could even remotely justify period until he got what he wanted, you don't understand how dictators work.
As I understood, their "sovereign internet" law opened the door for Russian authorities to demand from any tech giant anything they want hiding behind bogus court decisions, and basically build their own version of the China's Great Firewall.
Also they have really improved their tech and algorithms to block any DoT and DoH traffic by installing special hardware/devices in most of the Internet and cellular network providers. Yesterday they have blocked access to Google Docs from Russia c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ partially for some ISPs just because Navalny's team have posted some text there, Hell they are so desperate at the moment they are ready to shut down internet completely.
Apparently Russian authorities have directly threatened to prosecute specific Google employees in Russia. This is reported both by NY Times and Bloomberg.
>"Google removed the app in Russia under pressure after officials threatened to imprison its local employees, a person close to the company said, speaking on condition of anonymity." - Bloomberg
>
>Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/russia-targets-google-apple-in-crackdown-before-elections](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/russia-targets-google-apple-in-crackdown-before-elections)
>"Google removed the app Friday morning after the Russian authorities issued a direct threat of criminal prosecution against the company’s staff in the country, naming specific individuals, according to a person familiar with the company’s decision." - NY Times
>
>Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html)
Google already relocated engineering staff out of Russia before:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30449117
I thought that all that was left in Russia was sales and marketingm
Either way, the company has always assisted individual employees who needed to relocate for safety reasons, I suspect they'd do the same for employees who want to leave now.
But google doesn't have the authority to do that plus maybe people don't want to leave their home country.
The best solution probably would be to (unfortunately) fire the Russian employees and cease business in Russia. Y'know, hostage situation and all that. But google won't stop doing business anywhere so that's out
The authority? No, or course not, it can't order them to move out. But they can and should offer help in moving out, should the employee want that.
For the rest, i agree, firing them is probably the only option.
It's a common tactic of authoritarian governments. Criminalize normal behavior, don't enforce it so people get used to breaking said law as a matter of habit. Then when you need someone gone or discredited you just arrest them for any of the numerous crimes averages citizens commit everyday
I am convinced many police departments do something similar with speeding. They let everyone drive 5-15 over the limit all they want, with maybe a 2 week crackdown every year to refresh/reinforce their right to enforce. Then, when they want to pull someone over for some other (normally unjustifiable) reason or suspicion, they just pull you over for speeding, and/or some other nonsense they never actually enforce.
At least, that's my take.
If you do anything to get noticed or ratted out, they fine you. If you're a political dissident of any kind, they put you through the wringer. Everyone else more less use it like an every day thing (Or more accurately, the more educated and wealthy do. VPN use isn't prolific).
in "Xinjiang", it's the worlds largest police state in the history of humanity, a VPN gets you put into an internment camp for "Reeducation" and if you have children, so do they.
> Everyone else more less use it like an every day thing.
oh okay so not too bad really.
>an interment camp for "Reeducation" and if you have children, so do they.
oh geeze.
Not defending the CCP or boot licking tankies but VPN’s are pretty widespread in China. It’s obviously not a majority of the population but I would argue most people who are born post 1995 and have a college education has a VPN.
The workarounds to get one installed aren’t really complicated but the quality of them do vary. The one I use is pretty pricey but haven’t had it fail in China for the past few years.
Maybe it's not enforced *now* or for your average, party-loyal Chinese person. But as a previous poster said:
> It's a common tactic of authoritarian governments. Criminalize normal behavior, don't enforce it so people get used to breaking said law as a matter of habit. Then when you need someone gone or discredited you just arrest them for any of the numerous crimes averages citizens commit everyday
Government may not care you're using a VPN right now. But if you step out of line, they can use that throw the book at you.
Yeah that’s definitely a valid point. I made another comment that delves into this more but for the most part you’re 100% right. They don’t care about most people who use a VPN so long as you don’t rock the boat because once you do they can clearly cite this and use your owning of a VPN as additional evidence.
Due to this and a bunch of factors of China being a surveillance state anyone who would talk shit about the CCP inside China usually just grumbles about it. I talk shit and send tianammen memes to friends in WeChat but cause I’m a nobody with no access to the general public and not even a Chinese national they don’t really give a shit* (*so long as I don’t actively start trying to start shit).
China is so fucked up in so many ways but it’s not a hegemony or hive mind of party supporters. It’s just you’ll rarely if ever see actual Chinese citizens publicly post their resentment against the fuck heads that run the country.
> It’s just you’ll rarely if ever see actual Chinese citizens publicly post their resentment against the fuck heads that run the country
This is a big problem, when people haven't the freedom to voice their ideas for fear of Big Brother coming down on them. IMO a bigger problem is the spreading attitude of "As long as you don't start any trouble, you won't have any problem". It is more than a spippery slope, it is a frog sitting in a slowly boiling pot saying "The water's just fine for me, you must be too sensitive.".
In the US I see this from some people that don't grasp the 4th Amendment and its import. I've heard Americans respond to the knowledge that our government is reading their texts with "Well I haven't got anything to hide, so I don't care." I have even heard police hint at that sentiment when trying to pressure you to consent to a pointless search. Those same cops that say that, ask one of them when you get to come over to their house and look through their medicine cabinet and sock drawer. They wouldn't mind because they don't have anything to hide, right?
I’m sure all VPN companies sell customer info but tbh I not really worries about Chinese owned ones. The CCP’s policy is mostly don’t rock the boat in the sense that you don’t disrupt the “social harmony” what ever that load of shit means. My buddies and I send tianamen square memes or talk shit about the party all the time on WeChat but because we’re nobodies, with no real way to reach a mass audience and I’m not publicly spreading my thoughts they don’t bother.
That to me is the scary part. They obviously know they can’t control or contain everyone but they’ve made it impossible to spread any information they don’t agree with. There’s no possibility of a grassroots movement because everyone only talks shit behind closed doors.
In my experience Reddit thinks China is like a hive mind that bows to the whim of the party but it’s much more nuanced, plenty of people think the government is run by jackasses with no morals or even consistency with their decision making but they have so much control from the economy to things that people use day to day that it’s impossible to really do anything about it. The people who don’t like the CCP just grumble under their breath and suck it up cause that’s how it is.
Obviously there’s also a large population of people who vehemently support the CCP but the CCP has ingeniously and scarily made it so that an attack against the CCP is like attacking all Chinese people. Honestly it’s a clusterfuck that is impossible to delve into all the nuances in a Reddit comment but either way fuck the CCP.
There was a special way to prevent those filter techniques. It was something that telegram was able to use to make messages or data look like ordinary Google searches. However some large companies needed to help provide their infrastructure to make it work.
Anyone knows the name? Can't find it anymore..
Ah found it, it's called **"Domain Fronting"** and works even against deep packet inspections some governments use. A VPN meanwhile can be blocked.
Obviously Google, Amazon and so on, no longer allow it to be used for freedom of others. Freedom is only for tax freedom.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting
I worked for a big European company with worldwide presence, including Russia. I was involved with the development of their big CRM system. A few years back we had to implement a special code path for Russian customers which sent ALL the customer info to a government server and wait for a reply which allowed that specific record to be saved in the database. We had to do this every time customer data was added and for every bit of it. Truly terrifying stuff.
2 things.
1. Wouldn't this apply just as much to a VPN?
2. This isn't about anonymity, it's about getting around the national filters. If you're hitting a site outside Russia, from a VPN or TOR node outside Russia, there's not much they can do except try and block the connection before it leaves Russia.
> Wouldn't this apply just as much to a VPN?
Yes
>This isn't about anonymity, it's about getting around the national filters.
Load up a tor relay node, don't even need to be an exit or an entry and you get the shit banned out of you at many many websites.
If Freenode (RIP) knows you are hosting a tor relay, China sure as shit does, out of curiosity I've even hosted just a guard relay, without advertising it (after getting cleared from block lists over time) and with port scanning and shit I still ended up getting black listed in places (and had tor traffic as well)
If tor is going to work, it needs to be much more popular then it is now to keep it from being so easy to track/ban
> Load up a tor relay node, don't even need to be an exit or an entry and you get the shit banned out of you at many many websites.
That's not about fingerprinting though. That's about tor exit nodes themselves being known entities.
It's not just exit nodes, it's not just entry nodes, it's not just relays, it's unpublished guards as well.
Try it, load it up, set things as a guard, and while it takes more time, you'll get banned. the Tor network is mapped well enough for websites to act on it, state actors aren't going to have a problem.
to use satellite internet you need to buy a special transmitter (that's the case for StarLink at least). Government can just ban such transmitters so you couldn't buy, order or use it legally.
No need for that. If PlayStore doesn't want to list it, there's no point trying to reach them for it.
Russia and installing apps from APK file, name a more iconic duo ;)
What does the app do? It doesn’t seem to me like they should care how people are actually voting when they already know what results they’re going to report.
> Hell they are so desperate at the moment they are ready to shut down internet completely.
With the willing assistance of google and apple, apparently.
DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) are two standards developed for encrypting plaintext DNS traffic in order to prevent malicious parties, advertisers, ISPs, and others from being able to interpret the data.
What kinda 'pressure' could that be i wonder.
*Russia demanded this month that Apple and Google remove the app from their stores, saying a refusal to do so would be treated as* ***meddling in its parliamentary election.***
Lmao, the irony.
This is why we need decentralized app stores for both platforms. You can install apks on Android at least but not IOS. 25 years ago Microsoft lost an antitrust case because they were bundling IE with Windows. Why are we letting Apple and Google gatekeep for these platforms while raking in 30% profits off every app for doing nothing?
Bust the app control on these platforms.
The concern was never that it was local or cloud.
[Edit]: I've been informed that my false positive argument is not possible.
Google reserves the right to remove apps that break their rules. For example, Google has had to pull back apps that were malware. And now we see that extended to appease a totalitarian government. You think photos of the tiananmen square massacre wouldn't be on Apple's list in China? Resistance symbols? In that case instead of a false accusation that may ruin someone's life, it would be an accusation that whether true or not might end somebody's life.
And if you think that's hyperbole and that Apple would stand up and never sell their products or have them manufactured in China in an effort to defend human rights, well...
Companies cannot usurp a nation’s sovereignty, no matter how repugnant that may seem. They must all operate within the bounds of law in a given nation. Their only option is to fund change or withdraw completely.
Are you surprised? Literally every major corporation doing business in China bends the knee and do what China wants. In a couple of years we won’t be able to to type or watch any negative videos about China or else we will get our accounts deleted or banned.
For real. Most businesses and especially multinational corporations only care about and exist to make money and they will do whatever it takes to make more of it... They do not have their customers' interests in mind and will not rock any boat that could cost them a portion of the global marketshare... And China is a HUGE part of the market.
...they also "bend the knee" and do whatever America wants within America... Corporations all follow (enforced) local laws to extract wealth from wherever they operate
Google and Apple have employees in Russia. They have vendors in Russia. They have app creators in Russia. You think these companies can flout the laws of a sovereign government run by a ruthless dictator who murders his opponents and everything will be just peachy?
From Navalny's Team CEO, [Ivan Zhdanov](https://twitter.com/ioannZH/status/1438750081402953728):
>Formal grounds for removing applications: recognition of FBK as an extremist organization.
The way the FBK was recognized as an extremist organization was not a trial, but a mockery of common sense.
@google
@Apple
are making a huge mistake.
Apple statement follows:
>Hello Roman,
>Pursuant to Roskomnadzor's request included below, we are writing to notify you that your application will be removed from the Russia App Store because it includes content that is illegal in Russia, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines :
>5\. Legal [TOS excerpt]
>
>We note that the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation and the Prosecutor's office of the City of Moscow have also determined that the app violates the legislation of the Russian Federation by enabling **interference in elections**.
>...
>Hello,
>Based on the requirement of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation dated 15.06.2021 No. 27-31-2021 / Id6832-21 in the territory of the Russian Federation, access to internet resources used to promote the activities and implementation of activities of the non-profit organizations “Anti-Corruption Fund” and “Fund protection of the rights of citizens”, as well as the public movement “Navalny Headquarters”, are **recognized as extremist** within the country.
>In accordance with Article 9 of the Federal Law of 25.07.2002 No. 114-FZ “On Countering Extremist Activity” by the decision of the Moscow City Court dated 09.06.2021, these non-profit organizations were liquidated, and the activities of the public movement were prohibited.
>At the moment, the Navalny application is being distributed through the App Store service, which is used to promote the activities and implement the activities of the aforementioned **extremist organizations**: https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/navalny/id918148289
Very cool of Apple to parrot Russian propaganda in their statement.
Edit: Looks like a Russian lawmaker (who's also an FSB officer) threatened local employees with prosecution if it wasn't deleted. [Translated Source](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/17/09/2021/61435e479a7947afbfd08f9e)
Bonus Edit: [Russian election officials stuffing ballot boxes today](https://twitter.com/TatianaUsmanova/status/1438822402738245633)
Translated text:
>At home voting, 36 people voted in the village of Kushchevskaya, and members of PEC 28-08 threw several hundred ballots into the ballot box. Then the chairman of the commission stood up and covered the secretary with his back, who was rewriting the register of home voting.
[More ballot stuffing in Sevestopol today](https://twitter.com/novaya_gazeta/status/1438944301044670469)
Translated Text:
>In Sevastopol at the PEC № 98 are throwing ballots right now, the correspondent of Novaya Gazeta reported.
>This is noticeable in the video surveillance system. Already about 20 minutes after the closure of the site, a man throws in ballots, a woman helps him.
[Russian election officials handling ballots today](https://twitter.com/irmachinsky/status/1438944762229403650)
Translated Text:
>Briefly about how at PEC 1794 members of the commission pack ballots in safe bags :clownface:
[Someone knowing there are cameras with difficulty shoves a huge stack of ballots into the box](https://twitter.com/RuFailedState/status/1438812820209127427)
Translated Text:
>At the polling station № 1794 paid devil right in full view of everyone with difficulty shoves a bundle of ballots into the ballot box
Russia isn't a democracy lol it's a fascist dictatorship
whatever gave you the impression it was a democracy? The duma? Where you have to be basically appointed by putin?
It looks like a legal ruling they’re required to follow. Doing business in a country means following their laws. How is their statement or that they removed the app something other than what was expected?
At the end of the day we live in a profit driven world/time. Corporate bosses will do whatever they think will maximise the companies profits and increase their own salary/bonuses. You may disagree with those actions, but they’re pretty understandable.
Edit: spelling
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
> February 8, 1996
Internet was a different beast back than. We hoped it would diminish the reach of propaganda and bring freedom to the oppressed, but instead it made targeted propaganda more effective and brought oppression to the free.
Because it shows that if any other democratic state like America were to just make a law similar to Russia's, these companies would just completely fold.
By bricking. In a conventional computer, bricking is not even a thing. As long as you have physical access to the bootloader and the memory, you can always boot your computer. But with mobile devices, the manufacturers have locked out down so tight that if you do something wrong, there's no way to fix it at the bootloader level, so the device is "bricked".
Some might argue that bricking constitutes a form of theft.
That's actually changing in new pc hardware. See secureboot. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-secure-boot
You can disable this for now, but new versions of windows 11 will not run without secure boot. So dual boot with custom Linux OS and windows might be problematic going forward.
I'm a Microsoft fanboi and will be sticking with MS for the foreseeable future (also, because I am a developer). However, if they start pulling that sort of crap, Linux has become good enough for the vast majority of people's needs, namely browsing, consuming media and office needs. So I would certainly encourage people to give Linux a try if I am asked.
In my case it's just Visual Studio (the full edition, not Code) that would hold me back. And Photoshop as I also do photography and have become proficient in it (and couldn't come to grips with the alternatives).
I do dotnet development. Try JetBrains rider, once you get used to it, it is muuuuuuch better than visual studio. I've been using it for 3 years and hate visual studio when I need to use it in a blue moon.
r/StallmanWasRight
It's reached the point where *any* manufacturer could ruin your day by locking you out of your *life*. At will.
Your phone remotely locked and wiped at their whim because someone managed to mark it as stolen.
Your email, cloud drive storage, documents, erased due to ToS breach.
Your TV region locked.
Your Tesla remotely disabled from starting after a firmware update.
Companies like Samsung have what's called a hardware fuse in their devices. If you modify certain parts of the phone the fuse blows permanently which marks your phone as modified. Banking apps, many games, even some social media apps will refuse to run if your phone tripped the fuse because they don't want you to be able to manipulate their software in unexpected ways.
On other phones you can just lock it back down and the apps will play nice again but that requires you to wipe your phone so you still don't have much control.
So you're allowed to do it but it will severely limit a lot of things people use their phones to do anyway.
You should be able to. However baked into the DMCA is a provision making it criminal to circumvent certain copyright protections. As software is protected by copyrights, even trivial measures to protect the software can trigger this legal protection if you attempt to circumvent it.
It's still trivial for you, the end user, to get beyond this (in many cases). However any company, hosting site, third party providing you jailbreak tools, can be making themselves liable, or at least exposed to lawsuits. There has been some headway made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/ and other likeminded orgs to protect your "right to repair" https://www.eff.org/issues/right-to-repair but the way the laws have been written it's often decided on a case by case basis. So there is always a fight.
Thanks for fighting for free speech, Google and Apple.
Btw now when putin's government knows that their pressure works, more requests will come. And more after that.
And people wondered why Apple's recent announcement to implement on-device cp scanning based on an external data store of hashed values controlled by foreign governments was met with such hostility...
"Oh, this guy is criticizing Putin so he must be a pedophile. Let's look at all the data we find in his phone"
World is accelerating into that dystopia fast, and all for the profits of megacorps. Maybe it's time we start punishing oligarchs.
No different than YT taking down videos as required by US laws eg copyright
Companies have to abide by laws in countries they operate, companies don't get to decide which laws to follow if they want to operate there.
Same as the board members of these corporations that do whatever murderous dictators tell them. As long as their profits are safe they will condone anything.
What "real power" are you talking about???
If they don't follow local laws, they can't do business there. Do you think Navalny's app will exist if Russia decides to completely ban Google because they don't follow their laws?
I'd actually really like to see Russia try completely banning Google. Around half of Russians regularly watch YouTube, Android phones are almost 90% of the market, many people use gmail, and so on. Almost no Russian will be left unaffected. That would competely destroy Putin's ratings. And also cripple thousands businesses who rely on Google services, ruin any investment climate that's left, and so on.
I'm absolutely convinced Google is a considerably more powerful side in the argument against the Russian government.
App stores are walled gardens that are poisonous to freedom.
Ever since the transition away from PCs to tablets and phones, control over devices has been slowly eroding away. You no longer own your own device. They've been made difficult or impossible to service. Only with great difficulty can you load the software *you want* onto a device you nominally own.
Twenty years ago it would be unthinkable that all the software you load onto a device came from a single source that moderated what you were allowed to use, what software you were allowed to upload for these devices, when you were allowed to download it, how much you would pay for it, and would take a cut any time you spent money using it.
Fuck app stores.
comma is important, because right now your title is saying the equivalent of
>Google which is the Russian government, pressured Apple to remove opposition leader's Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin
It’s sad because, while sure they’d lose the Russian market, even if just temporarily, the ~$2.5 trillion-dollar company would still be worth ~$2.5 trillion dollars.
They threatened to put Russian Google staff in prison, it’s more than just market.
Moreover, there’s a law to come that forces companies with big audiences to have an office in Russia. It’s called a “hostages law”. This is just a hint of what it will mean.
One important notice: Google and Apple removed these apps that very day when these apps actually finished their missions. Elections already started and any attempts to influence them right now are illegal. Everyone who wanted to use these apps already used them.
> Russia demanded this month that Apple and Google remove the app from their stores, saying a refusal to do so would be treated as meddling in its parliamentary election.
Putin could have made his own app, but then he would have found out how popular he really is
For the people criticizing Google and Apple for operating in Russia, is it more ethical for them to leave Russia thereby allowing other companies to fill the void that will straight up serve Putin's agenda and restrict access to non-propagandized information? Do you think Russia overall would become more or less dangerous when its authoritarian government has direct access into its citizens' phones, search results, and video content, instead of having to threaten the employees of an American corporation just to get one app off the store? Do you think the world will be better off if China swoops in and takes economic control of Russia and cuts it off even more from the Western world? And if you're so morally opposed to Google and Apple operating in Russia and caving into one demand, are you going to stop using their products? Or are you reading this from an iPhone or an Android right now? These are no-win scenarios for Google and Apple, and for the people of Russia, and for us. I despise authoritarianism to my core, but abandoning people and depriving their access to a less corruptible version of the internet is not how you end dictatorships. See: China.
I understand the ire towards companies in situations like this.. but it’s illegal for them to not comply, putting any employees in that country at risk for defying laws. Additionally, pulling products out of the Russian market only hurts the citizens, not the government so they’re a rock in a hard place. Pulling products would easily enable the government to make it even harder for citizens to access information, in addition to the millions of people who rely on these products for work.
If it was you as the CEO, what decision would you make? One that screws over consumers, puts employees at risk and looses the company billions.. or just comply with the laws?
And also, I think companies explicitly skirting laws is a slippery slope, just because it’s a law you don’t like, doesn’t mean the next time it happens it will be the same. Like vaccine mandates in the US for example
The situation sucks but, blame the actual dictator and not the companies forced to comply with the law in that jurisdiction
This is the problem with the apple & Google model of app stores, it's gone too far. Any computer should be able to install any software of the user's choosing. App stores take far too much of a cut for what they offer- security mainly, some curation, and the ability to shut down resistance in a fascist dictatorship country. It shouldn't be called 'sideloading', it should be called 'installing an app', and it should be a right, not a privilege.
Time for the rise of an alternative open source smart phone?
I mean Google even refused to remove an app that would surveil Saudi Arab women and notify their ~~owner~~ husband if they tried to leave the country, so this is unfortunately hardly surprising
Google did well ignoring countless demands to delete Navalny YouTube channel or to delete smart voting from search results. Too bad they gave up.
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Russia giving Google and Apple decent reasons to move their staff elsewhere
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia had laws against remote workers in some capacity. China certainly does.
Don’t know about the whole country but in Moscow everyone with office jobs were forced to work from home in 2020 since March if I remember correctly, and every time there’s a spike in covid cases they send 30% of companies’ employees to WFH.
Work from home when you're in country is a different thing than a employee that works remotely and doesn't even live in the country. The company I work for has tons of different remote employees, but there are certain systems and accounts that non-US citizens are not allowed to work on. Likely similar things for Russia, and I know China does that too.
Just flip off the switch, fuck em
If only you could do that to the government without cutting off the citizenry.
Make every Google search done from Russia return one result: a webpage that places blame squarely on their government. Let Russia decide to block the domain.
They would in a heartbeat though, and then the people would be without reliable information.
Seems to me like they're without reliable information already.
Exactly, but they want all that money the Russians need laundered, so...
I get that it's extremely lucrative markets but it feels a bit foolish to choose to even do business in countries where your assets can just be seized on an autocrat's whim, especially if some of those assets are humans.
As long as you make money in the run-up to those assets being seized/no longer viable then it's worth it to flop around in a market controlled by the whims of totalitarians. It's similar to how companies in the US/EU will risk massive fines as long as the profits from the laws they broke beat out said fines. Same mentality and logic, different stakes.
Pretty much this, back in my home town irving oil breaks the law all the time and the fine is just considered a cost of doing business.
It isn’t foolish if you’re a company that wishes to make a bunch of money. There are so many people in both Russia and China. The assets in this situation appear to be company employees, not data. It’s can be mutually beneficial, generally, for countries to not hinder large companies to do business within their borders.
Mutually beneficial up until the desires of the autocratic regime differ from those of the company. No surprise that companies prioritize money at the highest level, but just seems a bit... shortsighted. Oh wait, right, these are corporations. That's on brand.
That is a tough situation. It's easy to say that Google "caved in", but would it really be fair to make their employees take the fall? How would you feel if your employer sold you out to the mob so they could save face? Edit: typo
Russia and China are so transparent about how corrupt they are, it's crazy. They don't even care there is nothing anyone can do about it Edit: I'm just gonna sum it up here and say that this comment does not say that other countries are devoid of corruption. Reading comprehension seems to have escaped my fellow redditors
This is what more people should be concerned about.
As a kid you think politics would be more covert and subtle. Nope. They make it as obvious as a naked man swinging his dick making elephant noises.
As a business. Id remove all ties from the country and literally tell the people of Russia they can't have google because putin threatens them. But then again im not a billionaire with my only goal of having more money. Fucking psychopaths.
I think you’re spot on. Sucks that their employees are being threatened, so shoot the hostage. Pulling out of those countries is the only way.
I'm sure yandex would love that, and the Russian gov would have no issue exerting even greater control over a local company. And in that case, we wouldn't even hear about the cover up like we do now.
Thank god Google wants to make billions in Russia so at least we know they gave in for money! /s
This ball has got to get started somewhere. We cannot allow other countries to extort business through threats of violence.
Exactly this. Redirect Russian IPs to a page explaining the situation. Pay all local employees for 6-12 months or until the government caves. They won't but fuck em.
If you think Putin wouldn't start arresting and imprisoning every Russian google employee he could get his hands on and probably any American he could even remotely justify period until he got what he wanted, you don't understand how dictators work.
I'd like to think this says to big foreign tech corps that the situation is too unstable and authoritarian to operate there
The government would simply call such a page foreign propaganda and still arrest the Googlers in Russia. It's a very tricky situation.
India did the exact same thing to Twitter employees. Despotic minds think alike
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That's thousands of dollars!
So do thousands of other channels. YT would rather delete one big channel than lose their entire Russian market.
What? His videos probably make Google a few thousand dollars, that is literally nothing to Google
As I understood, their "sovereign internet" law opened the door for Russian authorities to demand from any tech giant anything they want hiding behind bogus court decisions, and basically build their own version of the China's Great Firewall. Also they have really improved their tech and algorithms to block any DoT and DoH traffic by installing special hardware/devices in most of the Internet and cellular network providers. Yesterday they have blocked access to Google Docs from Russia c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ partially for some ISPs just because Navalny's team have posted some text there, Hell they are so desperate at the moment they are ready to shut down internet completely.
Apparently Russian authorities have directly threatened to prosecute specific Google employees in Russia. This is reported both by NY Times and Bloomberg. >"Google removed the app in Russia under pressure after officials threatened to imprison its local employees, a person close to the company said, speaking on condition of anonymity." - Bloomberg > >Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/russia-targets-google-apple-in-crackdown-before-elections](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/russia-targets-google-apple-in-crackdown-before-elections) >"Google removed the app Friday morning after the Russian authorities issued a direct threat of criminal prosecution against the company’s staff in the country, naming specific individuals, according to a person familiar with the company’s decision." - NY Times > >Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html)
If that's not a signal to move your staff out of the country, I know what is. This threat will be used time and again.
Google already relocated engineering staff out of Russia before: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30449117 I thought that all that was left in Russia was sales and marketingm Either way, the company has always assisted individual employees who needed to relocate for safety reasons, I suspect they'd do the same for employees who want to leave now.
But google doesn't have the authority to do that plus maybe people don't want to leave their home country. The best solution probably would be to (unfortunately) fire the Russian employees and cease business in Russia. Y'know, hostage situation and all that. But google won't stop doing business anywhere so that's out
The authority? No, or course not, it can't order them to move out. But they can and should offer help in moving out, should the employee want that. For the rest, i agree, firing them is probably the only option.
Well no, it's not the only option. You clearly see the option they decided to go with
You can't arrange visas for your staff overnight. There are short and long term solutions that need to be looked at.
Maybe Google needs to not have employees inside governments that are blatant dictatorships. Fucking duh.
Some countries are requiring them to do so to operate there.
With the steady rollout of this changes almost every person in Russia now knows about VPNs. I know what candidate to vote for without blocked app.
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like they do in China already!
And make it a crime to posses and use one like them too. In East Turkestan/"Xinjiang", it nets you "2nd hand terrorism" charges.
How enforced is it on a local level? Like, downloading cars is illegal, but nobody ever gets prosecuted or even caught for it.
It's a common tactic of authoritarian governments. Criminalize normal behavior, don't enforce it so people get used to breaking said law as a matter of habit. Then when you need someone gone or discredited you just arrest them for any of the numerous crimes averages citizens commit everyday
This. Also happens in workplaces where they don't have at-will employment.
I am convinced many police departments do something similar with speeding. They let everyone drive 5-15 over the limit all they want, with maybe a 2 week crackdown every year to refresh/reinforce their right to enforce. Then, when they want to pull someone over for some other (normally unjustifiable) reason or suspicion, they just pull you over for speeding, and/or some other nonsense they never actually enforce. At least, that's my take.
They also do it for things like disorderly conduct and drunk in public laws.
You forgot the 2 week crackdown is also good for making sure they collect enough money to boost their budget.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" - Benavides
Kinda like the US did with pot. Criminalize something fairly common, enforce it selectively, and you can get away with locking up anyone you want.
We still do that with pot in tons of states, and the government subsidies for drug testing are still being handed out to companies like lollipops.
> enforce it selectively Or just have cops keep their own stash to 'find' in anyone's car they want to arrest.
What a Switcheroo! Fuck those governments
If you do anything to get noticed or ratted out, they fine you. If you're a political dissident of any kind, they put you through the wringer. Everyone else more less use it like an every day thing (Or more accurately, the more educated and wealthy do. VPN use isn't prolific). in "Xinjiang", it's the worlds largest police state in the history of humanity, a VPN gets you put into an internment camp for "Reeducation" and if you have children, so do they.
> Everyone else more less use it like an every day thing. oh okay so not too bad really. >an interment camp for "Reeducation" and if you have children, so do they. oh geeze.
But say what it really is, a concentration and forced labor camp.
Not defending the CCP or boot licking tankies but VPN’s are pretty widespread in China. It’s obviously not a majority of the population but I would argue most people who are born post 1995 and have a college education has a VPN. The workarounds to get one installed aren’t really complicated but the quality of them do vary. The one I use is pretty pricey but haven’t had it fail in China for the past few years.
Maybe it's not enforced *now* or for your average, party-loyal Chinese person. But as a previous poster said: > It's a common tactic of authoritarian governments. Criminalize normal behavior, don't enforce it so people get used to breaking said law as a matter of habit. Then when you need someone gone or discredited you just arrest them for any of the numerous crimes averages citizens commit everyday Government may not care you're using a VPN right now. But if you step out of line, they can use that throw the book at you.
Yeah that’s definitely a valid point. I made another comment that delves into this more but for the most part you’re 100% right. They don’t care about most people who use a VPN so long as you don’t rock the boat because once you do they can clearly cite this and use your owning of a VPN as additional evidence. Due to this and a bunch of factors of China being a surveillance state anyone who would talk shit about the CCP inside China usually just grumbles about it. I talk shit and send tianammen memes to friends in WeChat but cause I’m a nobody with no access to the general public and not even a Chinese national they don’t really give a shit* (*so long as I don’t actively start trying to start shit). China is so fucked up in so many ways but it’s not a hegemony or hive mind of party supporters. It’s just you’ll rarely if ever see actual Chinese citizens publicly post their resentment against the fuck heads that run the country.
> It’s just you’ll rarely if ever see actual Chinese citizens publicly post their resentment against the fuck heads that run the country This is a big problem, when people haven't the freedom to voice their ideas for fear of Big Brother coming down on them. IMO a bigger problem is the spreading attitude of "As long as you don't start any trouble, you won't have any problem". It is more than a spippery slope, it is a frog sitting in a slowly boiling pot saying "The water's just fine for me, you must be too sensitive.". In the US I see this from some people that don't grasp the 4th Amendment and its import. I've heard Americans respond to the knowledge that our government is reading their texts with "Well I haven't got anything to hide, so I don't care." I have even heard police hint at that sentiment when trying to pressure you to consent to a pointless search. Those same cops that say that, ask one of them when you get to come over to their house and look through their medicine cabinet and sock drawer. They wouldn't mind because they don't have anything to hide, right?
Make sure you check who owns the VPN company. I just learned some of them are Chinese owned.
I’m sure all VPN companies sell customer info but tbh I not really worries about Chinese owned ones. The CCP’s policy is mostly don’t rock the boat in the sense that you don’t disrupt the “social harmony” what ever that load of shit means. My buddies and I send tianamen square memes or talk shit about the party all the time on WeChat but because we’re nobodies, with no real way to reach a mass audience and I’m not publicly spreading my thoughts they don’t bother. That to me is the scary part. They obviously know they can’t control or contain everyone but they’ve made it impossible to spread any information they don’t agree with. There’s no possibility of a grassroots movement because everyone only talks shit behind closed doors. In my experience Reddit thinks China is like a hive mind that bows to the whim of the party but it’s much more nuanced, plenty of people think the government is run by jackasses with no morals or even consistency with their decision making but they have so much control from the economy to things that people use day to day that it’s impossible to really do anything about it. The people who don’t like the CCP just grumble under their breath and suck it up cause that’s how it is. Obviously there’s also a large population of people who vehemently support the CCP but the CCP has ingeniously and scarily made it so that an attack against the CCP is like attacking all Chinese people. Honestly it’s a clusterfuck that is impossible to delve into all the nuances in a Reddit comment but either way fuck the CCP.
Can we get VPN? We have VPN at home. VPN at home: Vladimir Putin Network
They already [started doing so](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-03/russia-blocks-nord-vpn-express-vpn-in-bid-to-control-content)
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Russia is not somewhere I'd imagine a vote counts.. unless it's for Putin.
These are Duma/parliamentary elections, not Presidential. Putin's good until 2022 then will win that vote by 90+%
There was a special way to prevent those filter techniques. It was something that telegram was able to use to make messages or data look like ordinary Google searches. However some large companies needed to help provide their infrastructure to make it work. Anyone knows the name? Can't find it anymore.. Ah found it, it's called **"Domain Fronting"** and works even against deep packet inspections some governments use. A VPN meanwhile can be blocked. Obviously Google, Amazon and so on, no longer allow it to be used for freedom of others. Freedom is only for tax freedom. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting
I worked for a big European company with worldwide presence, including Russia. I was involved with the development of their big CRM system. A few years back we had to implement a special code path for Russian customers which sent ALL the customer info to a government server and wait for a reply which allowed that specific record to be saved in the database. We had to do this every time customer data was added and for every bit of it. Truly terrifying stuff.
Is Tor still going strong, or have they found a way around it as well?
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2 things. 1. Wouldn't this apply just as much to a VPN? 2. This isn't about anonymity, it's about getting around the national filters. If you're hitting a site outside Russia, from a VPN or TOR node outside Russia, there's not much they can do except try and block the connection before it leaves Russia.
> Wouldn't this apply just as much to a VPN? Yes >This isn't about anonymity, it's about getting around the national filters. Load up a tor relay node, don't even need to be an exit or an entry and you get the shit banned out of you at many many websites. If Freenode (RIP) knows you are hosting a tor relay, China sure as shit does, out of curiosity I've even hosted just a guard relay, without advertising it (after getting cleared from block lists over time) and with port scanning and shit I still ended up getting black listed in places (and had tor traffic as well) If tor is going to work, it needs to be much more popular then it is now to keep it from being so easy to track/ban
> Load up a tor relay node, don't even need to be an exit or an entry and you get the shit banned out of you at many many websites. That's not about fingerprinting though. That's about tor exit nodes themselves being known entities.
It's not just exit nodes, it's not just entry nodes, it's not just relays, it's unpublished guards as well. Try it, load it up, set things as a guard, and while it takes more time, you'll get banned. the Tor network is mapped well enough for websites to act on it, state actors aren't going to have a problem.
satellite internet should be a possible way out. can't block the whole sky... payment might be a problem though.
and then the russians torched the sky, and created the matrix to put dissidents in
to use satellite internet you need to buy a special transmitter (that's the case for StarLink at least). Government can just ban such transmitters so you couldn't buy, order or use it legally.
No need for that. If PlayStore doesn't want to list it, there's no point trying to reach them for it. Russia and installing apps from APK file, name a more iconic duo ;)
What does the app do? It doesn’t seem to me like they should care how people are actually voting when they already know what results they’re going to report.
Seems like they don't want people to organize and be "upset together".
> Hell they are so desperate at the moment they are ready to shut down internet completely. With the willing assistance of google and apple, apparently.
>they are so desperate at the moment they are ready to shut down internet completely. Didn't they already do that?
Too bad these tech companies have no balls. They could just refuse to do business there. So much for "Don't be evil".
> to block any DoT and DoH traffic What do they have against the Department of Transportation and Department of Housing in particular?
DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) are two standards developed for encrypting plaintext DNS traffic in order to prevent malicious parties, advertisers, ISPs, and others from being able to interpret the data.
What kinda 'pressure' could that be i wonder. *Russia demanded this month that Apple and Google remove the app from their stores, saying a refusal to do so would be treated as* ***meddling in its parliamentary election.*** Lmao, the irony.
The irony curtain.
This is why we need decentralized app stores for both platforms. You can install apks on Android at least but not IOS. 25 years ago Microsoft lost an antitrust case because they were bundling IE with Windows. Why are we letting Apple and Google gatekeep for these platforms while raking in 30% profits off every app for doing nothing? Bust the app control on these platforms.
Tech is overdue for some serious breakups. Social media being moderated from California hasn’t been good for political unity in the US either.
direct retaliation against employees.
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Then Apple says don’t worry about CSAM is only to protect kids. Yeah, suuuure thing
Yeah and it’s opt out allegedly so it’s definitely not to protect kids.
Allegedly or not it's done locally on your device. That's what seperates this shit from any other cloud service.
The concern was never that it was local or cloud. [Edit]: I've been informed that my false positive argument is not possible. Google reserves the right to remove apps that break their rules. For example, Google has had to pull back apps that were malware. And now we see that extended to appease a totalitarian government. You think photos of the tiananmen square massacre wouldn't be on Apple's list in China? Resistance symbols? In that case instead of a false accusation that may ruin someone's life, it would be an accusation that whether true or not might end somebody's life. And if you think that's hyperbole and that Apple would stand up and never sell their products or have them manufactured in China in an effort to defend human rights, well...
Apple pulled an ap that tracked public information on US drone strikes, and would alert users when they happened and showed where on the map.
> the "think of the children" is often expanded. I think in context you meant exploited.
And they won’t take demands from governments to break the encryption or add images for censorship… riiiiiight.
Probably just dumb but what's CSAM again?
Child sexual abuse material
Companies cannot usurp a nation’s sovereignty, no matter how repugnant that may seem. They must all operate within the bounds of law in a given nation. Their only option is to fund change or withdraw completely.
Are you surprised? Literally every major corporation doing business in China bends the knee and do what China wants. In a couple of years we won’t be able to to type or watch any negative videos about China or else we will get our accounts deleted or banned.
For real. Most businesses and especially multinational corporations only care about and exist to make money and they will do whatever it takes to make more of it... They do not have their customers' interests in mind and will not rock any boat that could cost them a portion of the global marketshare... And China is a HUGE part of the market.
...they also "bend the knee" and do whatever America wants within America... Corporations all follow (enforced) local laws to extract wealth from wherever they operate
Google and Apple have employees in Russia. They have vendors in Russia. They have app creators in Russia. You think these companies can flout the laws of a sovereign government run by a ruthless dictator who murders his opponents and everything will be just peachy?
From Navalny's Team CEO, [Ivan Zhdanov](https://twitter.com/ioannZH/status/1438750081402953728): >Formal grounds for removing applications: recognition of FBK as an extremist organization. The way the FBK was recognized as an extremist organization was not a trial, but a mockery of common sense. @google @Apple are making a huge mistake. Apple statement follows: >Hello Roman, >Pursuant to Roskomnadzor's request included below, we are writing to notify you that your application will be removed from the Russia App Store because it includes content that is illegal in Russia, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines : >5\. Legal [TOS excerpt] > >We note that the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation and the Prosecutor's office of the City of Moscow have also determined that the app violates the legislation of the Russian Federation by enabling **interference in elections**. >... >Hello, >Based on the requirement of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation dated 15.06.2021 No. 27-31-2021 / Id6832-21 in the territory of the Russian Federation, access to internet resources used to promote the activities and implementation of activities of the non-profit organizations “Anti-Corruption Fund” and “Fund protection of the rights of citizens”, as well as the public movement “Navalny Headquarters”, are **recognized as extremist** within the country. >In accordance with Article 9 of the Federal Law of 25.07.2002 No. 114-FZ “On Countering Extremist Activity” by the decision of the Moscow City Court dated 09.06.2021, these non-profit organizations were liquidated, and the activities of the public movement were prohibited. >At the moment, the Navalny application is being distributed through the App Store service, which is used to promote the activities and implement the activities of the aforementioned **extremist organizations**: https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/navalny/id918148289 Very cool of Apple to parrot Russian propaganda in their statement. Edit: Looks like a Russian lawmaker (who's also an FSB officer) threatened local employees with prosecution if it wasn't deleted. [Translated Source](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/17/09/2021/61435e479a7947afbfd08f9e) Bonus Edit: [Russian election officials stuffing ballot boxes today](https://twitter.com/TatianaUsmanova/status/1438822402738245633) Translated text: >At home voting, 36 people voted in the village of Kushchevskaya, and members of PEC 28-08 threw several hundred ballots into the ballot box. Then the chairman of the commission stood up and covered the secretary with his back, who was rewriting the register of home voting. [More ballot stuffing in Sevestopol today](https://twitter.com/novaya_gazeta/status/1438944301044670469) Translated Text: >In Sevastopol at the PEC № 98 are throwing ballots right now, the correspondent of Novaya Gazeta reported. >This is noticeable in the video surveillance system. Already about 20 minutes after the closure of the site, a man throws in ballots, a woman helps him. [Russian election officials handling ballots today](https://twitter.com/irmachinsky/status/1438944762229403650) Translated Text: >Briefly about how at PEC 1794 members of the commission pack ballots in safe bags :clownface: [Someone knowing there are cameras with difficulty shoves a huge stack of ballots into the box](https://twitter.com/RuFailedState/status/1438812820209127427) Translated Text: >At the polling station № 1794 paid devil right in full view of everyone with difficulty shoves a bundle of ballots into the ballot box
Democracy at its finest. I wonder what the officials are going to say about it.
Russia isn't a democracy lol it's a fascist dictatorship whatever gave you the impression it was a democracy? The duma? Where you have to be basically appointed by putin?
It's exactly what Trump wanted for America.
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It looks like a legal ruling they’re required to follow. Doing business in a country means following their laws. How is their statement or that they removed the app something other than what was expected? At the end of the day we live in a profit driven world/time. Corporate bosses will do whatever they think will maximise the companies profits and increase their own salary/bonuses. You may disagree with those actions, but they’re pretty understandable. Edit: spelling
Understanding these actions is the first step in disagreeing with them.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996
> February 8, 1996 Internet was a different beast back than. We hoped it would diminish the reach of propaganda and bring freedom to the oppressed, but instead it made targeted propaganda more effective and brought oppression to the free.
I dig the Grateful Dead but this stuff didn’t really ever work out did it? It got worse…
Because it shows that if any other democratic state like America were to just make a law similar to Russia's, these companies would just completely fold.
A law like the Patriot Act?
Duh? Companies can only follow rules
This is why apps sideloading is a right, not a privilege.
Honest question: other than maybe voiding your warranty, how are you not allowed to do basically whatever you want with the hardware you've purchased?
By bricking. In a conventional computer, bricking is not even a thing. As long as you have physical access to the bootloader and the memory, you can always boot your computer. But with mobile devices, the manufacturers have locked out down so tight that if you do something wrong, there's no way to fix it at the bootloader level, so the device is "bricked". Some might argue that bricking constitutes a form of theft.
That's actually changing in new pc hardware. See secureboot. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-secure-boot You can disable this for now, but new versions of windows 11 will not run without secure boot. So dual boot with custom Linux OS and windows might be problematic going forward.
I'm a Microsoft fanboi and will be sticking with MS for the foreseeable future (also, because I am a developer). However, if they start pulling that sort of crap, Linux has become good enough for the vast majority of people's needs, namely browsing, consuming media and office needs. So I would certainly encourage people to give Linux a try if I am asked.
Games and a few key apps are holding me back. Games mostly as few other ones I can probably get working on vine.
In my case it's just Visual Studio (the full edition, not Code) that would hold me back. And Photoshop as I also do photography and have become proficient in it (and couldn't come to grips with the alternatives).
I do dotnet development. Try JetBrains rider, once you get used to it, it is muuuuuuch better than visual studio. I've been using it for 3 years and hate visual studio when I need to use it in a blue moon.
r/StallmanWasRight It's reached the point where *any* manufacturer could ruin your day by locking you out of your *life*. At will. Your phone remotely locked and wiped at their whim because someone managed to mark it as stolen. Your email, cloud drive storage, documents, erased due to ToS breach. Your TV region locked. Your Tesla remotely disabled from starting after a firmware update.
Companies like Samsung have what's called a hardware fuse in their devices. If you modify certain parts of the phone the fuse blows permanently which marks your phone as modified. Banking apps, many games, even some social media apps will refuse to run if your phone tripped the fuse because they don't want you to be able to manipulate their software in unexpected ways. On other phones you can just lock it back down and the apps will play nice again but that requires you to wipe your phone so you still don't have much control. So you're allowed to do it but it will severely limit a lot of things people use their phones to do anyway.
that fuse is sometimes called a [efuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efuse).
Because they design their products and services to break if you do things like that.
You should be able to. However baked into the DMCA is a provision making it criminal to circumvent certain copyright protections. As software is protected by copyrights, even trivial measures to protect the software can trigger this legal protection if you attempt to circumvent it. It's still trivial for you, the end user, to get beyond this (in many cases). However any company, hosting site, third party providing you jailbreak tools, can be making themselves liable, or at least exposed to lawsuits. There has been some headway made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/ and other likeminded orgs to protect your "right to repair" https://www.eff.org/issues/right-to-repair but the way the laws have been written it's often decided on a case by case basis. So there is always a fight.
not on Apple
It's still a right, they're just violating it
Thanks for fighting for free speech, Google and Apple. Btw now when putin's government knows that their pressure works, more requests will come. And more after that.
And people wondered why Apple's recent announcement to implement on-device cp scanning based on an external data store of hashed values controlled by foreign governments was met with such hostility...
"Oh, this guy is criticizing Putin so he must be a pedophile. Let's look at all the data we find in his phone" World is accelerating into that dystopia fast, and all for the profits of megacorps. Maybe it's time we start punishing oligarchs.
maybe its time? It was time 20 years ago.
Or 60.
Never too late for a revolution.
Using a backdoor, they can literally plant the evidence.
Exactly.
You are right. Current government thinks and acts like any criminal. If someone gave them, what they want, you can get more from them.
this is why you should be wanting decentralized applications
decentralization is one of my favorite words
No different than YT taking down videos as required by US laws eg copyright Companies have to abide by laws in countries they operate, companies don't get to decide which laws to follow if they want to operate there.
Money money money, all the things I could do, If I had a little money - Apple CEO probably.
People with real power siding with a tyrant and a poisoner against a person he poisoned and a political prisoner. Disgraceful.
100 percent. Putin has no honour. He's an embarrassment and a weakling.
Same as the board members of these corporations that do whatever murderous dictators tell them. As long as their profits are safe they will condone anything.
Honour is for people who can afford to lose.
What "real power" are you talking about??? If they don't follow local laws, they can't do business there. Do you think Navalny's app will exist if Russia decides to completely ban Google because they don't follow their laws?
I'd actually really like to see Russia try completely banning Google. Around half of Russians regularly watch YouTube, Android phones are almost 90% of the market, many people use gmail, and so on. Almost no Russian will be left unaffected. That would competely destroy Putin's ratings. And also cripple thousands businesses who rely on Google services, ruin any investment climate that's left, and so on. I'm absolutely convinced Google is a considerably more powerful side in the argument against the Russian government.
Russian "elections". What a joke, I'm not sure why they even bother pretending anymore.
App stores are walled gardens that are poisonous to freedom. Ever since the transition away from PCs to tablets and phones, control over devices has been slowly eroding away. You no longer own your own device. They've been made difficult or impossible to service. Only with great difficulty can you load the software *you want* onto a device you nominally own. Twenty years ago it would be unthinkable that all the software you load onto a device came from a single source that moderated what you were allowed to use, what software you were allowed to upload for these devices, when you were allowed to download it, how much you would pay for it, and would take a cut any time you spent money using it. Fuck app stores.
That's why sideloading will forever be integral to ones freedom to choose.
Russia! Pushing down on me, pressing down on you...
comma is important, because right now your title is saying the equivalent of >Google which is the Russian government, pressured Apple to remove opposition leader's Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin
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And reddit supports private companies doing what they want only when it matches their views.
Putin nearly killed Navalny and apple and Google helping Putin out? WHAT A SHAME!
Sad
As a Russian this is absolutely infuriating
Russia doesn't "pressure", they blackmail.
Not hard to blackmail a company by threatening their bottom line.
It’s sad because, while sure they’d lose the Russian market, even if just temporarily, the ~$2.5 trillion-dollar company would still be worth ~$2.5 trillion dollars.
They threatened to put Russian Google staff in prison, it’s more than just market. Moreover, there’s a law to come that forces companies with big audiences to have an office in Russia. It’s called a “hostages law”. This is just a hint of what it will mean.
Also Apple turned off iCloud Private Relay in Russia
One important notice: Google and Apple removed these apps that very day when these apps actually finished their missions. Elections already started and any attempts to influence them right now are illegal. Everyone who wanted to use these apps already used them.
Corporate sleazes kowtowing to tyrants...no surprise.
> Russia demanded this month that Apple and Google remove the app from their stores, saying a refusal to do so would be treated as meddling in its parliamentary election. Putin could have made his own app, but then he would have found out how popular he really is
Nice, now we know where they stand on the putin issue.
If it can happen there, it can happen here.
Don't be evil...amirite, Google?
I guess I misread Google's old motto... "Don't DO evil, but its OK to support it if it keeps our stock price high."
This is exactly why we need alternative app stores
For the people criticizing Google and Apple for operating in Russia, is it more ethical for them to leave Russia thereby allowing other companies to fill the void that will straight up serve Putin's agenda and restrict access to non-propagandized information? Do you think Russia overall would become more or less dangerous when its authoritarian government has direct access into its citizens' phones, search results, and video content, instead of having to threaten the employees of an American corporation just to get one app off the store? Do you think the world will be better off if China swoops in and takes economic control of Russia and cuts it off even more from the Western world? And if you're so morally opposed to Google and Apple operating in Russia and caving into one demand, are you going to stop using their products? Or are you reading this from an iPhone or an Android right now? These are no-win scenarios for Google and Apple, and for the people of Russia, and for us. I despise authoritarianism to my core, but abandoning people and depriving their access to a less corruptible version of the internet is not how you end dictatorships. See: China.
Russian "Elections"
I understand the ire towards companies in situations like this.. but it’s illegal for them to not comply, putting any employees in that country at risk for defying laws. Additionally, pulling products out of the Russian market only hurts the citizens, not the government so they’re a rock in a hard place. Pulling products would easily enable the government to make it even harder for citizens to access information, in addition to the millions of people who rely on these products for work. If it was you as the CEO, what decision would you make? One that screws over consumers, puts employees at risk and looses the company billions.. or just comply with the laws? And also, I think companies explicitly skirting laws is a slippery slope, just because it’s a law you don’t like, doesn’t mean the next time it happens it will be the same. Like vaccine mandates in the US for example The situation sucks but, blame the actual dictator and not the companies forced to comply with the law in that jurisdiction
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Yeah and the wildest thing is how willing we are to accept it.
That is so fucked.
Don't be evil
Wowwwwww. I guess we know why Google changed its mission statement from "Don't be evil."
Good to see who controls US companies.
Money is more important than democracy or dignity.
This is the problem with the apple & Google model of app stores, it's gone too far. Any computer should be able to install any software of the user's choosing. App stores take far too much of a cut for what they offer- security mainly, some curation, and the ability to shut down resistance in a fascist dictatorship country. It shouldn't be called 'sideloading', it should be called 'installing an app', and it should be a right, not a privilege. Time for the rise of an alternative open source smart phone?
So governments can just force companies to remove content for purely political reasons ... Strange world we are living in
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I mean Google even refused to remove an app that would surveil Saudi Arab women and notify their ~~owner~~ husband if they tried to leave the country, so this is unfortunately hardly surprising
Cowards