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Russia restricts opposition election voting app (netblocks.org)
283 points by biggunz on Sept 19, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 231 comments



- Google removes Navalny's team google document with "Smart Vote" instructions.

- YouTube blocks videos with Smart Vote instructions.

- Telegram blocks a bot with Smart Vote the instructions


I’m a bit surprised by the telegram one - I thought they were uncooperative enough with law enforcement to blow this off. Guess not?


Telegram can't do anything if Google and Apple threaten to remove its app from the stores. On Android they've started promoting sideloading the app for a while already, but that's not an option for Apple devices sadly.

They've restored the bot functionality for accounts that are registered with non-Russian phone numbers though.


That only works in so far as the government you're blowing off doesn't have the willingness to actually shut you down and block you or actively threaten your employees in the country (as reportedly happened to Google).


> and block you

You mean like Roskomnadzor has already tried to do to Telegram, and failed?


Bypassing censorship costs money they may not have as much as they used to


No, this is only their marketing shtick unfortunately


Telegram is made by Russian entrepreneurs. Can you really expect them to not bend the knee for Putin?


Definitely. A lot of Russians hate Putin's guts. For Russian enterpreneurs living outside Russia, you have to prove that.

It's the difference with e.g. Chinese expats who, as I expect, would usually be reasonably loyal to Chinese state.


[flagged]


Why do you always bring up America when we're talking about injustices in other countries?

As a Russian, it pisses me off. It's like saying "black people shouldn't moan, because white people suffer too".


In this particular case it is very relevant, because Navalny himself was warning [1] that it is a dangerous precedent which is going to help the enemies of freedom everywhere. And he was absolutely right.

[1] https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347960298569928704


I see it a bit differently

In my opinion there's a point: if the dominant ethnicity is being enslaved, imagine what could happen to powerless minorities.

In other words, if countries that call themselves free are becoming less free day after day, it becomes obvious to imagine that not-as-free countries will follow the same route, maybe even faster.

they simply started from a different position in the global-freedom scale.

EDIT: apparently from the downvotes someone believes that Russia is a special place were all the bad things happen, while in the west when the US government spies their allies it's progress. If an American company, Apple for example, obey to the free government of the US of A when they ask for more control over the content on their platform, what make you think that they will fight against other more repressive governments? (they have in fact put this specific app down on their store, as per Putin's request) information warfare and content control are the weapons of the future, it is quite naive to think that there will be good governments that won't use it and bad governments that will abuse it. Everyone will use it to their own advantage. what's happening today is just the tip of the iceberg, wait for the day when the internet won't be globalized anymore as it is today and we'll have hundreds of local internets hardly connected to each other, allowing only some highly monitored link to "friendly" nets.


You're absolutely right. As an American, it is shameful the direction we've been going all in the name of 'safety'. If the "most free country on Earth" starts clamping down this hard, and spends copious amounts of time engineering forms of technical censorship/suppression, there is little or no reason to expect anywhere else to not do any different.

To be frank, America has lost a strategic asset in the form of being an attractive place to come for the best and brightest to try to realize something unfettered; and we're not doing a damn thing to export anything that creates any semblance of assurance that the American experiment's results are any better than anywhere else's.

The bar has been lowered so far it isn't even funny.


Navalny correctly predicted that the Trump ban gave authoritarian governments fair precedent. Hey, the US can ban the previous President. They paved the road.


[flagged]


I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers


To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.


It's sneaky. It's against site rules to make the accusation because it's usually impossible to confirm but it is absolutely a tactic used by foreign powers.

https://www.state.gov/russias-pillars-of-disinformation-and-...


Thanks for that link. I had read parts of the Mueller report before, and learned some of the TTP's that the Russians used during the 2016 campaign/election, but this lays it out more clearly.


The belief among technologists that censorship is a good thing is relative recent, and there is still quite a large number of people who still think that all censorship is bad when it comes from the powerful deciding what the powerless can see and do.

The group that is against censorship is likely still angry with companies like Facebook, twitter, apple, and it makes more sense that it is those people who continue to make jabs about past censorship. One do not need to pay people to be angry.

Here is a question: Does the hkai use above has a history of advocating free speech outside of articles that cover Russia? Is it consistent with someone who has not accepted that powerful companies should hold such power on society?


People are under the illusion that we have free speech ,we do not!

We have LIMITED FREE POLITICAL SPEECH...big difference...the dark right prefers to lie to people and claim we have unfettered free speech.


I wonder if you'd still be using those big brave all caps if the tables were turned and you were the one being censored. It could happen, you know.


>> I'd venture a guess that this low-grade whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly from Russian and similar bots trying to divert attention.

> I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers

I will make an attempt at an explanation, or at least an unusual way to think about it. It's not that I find it difficult to "believe" it....it is very easy to "believe" it....just do it. However, forming a strong belief that it is actually true, based on sound logic and strict epistemology, this is far less easy, for me.

Firstly, consider the logic (if we interpret the statement literally): Because "A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers", then therefore it logically follows that "whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly[!] from Russian[!] and similar bots trying to divert attention".

Clearly, this logic is not free of flaws.

Now of course, your actual opinion on the matter is surely more complex, but then this raises the important (and typically "This is Water"-type unrealized) point that we use an amazingly crude language, on amazingly crude internet platforms, to debate (conceptualize, and form opinions upon) a problem space (reality) that is infinitely dimensionally complex, not to mention deceptive, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. And even worse: all of this is conducted upon a not very well understood and known to be incredibly flawed platform: the human mind.

If you think about it, is the very premise (axiomatic ~~belief~~ perception) that humanity can form highly comprehensive accurate individual and shared models of this mess in the first place not obviously delusional and hubristic?

Below we have:

> To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.

This is clearly a false dichotomy - are there really only two options here? There are many different ways to think about this, and I would be surprised if the person who wrote that comment wouldn't be able to whip up a whole bunch of other theories without breaking a sweat. And yet, they wrote that comment....and that comment was consumed (as ~correct) by other agents within the system, in turn distorting their internal model of reality (which is typically considered to be reality itself, another root cause problem), agents who will then go on to distort the models of other agents in one giant game of Telephone[1].

Day after day, year after year, generation after generation we (and here I include the much more competent than average minds here on HN) repeat this obviously (when looked at from the proper perspective, a perspective that seems to be available only in certain states of mind[2]) highly flawed behavior, and "shake our fists at God" (or the members of our outgroups) for causing these problems.

What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon: not only does it seem not possible to get people to stop behaving like this, it seems to be impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that there might be some truth to this characterization of it. Like, they might post a pithy comment ~"proving it wrong", but if one is to reply to that pointing out that it suffers from the very same phenomenon being described, the response tends to be either rhetoric (on less intellectual platforms) or solipsism &/or silence/disinterest (on more intellectual platforms).

It is a very difficult nut to crack, especially when no one else is able to be interested in cracking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory


Also interesting is how unpopular (for reasons that are not stated) these ideas seem to be across most any ideology, educational level, gender, etc.


Parler isn't banned from the internet, it's banned from AWS and mobile app stores. These bans weren't ordered by the government either.


To me the negative aspects of censorship is not exclusive to governments. It is any censorship when it comes from the powerful controlling the powerless in order to maintain that power relationship. Government vs citizen is one form of power relation, but so is dominating market holder vs user. A third is infrastructure vs user.

Apple has decided to hold the power of being the gatekeeper of mobile apps. Every time they utilize that power they demonstrate the power relation that they hold over their captured audience. I could be cheering when I agree with their choice and get upset every time they do something which I disagree with, but in terms of power it the exact same thing. I rather choose to oppose the power itself.


I'm not disagreeing that there are megacorporations which wield too much power. I don't believe it's a good thing that Apple can decide what software you can run on the device you bought, and I don't think the often used security argument is sufficient justification. It would be better if there were other legal ways to install software on iDevices.

But if there are other ways to install software, I don't really have any moral qualms with Apple moderating its own store. They can sell whatever they choose to sell, as far as I'm concerned. In the case of Parler specifically, I see no moral issue whatsoever because you can still access Parler through the browser. Apple and Google aren't blocking their users from accessing Parler, they're simply refusing to do business with them.

Calling this censorship or a violation of free speech is, to me, confusing the right to free speech with an imagined duty of other people and entities to provide you with a platform.


If there is no power relation then there is hard to argue an abuse of power. Since I am neither an iphone user, iphone developer or parler user/developer I can't know if such power relation exist.

However could not the same be said about the app in the article? What does the app do that they can't do through the browser? If apple has no power in this relationship then the impact of the decision should be zero. It seems however that Apple do have some power or else the Russian government wouldn't have gone after Apple to censor the app.

Censorship is just an other word for power abusing their position to limit the powerless. It is not about forcing people and entities to provide a service, its to prevent people and entities that holds power to abuse that power in order to keep others powerless. If that translated in a specific case to being forced to provide a service, then there is always a second choice. They can open up and give up the thing that gives them power. In the case of apple that would be to provide alternative ways to install software without tricks that keeps apple in power. It is an active choice of Apple to be the door keeper for what the captured users can or can't do with their own devices.


Censorship is not always an abuse of power. Forum moderation is a form of censorship. The moderators on HN will delete your comment if it violates the community guidelines. But I'm certainly not against that, in fact, that's why I'm here in the first place.


The question comes down to how much power HN moderators has and how they use it.

If HN was the primary place where the wast majority of startups got funding, and HN moderator would delete comments in order to influence the conversation between investors and founders, such moderation would very quickly be seen as an abuse of power. It is one form of moderation that I have never seen on HN.

As it is, HN moderators has a rather limited power and rarely been exercising the little power they have. A way to describe this is that people wielding power do not always commit act of abuse, and all power is not equal. There is no true name policy on HN, no rules against people contacting each other outside of HN, no restrictions against people based on political, religious or other views. I can mention the competing communication platform discord and not get banned for doing so. People can read HN without creating accounts, and HN do not block VPNs or Tor.

As a tool for authoritarians, HN moderation is not an effective one. Possible by design. Their behavior has so far not been to utilize power in order to maintain power. There is not much left if you remove power and abuse from the definition of censorship, and so I would not describe HN moderation as it is now as censorship. Occasionally they do things like automatically reduce article weights based on specific political topics, which is a soft kind of censorship, but from what I have seen they have taken a bit more relaxed attitude and not done that so often any more.


If that platform was owned by the government, or in the public domain. Or not owned by anybody, like the space around our planet. Then such shenanigans would definitely be called censorship and a violation.

But because it's privately owned, it isn't.

The way it hinges on who's name is on the receipt. Which is just a legal artifact. Seems unrealistic.

I mean, the more realistic take is : yes, our whole population is definitely using it to communicate. Before that solid fact any mere legalism is insubstantial.

And when you look at it that way it follows that there is definitely a snake in the cradle.


Private censorship is absolutely censorship. Anyone disagreeing is engaged in a dishonest semantic argument as there are numerous examples of it usage this way that predate this debate by decades.

The argument is that the first ammendment protects the right to engage in private censorship.

In my mind, the core debate at the center of the issue is the assertion that corporations have the same rights as any other citizen. I think that is patently absurd but the Supreme Court disagrees.


"But because it's privately owned, it isn't"

So if the city officials sell public squares into private ownership you loose the right to protest. Its not sensorship!

Very convenient, I am sure it will never be abused.

Lets try a different example - what if oil companies pay twitter to boot off all climate activists, is that cool?


> But because it's privately owned, it isn't.

This is sarcasm right ? I mean when the party in power directly issues fiat's to social media to ban something, it is OK ?


My wording was a bit careless in my previous post: I didn't distinguish between censorship and free speech violations. If YouTube deletes your video for violating ToS, that can be called censorship (in the same way that a forum moderator removing your post can be called censorship), but it's not infringing on your right to free speech.

This is because your right to free speech doesn't entail a right to any particular platform or channel. Others, including the government, are in no way obligated to help you broadcast your speech.


We might ask what good the right to free speech achieves.

And then we would ask if the behavior in question interferes with the achievement of that good.

Thus we avoid the merely semantic tangles.


Sure, go ahead.


If your internet provider, phone operator, advertisement agency, newspaper and TV station all decide to "not help you broadcast your speech" then you have no speech.

Now, i know this is crazy, what if someone 'encourages' them to make the correct decision regarding not helping you? Someone with loads of money and inflience, that doesn't like your speech? Like an oil company, sensoring an activist, is that still legal?


> To me the negative aspects of censorship is not exclusive to governments. It is any censorship when it comes from the powerful controlling the powerless in order to maintain that power relationship.

Parler was bankrolled by the 'powerless' heiress daughter of oligarch Robert Mercer.


Everything I had read says that the reason it was taken down was because of what users did on the platform. They did not want those users accessing the site, and so they went after the platform.

We could all be cheering for the fact that the powerful went after those users, and then be angry when they go after users we want to protect, but I don't. I rather want to promote users ability to choose themselves if they want a filter that removes Parler members from their own devices.

On HN there is a setting which allow users to see dead comments. Its a user setting. There could be any number of dead comments and yet users can see them if they choose to do so. Such a simple choice makes a rather large difference in the power relation between HN moderators and HN user. Without it this whole discussion could not even exist as the parent comment is dead.


Parler had contractual obligations with AWS that they violated, were given opportunities to correct the violations, and were unable to do so. AWS hosts more objectionable content than Parler, but those parties are able to keep themselves within the bounds of their contract. It's that simple. Parler wasn't censored, they breached their contract and so their contract was terminated.


You don't see a problem with infrastructure providers cultivating vendor lock-in in order to wield the ace-in-the-hole of deplatcorming when the time is right a problem?

Given, it was Gab and Parker's problem for not going multi-cloud; but there is something specifically untenable to me about this whole "my entire infrastructure is now dead to you in 48 hours" sort of thing that Gab and Parler went through. Yes, it's a matter of contract law because they accepted the ToS as is, but I don't see anywhere that actually services alternative terms pipelines either.


It was similar to self-censure from Amazon, that is if they wanted to still gain lucrative contracts with the military-industrial complex opposed by the candidate that they banned.

To say nothing of the personal vendetta between the owner of Amazon and said candidate, the owner being the wealthyest man on Earth and directly controlling a big mouth-piece of the media (WashPo). The US is by definition an oligarchic state (the previous president was an oligarch, the current one was put in place by the oligarch enemies of the one before him).


> It was similar to self-censure from Amazon, that is if they wanted to still gain lucrative contracts with the military-industrial complex opposed by the candidate that they banned.

Sounds like pure speculation.


It walks and quacks like self-censure in view of future monetary (and not only) gains.

Again, I'm surprised that almost no-one in here (to say nothing of the big media outlets) is not saying anything about the huge conflict of interest involving Bezos and the companies he owns and/or controls.


Don't you remember people from Google saying that it should not be broken up to be able to prevent "next Trump situation"?

https://www.facebook.com/ProjectVeritas/videos/2445258202376...


>The US is by definition an oligarchic state

Yep, I saw a few types of researches before. The US is, by all definitions, an oligarchy.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...


Do you really think the previous president and the current president are enemies?


No, I don't think Biden and Trump are enemies, I do think Bezos and Trump are enemies. In fact I tried saying that but because English is not my mother language maybe it came out wrong.


That effectively means they are banned from having notifications on iOS.


lol bit rich calling Parler and Gab banned. They can easily buy their own servers and host it themselves. Or are you suggesting the government force AWS/Godaddy/Microsoft to host them?


If everyone cuts them off, yes! Free speech laws originally meant that you could stand on a street corner and rant freely (but no one was forced to listen).

It did NOT mean that for a particular person all street corners were suddenly unavailable. We have many de facto monopolies here: Google prioritizes medium.com nonsense over private sites, app stores are monopolies etc.

So while physical hosting and DNS providers should be available by law anyway, I think due to content discoverability and monopolistic issues the same applies to certain virtual market places.


Free speech laws mean nothing of the sort. Free speech also (generally) includes freedom of association. AWS should be Free to not associate with entities who do not meet their stated TOS.


Supermarkets do not have freedom of association, which is a good thing. Artists and small businesses selling very personal custom services should have freedom of association, but that's it.

What if no one wants to sell you a computer, car, house, food?


> Supermarkets do not have freedom of association, which is a good thing.

You're wrong; they do have freedom of association. They're free to choose whose products they do and do not carry, for example. They're also free to deny entrance to anybody for almost any reason (except for an enumerated class of prohibited reasons).


Street corner, car dealership, soap box, sign printing...


Difference is that in the US it was not a government. Private enterprise reacted to public pressure. People made them do it.

In Russia it is the government.


People? What people? Was there a vote held?


Corporations have better way to gauge the opinion of the silent majority.


Not the OP, but this is actually something I doubt.

There is a long list of expensive products that outright flopped or the public received them in a rather lukewarm way. The same is true about, say, movies.

If companies can make such huge mistakes in their core business, surely they aren't any better in gauging public opinion in politics.


telegram also removed bots from Navalny team which you could ask what non-ruling-party candidate has most chances to win, to facilitate "protest", tactical vote, much the same as the app would do. Telegram CEO cited some nonsense about "silent days" (why would he had obey them?) which are not even a thing with current 3-day voting in Russia. Many people agree Durov just got threaten that telegram app would be yanked from appstores, just like navalniy's app.

Huge win of the current government in their intimidation tactics.


“Silent days” are still a thing. The new bit is that the day before the election is not included, only the election days themselves. This prohibition makes sense to me.

My personal opinion is that telegram’s actions are reasonable in this context.

Navalny’s team fucked up by publishing their recommendations only on the 15th, two days before voting. I don’t understand that decision at all.


You have these "silent days" in most countries. When we have elections in France, we just look at Belgian or Swiss newspapers to see how the votes are going on. They do not care about these days, only French newspapers and media do.

Twitter does not, Facebook does not, Telegram does not - nobody cares except for France.

How is Russia different?


You either believe that this regulation makes sense, or you don’t. France, apparently, is in a situation where nobody cares enough to enforce, but taking the law off the books is not politically feasible. I do not know whether that’s a good thing.

As a Russian: the election has a limited relevance beyond a certain type of signaling. The majority of United Russia is largely guaranteed by the “electoral sultanates”, so votes cast now will not impact new legislation over the next five years.

If your purpose is to signal things, being morally clean is more important than the number of votes you manage to achieve. If a law is reasonable, and a norm in multiple other well-regarded systems, it makes sense to comply.


> France, apparently, is in a situation where nobody cares enough to enforce

It is strictly enforced in France. But Internet knows no borders so the statistics of votes (which is is illegal to provide in France during the voting day) are available outside of France (usually in French speaking Belgian / Swiss online newspapers, or Twitter/FB/...).

My point is that a country cannot expect that other countries (and services in these countries) will follow their rules.

> If your purpose is to signal things, being morally clean is more important than the number of votes you manage to achieve. If a law is reasonable, and a norm in multiple other well-regarded systems, it makes sense to comply.

I am not sure I understand that point.


> It is strictly enforced in France

It’s not strictly enforced. Exit polls published outside France are collected inside France. Those who collect with clear intent to immediately publish are subject to French law, and may be fined. Which, from what you are saying, does not happen.

> I am not sure I understand that point

I am not sure how to explain it better. You should not both demand lawful election and circumvent electoral laws at the same time. You can, and people do, but it’s not a strong position.


> Those who collect with clear intent to immediately publish are subject to French law, and may be fined

Exit polls are legal. Publishing them is not. They are published by non-French entities, which cannot be fined because of some internal law of ours.

> You should not both demand lawful election and circumvent electoral laws at the same time. You can, and people do, but it’s not a strong position

The rules are from the times where information was provided by printed newspapers, radio and TV. It is time to realize that we are in a different world and adapt.

If we allow foreign newspapers to publish data (because we cannot forbid that), we should give an equal chance to the French ones.


It could still allow for a few independent-ish senators via single mandate district system. If it is allowed to run fairly at least in some locales.

Source: observing one.


Sure. How does this relate to the very late publishing of lists? Or to complying with “silent days”?


It doesn't. Merely a comment towards the state of electoral affairs.


Hmm, I've been wondering the same, and I'm not sure this applies here. They clearly used other legal means (marking the org as terrorist). If you have a leaflet already at home, you can still read it. If you walk to your local party's branch, you can read the leaflets there. Websites of most parties do not close during silent days, only advertisement is forbidden. Finally, this Smart Voting app does not seem to use any real-time polling result, does it? It's basically a directory with local candidates per area.


What I meant is essence is that moving the information outside the country to an entity that is independent (and cannot be bullied like Apple or Google were) would allow for access to that information (the dynamic part (the part of the information that changes) is interesting because, as you noted, once you have it, you have it)


The government used the ‘extremist’ classification, yes. Telegram’s Durov referred to the ‘silent days’ practice as his excuse.


After that day candidates can not withdraw from the elections (that's the law), so the government can't threaten the recommended candidates.


This ensures Putin's government won't have enough time to subvert the recommended candidates in some way.


The government will have plenty of time to do that after the election.


But that won't prevent the person from being elected. Doing it after comes with many drawbacks.


Doing that before the election (I assume your plan, if you were Putin, is to have all 225 “recommended” candidates withdraw?) is more difficult than subverting the, very optimistically, 30 that will get elected.


There is no dichotomy here.

If you know the candidates beforehand, you can bully them before the election, see who wins nevertheless, and bully those again.

> to have all 225 “recommended” candidates withdraw?

Having some of them withdraw is also useful, it's a numbers game.


The candidates are known beforehand. Putin’s men do not need Navalny to tell them whether there is a popular candidate in an electoral district. Consolidation of “protest” votes does not make someone win an election; it gives a small extra push in contested districts.


You really don't see the difference between eliminating all the candidates (and all popular candidates) and eliminating one candidate per district?

Smart Voting™ creates these popular candidates in the districts where all competitors of Putin's guy are more or less equally popular. Knowing whom they will make popular is an advantage for Putin, don't you agree?

I have a feeling you're arguing out of stubbornness. My original point was that announcing the Smart Voting lists in the last moment can be useful, I think gave some good reasons for it.


“One per district” is 225, “all popular” in contested districts is, like, maybe 70?

Smart voting does not create new popular candidates. It’s a way to concentrate the 5 % they can access (or 2 %, if badly mismanaged by publishing the list too late) in an efficient way.


Please back the numbers up with data.


But there was nothing to hide, everyone knew that it will be basically "vote for Communists".


It's not true. I checked and I see plenty of Yabloko candidates being suggested


Don't they need to announce a concrete Communist to vote for? Last time I checked the number of Communists in Russia was strictly greater than one.


One Communist Party candidate per electoral district, yes.


There is a theory that Telegram is a Russian op, given that they still having office in Russia, which they are very secretive about, despite the claims of Durov being nearly chased by KGB on every corner.


Telegram had been banned by Russian authorities with a demand to disclose E2E encryption keys previously, then that ban was miraculously lifted last year. What is happening beneath the curtain is anyone’s guess.

Setting aside any speculation as to whether they are in fact a state-backed covert operation, last time I checked it appeared to be a tiny company of undisclosed structure, which—while in a way glamorous/romantic—does not strike me as a radically more acceptable/sustainable state of affairs, as it makes the individuals involved liable to be influenced (including through [in]direct fear for personal safety, a mechanism markedly more effective than fines or legal action) by whomever is able to find them.


We now see that Apple and Google routinely remove apps by request of Russian government. How come Telegram was never removed? Maybe the russian government never really asked?


They asked, but before this situation, there were no serious reasons for that. But a few days ago, the Navalny organization (FBK) was declared by the court to the status of an extremist organization. They just put the opposition on one list with terrorist organizations like ISIS and the Taliban.

For now, Google and Apple ban "another dangerous organization," not political opposition. Google and Apple already censor all the content and application for local markets.

It's nothing new. Many youtube videos are restricted in some countries but accessible in others. Companies want to make money, not to play political games, and to declare war for freedom. It's not their responsibility. But in Russia, many local players dream about a ban of Google and Apple to finally take all the market.

Mail.ru, Yandex, Vkontakte, Sber, etc., all these companies got money from an oligarchy in Russian, and for them, Google and Apple are the leading competitors in the market. Many local clones of google search, mail, WhatsApp, youtube, twitch, TikTok, and other services, but they can't win the market because of US companies.

I think, in the future, Russia will ban US giants on their market. Everything goes to this.


> They asked

I actually researched it. All sources that every story about 'they asked' cited in the end pointed to RosKomNadzor press release on their own website. And it is very well known that Russian government never lies.

There were no public confirmation from either Google or Apple that they did receive such request and refused to act on it, like they earlier did on LinkedIn.


There was a request from opposition to Apple about that, and they got an official answer. You can read it on Twitter

https://twitter.com/ioannZH/status/1438750081402953728


Read my grandparent comment again please. I was talking about Telegram, and that we don't have a confirmation if Apple or Google did receive a takedown request for it.


I understand what you are talking about, but this is not how rules apply to stores' apps. (not sure about App Store, I'm mainly working with Google Play).

You can read the legal part of Google Play, starting from section 8 and to the end. https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme...

TLDR: it's your responsibility to observe any regulation change and decision by google in your app. Suppose any content got banned on the platform by "applicable law" in any country's jurisdiction. In that case, you must apply this decision to your app because, legally, you must inherit all Google's decisions. If you don't do that, your app can get takedown without any notice.

I'm not sure when Google changed its policy about Crimea. I can verify it from my ex-company experience and legal department. Around 2015 our application got takedown without any details because we provide access to people who live in Crimea. Still, after our legal department contacted Google, they answered that it's our responsibility to observe these decisions and apply them.

Durov didn't wait for a takedown and applied app stores' decision to Telegram. Anyway, I think his message about this "silent day" is stupid, and the worst thing that can happen for Telegram is probably takedown for Russian users in stores for a few weeks.

I just checked now, and you have access to this bot if you are registered with any other phone number except these from Russia. My Ukraine and US numbers work fine with the bot.

UPD.: To clarify, I don't say everything happened because of this Google legal agreement, I'm not so into everything in Russia politics, Telegram, etc. It's my stupid opinion on the whole situation, with assumptions based on my experience. Take it with a grain of salt.

There was news about Russian investments in Telegram and agreements between Telegram and the Russian government, so maybe it's part of agreements, nothing more.


Telegram is used widely by many people, including people in government. Removing Telegram will wreak a lot of chaos. It's like cutting of external Internet. Technically possible, but very unpopular measure.


This conspiracy theory that telegram is a secret KGB project and all bans are kind of promotion campaign - I heard it a lot of times.

More frequently as a joke but sometimes you start thinking: "what if?"


You are correct that there is this theory, yet I haven't seen any evidence of that.

Deleting Navalny's bot seems like a response to a threat from Apple and Google. To fight this, it would be great to abandon Apple and distribute all apps via Android APKs, circumventing the app stores. (Not gonna happen, I know)

First they came for the American opposition, then they came for the Russian opposition, then there was no opposition at all.


In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution.

If the app is open source, it could also be hosted on F-droid (or just as an .apk on some website).

These kind of situations are exactly why we fight against walled gardens and centralizatiom. It's not a problem until it is.


> In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution.

The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.


So is this app using some other protocols that aren't DNS/http(s) that would make it immune to a dns level block? Because a native app that makes http calls is just as easy to block as a pwa


The app uses the same technology as some trojans: it connects to different pseudorandomly-generated domain names under Cloudflare protection, changing at least several times per day.


The client still needs to receive those domains somehow though, and that's the tricky bit. Unless the domains are unique per user, the blocker can just install the app and block the domains as they change.


You can embed the domains in the app, obfuscated. It's not foolproof but as long as they can't crack it in the few days that are left until the election...


Is there a name for this technique, or a thorough description of it somewhere? So that I could put it in my bookmarks & notes.


Domain Generating Algorithm.

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2016/12/explain...

Although in this case, the generated domains are all under global.ssl.fastly.net and similar CDNs, not traditional TLDs.


Thanks!


Not really. You can use whatever you like, the possibilities are endless. AFAIU, the most straightforward approach would be to use Android / IOS push notifications (which can't be easily blocked) to regularly push a constantly changing (to avoid censorship) URL of your backend API servers to the mobile apps.


Unless those urls are unique per user, then the response to that is for the blocker (Russia in this case) to install the app and block the URLs as they change


They don't have to be strictly unique per user. You can send out different sets of URLs to different cohorts of users, then correlate new URL blockings with client IDs to detect rogue app installations and excommunicate them. Telegram did that when Russia tried (unsuccessfully) block it.


Given this is an app for tacical voting over a 2 day period (which has now passed) all the adversary needs to do is block it for a couple of days. Dns blocking cloudflare for 2 days would pretty much stop this in it's tracks.

(You are right about not requiring completely unique urls per user by the way).


No, it (again) doesn't work like this at all. 1) DNS blocking of cloudflare is useless, you can receive IPs, or names in non-cloudflare zones, 2) IP blocking of the whole cloudflare will bring so much collateral damage (unrelated services going down) that it's a non-starter, politically speaking, 3) cloudflare is far from the only mass frontend / cdn available, there are hundreds high-collateral services out there.


Sorry I misunderstood the fact that you were talking about sending IPs and not randomly generated dns name from cloudflare. My question was does this app use use a custom protocal, and I'd define a pseudo random IP provider over push notifications to be a cudtom prptovol.

This is a nation state suppressing information, I don't see why wholesale blocking services like cloudflare or any of the other possible options would be a non-starter, given it only needs to last for a weekend. There also doesn't appear to be any evidence that this app uses any of these techniques either as far as ive sedn.


I see, that makes sense.

The advantage of a web app is that it can be distributed in any number of ways though. It's trivial to take it and re-host it on different servers, as an onion service, or go the full decentralized route with IPFS or similar.


Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?


Just e-mail people an update from random address with GPG signature. That should be the more resilient and hard to block way to communicate information. It's fun when the old proven tech proves superior to new shiny tech.


Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it.

99% of the people are on the big email providers.

Also, you will quickly find out that sending many emails from random addresses (ie: spamming) doesn't work these days, they will be blocked by existing anti-spamming techniques, as evidenced by multiple posts on HN of people trying to do that from their own mail server.

You need to go through a whitelisted mail service (MailChimp, ...) which is another block point.


> Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it.

You don't need to mail links, you just need to mail required information. Asking Google to filter out some specific e-mail (which could be somewhat randomized for every recipient) probably will not work.

> You need to go through a whitelisted mail service (MailChimp, ...) which is another block point.

Russia can't ask US service to deny making business with US citizen (for example). It's completely outside of their territory.


> Russia can't ask US service to deny making business with US citizen (for example). It's completely outside of their territory.

Not sure what US citizens have got to do with this. Russia obviously was able to order Google to block relevant apps and documents for Russian people. Why would they care that US citizens can still access them?


Do you really think going through all that would be trivial to the masses?


Not now, but people adapt when there's an incentive.

Already if you go in a country with restrictive internet, you'll find the average working-age person knows how to use a VPN. Regular drug users in western countries know how to use Tor. Hong-Kong protestors were using a bluetooth mesh network app.


What about onion website? Can Russia already block Tor?


I'm not sure about Tor, but I know from my friends in Russian, who have direct access to this information, that the Russian government inherits all the practices and technologies from China, with DPI and all the things. Now even VPN + shadowsocks won't be a permanent solution.

It's obvious cooperation of governments that can help each other, one with tech to control, and the other with cheap resources for manufacturing. (you can google how Russian almost sold part of territories to China, there are even cities where all the administration are Chinese).


Not as of yet. Actually, if you use tor (with out-of-Russia exit nodes, which I think is the default when using it from Russia?), you can already freely access all the sites blocked in Russia, non-onion ones. But, obviously, tor and VPNs are good solutions only for people willing to go an extra mile to get to the prohibited content.


Navalny's website is also blocked in Russia, of course, so you won't be able to load that PWA. (Without VPN/)


Make it easily deployable so that it's found in many different places?


At some point you have to solve issue of trust. Bad actors will easily deploy it to many different places as well.


How do you make it so people trying to use your app can find the new version faster than the government can squash the new instance?


> On Friday, sources confirmed on background that at least one of the U.S.-based companies implementing the restriction felt compelled to comply for fear that local staff could face legal action upon receipt of a takedown order from the Russian Federation.

Really making the world a better place. How hard would it be to have employees from outside the country make the app review, and shield local employees from this? These companies do what they want to do, and they didn't think this was a hill worth fighting for, which is sad.


What would prevent Russian authorities from taking action against local employees anyway? The buck stops at the government. The only options for private companies in these type of situations are: comply or exit.


I don't think it has to escalate as aggressively as you're making it out to be, and yet exiting is an option as we saw from Google's reaction to China's demands. So here we're just seeing what things they consider bad enough and my comment is that it was sad this wasn't bad enough for them to put their foot down.


"Shield local employees from this" is the main hard part of this proposal. The Russian government does not especially care which part of the company Google claims is responsible for app review, and they will happily arrest/prosecute/murder any staff they can get their hands on if there's a chance it'll get then what they want.


It almost sounds as if operating in Russia is a bad idea.


Yeah, that's an old story, but there were engineering offices of a few big US companies in Russian before. Almost all of them left in 2010x when they understood what was going on there. Same for Belarus, companies moved their offices to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

They want to market and engineers there, but they don't want to risk working in authoritative countries with batshit crazy wannabe emperors. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-...


That is the definition of foreign power interference.


I wish there was a foreign power interference in Russia. At this point I will accept NATO intervention (will never happen though, West is just complicit with Putin).


You can move to Afghanistan to see enjoy one.


Is Afghanistan the new Somalia yet?


The restrictions are quite useless (and BTW the website is quite horrible and has a bad security record). Even in Yandex you can easily find the list on various websites. It has even been duplicated to Wikipedia:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_кандидатов_по_одноманда...


> I can't see the option to add a country

> You may not see this option if: You've changed your country within the last year.

> You aren’t currently in a new country.

> How does Google know my location?

> Depending on the products that you’re using and the settings that you choose, you may provide Google with different types of location information that are critical to making some services work and making others more useful for you. Location can come from real-time signals, like your IP address or device location, and also your past activity on Google sites and services, to tailor experiences for your context. Below are the primary ways we may get information about your location.

Never, never, never ever enable the GLS, and emergency location service (read the disclaimer, it's the same GLS)

If you never had GLS enabled, the only way Google can guess your location is your IP.

There is no opt out later in account setting to remove GLS info forever.

This is how they detect proxy users for Geoblocks


The current elections are shameful even by Russian standards. These are the recordings of some falsifications that happened in this cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knqpiDrtUs (until YouTube bans this video too).


It's shameful that there is no real opposition in Russia.

Looking on Latin America it's always ends with something violent.

On the other side: in Asia it's usually transforms into something not that bad, e.g. South Korea.


There is “no real opposition” in Russia, because real opposition is in prisons.


I know that "violence is never the answer" but it's pretty pretty hard to swallow when corrupted thiefs and murderers have state-guaranteed monopoly of physical violence.

I can't accept that, and no one should.


A monk asked Pa Ling, "What is the Blown Hair Sword? " Pa Ling said, "Each branch of coral supports the moon"


This makes zero sense


It makes more sense than the violence is not the answer trope.

At least it's not trying to make you an obedient slave


What do you mean? Could you elaborate?


If a rabid dog attacks you, you won't save yourself by politely asking it to stop.


I still don't know what you mean; I was hoping for something specific (i.e. not metaphors or implied and unclear solutions).


I'm not the OP, mine was an interpretation. My take is that being against violence is a good thing unless it leads to the point of self destruction.


Yeah, Putin's regime has no place in this day and age. It's totally anti-people.


So they should invade the Kremlin 6 January?


I find some comments in this section quite funny.

Russia was blamed with USA elections rigging because someone payed for facebook ads to promote one of the candidates.

In this case we have every evidence, that a group of people, financed by foreign organizations, created multiple apps, websites and other sources to manipulate people voices.

Wake up guys, such activity should and will be banned in every country.


> such activity should and will be banned in every country.

You're delusional if you believe that the current Russian government doesn't manipulate people's votes already. https://ruxpert.ru/images/3/3a/146%25.jpg


Russia is a democratic state where people elect their leaders.

US is a totalitarian state where people are manipulated by oligarch-controlled mass-media, with non-transparent voting process.

Oh, sorry, it's the other way around. I always confuse one with another.


I see very little difference in the two countries. Big money and powerful people control the narrative and social structures of both countries to the point that the average person has little say in the outcomes of elections.


Most people will never wake up. The system's very existence relies on it. Or alternatively, our system arises from humans being basically apes with very strong in-group/out-group instincts.


Guarantee people most outraged about this are same people who wanted to yeet Mango Mussolini from Facebook and Twitter for being Russian agent. None of them are having a lonely thought in their head how the said companies might have oppressed domestic opposition and if they did it's Good & Beautiful.


To me it is hillarious that the thing called "Smart Vote" (the one that was banned) means actually "vote for whoever you are told to vote for by the Navalny team". I only found it out a few days ago. This doesn't sound really smart to me at all. Quite the opposite. "Mindless vote" would be more correct. It doesn't care about the candidate's person, political agenda, views, biography, anything. It doesn't care about the party you are told to vote for, either. You should just vote for X or Y, for party X or party Y, and that's it :)


It's "smart" when compared to the previously employed strategy that was "vote for anyone, but United Russia candidate". Now the idea is to consolidate opposition votes for a single candidate in every electoral district that has the best chance to win over the main governmental candidate.

The list of candidates has very little to do with ideological support for the actual candidates on it. Most of them I'd say are crooks and shills themselves, but they are not THE crooks and shills the government wants to see in the State Duma.


Am I missing something here? It just sounds like a digital voting guide. Political parties in the US publish these all the time.


It's a guide, OK, I agree. But there's nothing smart about it.


This is pseudo preferential voting.

Preferential voting is much better voting system as you vote is not wasted on candidate who will not pass election threshold.

Smart here means the vote is used to make a difference and not get wasted


Yeah, that's how low the bar is in Russia. Anyone but Putin.

Which really won't help much, since his friends are everywhere. The whole structure is rotten. But it could start something at least.


This is how low the bar is for Navalny and his team, specifically. Nothing more, nothing less.


Putin for another 20 years. Nothing more, nothing less. God I hate that phrase. Of course there's so much more to it ffs.


Thanks to proprietary, centralized, vendor-controlled app stores.


It was less widely reported that Telegram, supposedly independent messenged closed access to Telegram bot which Navalny team tried to use to replace these apps. They claimed it was done in compliance to russian laws.

Source (in russian) https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bot...


Why don't they just make a hundred new accounts and upload it under different names?

The government could do the same - but if Google and Apple were really concerned about democracy, they could just delete the fake entries faster than the real entries.


At this moment, smart vote list is available on github only. Funny, isn't it?


What did the app do? The article quotes a tweet which describes it as a "Russian strategic voting app", but I can't imagine what that would involve. Does it send you notifications to go vote or something?


I imagine that this is less about the app than it is about controlling Google and Apple. Imagine Yandex was hosting Smart Voting apps for US elections


In my native language, "to russian it up" is an idiom meaning "to fuck things up".


Let me guess, at some point you were thoroughly russianed.


They tried to, but they russianed it.


Do you know of such city which used to be called Viipuri? What a nice city, wasn't it?


It’s curious that Putin in simultaneously able to subvert the election, but is scared enough about his flagging popularity that he feels the need to block this strategy.


How would this title be worded if it was Biden blocking a Trump app?

Lawmakers stop GOP attempt to rig election.

Wise technosleuths uncover plot to fix election.

No, stopping the app isn't stealing the election.

Now let's flip sides:

Trump disenfranchises minority voters.

Trump kills app designed to help underserved communities.

Machine learning can identify left and right news sources, this tells me they are not news but biased propaganda. It would be nice to have reporting without bias and use the same word playbook for every story.


I'd like to give a bit of perspective on what "smart voting" actually does and why there's reason to dislike it even if you dislike current Russian government.

Let's say there is a niche party or organization, which is ineligible to participate in the elections. So they get this bright idea: let's figure out who's the most proficient challenger in every district and recommend people vote for them. Seems like a decent way to shift the scales, but with plain majority voting the plan would not change the winner, only the margin he'd win by.

The key point is though: those challengers are working hard to improve their election results, in many cases they are really nice people who really want to do some good (in many other cases, they want to do some good only to themselves, but that's beyond the point). So they campaign and meet people and talk and generally work hard to get their ideas to the public. On election night they manage to snip another 5 percent points on top of their previous result from the juggernaught which is the local United Russia's candidate. They did good, right?

What happens now is that instead of talking about how they worked hard and tried to do some good and whatever, suddenly people start tweeting and telegramming about a great success for "smart voting", which is deemed the only reason the opposition candidate has improved his percentage. People talk about how the niche party (which has done nothing apart from distributing a list of names) is the actual "people's winner of the elections" as they managed to "kick UR's ass" and "make Putin afraid". They don't talk about the challenger candidates, those become puppets for "smart voting" after the fact and without any option to not participate.

Now imagine you are this hard-working opposition candidate, robbed of your accomplishments in the public eye. What would you think of "smart voting" and people behind it?


You can’t cheer government rulings when it comes to some things (e.g. app store workings) and expect companies to obey, yet complain about them when it comes to others (… also app store workings) and expect companies to resist or exit the market.


…why? You mean the context doesn’t matter at all?


What was the problem with the Ap


I'm pretty sure if this would be in Nazi Germany then Apple and Google would supply locations of the Jews. Because it was "illegal" not to.

We are years away from the global fascists superpowers (with mass surveillance, AI, nuclear and bio weapons), but no one seems to care. Let's feed the beast even more.


There is a book about IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. Now, I have no illusion that Apple, Google, and co. would not do the same in the circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust


Their telegram bot also not working today (an election day). Wonder if Telegram also in compliance with Putin.


Considering Apple complied with this request, we can be absolutely 100% sure that they would never even consider complying with the request to abuse their “CSAM detection” system to find dissident content.

I’m just so sure of it.

They would never.


This is what was given up when people chose App Stores over the web. You want centralization and safety? You also get companies that must comply with local law.

And very often, the law doesn't give a shit for your freedom. Especially not outside the 'West'.


People will find a way to justify it. It is nothing new under the sun. Glances at 3310:)


https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

* I'm not affiliated with the product/company


Russian government is already preparing hashes of CSAM materials. This list of hashes will be distributed to a number of parties, that will do blocking/removal/reporting.


glances at pre-order


Tell me, which alternatives are you considering?


Instead of getting a 13 Pro with 512GB, I'll take the 256GB version.

That'll teach em a lesson!


My alternative is to use smartphone only in exceptional use cases, as banking apps or emergency calls.

For calls use simplest phone available. Actual phone calls are the best user experience. Emotionally fair and transparent. You don't have to write thousand emojis to express emotion. You don't wait someone to respond or ignore. Things are direct and effective.

On the app side of things. There is no app that I need and I don't have on my laptop. 4G LTE Mifi with VPN. Intel core 2 duo / PureOS (removed ME). I am fan of big and powerful desktops and multi-monitor setups. Recently I discovered my dream desktop computer: https://shorturl.at/apqP3 https://shorturl.at/ceB06 If I want a photo, I have a small camera. If I know I will shoot, I grab my Leica.

It is all about the information diet. I want my mind to be clear and my perceptions sharp.

Smartphone UX and small screens in general are not the best way to consume information. iPad was cool middle ground solution, but I cannot trust Apple or any closed source software anymore.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...


Some alternatives:

- optional: keep the current phone and refuse to upgrade it (a few months)

- get a pinephone

- check compatibility and get a rootable Android phone

- dumbphone and pocket camera


Pinephone is nowhere near feature compatible with either Android or iPhone platforms right now.


And neither of them are feature complete with Pine phone either which is the reason for this thread :-)

Actually owning your own phone to the point of deciding yourself what runs on it and what does not and being able to repair it easily are two huge features when you start to think about it.


Unfortunately, if you ask the average user whether they want detailed control of what runs on their phone or a Facebook app, they're going to go for the Facebook app.

Most users don't have any utility in detailed control. They don't even know what to do with it.


> Most users don't have any utility in detailed control. They don't even know what to do with it.

Can I chime in and say that:

- Surprisingly many are getting uncomfortable with the current situation.

- If this had been our collective conclusion 20 years ago we wouldn't be sitting here working on blazingly fast Linux dev machines running dirt cheap servers in vast clouds, we would have been stuck with Windows (and probably an inferior version to Windows 10, since without competition there's less pressure to perform)


Most developers aren't most users. A little over 50% of developers use some variant of desktop Linux; total desktop Linux userbase is about 2% worldwide. The closest most users get to "using the Cloud" is checking their Gmail accounts or updating some shared company Google Docs.

Here in the rarefied air of HN, things look different than they do on the ground. Granted, developers have an outsized impact on what users will end up getting... But not by pretending PinePhone is anywhere near "ready for prime-time." I have one sitting on my desk right now; it's not. Rather, we should recognize the vast gap of work that needs to be done to get there and put the time in to get it there if we believe it's the right direction (and also recognize that if it's going to succeed in the marketplace, a lot of users are going to want something in PinePhone that's as easy to use for discovery and app maintenance as an app store; app stores introduced to users the concept "There is one simple and effective way to put apps on your phone," and they don't want to go back to the DIY days of yore. On the plus side, nothing about PinePhone requires only one app store).


https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

* I'm not affiliated with the product/company


I'll be getting rid of my Android device once the PinePhone is back in stock. I only ever use my phone for SMS, calls and maybe a flashlight here and there, so it should be a pretty comfortable transition.


Alternatives to what exactly?

A lot of people have reached the point of needing an iPhone. Nope, Android won't do, because it's not an iPhone. Too much friction and learning curve to ever use anything else than an iPhone. Game over.


Do people really fetishize the blue bubble this much?


What is "the blue bubble"?


Idiocy where people ridicule you for not having iMessage (and its features) because you have an Android phone and someone sends you messages on iMessage, it shows up as green for them, which creates a sense of inferiority in their eyes. (Android doesn't support iMessage unless you use something like AirMessage which requires a Mac, and iMessage to iMessage shows messages sent in blue, but SMS to iMessage, which is what Android users can use, shows a green message when iMessage users send messages).

It is a clever marketing ploy where Apple users make Android users feel bad for using a product because the colour of their messages is different.

Anecdotally (and randomly), I've seen "the blue bubble" can put additional pressure on males to get iPhones since "women use iPhones more, so I don't stand a chance if I have the green bubble."

I hate iMessage. Because of the blue bubble phenomenon, there are a lot of people in the US with iPhones just out of the need (pressure) to use iMessage. iPhones are ridiculously popular with American teenagers (probably over 90% usage in rich areas) and I've heard it isn't necessarily about iPhones being better. No, it is literally about iMessage and winning the social approval of their peers.

Since they have iMessage, suddenly you need to too. And so on.

I don't believe marketing or features or whatnot is what makes the iPhone popular. No, it is the crushing social pressure of iMessage.

F*ck iMessage.


After this ridiculous FaceTime bug [1] in 2019, I've disabled FaceTime permanently. Now, hackers are using zero-click exploits on iMessaging by crafting malformed images/pdfs thereby breaking the media notification parser, breaking out of the sandbox, breaking out of BlastDoor, hooking into the Springboard.app which has entitlements that grant access to everything on an iOS device. Jeff Bezos and Joshua Wong have experienced first hand how broken iPhone's security is.

I have an iPhone and iPad, and recently have been experiencing phantom rings. My iPhone/iPad would ring simultaneously for half a second and then flash "Unknown Audio" (instead of "Unknown Caller" or the caller ID). And, for phone calls, there's supposed to be a green phone icon, but these calls have blue phone icons. And the notifications don't stay in the notification screen. They're gone after the ring. I can't tell whether my phone's on the fritz or my data is being exfiltrated. Last weekend, I received 3 phantom calls in a span of 5 minutes. My phone can't be trusted for FaceTime calls and iMessages. Fucking irony.

We cannot grant absolute trust to any one entity. Do not fully trust Apple. Do not fully trust Google. Do not fully trust not your government. Granting them absolute trust grants them absolute power that can be corrupted against you absolutely. Even though Google is a privacy invasive company, at least Google doesn't have power over Android to the extent that Apple has power over iOS. Android users can still side-load the Navalny app because Google built this weakness into their system. Apple's complete authoritarian power over iOS means users don't have power to choose. Prefer to use apps/services like Signal that cannot kowtow to authoritarian regimes because these kinds of apps/services have little power that they can themselves abuse.

But actually, fuck apps, fuck serfdom. Prefer the open web. Prefer distributed systems. Self host.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18201383/apple-facetime-b...


My wife and I actually experience something similar that had a real impact on our social life's. Android and group iMessage do not play nice. The groups get "sharded" for seemly no reason. As a result, our friends stop added us to group messages and we were no longer in the loop for social gathering and "causal banter".

One of those instances where if I had an iphone, I actually think I would have developed closer relationship in the group. It's very off-putting to think about the impact of brand choice.


Wait until AR glasses are big, where it I'll start happening in person. Can't see the object everyone is pointing to, manipulating, and talking about? Wrong brand.

Since black people have Android more often, Apple is basically bringing back segregation.


Class segregation (by economic level and within genders mayhaps), and racial segregation. And one could argue with the OPs "sharding" it is already in effect now.


Now I'm very thankful Apple never got that kind of adoption in Europe.


Truly, what kind of emotionally insecure absurdity would you have to be shamefully allowing into your mind to give the least shit about the color of your message texts and your phone type? I can't imagine taking seriously anyone who shames me for something so vapid. Why even bother hating iMessage and etc? Why not just.... Not give a shit either way? In a very young girl or boy it's just maaaaybe slightly understandable (until a bit of good parenting intervenes to put it into perspective for the silliness it is) but for any functional adult? Ridiculous.



Wonder how many orange-man-bad posters is having a gear move in their head and wonder how many times they complied oppressing domestic opposition since 2016.

Probably don't want to think too much about that, much better be outraged about far away distant lands as your moral sword.


As far as I understand those apps were illegally gathering and storing personal data - real names and addresses - storing them abroad - which is no-no not only in Russia but in EU (GDPR).

In terms of voting - people can still lookup candidates proposed by Navalny's team online without breaking the law.

Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia.


> Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia.

It's not surprising at all. The communist party is the second-largest party here (polling at around ~20% in the last polls I saw). The point of the Navalny app is to highlight the candidates most likely to win against Единая Россия (Putin's party) in each district, which will usually be the candidate of the second largest party (with some exceptions).

(Just providing this information, I don't support Navalny)


No they weren't. The app doesn't need the name of the user at any step.

It wasn't storing the address either - it just has a search field where you input your address any time you need to use it.


The Navalny's team promised to remove personal data tracking only on 8th of September 2021 (i.e. https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora...). And the case against the app was opened way before that.


For curious - LinkedIn is banned in Russia for exactly the same reason.


Apple is in no position whatsoever to fight governments.

The amount of money and power they wield in the market and society is huge, but it doesn't even rank in competition to the power of the state. (For scale, the US, just a single country, has spent, only on the military, 4.3x the entire market cap of Apple ($2410B) since the iPhone was introduced.)

They have to do whatever the CCP tells them to do, as they are completely, inescapably beholden to the millions of people near the factories that produce 100% of the iPhones and iPads ever that hold machine guns (the PLA). Apple cannot exist without the consent and cooperation of the CCP; they will ban any emoji, text message content, camera content, VPN app, or protest coordination app that they are told to.)

(Yes, the 100% is slight hyperbole - Apple has started assembling a relatively small number of iOS devices in other places, but my point stands.)

Same goes for any large market, like Russia or the USA. If the state comes knocking, Apple and Google do not have a choice.

Even their options for public resistance are limited.

Remember, corporations are only allowed to exist or engage in trade with the consent of the state.


While true, they (and other companies) do market themself heavy as liberal&young™ with all of theirs twitter logos (such as in pride month).

Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China.

And as it seems, they prefer profit. Which kinda make all their marketing talk as purely virtue signaling.


Those that fool themselves with marketing fluff are the ones to blame.

"Do no evil" from Google, or "Think differently" from Apple, really, how naive one must be to think the end game isn't only about money and keeping the board happy about exponential growing sales?


> Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China.

If Apple didn't cooperate with China, there would be no iPhones, and Apple wouldn't meaningfully exist. iPhones are nearly exclusively manufactured in China. All the chips in iPhones, iPads, and now the most important macs are exclusively manufactured immediately adjacent to China, in a territory claimed by China.

China is the iPhone.


Just say 'Taiwan' it's not hard. It's OK, HN is in America.


Taiwan is irrelevant to the point I'm making. As the Taiwanese people are acutely aware, if push comes to shove, that supply chain comes under the physical control of the CCP/PLA in single-digit hours (albeit in a nonfunctional state).

The CCP has veto power over the production of all iPhones and iPads (and soon Macs) in the whole world. This has little/nothing to do with Taiwan, other than their unfortunate proximity to China.

If Apple wants to continue existing in any meaningful form, they must presently do what the CCP wants.

This goes the same for selling their devices in any given jurisdiction, such as Russia, to keep this on topic for TFA.


Well you literally brought Taiwan into the point you were making.

(And no, Taiwan can not be taken in matter of hours).


The latent power of big tech is incredible. Apple is so awash with cash, they could probably just stop doing business in a country without taking much damage. I don't know how big the russian market is for them - but for many countries smaller than that, they could dicate terms. Imagine the CEOs of a couple of tech companies meet for brunch, and decide to do something about human rights in order to feel good. So they tell country XY, get your human rights affairs in order, or, lol, no modern cell phones for you. (China would surely step in after some time, but look how much trouble Huawei was having with the sanctions and without Google apps recently outside of China.)

Also, consider that Apple, Google, Microsoft essentially have a backdoor on every piece of consumer electronics. They can push updates and do anything they want. Granted, this is a one-shot thing and might be ruinous for the company if abused, but if I was a foreign government I would be terrified.

I bet there are a lot of beind the scenes power struggles going on - the US supplies a lot of critical software, the PRC lots of hardware, Tawian has TSMC, Europe has ASML (and this is just the tech sector). Nobody wants to use their nuclear options, but with every public development you see, these powers are priced in. Probably, Google and Apple had long conversations with the state department, and somewhere the decision was made to comply with the Russian government. But the result could have easily been different.


Agreed. Remember the "good old days" where corporation would fight governments tooth and nail for their interests?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company


Apple is most certainly in a position to influence government. They have a device in the hands of more than a billion people who spend hours per day staring at it.

They absolutely have a responsibility to fight for human rights and freedom. By your logic, no one would ever engage in any kind of civil obedience and no one would be able to effect change: the government, after all, is also more powerful than any individual protestor and many of them are risking their livelihoods or even their lives by protesting.


The most famous advocate of civil disobedience in the US got executed as a result of his prominence.

(In an ultimate irony, Tim Apple keeps a picture of him (MLK) on the wall in his office, alongside a picture of the guy who signed the order as Attorney General to have the FBI put him under 24/7 surveillance (RFK), which resulted in the FBI sending him (MLK) anonymous letters attempting to blackmail him into suicide.)

Apple knows which way the wind blows. Even if they wanted to engage in the maximum amount of resistance that is feasible/practicable, that's not really very much, especially when an organization friendly to the US military has literally every single rich/connected person and the entirety of the executive, legislature, and judiciary under bulk surveillance at all times.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/tim-cook-barack-obama...

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/18/apples-warrant-canary-disappea...


> They have a device in the hands of more than a billion people who spend hours per day staring at it.

Including 99% of Russian legislators. They're suckers for luxury.

To be fair, though, executing political pressure through this kind of means might raise certain red flags back in US, even if that only happens in Russia, one time.




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