51–60 of 673 posts
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Apple has to comply with local laws, regardless of who authored the code.
Yes, but they are not forced to add new features, only to remove, which is kinda big difference.
Is this a removal of a feature?
There's no way Apple or any company to act as an extralegal entity in another country. Every time something like that comes up, I'm baffled by the expectation that an American company will impose the American values or American laws in another country. Back in the day when the internet felt like international thing not bound by any local laws, that was possible to some degrees but legislators caught up with it. It is…
The outrage is perfectly justified.
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So the circumvention is as easy as changing region, installing the app, changing region back?
Sorry, are you asking a clarifying question or trying to suggest that makes it OK?
Surely this can be trivially implemented as a website, in a matter of hours, no? It looks like the mistake Navalny's team made was trusting one method of distribution of information. Even worse, trusting a method with a central and corporate choke point.
That aside, I'm disgusted, but not surprised, at Google's actions.
It is time to ask Google and Apple if they were asked to actually remove Telegram from stores, when russian government was trying to ban it. It wasn't removed at the time, and all sources that Apple and Google were demanded to block it in Russia pointed to press-release on RosKomNadzor itself. I suspect that it is possible that all this Telegram block in Russia was a PR campaign coordinated with Russian government to…
There's no way Apple or any company to act as an extralegal entity in another country. Every time something like that comes up, I'm baffled by the expectation that an American company will impose the American values or American laws in another country. Back in the day when the internet felt like international thing not bound by any local laws, that was possible to some degrees but legislators caught up with it. It is…
Freedom from oppression is not an American value, and Americans need to stop thinking that. It is a universal value, cherished by people all over the world, including in Russia. The russian people is being taken advantage of by a small oligarchy that steals their resources, and the app that Google and Apple removed was supposed to help them transition to more democracy during the upcoming elections. The outrage is pe…
You should Google Afghanistan, or pretty much any Middle-Eastern country that was liberated by the Americans. See how well it ended.
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Yes, but they are not forced to add new features, only to remove, which is kinda big difference.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/16/apple-to-offer-governme... Is this a removal of a feature?
Apps you can decline? And uninstall? We are talking about quite different things here. Not to mention every Android with pre-installed bloatware.
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No, if (and only if) your Google Play region is set to Russia, the app isn’t accessible, not even via a direct link. This is how a local ban works: while it isn’t strictly speaking deletion as the files are manifestly still on Google’s servers, the users from the relevant country are locked out.
So the circumvention is as easy as changing region, installing the app, changing region back?
Two things of note, however:
- It’s all well and good fooling around with APKs (the devs aren’t completely opposed to just publishing them as files, either), but the primary value of the centralized repos is as a seed distribution mechanism for censorship circumvention: if something completely unforeseen happens and none of the pre-arranged responses work, you know you’ll just be able to push an update through the repo, and the Russian government would have to cripple most devices in the country to prevent that. That no longer holds.
(Google Docs was blocked via SNI sniffing on cellular networks for about half a day yesterday, though, so I’ll have to revise my estimates of what they’re willing to break.)
- The primary issue is tactical voting lists for the parliamentary election (they published them on Docs as well, see?). That election started this morning, Friday 17, and will end on Sunday 19. After that point most of this will be moot. So any approach that you can’t inform most of your users about in that time span is useless.
(This is in contrast to the protracted battles over Telegram some time ago, which took place over a couple of years.)
Curse the US polititians and press for promoting the “foreign election interference” meme, now US companies are forced to comply or the Russian government will be able to cry hypocrisy. The equivalence is invalid when considered in full, of course, but the slogan was “foreigner influencing elections = bad”, and with that level of detail it is valid. That’s the problem with slogans: they eliminate nuance.
(The EU slogan, “foreign tech company flouting local law = bad”, would also be exploitable here, but thankfully it didn’t penetrate that far. Note that I support most of the specific values of “law” this slogan was originally instantiated with!)