161–170 of 673 posts
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Not really; Youtube has a mechanism for geographically restricting videos. Germans could talk for hours about it ;)
Two different things; removing something from everyone versus blocking something from specific userbase.
Reuters doesn't report this, but the government officials threatened the companies (Apple and Google) with jail time for their employees yesterday. After that the companies finally conceded. There's a short video fragment from the meeting of the government officials and the companies representatives. It's worth watching, especially if you come from a democratic nation. Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don…
> Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don't amount to "doing the right thing". IT IS very much a right thing. Don't want to work for such company? Leave! It's not an indentured slavery! Fuck, You Sergei Brin! You just screwed the most monumental display of courage, and determination by employees of Google Russia with a single pen stroke.
Do they have a PWA option? Or an ordinary web site? The world needs to get away from closed stores and back to open systems.
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…
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Even Navalny and his supporters are not calling for foreign companies to all pull out of Russia. What makes you think you know better what is good for the Russian people and the opposition groups than Russians and the opposition groups themselves? How many of Russia's Apple employees think Apple is "participating in dictatorship" by employing them? How many Russian citizens, including the political opposition, do you…
> What makes you think you know better what is good for the Russian people and the opposition groups than Russians and the opposition groups themselves? Because if regime's economy collapses, the regime will collapse sooner.
The thing is, that it's all very time-sensitive. And I expect pressure was unreasonably high. We have elections in Russia this weekend and Navalny app was used as a tool to coordinate protest voting. It is called "Smart Voting" by Navalny team and it is getting a lot of attention for upcomping elections. If Apple and Google would just be a little bit slower and complied next Monday :) Still there are more ways to coo…
It's not clear what does the app do? What is protest voting and how do you coordinate it ?
The idea is that instead of spreading votes and allowing the baddies to get the highest percentage (but not even close to 50%) and win, people would concentrate their votes.
If you are still in disbelief, that Kremlin would apply such an enormous pressure just to ban a simple list of voting recommendations, I want to remind you that this is exactly what happened last night: the recommendations were posted on Google Docs and Russia decided to ban the whole Google Docs service for that.
Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing. "Sorry, need a few more billion, so we're going to side with an oppressive regime against Democracy." Reminds me of a Dylan line "Will all the money you made buy back your soul?"
> Very sad when not even the massively rich will bother to do the right thing. The issue is Google and Apple isn't owned by one massively rich person. They are owned by tens of thousands of shareholders, many extremely wealthy but most small, including both individual investors but also pension funds and hedge funds, and the CEO & Board are legally obligated to act in their fiduciary interest.
Reuters doesn't report this, but the government officials threatened the companies (Apple and Google) with jail time for their employees yesterday. After that the companies finally conceded. There's a short video fragment from the meeting of the government officials and the companies representatives. It's worth watching, especially if you come from a democratic nation. Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don…
Pull out of the countries then. Participating in dictatorship is barely better than refusing to do so if that dictatorship will falsely imprison your employees.
Moving out of their country is just what dictatorships want. To do their thing undisturbed.
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Usually, we would sanction countries that did this. Maybe time to sanction companies? Otherwise, why do anyone expect them to do anything other than what is the most profitable? Its even illegal not to.
> Usually, we would sanction countries that did this. Maybe time to sanction companies? Otherwise, why do anyone expect them to do anything other than what is the most profitable? Its even illegal not to. Sanction for what exactly? Sanctions against nations don't work. USA has been sanctioning Cuba, Iran for half a century, no regime change whatsoever, it only hurt the population in these countries. USA are sanctioni…
But then the next logical step is to propose the action that actually works: sanctions against individuals. Perhaps that's what should be done - sanctions against individual decision-makers at Google and Apple?..