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Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

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651–660 of 673 posts

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. Withdraw the app and you go to jail. Don’t withdraw the app and your Russian employees go to jail

No - this is elementary game theory. By precommitting to "if I withdraw the app I will go to jail", then the Russian threat would become ineffective and they wouldn't make it to begin with. Granted, the real world is more complicated but this is equivalent of using the strategy of disabling your steering wheel before playing a game of chicken.

It's not a game of chicken. Russia is well prepared to collide - did that many times. Threats won't work - actually jailing important Russians abroad for supporting Russian organizations under sanctions will.

Direct action is the primary working approach here.

For those reasons Google and Apple should be considered aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal as of now - but how well it looks?

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#652
post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. Withdraw the app and you go to jail. Don’t withdraw the app and your Russian employees go to jail

The only winning move is not to play (i.e. don't have offices in authoritarian states)

Bingo. Those who do have offices should also feel heat from unfair competition, so this should be legalized somehow.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#653
post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - this is elementary game theory. By precommitting to "if I withdraw the app I will go to jail", then the Russian threat would become ineffective and they wouldn't make it to begin with. Granted, the real world is more complicated but this is equivalent of using the strategy of disabling your steering wheel before playing a game of chicken.

It's not a game of chicken. Russia is well prepared to collide - did that many times. Threats won't work - actually jailing important Russians abroad for supporting Russian organizations under sanctions will. Direct action is the primary working approach here. For those reasons Google and Apple should be considered aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal as of now - but how well it looks?

> Google and Apple [are] aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal … - but how well it looks?

Meh, no quite as bad as the US quietly making Russia its second largest supplier of oil, no?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/russia-ca...

If you want to starve Crazy Ivan of his forex…

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but the Hunter Biden stuff was a shameless distraction with no real substance. Uh, that's really not a strong affirmative justification for taking active measures to stop people from using your platform to share a story. And of course the real problem is not simply that the story was suppressed, but that we all know that media platforms do not in fact have a blanket policy against reporting on "shameless distraction…

They do have policies against spreading misinformation.

Yes, and those policies are not evenly applied. That's the issue. iirc Twitter caught some flak for initially justifying the suppression of the story based on the fact that it had come from "hacking" the laptop, and then only let up after it was pointed out that there were many other examples of stories like this that were not suppressed.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#655
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the US constitutional system remotely relevant in this discussion?

Because every political system has elements of "authoritarianism"/decisions being made by unelected officials. For instance, we often criticize Iran as being authoritarian, but compared to many of our allies elsewhere, Iran is actually relatively democratic, even if they have authoritarian "checks" just like we do with the Supreme Court.

I have a hard time understanding what you mean about Iran:

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

Seems like a dictatorship to me.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this threaten your liberty?

You know how posting nudes gets you banned from social media, or gets your google account banned and you loose access to all your files on Drive? The same will happen with physical devices that you bought - a car, an electric bike, a smart coffee machine. Imagine a car detecting you are smoking dope, or taking an issue with your trip to the abortion clinic. You think it's not gonna happen, its too absurd? I just had…

Nothing in the new Apple scanner relates to what you are talking about. There is a absolutely no limitation on storing and transmitting porn and other types of nude material, as long as it’s legal.

You can even store copyrighted porn, they won’t try and stop you.

If a car could detect if the driver was smoking dope that would be excellent. I don’t think you have the right to drive around blunted.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#657
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am of course comparing to the USSR, not modern Russia. Pretty much the entire "progressive" wing of the party, with its anti-capitalism and fostering massive welfare state dependency, as well as the recent focus on "oppression" and "power", and purity testing. I am pretty meh/cynical about the economic aspects, actually; sure, I think these are bad ideas, but unless they run the thing entirely into the ground, I be…

> USSR has collapsed when I was 7, but I was still brainwashed enough that I remember asking my parents about the English Premier League - how come they have soccer in England? Uhuh. So in 1991 you asked about an institution that wasn't created until 1992, because you believed it couldn't exist under capitalism even though it's actually explicitly a capitalist endeavour to make the richest clubs in English soccer eve…

Is that really your answer? If I were to respond in the same spirit, I could only suggest you watch less RT or I dunno, read less Jacobin.

I don't remember what it was called back then, I asked about the league in general. Spartak Moscow had a good run in Champions League that year and that was probably the year I started watching soccer. I know now how leagues are organized, but Soviet teams were at least officially amateurs, and associated with social organization (e.g. CSKA is an "army team" and Dynamo is a "cop team", etc.); even in late 90ies/aughts, opposing fans still used e.g. "musor" (Russian cop insult that means "trash", kinda like "pig" in the US) to yell at Dynamo fans. Or "myaso" ("meat") at Spartak, cause it was associated with a food factory for some time ages ago. So, I didn't understand how "workers" can play soccer when they are exploited. Didn't occur to me that you can get paid to do it and not be "oppressed". Which is the idea you get from even childrens' books, e.g. Neznayka on the Moon, which basically describes how bad capitalism is directly; and others more generally. As well as patriotic movies etc, incl. on how taking stuff from "bourgeoius exploiters" and later from "kulaks" was great and noble.

It's not even about individual books, facts, etc. it's the general outlook in life that one gets when constantly exposed to this. That is where struggle sessions come from (source: former coworkers who immigrated from China as adults). The economic aspects of the ideology also eventually produce this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus#Characteristic.... This slow conversion of everything to a similar collectivist, morally-outraged ideology via schools and colleges is what, as I see, might be a risk in the US. Hence the recent changes in Democratic party.

Currently it's a relatively small, if loud, part of the Democratic party, but it is clearly ascendant, especially with younger generation. The reason for that is hardly some horrors of "late stage capitalism" (again, I have direct experience with early stages ;) and numbers also don't lie - millennial per-capita wealth tracks boomers by age, the housing to income ratio in the US is one of the lowest in the developed world, poor Americans have more disposable income than middle class Europeans, etc.). It's mostly propaganda, and maybe a somewhat increased sense of entitlement (also seen in e.g. grade inflation). Both feed into general envy, when one believes the only ways to get more are dishonest or evil - it's a very Soviet sentiment btw, and I hear it all the time, incl. in person in Seattle.

Regardless of the cause, this would literally be the last thing I would ever support. Under a dumb government, individuals can still thrive (one great thing about trump era was how laughably bad he was at achieving most of his agenda).

EDIT: Remove some stuff I added in the prior edit, this is too long :) EDIT2: Make shorter yet.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, why not send actual CSAM then, so that they are actually caught? Getting them into review just causes them inconvenience. Because that requires possessing illegal images, while legal pornography that also happens to cause a hash collision with NeuralHash doesn't. Again, no one at Apple is reviewing the source image. They're reviewing obfuscated derivative images, and then informing law enforcement if they su…

Why would the police raid you based on blurry versions of completely legal images? And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stupid system. In any case, your scenario sounds pretty far fetched. Even if it actually works, I wouldn’t say it’s a major blocker.

> Why would the police raid you based on blurry versions of completely legal images?

Because they have a reasonable suspicion that they're illegal images, and it's quite literally job of the police to collect evidence to determine whether or not a suspect can be charged with a crime or not.

> And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stupid system.

Are you saying that Apple built a system that can detect CSAM, and then chose to build a system for distributing and viewing said illegal material, considering that the acts of distributing and viewing CSAM are both very, very illegal?

Again, it isn't Apple's job to determine what's CSAM or not, that's the job of the police and courts. Apple's obligation is to report what they believe could be CSAM to authorities, who will take the investigation from there.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the police raid you based on blurry versions of completely legal images? And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stupid system. In any case, your scenario sounds pretty far fetched. Even if it actually works, I wouldn’t say it’s a major blocker.

> Why would the police raid you based on blurry versions of completely legal images? Because they have a reasonable suspicion that they're illegal images, and it's quite literally job of the police to collect evidence to determine whether or not a suspect can be charged with a crime or not. > And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stup…

>Are you saying that Apple built a system that can detect CSAM, and then chose to build a system for distributing and viewing said illegal material, considering that the acts of distributing and viewing CSAM are both very, very illegal?

I'm saying that I'm pretty sure they will not turn you in to the police for possession of child porn without being damn sure that's what it is. How do you think the other FAANGs do it? I have never heard of anyone falsely reported for CSAM by Facebook for example, have you? Why would it be different for Apple?

I really don't think you are being honest about this.

Re: Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With regards to CSAM, I think the same applies. After all the CSAM issue only exists because the US government has decided that invasive monitoring is the only way to counter CSAM. No it hasn't. There is no legislation that the government passed or enforces that says Apple must scan people's private data on their devices for CSAM. Apple decided to do that all on their own.

But I read from that guy mike Hearn , the early Bitcoin dev that it's like a reverse search. They check the csam database and compare to what is in your files, sounds good at first, but, big concern is...what if governments start to add other, unrelated data to get rid of people who cause political friction and other undesired elements as per their government policies?

> what if governments start to add other, unrelated data to get rid of people who cause political friction and other undesired elements as per their government policies?

That's possibly the most inefficient way anyone can imagine. If they can control Apple, they can just tell them to search Mail.app and Photos.app. What you are proposing is a Rube Goldberg machine.

And I'm 99% certain various agencies are already reading all your emails, with or without Apple's help. They are not hiding that they are spying on Swedish citizens, with the help of our intelligence services. Pretty sure they spy on you as well.

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