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Russia restricts opposition election voting app

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Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#61

Post by strogonoff »

baybal2 wrote: post #9
codesnik wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#62

Post by anrtx »

killingtime74 wrote: post #33
hkai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Americans can ban their own opposition from their internet (Parler, Gab, and countless people blocked on mainstream platforms), then it's very hard to argue that the authoritarian Russian government shouldn't ban their opposition from the internet. Perhaps some on-chain solutions will help circumvent the American and Russian restrictions in a few years. Solana sounds like a good candidate for this sort of platform…

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.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#64

Post by pentae »

maga wrote: post #49
lotusmars wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

[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

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#65

Post by peoplefromibiza »

lotusmars wrote: post #42
hkai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Americans can ban their own opposition from their internet (Parler, Gab, and countless people blocked on mainstream platforms), then it's very hard to argue that the authoritarian Russian government shouldn't ban their opposition from the internet. Perhaps some on-chain solutions will help circumvent the American and Russian restrictions in a few years. Solana sounds like a good candidate for this sort of platform…

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".

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.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#66

Post by jsn »

leppr wrote: post #36
jsn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#67

Post by tazjin »

egao1980 wrote: post #56

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)

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#68

Post by luxuryballs »

sgjohnson wrote: post #63

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.

glances at pre-order

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#69

Post by gnull »

Sideyon wrote: post #55
gnull wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#70

Post by jsn »

maccard wrote: post #37
jsn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.
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