161–170 of 244 posts
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.
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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?
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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 wh…
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 re…
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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…
Source: observing one.
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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 th…
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…
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.
Source (in russian) https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bot...
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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.
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.
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.