Russia restricts opposition election voting app • Hacker News Board

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#171

Post by swayvil » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

ookdatnog wrote: post #156

swayvil wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that platform was owned by the government, or in the public domain. Or not owned by anybody, like the space around our planet. Then such shenanigans would definitely be called censorship and a violation. But because it's privately owned, it isn't. The way it hinges on who's name is on the receipt. Which is just a legal artifact. Seems unrealistic. I mean, the more realistic take is : yes, our whole population is d…

My wording was a bit careless in my previous post: I didn't distinguish between censorship and free speech violations. If YouTube deletes your video for violating ToS, that can be called censorship (in the same way that a forum moderator removing your post can be called censorship), but it's not infringing on your right to free speech. This is because your right to free speech doesn't entail a right to any particular…

We might ask what good the right to free speech achieves.

And then we would ask if the behavior in question interferes with the achievement of that good.

Thus we avoid the merely semantic tangles.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#172

Post by literallyaduck » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

How would this title be worded if it was Biden blocking a Trump app?

Lawmakers stop GOP attempt to rig election.

Wise technosleuths uncover plot to fix election.

No, stopping the app isn't stealing the election.

Now let's flip sides:

Trump disenfranchises minority voters.

Trump kills app designed to help underserved communities.

Machine learning can identify left and right news sources, this tells me they are not news but biased propaganda. It would be nice to have reporting without bias and use the same word playbook for every story.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#173

Post by bserge » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

sedan_baklazhan wrote: post #167

To me it is hillarious that the thing called "Smart Vote" (the one that was banned) means actually "vote for whoever you are told to vote for by the Navalny team". I only found it out a few days ago. This doesn't sound really smart to me at all. Quite the opposite. "Mindless vote" would be more correct. It doesn't care about the candidate's person, political agenda, views, biography, anything. It doesn't care about t…

Yeah, that's how low the bar is in Russia. Anyone but Putin.

Which really won't help much, since his friends are everywhere. The whole structure is rotten. But it could start something at least.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#174

Post by BrandoElFollito » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

akho wrote: post #107

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> France, apparently, is in a situation where nobody cares enough to enforce

It is strictly enforced in France. But Internet knows no borders so the statistics of votes (which is is illegal to provide in France during the voting day) are available outside of France (usually in French speaking Belgian / Swiss online newspapers, or Twitter/FB/...).

My point is that a country cannot expect that other countries (and services in these countries) will follow their rules.

> If your purpose is to signal things, being morally clean is more important than the number of votes you manage to achieve. If a law is reasonable, and a norm in multiple other well-regarded systems, it makes sense to comply.

I am not sure I understand that point.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#175

Post by salawat » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #65

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".

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 s…

You're absolutely right. As an American, it is shameful the direction we've been going all in the name of 'safety'. If the "most free country on Earth" starts clamping down this hard, and spends copious amounts of time engineering forms of technical censorship/suppression, there is little or no reason to expect anywhere else to not do any different.

To be frank, America has lost a strategic asset in the form of being an attractive place to come for the best and brightest to try to realize something unfettered; and we're not doing a damn thing to export anything that creates any semblance of assurance that the American experiment's results are any better than anywhere else's.

The bar has been lowered so far it isn't even funny.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#176

Post by vbezhenar » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

gatronicus wrote: post #168

vbezhenar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it. 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 d…

> Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it.

You don't need to mail links, you just need to mail required information. Asking Google to filter out some specific e-mail (which could be somewhat randomized for every recipient) probably will not work.

> You need to go through a whitelisted mail service (MailChimp, ...) which is another block point.

Russia can't ask US service to deny making business with US citizen (for example). It's completely outside of their territory.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#177

Post by kaladin-jasnah » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #158

cjonas wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait until AR glasses are big, where it I'll start happening in person. Can't see the object everyone is pointing to, manipulating, and talking about? Wrong brand. Since black people have Android more often, Apple is basically bringing back segregation.

Class segregation (by economic level and within genders mayhaps), and racial segregation. And one could argue with the OPs "sharding" it is already in effect now.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#178

Post by salawat » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

ookdatnog wrote: post #31

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…

Parler isn't banned from the internet, it's banned from AWS and mobile app stores. These bans weren't ordered by the government either.

You don't see a problem with infrastructure providers cultivating vendor lock-in in order to wield the ace-in-the-hole of deplatcorming when the time is right a problem?

Given, it was Gab and Parker's problem for not going multi-cloud; but there is something specifically untenable to me about this whole "my entire infrastructure is now dead to you in 48 hours" sort of thing that Gab and Parler went through. Yes, it's a matter of contract law because they accepted the ToS as is, but I don't see anywhere that actually services alternative terms pipelines either.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#179

Post by gnull » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

akho wrote: post #101

gnull wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that won't prevent the person from being elected. Doing it after comes with many drawbacks.

Doing that before the election (I assume your plan, if you were Putin, is to have all 225 “recommended” candidates withdraw?) is more difficult than subverting the, very optimistically, 30 that will get elected.

There is no dichotomy here.

If you know the candidates beforehand, you can bully them before the election, see who wins nevertheless, and bully those again.

> to have all 225 “recommended” candidates withdraw?

Having some of them withdraw is also useful, it's a numbers game.

Re: Russia restricts opposition election voting app

#180

Post by ookdatnog » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #171

ookdatnog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wording was a bit careless in my previous post: I didn't distinguish between censorship and free speech violations. If YouTube deletes your video for violating ToS, that can be called censorship (in the same way that a forum moderator removing your post can be called censorship), but it's not infringing on your right to free speech. This is because your right to free speech doesn't entail a right to any particular…

We might ask what good the right to free speech achieves. And then we would ask if the behavior in question interferes with the achievement of that good. Thus we avoid the merely semantic tangles.

Sure, go ahead.