Vkontakte Founder Flees Russia

I don't think there's any question about dominance, rather, it's about complacency.

If in the coming years Russia takes Ukraine, and or other countries like Latvia or Moldova, it'll be due to the West being complacent. Putin - or any dictator - 'winning' the first four rounds due to other nations having an attitude of not giving a shit, would match up with what typically has happened throughout history.

"The West has become so dominant" that Putin was able to successfully leverage anti-western feelings in a semi-democratic way for 15 years now, with no end in sight. "The West has become so dominant" that Bin Laden is still considered a hero by millions of people. "The West has become so dominant" that anti-Western sensibilities still hold solid democratic majorities across the Middle East and South America (Egypt etc).

Honestly, where did you get this feeling that "the West has become so dominant"? From a military standpoint, Europe is bent on disarming: not even the UK can now afford the sort of effort that a close US partnership still imposes, and the US government itself is busy cutting everything it can. In fact, only a massive threat from Putin might be able to revive European defence budgets. Most European armies are creaking, from a technological standpoint; the only European nation pumping fresh cash in their armed forces is Russia, which is why Putin can afford to be so bullish. 1995 was almost 20 years ago, the world has changed. Bin Laden and Afghanistan militias showed that "the West" is, in fact, long from being "dominant" both at the military and cultural level.

Actually the HN community is politically deeply divided. Complaints about its ideological bias thus tend to contradict one another. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7626420 says much the opposite.

You're right on the important thing, though. It's too much to expect HN to "objectively assess a topic that is under heavy propaganda from all sides". Objective assessment requires time, calm, reconsideration, and a high ratio of information per conclusion—plus a discourse in which people respond first to what is true in others' comments rather than to what is false in them. That bar is too high for an internet forum, or at least this one.

Before scuffing at Russia as a dictatorship, let's get real here. Which domestically-based, major internet businesses holding vast swathes of social network data are run by foreigners in any of two other key national markets: China and the US?

Well, can anyone name a single one? No? Aside from AMDOCS, which seems to have jumped ship to the US to spruce up its image, or perhaps to a limited extent (versus China Unipay's domestic, now regional, and increasingly global settlement network) Mastercard/Visa and SWIFT (for international settlements only) in China, I can't. Don't forget what happened to Google in China, and how Schmidt and his political buddy then turned around and visited that great bastion of human rights, North Korea, in a transparent snub to China. Don't forget how Microsoft's Skype hands over surveillance keys for its users' private communications to the Chinese government as a market entry strategy.

Politics (control) and business (profit) really have self-organized in to a transnational network of mutual back-scratching oligopolies the world over. Here in China, domestic alternatives to global networks are encouraged (largely by limiting international bandwidth, more rarely by outright censorship) to maximise state opportunities for control and surveillance. Russia seems the same. Perhaps it's time to re-read the preface to Cypherpunks... http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.

Recall that states are the systems which determine where and how coercive force is consistently applied.

The question of how much coercive force can seep into the platonic realm of the internet from the physical world is answered by cryptography and the cypherpunks’ ideals.

As states merge with the internet and the future of our civilization becomes the future of the internet, we must redefine force relations.

If we do not, the universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.

The sad thing is, as hyperbolic as this can sound to the uninitiated, it's reality.

how much of Facebook can you zero out before a sysadmin detects it? Probably not enough to matter, especially if there are backups which would lead to a headache for the Ops team but not much more.