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The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

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Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#151

Post by suslik »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #100
roenxi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reasonable argument that, as a minor nobody, we should rather use services from hostile countries. It isn't feasible for Russia to to compel someone in an English-speaking country to do something unpleasant. That is a lot more than can be said for the local police or politicians. Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

I don’t know, you’ve never heard of blackmail? $500 in Bitcoin to some wallet or we leak your search results to your church group?

How would they connect search results to an individual? Surely, a simple VPN, which is a basic internet hygene these days, prevents that.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#152

Post by mcpackieh »

whimsicalism wrote: post #118

I feel like this whole neo-cold war against China & Russia was never put up for a vote. Where can I vote against it? Please, let's all just get rich together. Governments democratize over time - the UK wasn't a democracy when it started out but over 1000 years of governance transitioned into being one. I suspect it will be much faster nowadays, but in the meantime - please no war.

This is how representative democracies generally work. Direct democracy, referendums and the like, are an exception to the rule.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#153

Post by justsomehnguy »

dijit wrote: post #111
simoncion wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many active 'master' branches at work, and many, many active 'master' branches on Github. By that measure, the movement to rename every 'master' branch to 'main' has been a resounding failure. (If you look at the events at the time it sprung up, you could pretty safely say that it was encouraged as a way to distract from the then-current "GitHub is doing business with US's ICE!" hatestorm, and man was it su…

If your only active metric is "all or nothing". Sure, there's a few. But the major git hosting platforms are only using 'main' as the default for new branches, and there is significant enough social stigma for new projects that it's preferred to use main. I don't have precise statistics, but I would happily wager that even though master was the default for so long that the majority of git repositories that have been…

> completely skew the demographic

By 'twitter brigades trying to smear your name'. Great success!

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#154

Post by speed_spread »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #116
roenxi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reasonable argument that, as a minor nobody, we should rather use services from hostile countries. It isn't feasible for Russia to to compel someone in an English-speaking country to do something unpleasant. That is a lot more than can be said for the local police or politicians. Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

I have a better way to frame this. A hostile country is less interested in low profile users and is not as able/willing to use the data it collects against the user. Committed tax evasion / breach of contract / fraud? Russia is much less likely to care than your own government.

You're framing it wrong. They _care_ very much. They even have a word for it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#155

Post by tri5635hhfgvv5r »

throw-ru-938 wrote: post #144
slashdev wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example?

There's probably no hard proof, but Russia is allegedly funding far-right movements like AfD and whatever Le Pen's party in France is now called. Also, see the career of Gerhard Schroeder, first German chancellor and then a top Gazprom official.

[flagged]

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#156

Post by mc32 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #91
kypro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example. Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives. I don't use image search much, but ye…

>but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...

It looks like the best solution is for “westerners” to use Yandex and everyone else to use Google or Bing and this way they can search with less targeted censoring on their terms.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#157

Post by VincentEvans »

0xDEF wrote: post #133
undefinedland wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Today, Russia is essentially also arguing for pre-emptive war but the reasoning - putting American missiles and forces in Ukraine - is a hell of a lot plausible. The Russian government invaded Ukraine because they consider it a fake nation that was illegitimately carved out of Russia. The "neo-Nazi NATO" excuses were just lies they made up for naive Westerners.

At this point it’s a chicken an egg problem - do russians really believe what you said, or are their beliefs a product of decades of internal propaganda?

I mean, yeah, probably many of them believe it now.

Personally, I lean towards this - after 20 years in power Putin is a defacto dictator perched on top of a government machine he constructed to keep him there. A machine composed of various pieces of corruption, propaganda, repressions, and bribes.

And like many dictatorships before - having to pressure relief valve of changing people in power, he has to deflect discontent elsewhere, external enemies, NATO, etc, and ply his population with achievements they can soothe themselves with while submerged in poverty and corruption. And justifications are made up as needed by the machine of the state.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#158

Post by tri5635hhfgvv5r »

avgcorrection wrote: post #143
0xDEF wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>increased Russophobia Where in the world is there any "Russophobia"? The far-right in the West and around the world loves Russia and Russians.

The far right has (predictably, misguidedly) become apparent Russophiles in reaction to the mainstream Russophobia (the “own the libs” playbook). I don't think that's that significant. But it does prove my point.

[flagged]

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#159

Post by civilitty »

slashdev wrote: post #141
dindobre wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.

For example?

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_Security_Co...

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#160

Post by speed_spread »

chaosbolt wrote: post #43
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #13

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works. If you don’t want me to use the Russia…

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? (answering to the OP) Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done. >Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results…

Unless you live in a shit hole, the worse that can happen is for your government to "just" jail you based on the information you provided. But if you provide that same info to enemy forces, they might use it to get leverage on you, getting you into even deeper shit than you already were. And they'll eventually dump you anyway and you'll be in a much worse situation.
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