Russia restricts opposition election voting app

>> I'd venture a guess that this low-grade whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly from Russian and similar bots trying to divert attention.

> 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

I will make an attempt at an explanation, or at least an unusual way to think about it. It's not that I find it difficult to "believe" it....it is very easy to "believe" it....just do it. However, forming a strong belief that it is actually true, based on sound logic and strict epistemology, this is far less easy, for me.

Firstly, consider the logic (if we interpret the statement literally): Because "A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers", then therefore it logically follows that "whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly[!] from Russian[!] and similar bots trying to divert attention".

Clearly, this logic is not free of flaws.

Now of course, your actual opinion on the matter is surely more complex, but then this raises the important (and typically "This is Water"-type unrealized) point that we use an amazingly crude language, on amazingly crude internet platforms, to debate (conceptualize, and form opinions upon) a problem space (reality) that is infinitely dimensionally complex, not to mention deceptive, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. And even worse: all of this is conducted upon a not very well understood and known to be incredibly flawed platform: the human mind.

If you think about it, is the very premise (axiomatic ~~belief~~ perception) that humanity can form highly comprehensive accurate individual and shared models of this mess in the first place not obviously delusional and hubristic?

Below we have:

> To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.

This is clearly a false dichotomy - are there really only two options here? There are many different ways to think about this, and I would be surprised if the person who wrote that comment wouldn't be able to whip up a whole bunch of other theories without breaking a sweat. And yet, they wrote that comment....and that comment was consumed (as ~correct) by other agents within the system, in turn distorting their internal model of reality (which is typically considered to be reality itself, another root cause problem), agents who will then go on to distort the models of other agents in one giant game of Telephone[1].

Day after day, year after year, generation after generation we (and here I include the much more competent than average minds here on HN) repeat this obviously (when looked at from the proper perspective, a perspective that seems to be available only in certain states of mind[2]) highly flawed behavior, and "shake our fists at God" (or the members of our outgroups) for causing these problems.

What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon: not only does it seem not possible to get people to stop behaving like this, it seems to be impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that there might be some truth to this characterization of it. Like, they might post a pithy comment ~"proving it wrong", but if one is to reply to that pointing out that it suffers from the very same phenomenon being described, the response tends to be either rhetoric (on less intellectual platforms) or solipsism &/or silence/disinterest (on more intellectual platforms).

It is a very difficult nut to crack, especially when no one else is able to be interested in cracking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

Putin for another 20 years. Nothing more, nothing less. God I hate that phrase. Of course there's so much more to it ffs.

The question comes down to how much power HN moderators has and how they use it.

If HN was the primary place where the wast majority of startups got funding, and HN moderator would delete comments in order to influence the conversation between investors and founders, such moderation would very quickly be seen as an abuse of power. It is one form of moderation that I have never seen on HN.

As it is, HN moderators has a rather limited power and rarely been exercising the little power they have. A way to describe this is that people wielding power do not always commit act of abuse, and all power is not equal. There is no true name policy on HN, no rules against people contacting each other outside of HN, no restrictions against people based on political, religious or other views. I can mention the competing communication platform discord and not get banned for doing so. People can read HN without creating accounts, and HN do not block VPNs or Tor.

As a tool for authoritarians, HN moderation is not an effective one. Possible by design. Their behavior has so far not been to utilize power in order to maintain power. There is not much left if you remove power and abuse from the definition of censorship, and so I would not describe HN moderation as it is now as censorship. Occasionally they do things like automatically reduce article weights based on specific political topics, which is a soft kind of censorship, but from what I have seen they have taken a bit more relaxed attitude and not done that so often any more.

It's shameful that there is no real opposition in Russia.

Looking on Latin America it's always ends with something violent.

On the other side: in Asia it's usually transforms into something not that bad, e.g. South Korea.

After this ridiculous FaceTime bug [1] in 2019, I've disabled FaceTime permanently. Now, hackers are using zero-click exploits on iMessaging by crafting malformed images/pdfs thereby breaking the media notification parser, breaking out of the sandbox, breaking out of BlastDoor, hooking into the Springboard.app which has entitlements that grant access to everything on an iOS device. Jeff Bezos and Joshua Wong have experienced first hand how broken iPhone's security is.

I have an iPhone and iPad, and recently have been experiencing phantom rings. My iPhone/iPad would ring simultaneously for half a second and then flash "Unknown Audio" (instead of "Unknown Caller" or the caller ID). And, for phone calls, there's supposed to be a green phone icon, but these calls have blue phone icons. And the notifications don't stay in the notification screen. They're gone after the ring. I can't tell whether my phone's on the fritz or my data is being exfiltrated. Last weekend, I received 3 phantom calls in a span of 5 minutes. My phone can't be trusted for FaceTime calls and iMessages. Fucking irony.

We cannot grant absolute trust to any one entity. Do not fully trust Apple. Do not fully trust Google. Do not fully trust not your government. Granting them absolute trust grants them absolute power that can be corrupted against you absolutely. Even though Google is a privacy invasive company, at least Google doesn't have power over Android to the extent that Apple has power over iOS. Android users can still side-load the Navalny app because Google built this weakness into their system. Apple's complete authoritarian power over iOS means users don't have power to choose. Prefer to use apps/services like Signal that cannot kowtow to authoritarian regimes because these kinds of apps/services have little power that they can themselves abuse.

But actually, fuck apps, fuck serfdom. Prefer the open web. Prefer distributed systems. Self host.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18201383/apple-facetime-b...