6 ms·

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, Twitter, etc. could have a very strong influence on changing this if they banded together to respo

by davidu 11y ago

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, Twitter, etc. could have a very strong influence on changing this if they banded together to respond to this in some way. The government might be doing what they think is right, but public backlash can change policy almost overnight. We saw this in the US recently with SOPA/PIPA. The "Internet" response was unprecedented. The people of Kazakhstan can achieve the same outcome.

1ris 11y ago
What should these companies responses be? And why should the kazach goverment care? They'd prefer if the poeple used russian (or kazach) copy cats like vkontakte anyway.
- davidu 11y ago
  The government preference isn't important, citizen preference is. As to what they can do... it's a range from info to painful, but they can choose a range of options from serving up interstitials in a localized language that explains the issues, problems, and privacy and security implications... all the way to deny service. If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action. And these companies can help orchestrate, just as we did with SOPA/PIPA.
  - minimuffins 11y ago
    You're talking like Kazakhstan is a functional democracy. http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-striking-oil-workers-killed-in-kazakhstan-by-us-supported-dictator/ http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-str...
    - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
      Let's not forget when they bossed around some Italian secret services, police and administration underlings to arrest and deport the wife and child of a Kazakh dissident: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabd...
      - minimuffins 11y ago
        Wow, didn't know about that. Thanks for the link.
  - weland 11y ago
    > If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action. Hah, right. They'll just file a complaint to their ombudsman and the Congress will take care of it. No, this is Kazakhstan, not California. If citizens band up and demand something that the government is against, the police will crack down on their homes, arrest 15,000 people at random out of which only 10,000 or so will return to their homes (not necessarily alive), and the remaining 5,000 will rot in jail for high treason. And if they keep getting wise ideas, they'll send in the army.
- patcheudor 11y ago
  Simple. Immediately implement certificate pinning so that rogue CA's can't be used to MitM their application traffic. That should have happened long ago for these apps anyway. This will break those apps and the government, in the face of everything breaking for their citizens might re-think their plan and at a minimum, turn of TLS middling for the impacted domains.
ascendantlogic 11y ago
Because having the NSA snoop on them is clearly preferable.
bpodgursky 11y ago
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc tried this in China and failed. It inconvenienced the people, but it's not going to cause a popular uprising. In the west, you forget that guns and the threat of raw violence by the government are a very real deterrent Kazakhstan isn't going to produce a Baidu, but I'm sure Yandex and VK would be happy to fill a void and play along with their rules. And in the end, people just have less access to unfiltered news about the outside world. It's a losing plan.
- mtgx 11y ago
  And BlackBerry tried in Pakistan and "succeeded" - at least in delaying the shutdown of its servers by another month. It's easier to do it in countries where "freedom" was the status quo and then the government decides to do something like that. China isn't exactly a free country to begin with, and the Great Firewall was older than Google in China.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Blackberry caved and gave the Saudi's and other gulf nation the ability to decrypt the traffic, as usual money plays a bigger role than morals. Not that morals played anything in the decision to begin with BB calculated that it would cost them more to cave than to resist in terms of because it could sway existing customers to switch away from their platform, that was true for Pakistan but since Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have money it wasn't true in that case. And if you are implying that Kazakhstan was "free" to begin with that's utterly wrong, you are also wrong about China the "Great Firewall" didn't came online until 2003, and they still do not implement wide scale SSL MITM attacks (I've used Internet in China that wasn't a special line for foreigners or was routed through HK and many sites like wikipedia for example were blocked over HTTP but not over HTTPS). That said fighting such activity by boycotting only aggravates the situation as you are doing even more harm to the people of the country, it's bad enough being monitored 24/7 but at least you have access to information and people from all over the world.
- wisty 11y ago
  China is a large enough market that Chinese services (Baidu, Weibo, QQ, etc) can fill the gap. And there's many companies that did play ball (Microsoft). Kazahstan could just use Baidu, but it's really best for Chinese speakers, and it would give leverage to China (which they might be leery of).
codeshaman 11y ago
> The people of Kazakhstan can achieve the same outcome. Highly unlikely. From Wikipedia: In April 2015, Nazarbayev was re-elected with almost 98% of the vote. That kind of tells the whole story - people are "behind" this (or rather no-one dares contradict the authorities). That country is basically owned by the Family and resistance is pretty much futile.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  In other words: it doesn't matter who is voting, what matters is who is counting the votes.
  - usrusr 11y ago
    Given the highly volatile ethnic mix of Kazakhstan and the lurking destabilizing effect of foreign interests longing for abundant mineral resources, a strong majority for stability over freedom is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, 98% seems very much out of this world. But with the "right" mix of fearmongering and early divide-and-conquer intervention when a moderate opposition ist starting to organize? Certainly not unthinkable. There's so much more to a healthy democracy than not miscounting the votes.
    - AnAfrican 11y ago
      I don't know why you're downvoted. I agree a hundred percent. People from stable democracies tends to underestimate how afraid people can be of chaos and how easy it is for some goverment to associate democracy with chaos. When a moderate opposition starts to organize, a non-moderate one (or one that takes advantage of ethnic fault lines) does too.
- dave2000 11y ago
  Uh...that's not what I read into a 98% election result!
- 11y ago
mmmBacon 11y ago
Kazakhstan is not the US. We are highly unlikely to see a public uprising in Kazakhstan over this when the country has had the same president since 1991 and rubber-stamp parliament. Protests in 2011 were quelled by gunning down protestors (see below). Nazarbayev, re-elected in a barely contested election to a fifth term on Sunday, was born to a peasant family. He trained as an engineer before rising through the ranks of the Kazakh Communist Party to head it in 1989 and was elected president on the eve of the Soviet breakup in 1991. Since then, his power has become absolute, with resounding, but internationally criticised election victories in 1999, 2005 and 2011. There is no obvious succession plan in place and there are no clear alternatives to Nazarbayev's rule... In 2011, however, a pay dispute in the oil sector turned violent with government troops shooting dead 15 protesters and injuring over a hundred [source:] http://news.yahoo.com/nazarbayev-kazakhstans-moderniser-authoritarian-streak-093944342.html http://news.yahoo.com/nazarbayev-kazakhstans-moderniser-auth...
- tobltobs 11y ago
  There was no public uprising after Snowden in the US either ... Some will now say you can't compare this. They are right because what Kazakhstan is doing there looks amateurish.
  - djsumdog 11y ago
    For a while, I've been in the camp that the Snowden leaks were intentional and that he still works for the US. A rich work from home government contractor, with a smoking hot girlfriend, takes off with secrets and hides in Russia. His hot girlfriend is even allowed to join him. I think it's more likely the Snowden leaks were to show just how little Americans care. They're using that spy network to track reactions.
    - andreyf 11y ago
      If Snowden works for the US, or did when he leaked, who does / did he report to? It certainly wasn't Clapper...
    - 11y ago
KAdot 11y ago
As I know from my Kazakhstan-born friend, Twitter and LiveJournal are banned in Kazakhstan for years, nobody cares.
- almaty 11y ago
  Both are available in Kazakhstan. I don't remember twitter being blocked here. LJ was blocked due to former high-profile official's blog.
dogma1138 11y ago
It's unlikely that the Kazakh government would be able to do that much with it. Kazakhstan has a population of about 18M and internet penetration of about 35% if they would really want to sift through all that traffic they are more than welcome to do so, just keep in mind that even the US would probably not be able to do so with any degree of effectiveness. The only thing that Google et al. could do is refuse to provide service to Kazakhstan which would only harm the people even more, if you are a dissident you are already taking a huge risk denying people the ability to access information and to connect with others won't help to reduce that risk just only make it worse as it would only isolate them further. China is doing the same, so do many Gulf nations to some extent or another, no one is arguing that we should not cooperate with China, cooperation is the only real way to effect change in those nations in the first place, or would you think China would be as open as it is today if we would have a technical and cultural embargo over it?
- andreyf 11y ago
  How is China doing the same?
  - netik 11y ago
    Western companies sell them hardware and software to process the traffic that they Capture. Cisco, et.al is complicit in this work, including the firewall itself.
tomjen3 11y ago
Well they could make using client certificates mandatory from Kazakhstanian ip addresses. Now the gov server can't connect and so can't MITM anything.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  No, that would simply make kazakhs unable to connect to that service; with the proposed solution SSL traffic that for whatever reasons couldn't be MITM'ed simply wouldn't work at all.

by davidu 11y ago

1ris 11y ago

What should these companies responses be? And why should the kazach goverment care? They'd prefer if the poeple used russian (or kazach) copy cats like vkontakte anyway.

davidu 11y ago
The government preference isn't important, citizen preference is. As to what they can do... it's a range from info to painful, but they can choose a range of options from serving up interstitials in a localized language that explains the issues, problems, and privacy and security implications... all the way to deny service. If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action. And these companies can help orchestrate, just as we did with SOPA/PIPA.
- minimuffins 11y ago
  You're talking like Kazakhstan is a functional democracy. http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-striking-oil-workers-killed-in-kazakhstan-by-us-supported-dictator/ http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-str...
  - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
    Let's not forget when they bossed around some Italian secret services, police and administration underlings to arrest and deport the wife and child of a Kazakh dissident: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabd...
    - minimuffins 11y ago
      Wow, didn't know about that. Thanks for the link.
- weland 11y ago
  > If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action. Hah, right. They'll just file a complaint to their ombudsman and the Congress will take care of it. No, this is Kazakhstan, not California. If citizens band up and demand something that the government is against, the police will crack down on their homes, arrest 15,000 people at random out of which only 10,000 or so will return to their homes (not necessarily alive), and the remaining 5,000 will rot in jail for high treason. And if they keep getting wise ideas, they'll send in the army.
patcheudor 11y ago
Simple. Immediately implement certificate pinning so that rogue CA's can't be used to MitM their application traffic. That should have happened long ago for these apps anyway. This will break those apps and the government, in the face of everything breaking for their citizens might re-think their plan and at a minimum, turn of TLS middling for the impacted domains.

ascendantlogic 11y ago

Because having the NSA snoop on them is clearly preferable.

bpodgursky 11y ago

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc tried this in China and failed. It inconvenienced the people, but it's not going to cause a popular uprising. In the west, you forget that guns and the threat of raw violence by the government are a very real deterrent Kazakhstan isn't going to produce a Baidu, but I'm sure Yandex and VK would be happy to fill a void and play along with their rules. And in the end, people just have less access to unfiltered news about the outside world. It's a losing plan.

mtgx 11y ago
And BlackBerry tried in Pakistan and "succeeded" - at least in delaying the shutdown of its servers by another month. It's easier to do it in countries where "freedom" was the status quo and then the government decides to do something like that. China isn't exactly a free country to begin with, and the Great Firewall was older than Google in China.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Blackberry caved and gave the Saudi's and other gulf nation the ability to decrypt the traffic, as usual money plays a bigger role than morals. Not that morals played anything in the decision to begin with BB calculated that it would cost them more to cave than to resist in terms of because it could sway existing customers to switch away from their platform, that was true for Pakistan but since Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have money it wasn't true in that case. And if you are implying that Kazakhstan was "free" to begin with that's utterly wrong, you are also wrong about China the "Great Firewall" didn't came online until 2003, and they still do not implement wide scale SSL MITM attacks (I've used Internet in China that wasn't a special line for foreigners or was routed through HK and many sites like wikipedia for example were blocked over HTTP but not over HTTPS). That said fighting such activity by boycotting only aggravates the situation as you are doing even more harm to the people of the country, it's bad enough being monitored 24/7 but at least you have access to information and people from all over the world.
wisty 11y ago
China is a large enough market that Chinese services (Baidu, Weibo, QQ, etc) can fill the gap. And there's many companies that did play ball (Microsoft). Kazahstan could just use Baidu, but it's really best for Chinese speakers, and it would give leverage to China (which they might be leery of).

codeshaman 11y ago

> The people of Kazakhstan can achieve the same outcome. Highly unlikely. From Wikipedia: In April 2015, Nazarbayev was re-elected with almost 98% of the vote. That kind of tells the whole story - people are "behind" this (or rather no-one dares contradict the authorities). That country is basically owned by the Family and resistance is pretty much futile.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Drdrdrq 11y ago
In other words: it doesn't matter who is voting, what matters is who is counting the votes.
- usrusr 11y ago
  Given the highly volatile ethnic mix of Kazakhstan and the lurking destabilizing effect of foreign interests longing for abundant mineral resources, a strong majority for stability over freedom is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, 98% seems very much out of this world. But with the "right" mix of fearmongering and early divide-and-conquer intervention when a moderate opposition ist starting to organize? Certainly not unthinkable. There's so much more to a healthy democracy than not miscounting the votes.
  - AnAfrican 11y ago
    I don't know why you're downvoted. I agree a hundred percent. People from stable democracies tends to underestimate how afraid people can be of chaos and how easy it is for some goverment to associate democracy with chaos. When a moderate opposition starts to organize, a non-moderate one (or one that takes advantage of ethnic fault lines) does too.
dave2000 11y ago
Uh...that's not what I read into a 98% election result!
11y ago

mmmBacon 11y ago

Kazakhstan is not the US. We are highly unlikely to see a public uprising in Kazakhstan over this when the country has had the same president since 1991 and rubber-stamp parliament. Protests in 2011 were quelled by gunning down protestors (see below). Nazarbayev, re-elected in a barely contested election to a fifth term on Sunday, was born to a peasant family. He trained as an engineer before rising through the ranks of the Kazakh Communist Party to head it in 1989 and was elected president on the eve of the Soviet breakup in 1991. Since then, his power has become absolute, with resounding, but internationally criticised election victories in 1999, 2005 and 2011. There is no obvious succession plan in place and there are no clear alternatives to Nazarbayev's rule... In 2011, however, a pay dispute in the oil sector turned violent with government troops shooting dead 15 protesters and injuring over a hundred [source:] http://news.yahoo.com/nazarbayev-kazakhstans-moderniser-authoritarian-streak-093944342.html http://news.yahoo.com/nazarbayev-kazakhstans-moderniser-auth...

tobltobs 11y ago
There was no public uprising after Snowden in the US either ... Some will now say you can't compare this. They are right because what Kazakhstan is doing there looks amateurish.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  For a while, I've been in the camp that the Snowden leaks were intentional and that he still works for the US. A rich work from home government contractor, with a smoking hot girlfriend, takes off with secrets and hides in Russia. His hot girlfriend is even allowed to join him. I think it's more likely the Snowden leaks were to show just how little Americans care. They're using that spy network to track reactions.
  - andreyf 11y ago
    If Snowden works for the US, or did when he leaked, who does / did he report to? It certainly wasn't Clapper...
  - 11y ago

KAdot 11y ago

As I know from my Kazakhstan-born friend, Twitter and LiveJournal are banned in Kazakhstan for years, nobody cares.

almaty 11y ago
Both are available in Kazakhstan. I don't remember twitter being blocked here. LJ was blocked due to former high-profile official's blog.

dogma1138 11y ago

It's unlikely that the Kazakh government would be able to do that much with it. Kazakhstan has a population of about 18M and internet penetration of about 35% if they would really want to sift through all that traffic they are more than welcome to do so, just keep in mind that even the US would probably not be able to do so with any degree of effectiveness. The only thing that Google et al. could do is refuse to provide service to Kazakhstan which would only harm the people even more, if you are a dissident you are already taking a huge risk denying people the ability to access information and to connect with others won't help to reduce that risk just only make it worse as it would only isolate them further. China is doing the same, so do many Gulf nations to some extent or another, no one is arguing that we should not cooperate with China, cooperation is the only real way to effect change in those nations in the first place, or would you think China would be as open as it is today if we would have a technical and cultural embargo over it?

andreyf 11y ago
How is China doing the same?
- netik 11y ago
  Western companies sell them hardware and software to process the traffic that they Capture. Cisco, et.al is complicit in this work, including the firewall itself.

tomjen3 11y ago

Well they could make using client certificates mandatory from Kazakhstanian ip addresses. Now the gov server can't connect and so can't MITM anything.

PeterisP 11y ago
No, that would simply make kazakhs unable to connect to that service; with the proposed solution SSL traffic that for whatever reasons couldn't be MITM'ed simply wouldn't work at all.