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Russia restricts opposition election voting app

283 points by biggunz 5y ago

roschdal 5y ago
Putin forever.
vasco 5y ago
> On Friday, sources confirmed on background that at least one of the U.S.-based companies implementing the restriction felt compelled to comply for fear that local staff could face legal action upon receipt of a takedown order from the Russian Federation. Really making the world a better place. How hard would it be to have employees from outside the country make the app review, and shield local employees from this? These companies do what they want to do, and they didn't think this was a hill worth fighting for, which is sad.
- csande17 5y ago
  "Shield local employees from this" is the main hard part of this proposal. The Russian government does not especially care which part of the company Google claims is responsible for app review, and they will happily arrest/prosecute/murder any staff they can get their hands on if there's a chance it'll get then what they want.
  - varjag 5y ago
    It almost sounds as if operating in Russia is a bad idea.
    - neonbones 5y ago
      Yeah, that's an old story, but there were engineering offices of a few big US companies in Russian before. Almost all of them left in 2010x when they understood what was going on there. Same for Belarus, companies moved their offices to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. They want to market and engineers there, but they don't want to risk working in authoritative countries with batshit crazy wannabe emperors. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-engineering-office-russia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-...
- benque 5y ago
  What would prevent Russian authorities from taking action against local employees anyway? The buck stops at the government. The only options for private companies in these type of situations are: comply or exit.
  - vasco 5y ago
    I don't think it has to escalate as aggressively as you're making it out to be, and yet exiting is an option as we saw from Google's reaction to China's demands. So here we're just seeing what things they consider bad enough and my comment is that it was sad this wasn't bad enough for them to put their foot down.
- paganel 5y ago
  That is the definition of foreign power interference.
  - lotusmars 5y ago
    I wish there was a foreign power interference in Russia. At this point I will accept NATO intervention (will never happen though, West is just complicit with Putin).
    - djjdjuuooo 5y ago
      You can move to Afghanistan to see enjoy one.
      - zo1 5y ago
        Is Afghanistan the new Somalia yet?
codesnik 5y ago
telegram also removed bots from Navalny team which you could ask what non-ruling-party candidate has most chances to win, to facilitate "protest", tactical vote, much the same as the app would do. Telegram CEO cited some nonsense about "silent days" (why would he had obey them?) which are not even a thing with current 3-day voting in Russia. Many people agree Durov just got threaten that telegram app would be yanked from appstores, just like navalniy's app. Huge win of the current government in their intimidation tactics.
- akho 5y ago
  “Silent days” are still a thing. The new bit is that the day before the election is not included, only the election days themselves. This prohibition makes sense to me. My personal opinion is that telegram’s actions are reasonable in this context. Navalny’s team fucked up by publishing their recommendations only on the 15th, two days before voting. I don’t understand that decision at all.
  - gnull 5y ago
    This ensures Putin's government won't have enough time to subvert the recommended candidates in some way.
    - akho 5y ago
      The government will have plenty of time to do that after the election.
      - gnull 5y ago
        But that won't prevent the person from being elected. Doing it after comes with many drawbacks.
        akho 5y ago
        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.
sneak 5y ago
Apple is in no position whatsoever to fight governments. The amount of money and power they wield in the market and society is huge, but it doesn't even rank in competition to the power of the state. (For scale, the US, just a single country, has spent, only on the military, 4.3x the entire market cap of Apple ($2410B) since the iPhone was introduced.) They have to do whatever the CCP tells them to do, as they are completely, inescapably beholden to the millions of people near the factories that produce 100% of the iPhones and iPads ever that hold machine guns (the PLA). Apple cannot exist without the consent and cooperation of the CCP; they will ban any emoji, text message content, camera content, VPN app, or protest coordination app that they are told to.) (Yes, the 100% is slight hyperbole - Apple has started assembling a relatively small number of iOS devices in other places, but my point stands.) Same goes for any large market, like Russia or the USA. If the state comes knocking, Apple and Google do not have a choice. Even their options for public resistance are limited. Remember, corporations are only allowed to exist or engage in trade with the consent of the state.
- yonixw 5y ago
  While true, they (and other companies) do market themself heavy as liberal&young™ with all of theirs twitter logos (such as in pride month). Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China. And as it seems, they prefer profit. Which kinda make all their marketing talk as purely virtue signaling.
  - sneak 5y ago
    > Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China. If Apple didn't cooperate with China, there would be no iPhones, and Apple wouldn't meaningfully exist. iPhones are nearly exclusively manufactured in China. All the chips in iPhones, iPads, and now the most important macs are exclusively manufactured immediately adjacent to China, in a territory claimed by China. China is the iPhone.
    - varjag 5y ago
dandanua 5y ago
I'm pretty sure if this would be in Nazi Germany then Apple and Google would supply locations of the Jews. Because it was "illegal" not to. We are years away from the global fascists superpowers (with mass surveillance, AI, nuclear and bio weapons), but no one seems to care. Let's feed the beast even more.
- Koenvh 5y ago
  There is a book about IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. Now, I have no illusion that Apple, Google, and co. would not do the same in the circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
baybal2 5y ago
> I can't see the option to add a country > You may not see this option if: You've changed your country within the last year. > You aren’t currently in a new country. > How does Google know my location? > Depending on the products that you’re using and the settings that you choose, you may provide Google with different types of location information that are critical to making some services work and making others more useful for you. Location can come from real-time signals, like your IP address or device location, and also your past activity on Google sites and services, to tailor experiences for your context. Below are the primary ways we may get information about your location. Never, never, never ever enable the GLS, and emergency location service (read the disclaimer, it's the same GLS) If you never had GLS enabled, the only way Google can guess your location is your IP. There is no opt out later in account setting to remove GLS info forever. This is how they detect proxy users for Geoblocks
tandav 5y ago
- Google removes Navalny's team google document with "Smart Vote" instructions. - YouTube blocks videos with Smart Vote instructions. - Telegram blocks a bot with Smart Vote the instructions
- hkai 5y ago
  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.
  - nabla9 5y ago
    Difference is that in the US it was not a government. Private enterprise reacted to public pressure. People made them do it. In Russia it is the government.
    - vadfa 5y ago
      People? What people? Was there a vote held?
      - nabla9 5y ago
        Corporations have better way to gauge the opinion of the silent majority.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        Not the OP, but this is actually something I doubt. There is a long list of expensive products that outright flopped or the public received them in a rather lukewarm way. The same is true about, say, movies. If companies can make such huge mistakes in their core business, surely they aren't any better in gauging public opinion in politics.
gswdh 5y ago
However unfortunate the outcome, I think the companies have to comply. These companies are not above the law in their respective operating countries.
leppr 5y ago
In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution. If the app is open source, it could also be hosted on F-droid (or just as an .apk on some website). These kind of situations are exactly why we fight against walled gardens and centralizatiom. It's not a problem until it is.
- jsn 5y ago
  > In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution. The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.
  - leppr 5y ago
    I see, that makes sense. The advantage of a web app is that it can be distributed in any number of ways though. It's trivial to take it and re-host it on different servers, as an onion service, or go the full decentralized route with IPFS or similar.
    - beebeepka 5y ago
      Do you really think going through all that would be trivial to the masses?
      - leppr 5y ago
        Not now, but people adapt when there's an incentive. Already if you go in a country with restrictive internet, you'll find the average working-age person knows how to use a VPN. Regular drug users in western countries know how to use Tor. Hong-Kong protestors were using a bluetooth mesh network app.
    - jsn 5y ago
      Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?
atemerev 5y ago
The current elections are shameful even by Russian standards. These are the recordings of some falsifications that happened in this cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knqpiDrtUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knqpiDrtUs (until YouTube bans this video too).
- ingas 5y ago
  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.
  - atemerev 5y ago
    There is “no real opposition” in Russia, because real opposition is in prisons.
putinkiller 5y ago
Beautifully hypocritical for a dictator like putin to cry foul considering how much work he put into getting Trump elected and re-elected. I hope one of navalny’s family members cuts putin’s cock off and shove it up his commie ass. Putin and his entire family should be skinned alive on rt.com Funny really. democants think putin is evil because of trump where republicrats think he is evil because of religion.
dgan 5y ago
I know that "violence is never the answer" but it's pretty pretty hard to swallow when corrupted thiefs and murderers have state-guaranteed monopoly of physical violence. I can't accept that, and no one should.
- thih9 5y ago
  What do you mean? Could you elaborate?
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    If a rabid dog attacks you, you won't save yourself by politely asking it to stop.
    - thih9 5y ago
      I still don't know what you mean; I was hoping for something specific (i.e. not metaphors or implied and unclear solutions).
      - squarefoot 5y ago
        I'm not the OP, mine was an interpretation. My take is that being against violence is a good thing unless it leads to the point of self destruction.
- charbonneau 5y ago
  A monk asked Pa Ling, "What is the Blown Hair Sword? " Pa Ling said, "Each branch of coral supports the moon"
  - progre 5y ago
    This makes zero sense
    - beebeepka 5y ago
fuoqi 5y ago
The restrictions are quite useless (and BTW the website is quite horrible and has a bad security record). Even in Yandex you can easily find the list on various websites. It has even been duplicated to Wikipedia: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_кандидатов_по_одномандатным_округам_на_выборах_в_Государственную_думу_2021_года https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_кандидатов_по_одноманда...
egao1980 5y ago
As far as I understand those apps were illegally gathering and storing personal data - real names and addresses - storing them abroad - which is no-no not only in Russia but in EU (GDPR). In terms of voting - people can still lookup candidates proposed by Navalny's team online without breaking the law. Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia.
- egao1980 5y ago
  For curious - LinkedIn is banned in Russia for exactly the same reason.
- tazjin 5y ago
  > Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia. It's not surprising at all. The communist party is the second-largest party here (polling at around ~20% in the last polls I saw). The point of the Navalny app is to highlight the candidates most likely to win against Единая Россия (Putin's party) in each district, which will usually be the candidate of the second largest party (with some exceptions). (Just providing this information, I don't support Navalny)
- hvis 5y ago
  No they weren't. The app doesn't need the name of the user at any step. It wasn't storing the address either - it just has a search field where you input your address any time you need to use it.
  - egao1980 5y ago
    The Navalny's team promised to remove personal data tracking only on 8th of September 2021 (i.e. https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora-lichnyh-dannyh/a-59130116 https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora...). And the case against the app was opened way before that.
sgjohnson 5y ago
Considering Apple complied with this request, we can be absolutely 100% sure that they would never even consider complying with the request to abuse their “CSAM detection” system to find dissident content. I’m just so sure of it. They would never.
- luxuryballs 5y ago
  glances at pre-order
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Tell me, which alternatives are you considering?
    - eitland 5y ago
      Some alternatives: - optional: keep the current phone and refuse to upgrade it (a few months) - get a pinephone - check compatibility and get a rootable Android phone - dumbphone and pocket camera
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Pinephone is nowhere near feature compatible with either Android or iPhone platforms right now.
        eitland 5y ago
        And neither of them are feature complete with Pine phone either which is the reason for this thread :-) Actually owning your own phone to the point of deciding yourself what runs on it and what does not and being able to repair it easily are two huge features when you start to think about it.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        Unfortunately, if you ask the average user whether they want detailed control of what runs on their phone or a Facebook app, they're going to go for the Facebook app. Most users don't have any utility in detailed control. They don't even know what to do with it.
medo-bear 5y ago
I imagine that this is less about the app than it is about controlling Google and Apple. Imagine Yandex was hosting Smart Voting apps for US elections
selivanovp 5y ago
I find some comments in this section quite funny. Russia was blamed with USA elections rigging because someone payed for facebook ads to promote one of the candidates. In this case we have every evidence, that a group of people, financed by foreign organizations, created multiple apps, websites and other sources to manipulate people voices. Wake up guys, such activity should and will be banned in every country.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  Most people will never wake up. The system's very existence relies on it. Or alternatively, our system arises from humans being basically apes with very strong in-group/out-group instincts.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > such activity should and will be banned in every country. You're delusional if you believe that the current Russian government doesn't manipulate people's votes already. https://ruxpert.ru/images/3/3a/146%25.jpg https://ruxpert.ru/images/3/3a/146%25.jpg
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Russia is a democratic state where people elect their leaders. US is a totalitarian state where people are manipulated by oligarch-controlled mass-media, with non-transparent voting process. Oh, sorry, it's the other way around. I always confuse one with another.
  - ratsmack 5y ago
    I see very little difference in the two countries. Big money and powerful people control the narrative and social structures of both countries to the point that the average person has little say in the outcomes of elections.
- solmag 5y ago
  Guarantee people most outraged about this are same people who wanted to yeet Mango Mussolini from Facebook and Twitter for being Russian agent. None of them are having a lonely thought in their head how the said companies might have oppressed domestic opposition and if they did it's Good & Beautiful.
captainmuon 5y ago
Why don't they just make a hundred new accounts and upload it under different names? The government could do the same - but if Google and Apple were really concerned about democracy, they could just delete the fake entries faster than the real entries.
mahoro 5y ago
At this moment, smart vote list is available on github only. Funny, isn't it?
solmag 5y ago
Wonder how many orange-man-bad posters is having a gear move in their head and wonder how many times they complied oppressing domestic opposition since 2016. Probably don't want to think too much about that, much better be outraged about far away distant lands as your moral sword.
squarefoot 5y ago
Thanks to proprietary, centralized, vendor-controlled app stores.
JakaJancar 5y ago
You can’t cheer government rulings when it comes to some things (e.g. app store workings) and expect companies to obey, yet complain about them when it comes to others (… also app store workings) and expect companies to resist or exit the market.
- lovecg 5y ago
  …why? You mean the context doesn’t matter at all?
vzaliva 5y ago
It was less widely reported that Telegram, supposedly independent messenged closed access to Telegram bot which Navalny team tried to use to replace these apps. They claimed it was done in compliance to russian laws. Source (in russian) https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bota-umnogo-golosovanija-v-telegram/a-59220832 https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bot...
sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
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 the party you are told to vote for, either. You should just vote for X or Y, for party X or party Y, and that's it :)
- bserge 5y ago
  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.
  - sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
    This is how low the bar is for Navalny and his team, specifically. Nothing more, nothing less.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Putin for another 20 years. Nothing more, nothing less. God I hate that phrase. Of course there's so much more to it ffs.
- davesque 5y ago
  Am I missing something here? It just sounds like a digital voting guide. Political parties in the US publish these all the time.
  - sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
    It's a guide, OK, I agree. But there's nothing smart about it.
- evmt 5y ago
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
It’s curious that Putin in simultaneously able to subvert the election, but is scared enough about his flagging popularity that he feels the need to block this strategy.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Their telegram bot also not working today (an election day). Wonder if Telegram also in compliance with Putin.
markoutso 5y ago
What was the problem with the Ap
karaterobot 5y ago
What did the app do? The article quotes a tweet which describes it as a "Russian strategic voting app", but I can't imagine what that would involve. Does it send you notifications to go vote or something?
literallyaduck 5y ago
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.
pronik 5y ago
I'd like to give a bit of perspective on what "smart voting" actually does and why there's reason to dislike it even if you dislike current Russian government. Let's say there is a niche party or organization, which is ineligible to participate in the elections. So they get this bright idea: let's figure out who's the most proficient challenger in every district and recommend people vote for them. Seems like a decent way to shift the scales, but with plain majority voting the plan would not change the winner, only the margin he'd win by. The key point is though: those challengers are working hard to improve their election results, in many cases they are really nice people who really want to do some good (in many other cases, they want to do some good only to themselves, but that's beyond the point). So they campaign and meet people and talk and generally work hard to get their ideas to the public. On election night they manage to snip another 5 percent points on top of their previous result from the juggernaught which is the local United Russia's candidate. They did good, right? What happens now is that instead of talking about how they worked hard and tried to do some good and whatever, suddenly people start tweeting and telegramming about a great success for "smart voting", which is deemed the only reason the opposition candidate has improved his percentage. People talk about how the niche party (which has done nothing apart from distributing a list of names) is the actual "people's winner of the elections" as they managed to "kick UR's ass" and "make Putin afraid". They don't talk about the challenger candidates, those become puppets for "smart voting" after the fact and without any option to not participate. Now imagine you are this hard-working opposition candidate, robbed of your accomplishments in the public eye. What would you think of "smart voting" and people behind it?
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
In my native language, "to russian it up" is an idiom meaning "to fuck things up".
- thriftwy 5y ago
  Let me guess, at some point you were thoroughly russianed.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    They tried to, but they russianed it.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      Do you know of such city which used to be called Viipuri? What a nice city, wasn't it?
aaron695 5y ago
Lol, the reason this is news was not Google was legally threatened, staff were threatened outside the legal system by the government. I guess you call it physically threatened.

283 points by biggunz 5y ago

Putin forever.

> On Friday, sources confirmed on background that at least one of the U.S.-based companies implementing the restriction felt compelled to comply for fear that local staff could face legal action upon receipt of a takedown order from the Russian Federation. Really making the world a better place. How hard would it be to have employees from outside the country make the app review, and shield local employees from this? These companies do what they want to do, and they didn't think this was a hill worth fighting for, which is sad.

csande17 5y ago
"Shield local employees from this" is the main hard part of this proposal. The Russian government does not especially care which part of the company Google claims is responsible for app review, and they will happily arrest/prosecute/murder any staff they can get their hands on if there's a chance it'll get then what they want.
- varjag 5y ago
  It almost sounds as if operating in Russia is a bad idea.
  - neonbones 5y ago
    Yeah, that's an old story, but there were engineering offices of a few big US companies in Russian before. Almost all of them left in 2010x when they understood what was going on there. Same for Belarus, companies moved their offices to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. They want to market and engineers there, but they don't want to risk working in authoritative countries with batshit crazy wannabe emperors. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-engineering-office-russia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-...
benque 5y ago
What would prevent Russian authorities from taking action against local employees anyway? The buck stops at the government. The only options for private companies in these type of situations are: comply or exit.
- vasco 5y ago
  I don't think it has to escalate as aggressively as you're making it out to be, and yet exiting is an option as we saw from Google's reaction to China's demands. So here we're just seeing what things they consider bad enough and my comment is that it was sad this wasn't bad enough for them to put their foot down.
paganel 5y ago
That is the definition of foreign power interference.
- lotusmars 5y ago
  I wish there was a foreign power interference in Russia. At this point I will accept NATO intervention (will never happen though, West is just complicit with Putin).
  - djjdjuuooo 5y ago
    You can move to Afghanistan to see enjoy one.
    - zo1 5y ago
      Is Afghanistan the new Somalia yet?

codesnik 5y ago

telegram also removed bots from Navalny team which you could ask what non-ruling-party candidate has most chances to win, to facilitate "protest", tactical vote, much the same as the app would do. Telegram CEO cited some nonsense about "silent days" (why would he had obey them?) which are not even a thing with current 3-day voting in Russia. Many people agree Durov just got threaten that telegram app would be yanked from appstores, just like navalniy's app. Huge win of the current government in their intimidation tactics.

akho 5y ago
“Silent days” are still a thing. The new bit is that the day before the election is not included, only the election days themselves. This prohibition makes sense to me. My personal opinion is that telegram’s actions are reasonable in this context. Navalny’s team fucked up by publishing their recommendations only on the 15th, two days before voting. I don’t understand that decision at all.
- gnull 5y ago
  This ensures Putin's government won't have enough time to subvert the recommended candidates in some way.
  - akho 5y ago
    The government will have plenty of time to do that after the election.
    - gnull 5y ago
      But that won't prevent the person from being elected. Doing it after comes with many drawbacks.
      - akho 5y ago
        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.

sneak 5y ago

Apple is in no position whatsoever to fight governments. The amount of money and power they wield in the market and society is huge, but it doesn't even rank in competition to the power of the state. (For scale, the US, just a single country, has spent, only on the military, 4.3x the entire market cap of Apple ($2410B) since the iPhone was introduced.) They have to do whatever the CCP tells them to do, as they are completely, inescapably beholden to the millions of people near the factories that produce 100% of the iPhones and iPads ever that hold machine guns (the PLA). Apple cannot exist without the consent and cooperation of the CCP; they will ban any emoji, text message content, camera content, VPN app, or protest coordination app that they are told to.) (Yes, the 100% is slight hyperbole - Apple has started assembling a relatively small number of iOS devices in other places, but my point stands.) Same goes for any large market, like Russia or the USA. If the state comes knocking, Apple and Google do not have a choice. Even their options for public resistance are limited. Remember, corporations are only allowed to exist or engage in trade with the consent of the state.

yonixw 5y ago
While true, they (and other companies) do market themself heavy as liberal&young™ with all of theirs twitter logos (such as in pride month). Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China. And as it seems, they prefer profit. Which kinda make all their marketing talk as purely virtue signaling.
- sneak 5y ago
  > Given that, one would assume they are willing to take a hit in profit (by not selling & not cooperating) in places like Russia and China. If Apple didn't cooperate with China, there would be no iPhones, and Apple wouldn't meaningfully exist. iPhones are nearly exclusively manufactured in China. All the chips in iPhones, iPads, and now the most important macs are exclusively manufactured immediately adjacent to China, in a territory claimed by China. China is the iPhone.
  - varjag 5y ago

dandanua 5y ago

I'm pretty sure if this would be in Nazi Germany then Apple and Google would supply locations of the Jews. Because it was "illegal" not to. We are years away from the global fascists superpowers (with mass surveillance, AI, nuclear and bio weapons), but no one seems to care. Let's feed the beast even more.

Koenvh 5y ago
There is a book about IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. Now, I have no illusion that Apple, Google, and co. would not do the same in the circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

baybal2 5y ago

> I can't see the option to add a country > You may not see this option if: You've changed your country within the last year. > You aren’t currently in a new country. > How does Google know my location? > Depending on the products that you’re using and the settings that you choose, you may provide Google with different types of location information that are critical to making some services work and making others more useful for you. Location can come from real-time signals, like your IP address or device location, and also your past activity on Google sites and services, to tailor experiences for your context. Below are the primary ways we may get information about your location. Never, never, never ever enable the GLS, and emergency location service (read the disclaimer, it's the same GLS) If you never had GLS enabled, the only way Google can guess your location is your IP. There is no opt out later in account setting to remove GLS info forever. This is how they detect proxy users for Geoblocks

tandav 5y ago

- Google removes Navalny's team google document with "Smart Vote" instructions. - YouTube blocks videos with Smart Vote instructions. - Telegram blocks a bot with Smart Vote the instructions

hkai 5y ago
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.
- nabla9 5y ago
  Difference is that in the US it was not a government. Private enterprise reacted to public pressure. People made them do it. In Russia it is the government.
  - vadfa 5y ago
    People? What people? Was there a vote held?
    - nabla9 5y ago
      Corporations have better way to gauge the opinion of the silent majority.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        Not the OP, but this is actually something I doubt. There is a long list of expensive products that outright flopped or the public received them in a rather lukewarm way. The same is true about, say, movies. If companies can make such huge mistakes in their core business, surely they aren't any better in gauging public opinion in politics.

gswdh 5y ago

However unfortunate the outcome, I think the companies have to comply. These companies are not above the law in their respective operating countries.

leppr 5y ago

In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution. If the app is open source, it could also be hosted on F-droid (or just as an .apk on some website). These kind of situations are exactly why we fight against walled gardens and centralizatiom. It's not a problem until it is.

jsn 5y ago
> In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution. The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.
- leppr 5y ago
  I see, that makes sense. The advantage of a web app is that it can be distributed in any number of ways though. It's trivial to take it and re-host it on different servers, as an onion service, or go the full decentralized route with IPFS or similar.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    Do you really think going through all that would be trivial to the masses?
    - leppr 5y ago
      Not now, but people adapt when there's an incentive. Already if you go in a country with restrictive internet, you'll find the average working-age person knows how to use a VPN. Regular drug users in western countries know how to use Tor. Hong-Kong protestors were using a bluetooth mesh network app.
  - jsn 5y ago
    Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?

atemerev 5y ago

The current elections are shameful even by Russian standards. These are the recordings of some falsifications that happened in this cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knqpiDrtUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knqpiDrtUs (until YouTube bans this video too).

ingas 5y ago
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.
- atemerev 5y ago
  There is “no real opposition” in Russia, because real opposition is in prisons.

putinkiller 5y ago

Beautifully hypocritical for a dictator like putin to cry foul considering how much work he put into getting Trump elected and re-elected. I hope one of navalny’s family members cuts putin’s cock off and shove it up his commie ass. Putin and his entire family should be skinned alive on rt.com Funny really. democants think putin is evil because of trump where republicrats think he is evil because of religion.

dgan 5y ago

I know that "violence is never the answer" but it's pretty pretty hard to swallow when corrupted thiefs and murderers have state-guaranteed monopoly of physical violence. I can't accept that, and no one should.

thih9 5y ago
What do you mean? Could you elaborate?
- squarefoot 5y ago
  If a rabid dog attacks you, you won't save yourself by politely asking it to stop.
  - thih9 5y ago
    I still don't know what you mean; I was hoping for something specific (i.e. not metaphors or implied and unclear solutions).
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      I'm not the OP, mine was an interpretation. My take is that being against violence is a good thing unless it leads to the point of self destruction.
charbonneau 5y ago
A monk asked Pa Ling, "What is the Blown Hair Sword? " Pa Ling said, "Each branch of coral supports the moon"
- progre 5y ago
  This makes zero sense
  - beebeepka 5y ago

fuoqi 5y ago

The restrictions are quite useless (and BTW the website is quite horrible and has a bad security record). Even in Yandex you can easily find the list on various websites. It has even been duplicated to Wikipedia: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_кандидатов_по_одномандатным_округам_на_выборах_в_Государственную_думу_2021_года https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_кандидатов_по_одноманда...

egao1980 5y ago

As far as I understand those apps were illegally gathering and storing personal data - real names and addresses - storing them abroad - which is no-no not only in Russia but in EU (GDPR). In terms of voting - people can still lookup candidates proposed by Navalny's team online without breaking the law. Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia.

egao1980 5y ago
For curious - LinkedIn is banned in Russia for exactly the same reason.
tazjin 5y ago
> Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia. It's not surprising at all. The communist party is the second-largest party here (polling at around ~20% in the last polls I saw). The point of the Navalny app is to highlight the candidates most likely to win against Единая Россия (Putin's party) in each district, which will usually be the candidate of the second largest party (with some exceptions). (Just providing this information, I don't support Navalny)
hvis 5y ago
No they weren't. The app doesn't need the name of the user at any step. It wasn't storing the address either - it just has a search field where you input your address any time you need to use it.
- egao1980 5y ago
  The Navalny's team promised to remove personal data tracking only on 8th of September 2021 (i.e. https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora-lichnyh-dannyh/a-59130116 https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora...). And the case against the app was opened way before that.

sgjohnson 5y ago

Considering Apple complied with this request, we can be absolutely 100% sure that they would never even consider complying with the request to abuse their “CSAM detection” system to find dissident content. I’m just so sure of it. They would never.

luxuryballs 5y ago
glances at pre-order
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Tell me, which alternatives are you considering?
  - eitland 5y ago
    Some alternatives: - optional: keep the current phone and refuse to upgrade it (a few months) - get a pinephone - check compatibility and get a rootable Android phone - dumbphone and pocket camera
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Pinephone is nowhere near feature compatible with either Android or iPhone platforms right now.
      - eitland 5y ago
        And neither of them are feature complete with Pine phone either which is the reason for this thread :-) Actually owning your own phone to the point of deciding yourself what runs on it and what does not and being able to repair it easily are two huge features when you start to think about it.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        Unfortunately, if you ask the average user whether they want detailed control of what runs on their phone or a Facebook app, they're going to go for the Facebook app. Most users don't have any utility in detailed control. They don't even know what to do with it.

medo-bear 5y ago

I imagine that this is less about the app than it is about controlling Google and Apple. Imagine Yandex was hosting Smart Voting apps for US elections

selivanovp 5y ago

I find some comments in this section quite funny. Russia was blamed with USA elections rigging because someone payed for facebook ads to promote one of the candidates. In this case we have every evidence, that a group of people, financed by foreign organizations, created multiple apps, websites and other sources to manipulate people voices. Wake up guys, such activity should and will be banned in every country.

nzmsv 5y ago
Most people will never wake up. The system's very existence relies on it. Or alternatively, our system arises from humans being basically apes with very strong in-group/out-group instincts.
jhgb 5y ago
> such activity should and will be banned in every country. You're delusional if you believe that the current Russian government doesn't manipulate people's votes already. https://ruxpert.ru/images/3/3a/146%25.jpg https://ruxpert.ru/images/3/3a/146%25.jpg
vbezhenar 5y ago
Russia is a democratic state where people elect their leaders. US is a totalitarian state where people are manipulated by oligarch-controlled mass-media, with non-transparent voting process. Oh, sorry, it's the other way around. I always confuse one with another.
- ratsmack 5y ago
  I see very little difference in the two countries. Big money and powerful people control the narrative and social structures of both countries to the point that the average person has little say in the outcomes of elections.
solmag 5y ago
Guarantee people most outraged about this are same people who wanted to yeet Mango Mussolini from Facebook and Twitter for being Russian agent. None of them are having a lonely thought in their head how the said companies might have oppressed domestic opposition and if they did it's Good & Beautiful.

captainmuon 5y ago

Why don't they just make a hundred new accounts and upload it under different names? The government could do the same - but if Google and Apple were really concerned about democracy, they could just delete the fake entries faster than the real entries.

mahoro 5y ago

At this moment, smart vote list is available on github only. Funny, isn't it?

solmag 5y ago

Wonder how many orange-man-bad posters is having a gear move in their head and wonder how many times they complied oppressing domestic opposition since 2016. Probably don't want to think too much about that, much better be outraged about far away distant lands as your moral sword.

squarefoot 5y ago

Thanks to proprietary, centralized, vendor-controlled app stores.

JakaJancar 5y ago

You can’t cheer government rulings when it comes to some things (e.g. app store workings) and expect companies to obey, yet complain about them when it comes to others (… also app store workings) and expect companies to resist or exit the market.

lovecg 5y ago
…why? You mean the context doesn’t matter at all?

vzaliva 5y ago

It was less widely reported that Telegram, supposedly independent messenged closed access to Telegram bot which Navalny team tried to use to replace these apps. They claimed it was done in compliance to russian laws. Source (in russian) https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bota-umnogo-golosovanija-v-telegram/a-59220832 https://www.dw.com/ru/pavel-durov-soobshhil-o-blokirovke-bot...

sedan_baklazhan 5y ago

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 the party you are told to vote for, either. You should just vote for X or Y, for party X or party Y, and that's it :)

bserge 5y ago
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.
- sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
  This is how low the bar is for Navalny and his team, specifically. Nothing more, nothing less.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Putin for another 20 years. Nothing more, nothing less. God I hate that phrase. Of course there's so much more to it ffs.
davesque 5y ago
Am I missing something here? It just sounds like a digital voting guide. Political parties in the US publish these all the time.
- sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
  It's a guide, OK, I agree. But there's nothing smart about it.
evmt 5y ago

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

It’s curious that Putin in simultaneously able to subvert the election, but is scared enough about his flagging popularity that he feels the need to block this strategy.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

Their telegram bot also not working today (an election day). Wonder if Telegram also in compliance with Putin.

markoutso 5y ago

What was the problem with the Ap

karaterobot 5y ago

What did the app do? The article quotes a tweet which describes it as a "Russian strategic voting app", but I can't imagine what that would involve. Does it send you notifications to go vote or something?

literallyaduck 5y ago

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.

pronik 5y ago

I'd like to give a bit of perspective on what "smart voting" actually does and why there's reason to dislike it even if you dislike current Russian government. Let's say there is a niche party or organization, which is ineligible to participate in the elections. So they get this bright idea: let's figure out who's the most proficient challenger in every district and recommend people vote for them. Seems like a decent way to shift the scales, but with plain majority voting the plan would not change the winner, only the margin he'd win by. The key point is though: those challengers are working hard to improve their election results, in many cases they are really nice people who really want to do some good (in many other cases, they want to do some good only to themselves, but that's beyond the point). So they campaign and meet people and talk and generally work hard to get their ideas to the public. On election night they manage to snip another 5 percent points on top of their previous result from the juggernaught which is the local United Russia's candidate. They did good, right? What happens now is that instead of talking about how they worked hard and tried to do some good and whatever, suddenly people start tweeting and telegramming about a great success for "smart voting", which is deemed the only reason the opposition candidate has improved his percentage. People talk about how the niche party (which has done nothing apart from distributing a list of names) is the actual "people's winner of the elections" as they managed to "kick UR's ass" and "make Putin afraid". They don't talk about the challenger candidates, those become puppets for "smart voting" after the fact and without any option to not participate. Now imagine you are this hard-working opposition candidate, robbed of your accomplishments in the public eye. What would you think of "smart voting" and people behind it?

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

In my native language, "to russian it up" is an idiom meaning "to fuck things up".

thriftwy 5y ago
Let me guess, at some point you were thoroughly russianed.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  They tried to, but they russianed it.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Do you know of such city which used to be called Viipuri? What a nice city, wasn't it?

aaron695 5y ago

Lol, the reason this is news was not Google was legally threatened, staff were threatened outside the legal system by the government. I guess you call it physically threatened.