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Comment by postramus | Hacker News Reader

I generally agree but I would have appreciated a more-direct response vis-a-vis Yandex.

In re: your broader point I don’t think they are “that smart” per se; or perhaps better put, I think they are smart enough to be aware their platforms are used by all kinds of agents for all sorts of purposes 24/7/365...but up until now also deemed it prudent to turn a rather universal blind eye towards those activities unless they were, say, so obviously fake that ordinary users could identify them as such.

Whether that universal blind eye was smart is tbd, but nothing in their response since then has seemed very clever.

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I had to research a bit about Yandex in order to understand the implications there.

The story seems to be something like this:

[1] Yandex builds an app to crawl Facebook without Facebook's permission [2] Facebook blocks Yandex [3] Yandex gets licensed access to Facebook's firehose

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/yandex-wonder/ [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/net-us-yandex-facebook/yandex... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/yandex-facebook/

There's certainly a plausible Kremlin long con here - fund Milner to invest in Facebook, ask Yandex to build a crawler for Facebook, expect that Facebook would shut it shut down, then suggest via Milner that there should be a partnership between Yandex and Facebook, thus gaining official access to Facebook's firehose, to be sent directly to Kremlin for analysis of message proliferation, and further influence of the American public.

The fundamental mistake there (the final move that allows you to be checkmated) is the firehose deal, not the investment.

In any case, thanks for making me think through the possible attack vector here. Your comment is the first one that was specific enough that made me think through why this could be a cause for concern.

> There's certainly a plausible Kremlin long con here

Not very plausible if compared to other things Kremlin does. Too long, too complicated, too hollywood. The modus operandi is much simpler - you do not need complex cons if you control everything. If you can come to Yandex and demand any data you want, anytime. You just have to keep Yandex alive, they'll find a way to get data (because it's their lifeblood, they are a data organization company, like Google) and when they do, you get the data too. Simple.

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