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Comment by syn0byte | Hacker News Reader

"So do we make our flagship product useless for the entire country or not?" - The real question

Yes? This isn't that complicated. You break it, and when competitive browser X refuses to do so, you sell the idea that browser X is compromised for all users everywhere (not just in Kazakhstan)

Stop thinking about the country with literally less than 1% of world internet users and start thinking of the reputational damage a less than charitable presentation of your collaboration with a totalitarian state against your users would do to the other 99%+ of your market.

That's fair, but the country doing this will just fork an open-source browser and make it their official browser.

Sure. "don't use Kazakhfox, it's malware, we've submitted definitions to the AV databases" isn't a hard sell for your 99%+ audience.

Malware forks of open source projects (and closed-source software!) are not a new problem.

Except they are a new problem when the use of them is mandated by a nation-state.

Which is bad news for the ~15m internet users in Kazakhstan. For the ~4000m internet users not in Kazakhstan & generally immune to their rubber hose attack, protecting them from being one BGP fuckup away from being MITMed by a hostile foreign power is much more important.

Totally separate problem that I agree needs to be fixed.

In reality, being one BGP trick away from a mere dedicated individual or corporate owning certs for your domain is an actual risk today.

Apple is openly collaborating with Chinese regime, including allowing the government to snoop on all Chinese traffic, yet they still have a high reputation for privacy. This just doesn't work, people don't give a shit about other countries.

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