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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

This is why the web is so important: no app stores to pressure.

It looks to be like this particular telegram bot could have been a web site?

A website which would get blocked instantaneously. Russia has an extensive censorship toolset available. They've blanket blocked a whole range of Cloudflare IPs at some point because they wanted a certain website behind Cloudflare shut down and didn't care about the collateral damage.

Of course, such a block is easy to circumvent with a VPN, but if you need a VPN to access it then the service is essentially unavailable to non-techs, greatly reducing its effectiveness.

There is a website[0] and I don't know why they didn't just launch a similar web app. Running on Google's appspot.com, the website would probably be dealt with the same way the apps were dealt with. No big hosting company (Amazon, Google, OVH, you name it) wants to risk being banned from the Russian internet, after all. A TOR hidden service would probably survive attempts at censorship, but at that point the whole effort is probably not worth the effort because you're not reaching many people locking the information behind TOR.

[0]: https://votesmart.appspot.com/

If your adversary is happy to block arbitrary network requests, why do they need to get the app removed from the app store? Can't they just block all requests it makes?

He mentioned that Telegram used Google and Apple's notifications to push fresh ip addresses to the app. Russian authorities can't block notifications selectively to the Telegram app, only to all apps that use Google's and Apple's infrastructure.

> Russian authorities can't block notifications selectively to the Telegram app, only to all apps that use Google's and Apple's infrastructure.

But they can ask Apple and Google to ban it.

Yes and in fact this is exactly what they did to Telegram for a while. But they found ways around it like those changing IPs.

They obviously could, but these days everybody uses CDNs and shared resources so they'd probably end up blocking a lot more than just this app.

For instance the app could well function completely offline if it embedded the list of candidates it supports, it which case they'd have to block all requests to the Google Play Store which would be rather heavy handed and unpopular.

I'm sure this was the easiest path this time.

They have in the past blocked large swaths of AWS to block this app:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16859299

Why would it matter? If a website tries to undermine a dictator with long hands, the website's owner needs a better defense than tech buzzwords.

The web is not open for everyone some countries block certain traffic. I guess one can use a VPN, thankfully that's becoming more mainstream.

If the app is a website or a webapp.

I am pretty sure the pressure will be given to the host and domain register.

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