Apple removed all VK and Mail.ru applications from the App Store
mezha.media
mezha.media
Great for deepening the divide between people & countries.
The internationality of the internet has always been inversely proportional to its accessibility to the masses.
Genuinely uncertain if this refers to Apple or the kremlin.
i think people are asking for it
The app store apps removal is very minor and does very little to further already existing divide.
On the other, now that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are banned it leaves even less means of communication and spreading information inside Russia, as bad as VK was.
If only it was kicked out before Russia banned Facebook (it allowed hatespeach towards Russians) people might have migrated to Facebook or something, now there's going to be a void.
Well, VK Web version is just as functional as the app, so maybe not such a big hit.
Also, in Russia most people use Android, so Google Play ban would be more effective.
This is a shameful unilateral decision by Apple, let there be no ambiguity.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/vk-results-idINL5N2V601G
I get the intention behind this rule for applying sanctions, but it still seems unfair to me that the son pays for the sins of the father and can't even atone for him.
it bears repeating that laws do not follow morality though, of course.
Personally: I find it deeply uncomfortable that nearly all tech seems to come out of the US, where sanctions and rules are applied unilaterally, with only relatively minor pushback.
I have even had issues supporting users when I was transitioning from bare-metal to cloud due to US sanctions blocking Cuba, Iran and a part of Ukraine (Crimea) which is nearly impossible for us to avoid selling our product to accidentally, dooming anyone living there to buy a product that can never work.
(The product was a multiplayer game)
If you are an Internet user in Europe, or even India, I would expect that you have absolute zero prior knowledge of Lewd Dreams meme. From the western borders of China all the way to Bering Strait it’s as basic of a knowledge as it subtly being inserted into or even exploited in totalitarian state propaganda.
But you haven’t seen it, because you have no reason to(no offense intended); there are invisible cultural borders already, in this global platform.
The only exceptions could be either successful self sufficient dictatorship (only China today), or complete nutjobs at the end of their rule, who disregard all concerns about local businesses.
I also hope the dialogue in these threads can improve. The quality of the comments, at the time of writing mine, are poor and quippy.
They can stand equal among nations with advanced financial markets, medicine and technology if they want. I have no problem with that, but it comes with a price: checking their territorial ambitions at the door. At this point I would even add on to that fully surrendering their nuclear arsenal because the leaders they’ve either chosen or “chosen” (and for the purposes of this conversation it doesn’t really matter which anymore) have proven to be irresponsible caretakers.
Putin's words are that Russians and Ukranians are the same people and Ukraine is not a real country, but a part of Russia.
There are many casualties among civilians because of how idiotic this war is, but nobody is killing Ukrainians on the basis of their ethnicity.
Russians do not consider us a separate nation and consider our language a "broken Russian". They are in fact trying to erase our language and our culture. They call anyone who considers themselves Ukrainian and not Russian a "nazi" that should be killed. This is a genocide.
We consider Ukrainians brothers in the best way possible. We don't care what language you speak, but it feels especially warm when we hear that you can speak Russian as well. Like you are speaking to a relative.
The government propaganda is trying hard to convince Russian population that they are fighting a small group of Nazis who took over government and against NATO mercenaries, not Ukrainians, because they know Russians don't want to fight them.
It may be hard for you to accept, given what's happening, but this is the bullshit that propaganda made some people believe.
I am telling you this as a person, whose girlfriend has heated arguments with her grandmother over a phone every week. It goes something like this:
"grandma! There are no mercenaries! They are fighting Ukranian military! Destroying cities! Where would they find so many mercenaries??? I don't care what you saw on TV! ... ".
The same thing every time.
There are probably ~3-5% of people who are fucked in the head and hate Ukranians, but most people do not.
Lets hope you dont start considering the rest of the world brothers.
> It may be hard for you to accept, given what's happening, but this is the bullshit that propaganda made some people believe.
That same bullshit propaganda has been spewed out by Russia for years and no one inside Russia did anything against it. When Nemstov was killed you all cowered away, when the first arrests for speaking out against the Ukraine war were made the rest of you hid away. This is your mess. This is on you to fix it. The rest of us have to deal wiuth the shit you allowed to come into power, and through inaction and ambivalence you allowed to to accumulate more and more power until we get to where we are today.
I know this is a contentious word for a lot of reasons, but this is completely within the scope of genocide.
The initial goal of this war was to change Ukraininan government to a more friendly one. I have no idea what the current goal is, but it's very clear it's not killing people. Propaganda is trying very hard to deny any killings of civilians that do happen, if the goal was genocide they would try to portray Ukrainians as less than humans, the way some Germans considered jews to be vermin during Hitler.
Russians identify deeply with Ukraine, many have relatives and roots there (myself included). For this reason propaganda is trying to say that they are not fighting Ukraine, but NATO mercenaries. Again, this is horrible but does not sound like genocide.
I fail to follow the logic here. If I beat you with a baseball bat, and will try very hard to deny that, does it mean my goal was not to beat you with a baseball bat? What if at the same time I will post articles in popular blogs about how you are a great human being and we are basically brothers?
If John kills Jane because she is black it is different than killing her by reckless driving. In this war civilians are getting killed because of disregard for human lifes while trying to kill the military, not intentionally because of the group they belong to.
I am not trying to say they are not killing people, it's the intention that I am questining. How can it be a genocide of Ukranians if Putin is killing a bunch of Russians that live there as well? And if there are many Ukranians in Russia's military doing the same thing.
Here is Putin on the record in a speech he gave:
“ Putin said in a Monday speech: "Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood. There has never been a sustainable statehood in Ukraine."
He argued that Ukraine was a creation of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin, its first leader, despite extensive evidence of a distinctive Ukrainian culture before that.
Putin also made a claim that Ukraine was a part of Russia's historic territory.
He said in his speech: "Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space.”
Here is the link for additional context including some nice words about having ties to Ukraine not dissimilar to what you just said: https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-denies-reviving-russia...
Maybe there is a cultural dissonance here and what Putin said means something completely different in Russian, but this to me reads as someone walking a fine line trying very hard not to admit that his goal is to erase Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as distinct from Russia and the Russian people. That was in February two days before launching a full scale invasion of Ukraine, and I don’t trust that the “official” reasons are the real ones. Putin is former KGB: deceiving foreigners and citizens alike is literally his bread and butter.
As for "not a real country", there's an opinion that I think has some truth to it, that Ukraine, Russia as well as other states were all forged in the flame of USSR. As I visit ex-USSR states they are very similar, like different flavors of the same country. National cloth and parts of language is all that is left.
This way there's not much need to change Ukraine to be like Russia, all of us already have the USSR culture.
Ukraine and it’s predecessor States were separate from any shared territory with Moscow and most of modern Russia’s western territory for something in the neighborhood of 700 years (at least!). There was even a force in Ukraine that fought against Union with Russia (and State Socialism) prior to Ukraine being subjected to Russian domination and eventually the USSR by Russian military force. Ukraine also declared independence from the USSR in 1991. That isn’t nothing either because Russia also went its own separate way and recognized Ukrainian independence. We also had an agreement since 1994 (the Budapest Memorandum) that Russia would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and that should have been the end of it.
But no, apparently that wasn’t enough and here we are, and for that matter you may as well call me British instead of American because apparently a few centuries of sovereign independence and cultural distinction don’t count.
In my limited experience there's more in common between Russia and Ukraine / Georgia / Kazakhstan than between Russia and Poland / Czech / Croatia etc, latter being Slavs.
USSR did a lot of work to unify culture of its states.
In my personal experience I can never tell if someone is from Ukraine or Belarus until they tell me. I can tell that someone is from EU (including Slavs) just by looking at their back 20 meters away.
And what happened on March 17, 1995?
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
The mental element, "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", is publicly there, in official speeches and everything.
The physical element ticks every box besides "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group", that we know of. The Russian army tortures murders civilians indiscriminately, puts them in grave peril (without access to food, water, heating), and kidnaps children.
It's textbook genocide.
Stop repeating Russian propaganda.
Believe me, that is not it.
You are likely right here though, that Donetsk and Lugansk would have likely became a part of Russia. I don't think anything would change for them, however, since these areas are already largely pro-Russian and were already controlled by military affiliated with Russia.
I expect after this war they are going to reconsider how much they want to be in Russia, because after promising to protect them, Putin sent all their young men to war.
Words don't mean anything anymore.
But Putin led off with “Ukrainians aren’t a real people”. Signaling counts for a lot in war and diplomacy.
This is not suspicious at all.
Did everyone forget about the Snowden leaks? Or did everyone just decide to trust the same people who lied to us about committing the crime in the first place when they said they stopped?
> Did everyone forget about the Snowden leaks
It appears you are misremembering or misunderstanding the Snowden leaks.
As others have pointed out, this court was also effectively a rubber stamp machine. Between 1979 and 2015, 38,365 warrants were approved and a grand total of 12 were rejected. That's an approval rate of >99.9%.
Go back and review the work of snowden, that is not how it worked.
Or which part of Snowden leaks he misunderstood?
> without any kind of warrant. there was a need for warrant
Nevertheless, you confirmed one part of a two part statement as being demonstrably false. So in conclusion, companies responded to court orders from courts in the jurisduction they were in.
> Might as well not be a warrant as you have no legal defense against it
You might need to take a refresher on what a warrant is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause is as good a starter as any, the bar is low, very low. Then check in in the Patriot Act, where the bar was lowered even further.
It definitely doesn't sound right.
This is hilarious.
I think it's very concerning to see society actively wanting to suppress "harmful" information/apps that've been deemed "harmful" by Governments, and by extension, corporate interests. Society sees these massive companies doing it with statements like "removing harmful misinformation", "aiding in the 'fight against the evil russians!'", etc. etc. etc.
I understand that "yes, Apple is a private company with their own catered app-store experience and can control what they do and don't allow on it".
What I don't like is that there are so few competitors in the phone space - Android app store, and Apple store, the rest are single-digit percentage or low double-digit percentage market shares. And, these current companies do everything in their power to make sure no other competitors enter the scene, even though there's high barriers/costs to enter the mobile device market.
Apple (and all gigantic tech companies) have so much power to sway society and sway public opinion, purely by restricting what apps or content you can or cannot have on your devices - further more they make corporate decisions (which I am undoubtedly sure are done behind closed doors with execs from other companies and/or the US Government) that affect so many people without even a thought. Whether it's been designed that way to allow the US government to have more soft-power over it's people rather than hard power like other countries (China, Russia) or not, it's harmful to everybody.
I wish there was more active/worthy competition in the mobile phone space.
> Google and Apple have removed hundreds of apps from their app stores at the request of governments around the world ...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/apps-...
EDIT to add that the Ars article was originally published in The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/the-same-app-can-pose-a-bigger-s...