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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

My biggest professional regret is not joining Mullvad when their founder emailed me.

A seriously large chunk of their values aligns with my own, and it's woefully few technical enthusiasts that continue to place liberty over convenience -- meaning most of us tend to use hyperscaler cloud providers under the purview of the US Government. -- and before anyone mentions it; yes that has been an issue for me in my professional career as the cloud providers must adhere to US sanctions, meaning if you are from Cuba, Iran or Crimea you can't play the games I made. -- which is annoying because you could buy our game legally in Russia and Ukraine, but if you happened to be in occupied territory then no play time for you.

Sidetracked a bit, but it's really refreshing from the outside to see a company that isn't scummy that values liberty.

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Yup. As a Cuban, sometimes it is annoying and sometimes go beyond that. Some cloud providers are totally off limits for us, some are fine with us (the minority and less known), some let us use some services but no others, some even have valid OFAC licenses but still deny access (because ACL complexities, I suppose)... it's all over the place. That's why I'm 95% of the time on crappy VPNs both to escape/evade US sanctions and my own country censoring mechanisms.

The thing is, I somewhat understand why the sanctions were placed decades ago, but... is that rationale still valid? Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.

Thank you for your position, BTW!

> Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.

This confirms my secondhand knowledge of financial sanctions. It seems to universally be this way and makes me wonder why we still tout them as if they were effective. They sure don’t seem to be.

That’s a very broad statement, almost automatically untrue. All countries, all situations, all financial sanctions?

It obviously isn't too broad, because instead of this comment you could have posted a single counterexample to disprove it.

The onus isn’t really on me, I’m not the one making blanket statements.

The idea is that "the many", the poor, will overthrown the elite.

Because they have limited access to the Internet? That’s just silly.

and many other things

Like, what things? I'm a citizen of a heavily sanctioned country, even though I haven't lived there for years. If anything, sanctions only affect people in such a way that they hate the countries that imposed the sanctions on their country, but not their own government. That's a very naive point of view.

Like we saw recentlly with Russia, the people were not upset when they invaded Ukraine. Then when McDonald's pulled out of Russia a fat guy chained itself to the doors. So internet, fast-food, clothes, cars, movies... water pumps... and so on.

> the people were not upset

False. There's a lot (the majority) of people from my close circle who were and are "upset", if I can put it this way. I don't have the statistics, but let's say that's 80/20 ratio (supporters/non-supporters), even though I personally believe it's closer to 50/50.

> fast-food, clothes

So you really think that limited access to the Internet and the fact that McDonalds is gone would force these 20% to get on the streets and fight against the heavily armed government forces AND the rest 80% of the country population? I mean, among the other reasons that come to mind, sanctions (movies, cars, clothes - what??) are somewhere at the very bottom of my list, if matter at all.

It's not what I think, is what actually happened: a russian guy protested ONLY for his lifestyle, a burger, not for his government killing other people.

Do you see the difference between "a guy" and 20% of the population?

Funny how everyone talks about the Chinese "great firewall" that blocks access towards some western platforms from China, and no one talks about "USA great firewall" that blocks Cuban citizen from acceding to a lot of services

Probably because they are very different things. It’s not like the US stops Cubans from reading Wikipedia.

Because the latter is not a thing. The United States does not implement any border firewalls on traffic entering the country. No law compels blocking Cuban citizens from accessing US hosted content, just preventing them from entering into financial transactions.

I honestly have no idea how the sanctions are reflected in the actual wording of the law, but what I see is that many companies are actually overzealous and wholesale limit (block) access regardless of the outcome of the content request (that is, even if the transaction is not a financial one.)

Let me give you an example: I can't open dell.com, at all. What I want to believe is that they blocked all access because it was easy, just a geo thingy flipped on. It is their decision though, but it is supported on existing sanctions. So... yes, the law compels them to do it, indirectly or not. And there are hundreds, thousands of other examples that I can provide, if you're interested.

Besides the technical differences brought up by other commenters, I'm a Canadian and I hear about USA sanctions toward Cuba on regular TV news and newspapers, never mind more specific news sources, every USA election cycle. It's a massive topic of public debate, and from what I can see it hugely influences outcomes of key seats in state and federal elections. Sometimes these claims of "nobody talks" or "mainstream media doesn't want you to know" are just... incorrect?

I also got upset when I had to implement geoip tracking to block specific countries and thought about the people that wouldn't have access to the free service we were providing, which I thought could help someone bootstrapping their small business and potentially improve their lives.

That being said, many people consider sanctions as an act of war[0] and if you think of them like that, well obviously it sucks, it's war and war-like consequences always suck for the people on the ground.

Just make sure when your boss asks you to implement geoblock bans for sanctions, do what you need to do and not more like trying to block VPN users or other shenanigans. Don't break the law but don't make it harder for people on the ground to use their right to internet access.

[0] https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/06/29/economic-sanctions-as-...

Sidenote: I know a bunch of people from Crimea and many things we take for granted are surprisingly complex for them. People from Cuba or Iran at least have the certainty of which country they are in.

Crimea is in Ukraine.

Yet, if you lived there you would be issued a Russian passport, your official documents would be from the Russian state; your police would be Russian.

And; if you lived in Laos, Cuba, Cambodia or Afganistan: you would currently be taking the opposite stance.

We owe it to ourselves to not permit the affectations of propaganda to convince us that we are consistently right, the truth on the ground is much more complicated.

I certainly believe Crimea is an invaded territory of Ukraine, but I cannot pretend that it's a wise notion to demerit the entire conflict down to "Crimea is in Ukraine".

It does nothing to help the people there, and is completely meaningless in the face of my initial comment: that while I could sell games to Ukrainians, I could not allow them to play from within Crimea... a territory you claim; is Ukraine. The implicit argument you just made is that we have created sanctions against Ukraine itself.

Crimea is de jure in Ukraine per international consensus. Crimea is de facto occupied by Russia. These are orthogonal statements are both valid. Everything else you listed derives from these premises.

Russian passport, your official documents would be from the Russian state; your police would be Russian

And, most likely, your personal allegiance would be Russian.

While this is a provocative response and there is no excuse for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2001 Ukrainian census[1] states 60.4% of the Crimean population considered themselves Russian and 24% of the Crimean population considered themselves Ukrainian.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea#Ethnici...

Obviously it's impossible to do a reasonably unskewed poll in Crimea right now. However in other parts of Ukraine the number of people who consider themselves Russian drastically decreased when Russia started shelling their homes. So it's not clear how informative 2001 polls would be. Russia has also deliberately encouraged Russians to move to Crimea recently which would also skew that statistic.

You make some good points. I agree, any census done after Russia took Ukraine in 2014 can't be used and I don't doubt people who once considered themselves Russian started to consider themselves Ukrainian after Russia attacked Ukraine, but this was before all that so I don't think that's a problem.

And I'm not saying considering yourself Russian means you have allegiance to Russia, but I think there is a strong correlation between the two. Even if there's less of a correlation than I think, the percentage which considers themselves Russian is over twice that of the percentage which considers themselves Ukrainian. Maybe the Tatars align more with Ukraine than Russia, improving the balance, but idk.

Whether the people considered themselves to be "Russian" or not, in 1991 54% of voters in Crimea came out in favor of independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...

Even though you have the results of "demographics" survey of 1989 that put "Russian" populace at 67%.

Thanks for this. I'm glad people have good, evidence-based responses to my comment.

This gives us a great idea of how likely a Crimean who considers themselves Russian would actually vote between the two and that while the correlation is strong, it might not be strong enough to suggest Crimeans would favor Russia and while Crimea is still clearly, the most Russian-friendly Ukrainian state, the decision between the two is much closer than I previously thought.

Edit: to add, I have talked with a Crimean who supports Ukraine, but they say the outcome of a vote would very likely be pro-Russia, even before they started shipping Russians in and pre-occupation.

What it probably shows, is that while the fraction of inhabitants of Russian ethnicity stayed roughly the same in there, the supporters for joining Russia, at the very least, are not the same exact set of people. And we don't really know their number because the vote didn't have any independent observers.

> but they say the outcome of a vote would very likely be pro-Russia, even before they started shipping Russians in and pre-occupation

I heard similar opinions too, but it might vary on who you ask. E.g. we talk about information bubbles on the Internet, but they exist IRL too. That is to say, hearsay is not proof. And even if it were true, one might keep in mind that the reasons for that might not be obvious. E.g. there had been a fair amount of anti-Ukrainian propaganda on the Russian state TV (which broadcasted in Crimea as well) starting with 2000s or so.

Or here's a thought exercise, from another perspective: would you say if US made a poll in Monterrey (Mexico) about whether the people in there wanted to join US, and >50% of them said yes, it would have been justifiable (in at least some practical sense) to annex it? Or Montreal/Canada, for example. It's close enough to the border.

That's disputed (literally :P)

Country borders are made up. While this is most obvious when looking at Africa it is also true everywhere else.

It is probably not too late

Last time I was in Gothenburg in Sweden, about one year ago, I even saw advertisements on the trams about Mullvad hiring people.

If you want to work for them, reach out to them. Maybe they need more people like us still :)

FYI it seems they are still looking for people. They are advertising on buses here in Gothenburg.

What caused you to pass on that opportunity?

It was before (or during the beginning of) COVID and it required on-site in Gothenburg.

I was firmly planted in Malmö (3hrs train away) and had just signed to buy an apartment.

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