After USA Ban: Google Kicks Kaspersky Out of Play Store
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heise.de
I think people mostly aren't surprised that a country is taking action against an enemy, that's expected in general. What might raise an eyebrow here and there is when they're doing it via the exact same means they classified as anti-democratic, anti-free market, anti-freedom, etc. when their enemies were doing it. It's the hypocrisy of the explanation and the realization once you try to look beyond the veneer of righteousness that those giving the explanation think their own people must be at peak ignorance.
So yea, we have to break those rules against entities who would use them against us.
As I said, the hypocrisy of the speech and perhaps the expectation that people will always swallow it (which sets a low bar for the opinion about those people) are what stands out, not that a country takes actions against an enemy. Atomic bombs were dropped in the name of peace, a minor phone app being banned can hardly be called "aggression".
I’ll wait.
True sanctions are associated with some political conditions. For instance one can apply some sanctions against Russia until it stops its war against Ukraine.
In the case of the so-called sanctions against China no valid reason is provided for them and there is no "until".
Real sanctions against China would be tied to some explicit requests, for example one could request from China to recognize Taiwan as an independent country, or to provide guarantees that they will not attempt to extend their territorial waters, or to guarantee certain rights for minorities, or whatever other changes in their current behaviors that are criticized by USA would be deemed as appropriate.
Instead of this, USA has not requested anything from China, and the official motivations for the sanctions are ridiculous. Many Chinese companies have been blacklisted because they provide products or services for the Chinese military forces. This is a normal behavior for any company in any country. Plenty of the most important US companies provide products or services for the US military. If all these US companies would be blacklisted by other countries, it is likely that the participation of USA in the international commerce would disappear almost completely.
While some of the less important US sanctions have at least this claimed purpose of weakening the Chinese military, even if no explicit rationale is given for why this is a legitimate goal, the most important US sanctions do not have any other goal than to eliminate the competitors of some US companies.
For instance the war against Huawei has begun exactly in the moment when Huawei was on the verge of surpassing Qualcomm in the production of chipsets for smartphones and they were clearly demonstrating a superior capacity of innovation over Qualcomm.
The second great wave of sanctions against SMIC and other important semiconductor device manufacturers has begun exactly when the Chinese were close to take a significant market share for flash memories from Micron.
In both cases the US sanctions have succeeded to remove from the market for consumer products the Chinese competitors of the US companies, preventing thus a drop in the prices of smartphones and SSDs, which would have been beneficial for everybody in the world except for the shareholders of a few US and Korean companies, but their effect against the Chinese military is likely to have been close to null.
Should? Maybe walk their talk? Too many times the US is criticizing countries like China for doing something only to turn around and do the very same thing but sprinkled with a "feel-good" explanation.
This [0] will never get old.
[0] https://www.brokenfrontier.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ho...
Yes, there has been tragic carnage. You can call me Neville Chamberlain, and insist I'm rewarding a bully for being a bully. But this conflict is reaping the proceeds of 30 years of whittling down the Russian sphere of influence and global respect. Even Putin's rise fits well into that narrative-- if Russia had been pulled closer to Europe after 1991, had a less catastrophic switch to private enterprise, had an economic rebirth more like, say, Estonia, would his brand of politics have gotten any traction in the first place? We could see this coming and did nothing to prevent it.
If the war is dragged out until it delivers, say, "a return to 1991 borders and some show trials at the Hague", there's no way that the Russian people don't spend decades in a full scale decoupling and brooding at the West. Even if Putin disappears, there are plenty of others who can stoke that fire. Worst case, you get a DPRK-style hermit state that spans 14 time zones with the industrial capacity and natural resources to back up its resentment.
Conversely, making a quick deal where they walk away as "winners"-- if you don't want to give them Donetsk, how about Cyprus-- lets us pivot towards breaking down the "Russia vs the West" narrative. Try to restructure some international organizations to ensure Russia feels like a respected participant instead of a pariah. Give them opportunities to use their military capability for peacemaking and retaining regional order-- let them have a sphere of influence they crave, but acknowledge it has costs. Develop some trade and joint-venture plans that aren't blatant plundering of a defeated foe. It took decades for many of the former Soviet-bloc states to fit into the modern European order, so we should start the countdown for Russia as soon as possible.
The US isn't "criticizing countries ... for doing something only to turn around and do the very same thing but sprinkled with a "feel-good" explanation." in terms of the situation in Ukraine. Either show they are, or provide a suggestion to the thing we're actually talking about.
There are a bajillion egregious things going on in the App Store. Why draw the line for Federal intervention here? Is there a sincere answer?
But regardless, what's the alternative and how is it immune to similar actions?
They could ask their nephew in fifth grade who would tell them about things like F-Droid and naked .apk files.
yesterday:
Google removes Kaspersky's antivirus software from Play Store https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41758475
Unfortunately the KGB did not simply dissolve, like nearly all the Warsaw Pact agencies -- and this fact is quite central to the situation we are facing today.
I'm not trying to start a nationalistic war or a debate about war, etc. I'm trying to ask what I think valid question.
There's your answer: coming from an eastern European, I probably know a thing or two how things work in the communist world. We saw what yandex was on the inside about a year and a half ago - it'd be brutally naive, even to a westerner, to think that a cyber-"security" company is any different or rather worse. You can read the bios of all the people in high positions in kaspersky - those are not ordinary entrepreneurs but state-funded individuals that should stay far away from windows if they decide to disobey a single order, whether it's spying or donating their children's kidneys. But if you wanna dive into it, yes, plenty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspersky_and_the_Russian_gove...
> In October 2017, subsequent reports alleged that hackers working for the Russian government stole confidential data from the home computer of a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor in 2015 via Kaspersky antivirus software. Kaspersky denied the allegations, stating that the software had detected Equation Group malware samples which it uploaded to its servers for analysis in its normal course of operation.
lol