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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Or it means that the original bans were primarily instituted because of myopic geopolitics and not because of any meaningful threats. In particular US ire towards Kaspersky grew rapidly after it was the only antivirus that picked up on NSA/'equation group' malware.

It's similar how the US banned all cooperation with China in space [1] because of some tropes about them being unable to do anything except steal American tech. That's why, to this day, there are no Chinese on the ISS. After that law China proceeded to develop, launch, and man their own space station, put a rover on Mars, and even carry out an unprecedented sample return mission from the dark side of the Moon, and just generally run circles around the US (except perhaps SpaceX) in space. Interestingly US researchers may not be able to access those Moon samples (which China shared with scientists worldwide) due to this stupid law.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

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Regardless what the original story behind the Kaspersky ban was, if you genuinely don't think that a Russian antivirus company represents a state-controlled threat to US organisations, public and private, in 2025 then I don't know what to say to you.

Not if US and Russia become “allies”. Then UK/EU companies will become a bigger “threat”.

It should go even further e.g. you don’t want ARM installing backdoors on their chips and giving hostile foreign organizations like the MI6 access to vital American infrastructure, intelligence data etc. do you?

It might be the time to consider switching to Elbrus or at least mandating that all devices used by US government agencies have to use Intel’s chips.

I think the argument is that non-cooperation represents a much greater long term threat to everyone involved than cooperation, collaboration.

Increased collaboration between the Russian state and the American state is bad for the ordinary citizens of both — and for freedom-loving people in Ukraine, Europe, and everywhere else.

The US and Russia are the biggest nuclear powers in the world. Positive relations here are good for absolutely everybody. Positive relations do not mean one has to approve of the political system, ideology, or whatever else of the other side. See: Saudi Arabia which remained a key ally for many decades in spite of being wayyyyyy further off the spectrum (relative to the US) than Russia could ever be.

Overtly adversarial relationships trend towards violence, sooner or later, and that's not a path we ever want to go down.

The US has turned towards enabling Russia’s imperialist war, and the Pentagon article explains how it will unilaterally disarm in the face of Russian cyberwarfare, leaving Russian criminal groups to run rampant in Europe and even the US. Abetting conquest and criminality is not the sort of collaboration we should cheer.

Wars are largely started because of poor relations. The US overtly supported and encouraged an effort within Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected president because he moving more towards Russia than the West. Russia then ended up invading Ukraine for fears of having NATO not only right on their doorstep, but right in their geographic Achille's Heel.

If the US and Russia were on good relations none of this would have happened, Germany's economy would still be booming, and just about everybody would be so much better off today. And no, the article does not say the Pentagon will "unilaterally disarm." It ordered a halt to offensive operations against Russia - e.g. the Russian government which is certainly going to be reciprocated. Criminal elements are a different topic, but I do expect as relations between US and Russia warm, they will no longer be looking the other way when these groups target the West.

Bullshit, after Ruzzia invaded Ukraine in 2014 you still have the ability to pretend Ukrainians did not really want to join EU and NATO and USA, Israel and Illuminaty caused the Ukrainians to protest their president that promised the West and then betrayed the people by going East.

Typical Zed propaganda where Eastern Europeans are all brainwashed to hate the good, kind Ruzzian empire. if you are USaians then go and fix your history and stop consuming MAGA and Zed propaganda.

You're having an anachronism. The events in Crimea only came after 'their president' was overthrown, and were directly and indisputably caused by it. The reason I say 'their president' is because Crimea is majority ethnic Russian and before them it was Tatars. It's never been Ukrainian in ethnicity or even close to such. And the event that was exploited into a crisis point was Yanukovych signing an economic agreement with Russia instead of the EU.

The US wasn't just doings things behind the scenes. This [1] is John McCain at a rally in Kyiv. Imagine if during the BLM (or January 6th or whatever) protests/riots if China/Russia/etc had sent high level officials to overtly rally people to try to overthrow the government. It's a completely surreal sight if you really think about what you're seeing. The US is right there saying 'Yeah, we're gonna overthrow you in plain sight - try to do anything about it and you'll be wishing that's all that happened.' And if you think there was nothing going on behind the scenes on top of that stuff that overt in front of the cameras, then I'd say you're not arguing in good faith!

In any case, none of this happens with good relations. A simple agreement to economically save Ukraine shouldn't have been an adversarial East vs West thing, but just another agreement to the benefit of Ukrainians. But that poor country's strategic positioning, and easily exploitable nationalist minority, means it was doomed to inevitably just end up as little more than a rope being tugged on by two giants. The giants will be fine regardless of what happens - it's just the rope that ends up in tatters.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg

Fck what about Ukraine borders are recognized by Ruzzia but they invaded Ukraine then they signed peace and invaded again

I don't give a shit what USA idiots said, if the people of Ukraine want in EU and NATO like their neighbors Poland, Romania, Hungary then why should a failed empire object.

You imply that USA brainwashed the Ukrainians, they instigated this.

Can't you use your brains? Can you see Ruzzians killing, raping, torturing their "brothers" ? It is obvious that for an ethnic Ruzzian genociding Polish, Romanians or Ukrainians is the same , they have no value for what we actually want.

We all want EU and NATO to be free of USSR/Ruzzian empire the Ruzzians want their empire back,

Ruzzia has nukes so the bullshit that NATO extens because they want to invade Ruzzia and steal their shit is stupid , use your brain

EU bought shit from Ruzzia, EU tried to get peace with the empire by making bussiness relations, EU had not plants to invade and steal Ruzzian lands .

There was ZERO risk for Ruzzia to get invaded, it is the same with the other wars Putin started, it is all geopolitics and many Zeds agree with it and make fun of us smaller country by claiming that this is how the world works, big empires screw the small countries.

> why should a failed empire object.

There is a lot to criticize the US for, but it is nowhere close to being a failed empire yet.

>There is a lot to criticize the US for, but it is nowhere close to being a failed empire yet.

At least we can agree Ruzzia is failed empire, no words on that part from KGB I am happy I found an agent that is not flagging or reporting me then goes to tell his mom how big of a hero he is.

I am not implying in any way that Ukrainians are brainwashed. The main weapon that the US uses against geopolitical adversaries is to take some organic issue, the sort which exist in every single country (including the US), and exploit it as much as possible to try to turn a small spark into a blazing inferno. If we didn't need to have McCain go speak in Ukraine to keep that fire burning - we wouldn't have. The optics are bad, it makes a mockery of any notion of not meddling in other democracies, and you can no longer dismiss direct involvement as just some conspiracy, as you initially tried to.

The reasons countries don't want geopolitical adversaries on their doorstep is because superpowers have an unspoken (well.. sometimes spoken [1]) 'sphere of influence' that is not to be touched. If Mexico signed a military agreement with Russia that involved them establishing forces there - we would be invading imminently. In fact this is exactly what the Cuban Missile Crisis [2] was about. Ukraine (and Taiwan) are not even just proxy wars between the US and Russia/China, but rather they're a proxy war against hegemony. Does the US have the right to setup right on Russia's front door? How about China's?

So the one thing I would agree with you is that indeed - the world remains one of the strong picking on the weak. And the last place you ever want to be is caught in the middle of a turf war between two giants. The world would be vastly better for everybody if those giants instead existed in collaboration, or at least healthy competition. One trying to dominate the other is only likely to hurt those caught in the middle. Because if the two giants ever came to unrestrained blows, the entire world would burn.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

This is still bullshit if some EU official comes and speaks in Romania then all the Zeds and MAGAs will claim that all Romanians votes are now invalid and we are actually brainwashed.

You guys need to accept the real reality, none of Ruzzian neighbors want to be part of Ruzzia, NONE . Everyone inteligent person is leaving Ruzzia, people in neighboring countries go in EU or West and not Ruzzia.

We know better what Ruzzians are capable of, and we know better what we want, no visit from an USaian or Soros can overnight change our minds.

I see this with Ruzzians that are USSR nostalgic, they actually think that Moscowites sacrificed their wealth to help everyone else and we just got brainwashed to hate them, the genocides did not happened anfd if they would have happened the victims deserved it.

The EU or Soros would never have the audacity, or power, to do what the US did. McCain was openly acting as an enemy of the state, as a high profile guest of the state, in plain sight, directly adjacent to the center of the state! That was a massive power play you can only do in a country you have under the heel of your boot.

  The US overtly supported and encouraged an effort within Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected president because he moving more towards Russia than the West. Russia then ended up invading Ukraine for fears of having NATO not only right on their doorstep, but right in their geographic Achille's Heel.

This war started when Ukraine's president Yanukovych, at the last minute and under Russian extortion, abandoned the EU-Ukraine trade agreement that would have opened up the EU for trade and other opportunities. This meant that Ukrainians could've easily seen their incomes grow by 3-4x in a short span of time, like other countries that entered deeper relations with the EU and eventually joined it saw.

Naturally, Ukrainians responded with massive protests, to which Yanukovych replied with increasing violence, culminating in 100 protesters being killed by police snipers. At that moment, Yanukovych lost the support of even his own party, fled to Russia out of fear of imminent imprisonment, and the Ukrainian parliament announced snap elections to replace him. The elections were held a few months later. Not many people would call general elections a "CIA coup".

NATO has nothing to do with it either, that's pure gaslighting. In the first few years after the initial invasion in 2014, Russia denied having any troops in Ukraine. According to Russia, the thousands of people equipped with Russian tanks, artillery, and air defense systems were merely local self-defense forces who had bought their equipment from military surplus stores. Russia claimed that Ukraine was in a civil war.

The narrative started shifting to blaming NATO only in the run-up to the full-scale invasion in 2022, when Russia abandoned the story that Ukrainians were fighting each other and needed a new justification for its massive surprise attack on all of Ukraine.

After the initial US allegations they moved their infrastructure and customer data over to Switzerland intentionally leaving them subject to both EU and Swiss customer data protection laws, and also opened up various hubs to enable interested parties to review their source code on demand, if desired.

I don't think every Russian company is conspiring against the US anymore than I think every US company is conspiring against Russia. In this case there's a clear and malicious motive for the US to want to block them that has nothing to do with threats, and they've gone way beyond any sort of reasonable standard to make it clear they have no ill intentions whatsoever.

Of course the problem is that proving you're not a witch is basically impossible, which is why innocent until proven guilty is a standard across the world, except when it comes into geopolitics when allegations are proof, leaving the accused parties to prove a negative.

I think the more prudent approach in the modern age is to simply assume that all states control organizations within their midst with the intention of posing a threat to citizens - foreign and domestic - and a misplaced trust in ones own state above all others is not only naive, but super dangerous.

If you're not holding your own government to the standards you apply to other states, you're putting yourself in danger.

Especially given the fact that the USA and its partners operates the largest, by far, information gathering/human rights abusing apparatus with well-known subversive purposes, by a long margin..

I agree with this, but would extend the distrust to all concentrations of power. Supremely wealthy corporations and individuals, although on their own lacking the state’s monopoly on violence, eventually co-opt the state through regulatory capture or other means (although they can ruin lives even without the state’s power). See Elon Musk for a particularly vivid contemporary example.

This is clear, long before Elon Musk came along - although previously, these corporate-capture individuals have worked to hide their malign influence, and in Musks' case, he seems more inclined to make it obvious and open.

Although it has to be stated, I don't think Elon has been calling for the bombing of innocent human beings at the same rate as his predecessors.

> meaningful threats

True, they cease being “meaningful” the moment you surrender and stop viewing them as threats.

OFC it’s all relative, Russia and similar actors having more political/economic influence in the US (and by extension globally) might not be viewed as a negative by some people.

I appreciate your tangent wrt US vs China in space.

TIL: I had no idea China had already launched their own space station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

Meh, or it was meaning threat, it is just that Trump is myoptic and completely under Putins control.

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