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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

You're suggesting that Apple, a giant publicly traded company with known people that can be summoned to court and assets located in places that can be seized, should ignore lawful orders from a country they are operating in?

Can I ask you how you think that would play out?

>Somehow piracy on the clearnet never really stopped with it being illegal in most countries.

I'm sure you can spot the difference between a small group of people running a piracy site and a multinational company selling physical devices in physical stores.

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> should ignore lawful orders from a country they are operating in?

By allowing users to install arbitrary software on their computers which is not directly controlled by them?

That certainly would be shocking and unheard of.

"Lawful" "order" is cute.

I'm not talking about Apple here.

This is what you said:

> Any sufficiently popular alternative would be subject to the same issue: you can't backdoor encryption without making it insecure.

I'm just saying this is not true because you can have a company without any legal presence, thus susceptibility to law enforcement, in the UK. The legal issue will be shifted onto the user, but it's hard to go after millions of users compared to one big company.

The parallel with piracy is that they also tend to be operated from beyond the jurisdiction of countries enforcing the copyright.

That didn't work out for X in Brazil. The government of a sovereign nation can just require you to have a presence to do business there.

That's mostly because of them using Musk's other business as leverage. A good company created explicitly to operate like this has no such vulnerability. The UK can try to stop them by trying to block the IPs or whatever, and the company is in turn free to try to circumvent it. The only issue is they may be banned from App store, which is a self-inflicted problem caused by Apple.

They simply blocked the whole of X in the whole of Brazil. They made it a crime to circumvent the block, so of course you could still access it with a VPN, as long as you didn't log into any account tied to your presence in Brazil, making it useless for politicians and the like. They didn't need to "use another business as leverage."

> you can have a company without any legal presence, thus susceptibility to law enforcement, in the UK

This is true, although you'd need to sideload to avoid things like "UK government bans this app from the UK app store".

Or worse, “UK government requires the App Store version to be backdoored”.

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