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Comment by eddanger | Hacker News Reader

The only winner out of this is Nokia who paid for the hotels and flights home of those bloggers. http://twitter.com/clintonjeff/status/242358009249026049

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Wow, that is brilliant PR.

This is greatness.

Nicely done there by Nokia, even if they only did for PR at least it was still a damn nice thing to do.

Check this too - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4469575

I will buy one of their Android phones instead of a Samsung one. Oh wait ...

Nokia is awesome ++

In 2008 Nokia's joint-venture with Siemens, Nokia-Siemens-Networks, developed and built "monitoring centres", on-site deep-packet-inspection and Internet filtering infrastructure for Iran and later also for Egypt and Iran. This wasn't just selling custom routers or something, but a large engineering project where they knowingly agreed to aid oppressive regimes in controlling their citizens and abusing human rights. We all know what role these packet filtering systems played in the Arab Spring, etc.

So, Nokia is not very awesome++ at all, in my opinion, and in fact even though what Samsung did was very shitty, it kind of pales in comparison.

In all fairness, two and a half year later, a human rights lawyer contacted them and told them this was not okay, and they stopped doing it. Or, to quote someone on Metafilter: "Big company does something any sane, thinking person would automatically know is immoral. Film at 11."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/22/iran-n...

http://www.metafilter.com/82687/Nokia-Siemens-and-the-Irania...

http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/news-events/press-room/c... (this is their mea culpa, it almost sounds like they learned a lesson, except that it took over 2 years and a human rights lawyer before they stopped helping oppressive regimes with human rights abuse)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nokia+siemens+internet+filtering+e...

Many big companies out there has links with this sort of thing.

IBM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#IBM_busin... Apple — FoxConn Disney - The allegations of Walt Disney's pedophillia. And so on.

I got down voted so thought I'd explain better.

My point is, it can be very hard to avoid all companies on ethics alone.

Well I guess is everyone is doing it we just shouldn't care.

You can care, just don't get delusions of grandeur over boycotting one company for those reasons when you most likely are using the infrastructure of another company that does the exact same thing.

Thank you for explaining it more eloquently than I was.

For the record, that downvote wasn't mine.

And your point is fair, both the first one, the clarification and shinratdr's rewording :) (except I'd kinda steer clear of things that are merely "alleged"--but I don't know anything about the Disney case)

And indeed I don't really know about avoiding all of them, however I do believe it's important to spread word about it, so that people know, and corporations know they can't get away with everything, and hopefully cause at least some corporations to do right.

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