5ESS

What you’re saying is absurd. It was 1 man who did those things, not “Russia, the country, as a whole”. I just try to imagine how I would feel if suddenly my life was devestated by foreign nations all because our president made a bad decision. When I did everything in my power not to elect that president, I voted against him, and I spent countless hours trying to convince others to vote against him as well. But ultimately I as an individual am powerless. So why should I suffer the consequences for something in which I had no control over and nothing to do with? It is injustice. Group punishments are wrong and only used by the most morally abhorrent nations in the world such as North Korea.

The change will occur within much faster if Russians have a safe and secure means to communicate with the outside world. It sounds more like you (and others who support sanctions) are more interested in making Russians suffer as some sort of revenge rather than invoking any kind of meaningful change in their governance.

I support free speech and access to a free, open, and uncensored internet for everyone on this planet and I wont discriminate based on nationality.

You can provision VPN servers on your computers and give them out to Russian nationals for free.

How are sanctions going to make anybody more informed?

They dont…That makes no sense. Instead of sanctions, a more effective strategy would be to provide Russians with free VPNs so that they can access western news media.

Could I (US citizen) get in trouble for providing free VPNs to Russian nationals?

Would these Russians get in trouble for using my US based VPN?

I want to support Russians during this difficult time but I don’t want them to get in trouble. I disagree with sanctioning and punishing ordinary citizens for the actions of the rich and powerful 1%. Imagine how it feel being a US citizen and getting punished for Donald Trump’s decisions. It’s wrong and makes no sense.

Tibet? East Turkestan? South China Sea?

It’s pretty gross that they won’t admit they made a mistake and instead choose to mislead the public using deceptive language.

Blame the state governments for publishing those records in the first place. Everyone knows that once information is published on the internet there is really no “undo” button. If judyrecords goes down another, perhaps less scrupulous, operator will release another similar site.

It wasn’t a breach. Those records were publicly available. It’s a shame the site’s operator complied with the takedown request. Unfortunately that’s what happens when you use a US hosting provider and domain. In the interest of transparency, site operator should consider migrating the site to a provider outside of US jurisdiction and/or making torrents of the record data that can’t be simply taken down.

I don’t think the US is a good place to live or to work. In fact I’ve been miserable ever since living here. It’s a depressing place with no semblance of justice. I can’t say that I wouldn’t support a regime change here.

Could you add support for 10 or 12 bit colors?

This should be redone in WebGL1 and WASM to be system independent and working on all devices including iOS and Mac.

It doesn’t work on iPhones…

Welcome to the post-truth world, where even posting a simple true statement “he is a male”, “she is a female”, is enough to warrant a ban.

If the graphics quality increases I might play it one day.

Not working on iPhone or iMac M1… not impressed by that..

Good. Anyone with a RTL-SDR and a copy of software available for free on GitHub can snoop on the SMS messages sent over 4g within close physical proximity. And for the rest, can be obtained with a little bit of background knowledge into lawfulintercept/subpoena process, an edited email template in the correct format sent to the carrier legal requests mailbox from a fake LEA domain name, with a shockingly high rate of success.

Even if it were proven that this was indeed true, the proof would certainly not be allowed to reach mainstream audiences. The author would be discredited, face character assassination (and sometimes physical assassination), and/or blacklisting from the scientific community. At the very least they would never be able to secure funding for future projects and their loved would start suffering from tragic “accidents”.

> the capital and man-hours of investment necessary to enter a market could be enormous

The point is this isn’t Apple’s fault so they shouldn’t be the ones punished for it. I completely disagree with the idea that if your product gets popular enough by virtue of delivering a superior experience that you then have some kind of obligation to appease the entitlement of users, or to foster growth of competitions, or to be obligated to open up your payment processor gateways to third parties resulting in cuts to your profits.

We’re getting off topic here. This isn’t Apple’s fault and has nothing to do with them. No one is forced to use Apple products because alternatives DO exist, so they are NOT a monopoly, and therefore antitrust laws should NOT apply to them.

> Look it this way. Why an ordinary user would use a phone that they cannot use with their bank or their employer in some cases? Widewine is the defacto and dejure standard for drm content playback and you must have an explicit google license to create a browser with such capabilities and there are less than half a dozen such browsers on the market.

Users should be suing their banks and Google then for restricting access, not Apple.

> For this same reason you need Google or Apple support to have a range of other enterprise apps/services native to your platform or you need to have another means to convince those developers that they should trust your signing keys.

Nobody actually needs any of that junk. A secure platform/service can be delivered via HTTPS through a simple web browser. No API keys or DRM licenses necessary. It’s unnecessary fluff that users should be suing the respective organizations to remove.

> Add distribution to that, because in order for your platform to reach significant number of users, it should be offered by the mobile carriers with their phone plans. How many companies do you know who are willing to compete with the agreements already done by Apple and Google?

Sue the mobile carriers then for Anti-trust. Not Apple. This isn’t Apples fault, so why should Apple be suffering the consequences?

> I've long used Linux exclusively on laptops/desktops and in the past I've been a Linux/Unix sysadmin but I have no idea how to go about getting a smartphone that runs Linux and works with the major carrier services or how much it would cost.

You aren’t doing enough research or trying hard enough then. PinePhone exists. Raspberry pi+4g modem and accompanying software for SMS/telephony exists. You can find Linux phones with a simple Google search (I find Purism and PinePhone on the first search results page for ‘Linux phone’. Also plenty of Android phones can be rooted. I managed to root every Android phone I owned since I was a teenager with limited technical expertise by following some simple tutorial or another.

It isn’t Apple’s fault that the average person isn’t doing their research or trying hard enough, so why should they be suffering the consequences? This line of thought stems from entitlement. Just because Apple’s solution is so good users feel entitled to other solutions being just as good, and when they aren’t up to par, initiate litigation against Apple for providing such a high quality solution that makes others pale in comparison.

If someone doesn’t like Apple‘s system, there are at least dozens of different phone manufacturers to choose from. Anti-trust laws are written to bust monopolies, which Apple doesn’t fit the definition of in any way, shape, or form. It is a bad-faith misinterpretation/misapplication of Anti-trust laws. Just because they are a popular choice doesn’t mean that users have no other choice. If you think they are a monopoly it means you think users are forced to use their product and have no other choice. How can anyone say with a straight face that users have no other choice but to use Apple? It’s just objectively incorrect.

But why should Apple be forced by the government to make changes to its platform under anti-trust laws when they aren’t even a monopoly? If someone doesn’t like Apple‘s system, there are at least dozens of different phone manufacturers to choose from. Anti-trust laws are written to bust monopolies, which Apple doesn’t fit the definition of in any way, shape, or form. It is a bad-faith misinterpretation/misapplication of Anti-trust laws. Just because they are a popular choice doesn’t mean that users have no other choice. If you think they are a monopoly it means you think users are forced to use their product and have no other choice. How can you say that with a straight face that users have no other choice but to use Apple? It’s just plain wrong.

I could name two dozen Linux distos that can support a 4g modem, a touch screen, a desktop environment with an app launcher, a web browser, and the capability to install arbitrary software packages. but it would be a waste of time because anyone reading this is probably already familiar with several popular Linux distros. PinePhone is the proof of concept that first comes to mind and there is no reason it’s software for SMS/telephony cant be ported to most any other disto.

> usage with popular apps and services

Isn’t a fair question, because the onus of supporting these “popular apps” isn’t on the operating system maintainer, it’s on the app’s developer to release packages that are compatible. There’s no real reason popular app (Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix etc) maintainers can’t release a working version for Linux, they just choose not to.

I don’t think Apple should be forced to make changes to their own platform at behest of government orders. Today it’s forcing them to open up payment gateways, tomorrow it’s forcing them to put a police backdoor in iMessage. I don’t agree with the sentiment at all. And if I owned a company, I wouldn’t like to be forced by the government to make changes to MY software. It is completely antithetical to the notion of this being a free country.

My point with PinePhone is that if someone wants to make their own platform that uses a different payment processing system, they are free to do so, much like PinePhone has done.

This isn’t comparable to the railroad monopolies of the 1800s like these anti-trust laws were intended to effect. Because no one is forcing anybody to use Apple products. If you don’t like it, simply use something else. No one anywhere is being forced to use Apple products. The idea that the government should force Apple to make changes to its systems both sickens and disgusts me.

How about PinePhone then?

Ummm, you’re being ridiculous, and not supported by evidence. there are plenty of open source OS’s with accompanying hardware platforms wherein this doesn’t happen.

Take PinePhone for a example. They aren’t being sued by any top players, and they certainly aren’t being banned at the domain level.

Sorry but I don’t buy into the Apple hatebonering. If someone wants to make their own competing OS and platform as good as Apple’s, they are 100% free to do so.