no it's not. they straight up serve kremlin, promoting kremlin fake news and silencing russian opposition (not much to silence but still). they can have whatever functionality they like, I still won't use it in billion years.
They do business in other countries and for that it is best for the business to appear as neutral as possible. We don't know how much they fiddle with the search results and ranking but this still looks quite neutral to me: https://yandex.com/search/?text=russo+ukrainian+war
You're going to get downvoted, but Eric Schmidt worked regularly with the state department, and google employees were involved in spurring the color revolutions.
Julian Assange detailed this in a newsweek article before his name and body were smeared into the ground:
Oh, but they say he's not trustworthy, or that it's a conspiracy theory that he was intentionally smeared. Well, the CIA and their contractors have been doing it for over a decade, even before he was unfairly accused of helping trump:
Always the response is to smear with the same thoughtless label when no valid criticism is put forward. There is a link to an actual proposal by a CIA contractor, no tinfoil necessary.
Not yet at least, the political climate may deteriorate to that point, especially when it's about elections, given recent revelations.
Still, at least right now it looks to me - and I have visited Russia and Ukraine several times in the past and still have indirect connections (to people heavily involved in business there) - that there still is considerable more freedom from the government and its wishes for people and companies in the West.
If you publicly criticize a US politician you may get some hate messages, but at least they are from private citizens and you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door threatening you with prison. In Germany some rogue police were found to send threatening messages, but as soon as it was discovered the government acted against it. Also in Germany there even were public rallies from pro-Russian folks, now try that in Moscow with pro-Ukraine banners... Russia even bans the colors yellow and blue, even when they have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine and are just decorative: "Russians Strip Yellow and Blue From the Nation’s Streets Over Ukraine War" -- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/27/in-photos-russians...
>I reject the false equivalence of the DHS and FSB. Not gonna both-sides this, sorry.
lmao mkay. Not identical, but very similar. It's not even 'Alex Jones'-tier to say this. I think you forget you are if you are under US or (even NATO). YOU WILL hear propaganda from your side, as the Russians do. It's NORMAL. We live under control of a hegemon with self-interests.
May I have to remind you of these? And tell me the difference between these and Russian spookery:
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do those things, and you've already been doing it repeatedly.
Sure, my rhetotic got kinda out of line. I get excited debating.
>and using HN for ideological battle
I reject the characterization, it's almost implying I have an end with these posts besides putting a point of view that's at least an alternative to status quo that can make people realize they don't have any skin in the game, and that the US State Dept. has. I also don't. I don't really care about the outcome of the war.
You broke the site guidelines badly here. The rules apply regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing a lot. If you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to ban you, so please stop.
Unmasked as a shill for saying that great powers engage in propaganda, false flagging and dissent crushing.
I have no skin in the game. War, no war, it doesn't matter to me the outcome of this war to be honest.
EDIT: But if you are all moral highground, answer me this:
Why did the US goad Ukraine into taking a hostile stance against a neighbouring (and somewhat rival) great power? Whas this to the interest of Ukranians? Or to the geopolitical interests of US? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg
"Why did you, W, goad X into expressing their sovereignty against Y? Didn't you know that Y would react with violence? That makes W the bad guy"
No, Y is always on the wrong side; you can't use the threat of violence and then claim via realpolitik that the other side was in the wrong. "Moral high ground" means you act out of principle, not political convenience. In this case, Ukraine didn't want to be in the Russian sphere, so we supported them.
And now yeah, the US is paying a lot of money and inconvenience to support Ukraine. Gas will be more expensive, we're spending tens of billions on weapons. But that's because it's the right thing to do; not every decision is a realpolitik game about maximizing revenue from vassal states (which I hope Russia will learn someday).
Ukraine has self interests. Everyone has. But not everyone can actualize those, due to reality. The reality is that Ukraine neighbours a powerful hegemon.
Since international relations are anarchistic (due to not being a supra-entity that has authority over states [authority!=international courts bullsh*]), Ukraine hasn't any right (to its sovereign, that does not exist) to be sovereign. It has to go out and look for itself.
Ukraine thought that had the US/NATO back, that made it act in a more reckless way (kind of when you rely on your big brother type stuff). It escalated 'till it decided it wanted to join NATO. It was goaded.
>you can't use the threat of violence and then claim via realpolitik that the other side was in the wrong.
who says? That's your problem. You lack the 'anarchistic' framework of geopolitics.
Now, realpolitik-wise, Ukraine's self-interests (of being more independent of Russia thru NATO) did clash with Russia's self-interests of being safe (and probably made Russia have a expansionary Casus Belli).
I feel that the US triggered and amplified the war, thru regime change in Ukraine (yep, maidan was a coup), recognizing aspirations of UA to NATO, making Zeleskyy too comfy to be more harsh in negotiations (where he had no leverage, cuz Ukraine's power small vs Rus.), ultimately resulted in unnecessary deaths, just for the purpose of sphere of influence expansion.
>so we supported them.
Even if it's reckless and could trigger something like this?
Also, I will play the 'reversed roles card' again. This time with a REAL example.
Cuba. Was. The. Same. Thing.
> clash with Russia's self-interests of being safe
They clash with Russia's perceived self-interests of being safe, yes. The problem is, Russia defines "being safe" the same way it always has, under the General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and all the (other) Tsars before, going right back to when the Grand Duchy of Muscovy emerged from vassalage to the Mongols: by distance of their borders from Moscow. And the distance they want is at least up to Warsaw, Vienna and Sofia, but preferably Berlin or Paris (or, better yet, Lisbon).
That kind of clashes with the current world order, where there are quite a lot of currently sovereign nations in the way, which would have to be subordinated to Moscow – or basically just wiped off the map – to give Russia what its leadership wants.
What you're advocating is in effect that this is how it should be, because Russia is "a great power". (Newsflash: So were Germany and Japan in 1939. And, to compare with Russia's current equal in GDP, Italy.)
A more rational solution would be that Russia updates its concept of "being safe" to at least the 20th century. (Or, hey, one that worked for at least some countries even in the 19th: Don't be an asshole to anyone, then nobody will want to attack you.)
> yep, maidan was a coup
I've found that to be rhe most infallible heuristic on social media for – oh-so-coincidenctally – the last third of a year: Calls Maidan a "coup" → is a Putler-propagandist troll.
> UA ... NATO ... Zeleskyy [yadda yadda] ultimately resulted in unnecessary deaths
Oh, that's funny. And here I thought it was Putler's unilateral decision to start a war of aggression causing all those deaths.
> Why did the US goad Ukraine into taking a hostile stance against a neighbouring (and somewhat rival) great power?
You gravely misspelled "Why did the US support the sovereign nation-state Ukraine in asserting its independence against a neighbouring rogue state whose dictatorial regime has delusions of still being a 'great power'?"
But I don't know, maybe that was what you meant to write and some evil employees at one of Putin's troll factories inserted their master's propaganda into your otherwise so well-thought-out piece.
You can twist it however you like, and select individual sentences and ignore the context and everything else I wrote. At this point (again, may get worse, it does not look good IMO) Russia is at least an order of magnitude worse. You have individual cases - maybe - in the US, but in Russia it's systemic and systematic and goes all the way to murder not just of the person but of the entire family - as we saw in March, when two oligarchs and their entire family were murdered, one in Russia, one in Spain (summary of oligarch deaths: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-all-the-russian-ol...). On top of that various murders of "traitors" e.g. in UK and in Germany. Trump got close in rhetoric to what Putin said on Russian TV in March but did not have a chance to implement it, and the US institutions still resist and don't (yet?) follow a dictator blindly, as they do in Russia.
> Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison
What about Canadian truckers? Didn't Trudeau call them terrorists, took their trucks, donations, bank accounts and driver licenses... There is no right to protest anywhere, don't kid yourself.
The Canadian truck protesters were allowed to shut down the center of the city, blast their horns 24 hours a day, and shut down a major international trade route. They were permitted to do this for weeks before the citizens got sick of it and demanded action from their government.
They gave protest a bad name.
Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.
>Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.
BLM rioters did this, and more. Violence + Property damage + Corporate Backing + gov backing.
They didn't had their donation money seized,and almost no resistance to establish order.
> I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in the US:
It seems plausible; we don't know what gets done under the FISA court but it would presumably involve companies like Google. Some suited agent of the US government turning up at Google HQ and threatening jail time under some FISA warrant if some pro-Trump something doesn't disappear off Google.
That'd be a scandal but not the worst abuse of the secret court system. It hasn't exactly covered itself with glory since inception. They already spy on basically everyone and that is a lot worse than some light censorship.
I would assume this could go unsaid, but apparently it needs to be said somewhere in this thread: there is zero comparison between the US and an autocratic dictator who attempts to kill and then jails his opposition, runs fraudulent elections, kills journalists, and invades sovereign countries. Zero. None. Zero.
>fraudulent elections: funny how the concerns that 'half' of the US had with elections were dismissed. Especially when conditions were different, by using a method usually agreed (until now, cuz narrative) prone to tampering. So much for free and fair elections.
Sure, there's probably a non-zero amount of germs in the pasteurised homogenised and sterilly-packaged milk I buy at the supermarket. So is drinking that equivalent to sucking the pus out of a punctured boil on the arse of a diseased cow?
No. There's zero comparison. None. Zero.
Learn to read, man. If nothing else, it'll make you a better propaganda troll for your Kremlin master.
Well they've made their choice and silenced our protest and opposition, and later spewed pro-war anti-Ukrainian propaganda using country's largest media (Yandex News).
If you're profiteering from our suffering and choose Kremlin's needs over ours, don't be suprised then when we tell you to shove your AI models and your search.
It's still working as usual and they announced the transition after 8 years of warmongering and blacklisting all opposition resources. And only when sanctions hit.
Now they scramble to present a whitewashed image to Western public. They will probably put themselves forward as great contributors to open source.
From context, pretty obviously "we Ukrainians". Didn't do too well in elementary reading, did you?
> I am not in this together. So change it to "I". I don't care about you lot... lmao
Thank you for so effectively demonstrating what a despicable excuse for a human being you are. I'll do my best to remember this when next I come across anything from you.
Not really, it's very different for Yandex in particular. Along with several other companies like Vimpelcom, they started the "Safe Internet League", an organization which exploited the think of the children argument to build the censorship regime from scratch. They practically created the original censorship laws, or participated in the creation, when they were in the best position to resist the government (and had the incentive to do so). As an example, Telegram successfully resisted the censorship while having much less leverage, much later.
Of course Yandex likes to pose as the victim of censorship, but the truth is that they are the censors themselves. They've been steamrolled by a runaway process they helped to create.
And someone upthread claimed their image search was so great in comparison to google... because google also censors their results. They just censor different things.
Yeah we definitely shouldn't worry about the political sympathies/vulnerabilities of the web services we use as the foundations of our shared knowledge...
There's a world of difference between Five-Eyes and being harrassed, mobbed, jailed, having a "Z" and "traitor" spray painted on your apartment door or being murdered.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand what's going on Russia and its Putin-controlled satellites like Belarus.
"Despite all the difficulties created by the Kiev authorities, over the past day, 29,733 people, including 3,502 children, were evacuated from dangerous areas of Ukraine and the Republics of Donbass to the territory of the Russian Federation without the participation of the Ukrainian side. And in total, since the beginning of the special military operation, there are 1,936,911 people, of which 307,423 are children," Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation, said at a briefing on Saturday.
https://www.interfax.ru/world/846957
There's a world of difference between living in Russia and using Yandex to search for how to kill Putin and living in the west and using Yandex to search for how to spin up a FastAPI server.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand that everyone isn't in the same situation as yourself.
People in Russia felt much safer using iCloud, Gmail or Google Drive. Of course they comply to some requests by Kremlin or police. But Yandex or VK just give information straight away often times without much procedure.
You misunderstand. The NSA went out of their way to tap Google's lines outside of the US, which made the leadership at Google furious. It accelerated the work to encrypt international fiber (I think many people were really bothered by the tcpdump of a bigtable RPC containing a user ID). I was at a conference shortly after an saw a SVP rip an NSA rep to pieces.
If Google is doing anything that is required of them legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.
That's what Google claims, however the leaked slides claimed "direct access".
edit: Does it really matter if they setup an FTP server instead of direct access, when we know a request can literally ask for "all" data (see Verizon).
> When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the US government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person," Google spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, among other news outlets. [1]
right, you're discussing the mechanism by which Google shares information with the US government- when required by law.
These systems don't give access to "all" data. Telephone companies are different- AT&T had a long standing, off the books agreement with US intelligence agencies (see Idea Factory for a fact-based discussion of what AT&T did) to share large amounts of information illegally.
We know that at least some companies were ordered to handover all data, continuously [1].
edit: I think we have enough evidence that I would assume that it's valid for the other companies on the slides, and if it's not true you'll have to provide some proof of that.
edit 2: [2]
> It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
> Greenwald explained that while there are "legal constraints" on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.
> "There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans," Greenwald said. "You can't target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."
> "And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," he added.
edit 3:
> Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” [3]
...has become such a huge tinfoil-hat kook that it taints anything he's ever said and done. I have no way of knowing when his brain-rot started to affect his writings, so I can't really trust the shit that seemed so convincing back in 2003 any more.
Weird how there is limited hard evidence of a secret, illegal government program... It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the Russian government.
> The difference is that checks and balances are much stronger in US,
You say that after we were talking about the NSA literally spying on US citizens, and without any proof? C'mon, are you really going to badger me about not having having the exact "hard evidence", and not even read my sources or provide ANY evidence yourself.
edit: Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.
> Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act has no whistleblower protection. If the courts were allowed rule honestly and without political entanglements, there's no way the Espionage Act is constitutional at prima facia.
Every country is or has been bad in some context in different times, because doing the interests of your country often translates into doing harm to some others. Yandex is a really nice search engine and I agree it's excellent for image searches compared to Google results polluted with Pinterest links and other cancerous SEO rubbish.
But does Yandex echo propaganda for the Kremlin? Yes of course, as do Google and most of the others for their advertisers and governments, albeit to some different degrees. The usual approach when someone or some company with a controversial public image does something good with apparently no strings attached should be "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes", that is, take the gift but don't trust them, mo matter if they're called Google, Microsoft, Yandex or whatever.
Their purpose is of course to associate the Yandex brand, and therefore Russia, to something perceived as good, have more people use it, so that more users will be exposed to their filtered news. Just be aware of that, take the good and ignore the rest.
Just take it to America from us, thank you. Along with VK. Great search engine and a social network. Full of backdoors for thugs and corrupt police, censorship and other lovely stuff... but you'll probably say that Google is full of it too, because you had no experience of living in Russia.
2003 certainly didn't have a better search engine. It only had a much smaller, open and un-SEO-biased Internet, making the indexing job correspondingly easier.
