https://www.reuters.com/technology/yandex-sells-news-content...
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
Julian Assange detailed this in a newsweek article before his name and body were smeared into the ground:
https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...
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:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-p...
Google is an arm of the state department, no doubt.
"Putin's agents reportedly threatened a top Google executive in Moscow with a 24-hour ultimatum – Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison" -- https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-agents-threatened-goo...
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...
Correct, it's DHS.
https://twitter.com/_secondthought/status/133274617257067725...
The same DHS who bans immigrants that are or have been members of a communist party [1].
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/policy-ma...
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:
>Assange was being hunted down by the US worldwide (https://diem25.org/exactly-10-years-ago-wikileaks-released-a...)
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
I could go on, but the point was made already.
Edit: So yes, it's actually 'both sides'
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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.
>If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'll do that then. Thanks for the heads up.
Which IMO is a comment that only a shitty person would make.
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.
That's why this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine.
US has the same pattern as Russia. It's actually incredible how close these are.
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.
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.
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.
They gave protest a bad name.
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.
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.
Zero.
Get it?
None.
Zero.
But... :
(persecuted journalist)
>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61839256
>https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/07/usa-must-not-...
(jails its opposition)
>https://eu.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrest...
>"hatespeech" (newspeak)
>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.
So _Zero_ huh?
Zero comparison.
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.
obeying to Kremlin is just an aspect of running business in Russia
the only option would be not to operate in Russia at all. Yandex can't do this, because their audience is primarily in Russia
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.
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.
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.
they continue to use it however, because it gives them the expected results most of the time
I usually try ddg first, if it's tech I use Bing, if it's local I use Google.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand what's going on Russia and its Putin-controlled satellites like Belarus.
And you've got Abby Martin and Chris Hedges who've had much of their content removed by YouTube. Chris Hedges is even a Pulitzer prize winner.
On the other side, the FSB has deported 1.3 million innocent Ukrainian civilians to concentration camps. (number is from official Russian sources)
> number is from official Russian sources)
Surly you can give a kind stranger a link to these official sources?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-accuses-russia-...
"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
>Reuters could not independently verify the figure given by Denisova or her allegations, for which she did not provide supporting evidence.
This is the first.
Interfax article doesn't loads for me right now, but I doubt they use the term "concentration camp" (like the previous poster said they do) too.
And given how I just today read how people in Kherson are happilly take Russian passports - I have a big doubt these accusations have a valid basis.
You're just a stranger. You'd have to prove you're kind.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand that everyone isn't in the same situation as yourself.
If Google is doing anything that is required of them legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.
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]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/googl...
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.
> Google and Facebook feed their data to NSA.
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]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/glenn-greenwal...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...
...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.
- phone calls surveillance in Venezuella: no Google no FB mentioned
- plain words of some reporter without any evidence provided, no Google no FB mentioned
Also where do you see Venezuela?
> 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, and such activities can be successfully investigated and government sued.
As an example, your verizon case was successfully challenged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klayman_v._Obama
In Russia, court system works in manual mode from Kremlin.
> Also where do you see Venezuela?
I misread, you are right.
Do you really expect the US government to literally publish their illegal surveillance operations on Wikipedia as proof?
Snowden's leaks and his statements should be enough to understand the big-tech surveillance apparatus aids the government under the table.
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.
Good chance is that whistleblowing would be protected in this specific case.
> 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.
Government can charge him with whatever they want, it is up to court to decide if charges are valid.
When has Russia ever been anything but bad?
that is the point