That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.
Western polling agencies almost immediately repeated the polls carried out in Crimea, presumably to debunk them, yet found the exact same numbers as Russia recognized. [1] Russia observed a 97% yes vote with an 83% turnout, so ~82% "yes" if we assume the people who didn't vote would all have voted no. Gallup found in their poll that ~83% of Crimeans felt that the vote "reflected the views of the people."
Some don't seem to know that Crimea has always been majority ethnic Russian in modern history. And before that it was majority Tatar (with Tatarstan now a republic of Russia). Crimea has never been Ukrainian, by ethnicity, ever. We're looking at escalating towards WW3 over something most people cheer on while having absolutely zero knowledge of even the basic facts, thanks to our stupid "information warfare."
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
Imagine if the January 6th riots somehow actually did end up driving e.g. Biden out of office. Would states that were aligned with Biden (and opposed to Trump) not thusly have the right to refuse to acknowledge the new government and declare their independence? It seems like a heck of a good reason to me!
That Russia did not managed in 2014 to threaten Ukraine away from western direction is what happened. Russia treated Ujrainian president not to sigh EU membership, Ukrainians revolted. Not an USA coup. And prites against specific rejection of democracy bt president.
Ukraine did not became Belarus in 2014 due to protests which were against Russian meddling. USA proteats were trying to impose autocracy.
Imagine this in a parallel world in the US. Where the US is a relatively weak, impoverished, and deeply corrupt nation. And the speaker was from ostensibly the most powerful nation in the world. You'd have brought out every anti-government individual in the country, all with that twinkle of violence in their eyes. Which is exactly what happened.
I don't really think we would have taken these steps if we felt that the protests would have played out as desired without our meddling, because it ruins even the perception of independence. It was just another in the endless line of long US driven coups. That's not to say the Ukrainian people (particularly of Western Ukraine) were happy. But there's a dramatic difference between dissatisfaction, even to the point of occasionally violent protest, and an actual successful insurrection.
Meanwhile, some EU politicians says words of support. Well, in this case, EU is good and Russia is still meddling into USA politics.
As for impoverished nations, being in Russia world is becoming more like Belarus or Chechenya. Or more like poor regions of Russia itself. The countries that joined EU are waaay better off then Russia puppet states.
And now the US is happy to push this Civil War to the brink of World War over what would have otherwise been a relatively inconsequential border war. And I think Einstein's quote is quite apt, "I do not know what weapons WW3 will be fought with, but I do know that WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones."
It's all about as brilliant as WW1 where a Bosnian Serb assassinates an Austro-Hungarian royal and the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it, and tens of millions die. And the icing on the cake is the ethnic issues that drove those initial events still exist, more than 100 years later.
For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly".
And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova
Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2]
Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine.
And yes, I wasn't expecting to see my inquiry deleted on their forum. I'm posting again without the screenshot. In case they didn't like what Yandex returns as results (which is weird, as it is their "business partner").
I'm also very humbled by the support of the hacker news community. As a long time lurker, it warms my heart a lot to see so much support. I hope it reaches Microsoft.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.
This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.
It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).
How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?
If you start with a gigantic number - even 0.1% of is going to still be gigantic.
It doesn't make it really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Are you aware of Bing doing anything like this? (I think it's bad enough that they take part in censorship, don't get me wrong.)
https://ain.capital/2023/01/27/yandex-developers-used-racist...
> "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine," the EU's listing states.
> The document also accuses Yandex of "promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine."
from: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/yandex_ceo_arkady_vol...
Yeah and they are going to change the formals too - Yandex NV(based in Netherlands) is considering turning the main part of the business into a separate Russian group https://newsunrolled.com/economy/132317.html
Yandex has been banned in Ukraine for some time now, so no point for MS to still have it as default search.
The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.
But it still does for several other countries. Which includes Moldova. Moldova is a country that Russia has repeatedly threatened. While advanced users may try and remove Yandex as default, non-tech savvy users likely leave the defaults.
Meaning Microsoft Edge shares data with Russia by setting Yandex as a default search engine for their users, which is really bad.
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