Not gonna happen. But it should, if this is the order!
The ruling is incredibly dumb for sure (at least the removing apps from devices part), but if the sovereign state demands it, they'll either have to exit the market/nation entirely or comply.
It's still the sovereign state however, businesses that want to be active on their territory have to comply with local legislation, wherever that legislation is an extreme overreach or not.
This is not a case of one arm of the government doing whatever it wants like with PRISM.
This is a public ruling. they're criminal if they don't comply, by definition.
Sometimes being a criminal by defying an unjust law is the best thing you can do.
You can't really do civil disobedience while everyone is looking at you, the way to do that is in secret.
Real life counter example, Leica Freedom Train, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Freedom_Train
Overt disobedience versus subversive disobedience can have a risk. Yeah, don't do things that will eliminate your entity from the world. But often you should be willing to take some kind of an L (loss). The best time to fight injustice is as early as possible; push back if you can.
Poor bastards.
Banning vpns is a bridge to far for me. The state is placing itself too far above the people, demanding control which it is not entitled to, dictating how we might think & connect.
Letting a state grow ever more vicious in its enforcement, letting it cut itself off from the world & punish its citizens by denying them access to the internet & technologies that the rest of the world enjoys is their own real power, is the economic-military control they have, if they want to go to war with businesses. That's all they have for power. And it makes them look dumb, shows them to be bullies, and hurts their people.
We need some states to get uppity, so it becomes more clear that the Internet doesn't care & that states can do what they want, ban what they want, and the rest of the world will keep moving along. That's exactly what's happening here, and the state is, in my view, making an absurd fool of itself by going so absurdly far in desperation to try to apply the law. Fucking with the app stores just to drive home a grudge match with one service is fucking ludicrous & we should laugh out ass off at these fools.
And the Internet & computing can't have such extreme veto power over how we think & connect. Europe for example has granted itself a right to be forgotten, where even if you do awful awful things you can ask to have yourself removed from the Internet. And so far that's been respected... In European search results. But as much as they insist, we don't censor the rest of the world of those results, just because one group of people says so.
Whether vpns are available isn't exactly the same. But its still horseshit. It's still casting a gigantic net because you are a petulant shitty power-mad rule-maker. It doesn't seem representative of the nation either; it seems like some hyper-political over-reacrion horseshit.
There's just so many people who will be trying to control how we think, how we connect, control what the internet is. And I feel like there's a long running crisis of what we do and what we don't do to match nations. We maybe aren't at full Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. But we've had a number of services get to the brink fo bas again and again, only for someone to blink. And it seemed inevitable that this system of never testingimots was going to break, and when it did, rather than break reasonably & part ways, Brazil has just gone scorched earth, has drastically drastically upped the brinkmanship & blast zone, in extremely harmful ways. This is just my judgement call, but fuck yeah I think this shit deserves a colossal colossal colossal middle finger, and if Brazil wants to escalate, well, have fun doing something other than the internet that everyone else uses. You'll have to build that path yourself, and I don't think we should support & enable that schism.
Also, the "right to be forgotten" suggests more rights of the data subject than the text of the article provides for. The title is often understood by data subjects to be an absolute right to have personal data deleted - however if the controller has a legal basis for the processing of personal data, the exercise of Article 17 GDPR has usually no effect.
I had to check with local news, because I couldn't believe it. It checks out, he did impose the fine. (It's R$50k if somebody is as uninformed as I was.)
Its just that the executive and legislative are now so weakened due to corruption scandals (and open investigations) that no one seemingly dares to move against 1 wild judge.
I wonder how this ends though. 1 judge seemingly has more power now than a set of democratically elected senators
It got worse in 2019. Some magazine ran a damning article on them. In retaliation, they granted themselves virtually limitless power to investigate, prosecute, judge and punish "fake news" of all kinds, with themselves as the victims. They determine what's fake of course. Their powers just kept expanding until they essentially usurped everything. It got to the point this judge started proposing changes to laws directly to our representatives. The changes were rejected but he just rammed the "fake news" nonsense down our throats anyway via his "resolutions". It's under the umbrella of this "fake news" inquisition that the judge-king banned X in Brazil.
And not a single politician will move against them. Precisely because they're all so hopelessly corrupt. All the judges need to do to put them in the ground is unearth one of countless corruption scandals.
This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the judiciary. Unelected judge-kings with lifetime mandates whose pens directly make the people with guns do their bidding. It's kind of ridiculous to even discuss "laws" at this point. These guys could write whatever they want on a piece of paper and it becomes law.
Even more context:
That said, I do think that judges in Brazil can have a larger investigative role due to the different legal system that does not happen in other countries with more separation of powers to prevent exactly this sort of thing.
Banning an entire communications technology, with abusively high fines for citizens who defy the ban, is on a whole other level.
Virtual Private Networking is the communications technology I was talking about.
Banning VPN's is what's shocking here.
Sometimes that's conjunction with a jury or as a panel of judges. Those scenarios involve voting or consensus. But not all judgements are made this way.
Decisions can be appealed or challenged by higher courts.
How come he is deleting the VPN apps on my phone??? That I need to remote to my overseas job???
How come I I'm now banned from reading what Zelensky, Kasparov, Yann LeCun, and thousands of others world leaders have to say?
How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
> How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
Because the other party did violate the law. Unfortunately, Twitter got taken over by an international ideologue who likes to pick fights, and you and your neighbor are suffering the consequences of that. He doesn't care about you in the least, and you should be wary about asking your government to pick up the slack for his egotism as it would just position him to further ignore or exploit you and your community.
(The broader VPN ban is admittedly another thing, though.)
Twitter was bought from ideologues by someone who opened it up to other ideologies. While this may have increased the absolute ideological load on the platform it actually decreased the effective ideological charge since opposite sides cancel out each other, pulling the balance towards the centre where it used to tilt heavily towards a single side.
The more opposing ideas on a platform, the more ideas are spread, tested, strengthened, weakened, and grown.
An echo chamber is where ideas go to die.
It’s important to curate a culture and agreed set of norms that you can live with when you’re not in control.
I honestly, wholeheartedly wish that was true.
In reality, however, the ideology of whoever holds more economic power has orders of magnitude more weight than the one of the powerless masses.
Most legal judgements are blunt swords.
Fairness is seldom considered.
I'm not agreeing with the outcomes here. Just pointing out laws get enforced, if they don't they aren't laws.
Brazilian constitution says:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
What he's doing is censorship, plain and simple. And it's unconstitutional.
This is the single most important thing about tech censorship I wish more HN'ers would figure out on their own. It may be narrated as a fight between corporations and judges, but in addition to all of that, it's ordinary individuals' rights on the line. "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
The right of an individual human to read what some individual account on a media platform wrote is a core civil right, and should be inviolate. It stands alone and apart from whatever other wrongs the platform is involved in.
The modern zeitgeist isn't merely burning books; it's burning down magnificent libraries of books in order to spite approximately five of them.
There are other ways besides the USDA, DoE, or FBI to get good food, health, education, and security.
Restricting access to X makes sense: the platform has removed themselves from the country, making it impossible to resolve legal and financial disputes in Brazil, so it makes sense they are not allowed to operate in the country anymore.
Then again, punishing users that access it through other means is baffling.
Google can definitely install/delete apps from your phone remotely using Play Store.
A thorough explanation of the applicable law, point by point, that demonstrates that everything that is happening here is outrageous :
BBC has a decent article that estabilishes a critique of the same points you mentioned in your post: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/c4n3wklk255o some of your complaints are quite fair, some don't.
In particular: "The Brazilian constitution specifies that the Supreme Court can only judge those with “privileged jurisdiction" isn't true at all. The Brazilian Constitution states a whole bunch of attributions to the Supreme Court, which you can read (in Portuguese) at:
https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/constitui... (search for "DO SUPREMO TRIBUNAL FEDERAL")
The role you mention, about ruling over "privileged jurisdiction" is one of 20+ attributed roles, a small fraction of their attributions.
When he couldn't find representatives of X, he went after SpaceX and StarLink, even though no law allows him to do so. The judge is simply on a personal vendetta against Elon Musk solely on the basis of political alignment.
This isn't baffling, this is leftist totalitarianism at work.
Indeed, before the election and subsequent fallout, the right-wing elmu was friendly towards the right-wing Bolsonaro, who these orders support.
Then, Starlink refused to block Twitter, and with that they kind of proved the Supreme Court's point that they operate under the same economic organization and are subject to the same leadership.
I guess they stepped into their own trap there.
( short of opening your phone and browsing instslled apps )
The order does say Apple and Google must take down the VPN apps, but the way it's been written makes me think it was intended to order VPN apps to make Twitter/X unavailable, but someone misunderstood it or poorly expressed it.
Of course you can't expect judges to understand technical terms very well, but this guy has been dealing with tech long enough I feel like they should know this VPN text is bullshit.
And shame on Canada and UK!
But the ban and the fine of US$8,900 for users who use a VPN to access X-Twitter still apply!
Edit: Thanks for this user https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404325 for posting the court order and bringing this new information:
Apple and Google must remove all VPN apps from their stores!
Apple and Google must DELETE all VPN apps already installed on users' phones!!!
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-suspended-de-moraes...