In Russia and China, they have their own search engines, social networks, eBay/Amazon alternatives, and so on. These companies have produced great free software like LLMs, databases, development tools, etc.
Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet is usually good news for us, the small people - even if that change is coming from the government.
But the state controls the flow of information in a dictatorship. So to me this seems more a lose-lose scenario than a lose-win or win-win.
The US initiates wars and supports war crimes as policy - dictatorship? We're far beyond that.
Wouldn't TikTok being sold to a company that the government trusts be an indication that the concern over access to Americans' data (rather than the message) is a genuine one?
So you think the government forced TikTok to sell it's US operations to Oracle, the company with CIA ties, that has been caught spying on it's customers data before, and who's CEO proudly said "Citizens will be on their best behavior,” and “because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” is about" data privacy"?
The TikTok legislation was about protecting Americans' data from foreign ownership. Oracle was not named in the legislation. Regardless of how corrupt the subsequent events have been, I don't think anyone on the platform has been censored as a result.
So to you its the state VS who? The rich billionaires + us?
The rich billionaires are the state. We're the ones with no real representation.
The fundamental divide is workers vs capitalists, not simply people vs government.
If it's a Putin-style dictator who has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country, there's literally nothing you can do that doesn't involve physical violence to change things.
You are living in a dictatorship right now. The dictatorship of capital. And just because our culture does not draw a line to differentiate capitalists and workers doesnt mean a difference doesnt exist.
Capitalists arent "just another citizen like you or me", but thats what they want us to think. It keeps the dream alive and the story going.
Oh "its us against the government". lol. Really?
Im telling you. The capitalists, the wealthy are the government.
A rich billioneaire is a shareholder.
> If they stop providing shareholder value [...] they have to change.
But we (the small people) don't care about the shareholder value. Shareholder value is often contrary to what we (the small people) value, so expect change for the worse.
> due to mass boycotts or public scandals
Sorry, what?
> has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country
Well, capitalists (as a group) spent 100+ years doing the same, so ...
To speak to your examples, the right to repair, farmers vs John Deere, the exodus from X to Bluesky, the rise of alternative messaging platforms, the outright murder of CEOs on the street and the beatification of the primary suspect on social media…just to scratch the surface
These are all headlines straight from HN and the fact that you even know about them is the difference.
The fundamental difference is while we both lack any real power to change this, under an actual dictatorship people get jailed or worse for that expression.
Let’s touch base on this again when Dictatorship from big capital means Disney puts me in prison for dissent against the mouse and then offers me clemency if I go to the front lines in their next special military operation.
that last sentence rung like a bell & will reverberate until Larry Ellison's police drones follow you home because you blocked the drive-in of a Larry-owned fastfood franchise by way of a peaceful sit-in, protesting the mistreatment of human workers by robot overseers at Larry's Lasagna, nation-wide.
orwell it not come to that?
On the other hand... People in the West rarely get the taste of what happens if someone deeply immoral gets to the top. The closest we got is Trump who might be an arrogant egoistic asshole, but he's very far from deciding to kill thousands of people to fulfill his ambitions. Nevertheless, normal sensitive people feel abhorred when they hear or see how immigrants are treated and so on. Imagine this developed decade after decade, also using modern tech, into a cold machine an ordinary person is powerless against.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it but imagine your whole life, and often of your family, can be destroyed in an instant because you found yourself in a wrong place, you made a wrong comment, you expressed your opinion too openly. You were relaxed because maybe you did similar things in the past but you still lived a normal life; then at that particular moment it ended abruptly and there is no recourse. Nobody can save you and you know it's all finished. In the West there is nothing close to that.
Well, actually, the whole cancel culture dynamic is a softer alternative to what you just described. And it doesn’t even require you to be the actor — it can be your spouse, your child, whoever. One tweet and you can lose your job, your house, your marriage, especially in an economy like this it hits hard. It really is the same idea: "your whole life, and often your family’s life, can be destroyed in an instant." You won’t go to jail, but your life can still become miserable.
Of course, the big difference is jail time — and that matters. I'm familiar with cases where a 30-year-old woman was sentenced to more than 10 years just for donating $20 to Ukrainian forces (she was traveling to her mom's funeral and got caught).
And at the end of the day, all of this is politics. If you're smart enough and in Russia or China, you can learn to navigate it. But there's never a guarantee. You can still end up as "лёд под ногами майора" ("ice under the major's feet"), as the famous Russian punk rock singer put it.
Seems to work fine from a Chinese VPN IP
These people were on the Europe's side politically, yet they were targeted by just the passport.
I'm not saying they should be lifted, but they punished the most exactly the pro-European Russians, inside our outside.
This is standard Russian censorship of western media and news.
Source: I'm in Russia now.
In the end it'll likely end with whitelists of allowed IP addresses, and that will indeed insure that nobody would be able to access banned resources.
I already had this idea of tunneling traffic through the voice/video calls in the Max messenger app. No one has done it in practice, yet, but I see no reason why it should not be possible.
Обход блокировок, который ловит даже на парковке ;)
I understand this is extreme, but a good illustration. He was doing something on his own, and was charged. Such enforcement is extremely unlikely in Russia even in todays situation. For instance, a recent law explicitly banned _searching_ for extremists materials, e.g. Navalny's party website (they're labelled as extremists ex-court by the Interior or the Justice ministry, I don't remember). But there's been just 1 court case since then. You can search whatever you want as long as you're not public about it. As soon as you get enough publicity, you do get on the radar.
Same kinds of examples: in the 1950's USSR some musicians were shadow-banned (there was no legal ban on them), and not published. A man made a lathe and carved disks with their music on used x-ray films. He was arrested when he got enough publicity and sold good deal of copies. He was charged not for copying them -- there was no ban on this -- but for illicit enterpreneurship, or speculation as it was called back then. Had he been doing this alone, he'd probably have not got under arrest.
I actually, think it's roughly the same as dealing with Torrent and trackers in the Western world nowadays.
https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2024-11-22_v_rossii_zapretili_...
Seeking extremist materials is illegal as of September. If that is not "bypassing censorship" then what is?
By the way. Extremist materials is a big list of thousands of things that no one can always know. What it means for a normal person? If you use VPN you can be finding extremist materials, if you don't = then you don't (because they are all helpfully blocked)
After 3 months there is one guy with a case for looking up Azov for example https://meduza.io/amp/cards/mvd-vpervye-popytalos-oshtrafova...
edit: didn't know they allow anything except belarus, cool... as long as you can anonymously register that number
using VPN for circumventing censorship is illegal in Russia. fine is worse if if you promote it. for people who can't afford to spend a few thousands it's enough.
some people don't care about fines, but new ISP equipment detects and ban VPNs quickly so people always need to keep trying new servers. so people get used to not using VPN more and more because it's annoying and unstable.
A normal person follows the law. It's bad when that law is forced by dictator but you should get off your high horse sometimes. If you think of regular public as complete idiots you should not be surprised when they vote for putin. Similar thing happened in america where democrats alienated as many people as possible by looking down on them like they're stupid
And why it is logically not true: an idiot is by definition a person with abnormality. If you are saying 90% of people are abnormal... idk what to tell you
> I personally give access to my vpn server to ~100 users for free, and so far the access is stable enough
yeah I often talk to a friend who does the same. depending on your region it won't be too stable for long.
> you won't be content with being blocked from the information you seek
You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know it is, you don't seek it. That's why censorship works
And it has nothing to do with the law — currently, using vpn isn't breaking any laws.
Basically I'll tell you it's like this:
60% chance you have some VPN apps, if you are not old or if you have a child to explain it to you. The main use: whatsapp or telegram which are semi blocked, and if you are young and fashionable or your fashionable son sends you these links then youtube-instagram-tiktok which are blocked. Regularly VPN fails (ISPs block them fast) so you turn on another one and keep doing like this until one works. Fun fact, paid ones are blocked faster so it is more reliable to use free VPN. (Remember that you won't hear about VPN by random people or teachers at school because it is very illegal)
And you should know that outside of tech bubble the most popular media in the country is by far VK, Telegram and maybe Whatsapp. Youtube/instagram/tiktok are minority. Telegram/whatsapp are legit why many people use VPN, but it is not required (probably the only reason they are not fully blocked is to discourage VPN use). And even then only until everybody switch to Max which is already required by many schools and in all budget jobs. Remember that most most people in Russia support the government and do what they are told.
So ask yourself how many people have a reason to bother with all this. And actually who of them is bigger idiot, who is using free VPN (safe like used condom) or who is not using VPN.
But OK, you can call everybody complete idiots, that's fine. Just don't expect people to take you very seriously while you are looking down on them.
You seem to have a very limited understanding of Russia.
First, nobody in Russia ever thinks of its population in racial terms like 'white'. At most, there are ethnic terms like 'russians', 'caucasians' [0], 'tatars', 'yakuts', etc. -- there aren't even any genuine Asians here but the students from China.
And no, thanks to the soviets, the cultural influence between most of these ethnic groups is next to unexistent.
More, you say 'the white west' of the country, but this is again a misconception: the closer you get to the 'west' (or, more correctly, to the center, like Moscow and Saint Petersburg), the less 'russian' it is. The percent of ethnic russian population is far higher in eastern parts of the country and on the outskirts than in Moscow, where the percent of ethnical russians is the lowest.
> Remember that most most people in Russia support the government and do what they are told.
Yeah, Putin once again thanks you for your service. You have no idea what real Russia looks like, as I've proven above when I disproved your misconceptions, yet, you go out of your way and still spread Putin's narrative how popular he is.
In reality, Putin stays in power because he has an army of paid thugs who'll kill anyone who opposes him. If Putin would participate in any honest elections vs just about anyone who is not one of his cronies, he'd lose such elections in a landslide. That's why he will never do the Lukashenko's mistake of allowing even a simple housewife to run against him, which ran, and won, so Lukashenko had no blatantly falsify the election results and suppress the protests to stay in power. Genuinely popular leaders do not need such precautions. Putin knows he is deeply unpopular, Russians know he is deeply unpopular, and only unwitting Putin's henchmen from the West spread Putin's narrative that he is a very popular leader. Lol.
[0]: No, not 'caucasians' as americans understand the term, but people from actual Caucasus region, like Chechnya, Dagestan, Armenia, Georgia -- the actual Georgia, not the one which is next to South Carolina :-D
There is a good reason to use the term "white" and that is because non-whites (you know what I mean) are discriminated. I have various stories but I won't go in detail. I don't blame you, I didn't really think about it in that way for most of my life.
And if you talk to more normal people you may find out that it's not just force, many people follow "party line" because they think the government says truth. Control of information is a magical thing
Looking at your dictator's approval levels and the number of people willingly signing up to die while killing innocents, that sounds correct.
You all need help breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
Every time someone like Bukele flexes that his approval rating is higher than Putin's, I laugh -- the guy clearly doesn't understand that this isn't the flex he thinks it is.
I think if you talked to more fellow russians you would be surprised how many support him unironically)
by my estimate more than 50% (of people who have an opinion)
control of information is a magical thing
Even if they didn't massage the stats after asking people, I doubt everyone is fully comfortable sharing their honest opinions.
So...we can't know. We likely never will know, at least how people at large felt in this precise moment.
Regarding your claim that Putin flooded the lower classes with money, this is simply false. What percent of the population do you think signed up for war? Do you really think that 0.5% (optimistic estimate) that did sign up had spread their wealth with anyone else?
Just last week I stayed in the hospital with 2 men, 72y.o and 64y.o. One has pension of 19k RUB, another one 23k RUB. That's fewer than $300. Showered with money, Yay!
But now you go to war and you/your family gets 200000 monthly. You can buy a cheap car for that money AND buy a flat in a city (first mortgage payment) after first month. Not counting signup bonus.
(And you somehow forget about the little insignificant downside of a mercenary career that you might be a bit dead or maimed, oops)
I agree that "flooded lower classes with wealth" is an exaggeration but I think it is not completely wrong.
- are you saying people forced to sign up for the war by force or rapists who do it to get out of jail in Russia are idiots?
- are you saying being pro putin/pro war is like being an idiot in Russia?
- are you saying russians in tech are saints and all like one are "not idiots" against the war? maybe you need a reminder about unit 26165 and APT28
- are you saying "everyone in russia/china/israel/iran/north korea/republican party is an idiot"? then allow me to congratulate you on such nuanced understanding of the world, enough said!
Others are immoral or evil smart people. Unless you're working to undermine your dictator, that might be you.
americans voted for trump because they are tired of democrats looking down on them. in other words, people with your attitude are to blame. until you seriously start trying to understand people and why they do stuff (it is not because they are idiots) you will keep making them do the opposite of what you think is good.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/idiot "1 Informal., an utterly foolish or senseless person." Nope, no abnormality needed.
There was (and still is in some places) a lot of lead poisoning. That more people are dumber than their genetics would otherwise dictate doesn't make them not idiots in my obviously-informal ranting.
> americans voted for trump because they are tired of democrats looking down on them.
Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free
Also do not miss twitter and facebook. Youtube is working (so far) with no ads.
Also stuff like WaPo is perfectly acessible. Sometimes I skim through it (also mostly comments), then check ZeroHedge to get the opposite view.
So a lot of info is acessible. Quite a few of resources are blocked on the other side though.
I surely can use VPN but prefer not to unless that required for more intellectual activity then reading news.
Can you elaborate here? ZeroHedge isn't an opposing viewpoint nor opinion, it's mostly made-up nonsense. Even calling it pseudoscience would be generous.
I'm not political or activist of any kind. However sometimes it makes sense to get understanding how other people think, so sometimes I read comments here and there.
HN has its own bias as well. Usually the quality of discussion here is quite high though.
https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-tr...
Only if the 'establishment' involved is, well, reality.
> I would not call it a complete nonsence though, for me it's a place where you can "get" thinking of folks who are opposing "the System".
No, it's where you can get thinking from crazy people. Actual dissidents are elsewhere.
Unless you mean the comments section, which is something else altogether.
People's worldviews define their opinions, no matter how bizarre or fantastical a worldview may be.
This is standard European censorship of Russian media and news.
"On 2 March 2022, the Council of the European Union adopted a measure suspending the broadcasting activities of RT (and another Russian outlet Sputnik) in the EU"
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
"Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine: Council bans broadcasting activities in the European Union of four more Russia-associated media outlets"
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024...
BBC got caught manipulating videos featuring Trump. 12000 people were detained in the UK for thought crimes. In one year. One little old lady was arrested for praying silently.
France went after Durov.
Russia media IS banned, hiding behind ISP incompetence doesn't count.
Come on. Wake up. We who have lived under actual socialist dictators can see what's happening.
[0] https://www.outlookindia.com/national/explained-what-jaishan...
As my USAian friend once told me, "it's better to do whatever you want, and then pretend to apologise when you get caught."
Are you okay, man?
> EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.
I don't see any crying about censorship. It's a made up argument. Personally, I couldn't care less about censoring in Russia or any other country that I'm not living in.
Would like to point out that Russian bans came in response to the EU ban.
"The EU first banned Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik on March 1, 2022, as part of sanctions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia then restricted access to Western outlets, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, on March 4, 2022, in response. A more recent cycle occurred in 2024, with the EU banning Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta on May 17 (effective June 25), followed by Russia's ban on 81 EU media outlets, including Politico and AFP, on June 25. In both cases, Russia's actions came after the EU's."
Personally, I think this is stupid but domestic politics sadly always trump international common-sense.
I can't tell the difference between CNN and Fox. They're all liars.
No, I don't pay attention to US media as a source of real news. It's just fiction, pandering to two different audiences.
> This is standard European censorship of Russian media and news.
We should all emulate US media.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764546/watch-surreal-video-co...
Read "The Gray Lady Winked" by Ashley Rindsberg.
Nothing of this sort happens in Russia anymore. The Kremlin has full editorial control over all media outlets. What they want published gets published; what they want suppressed does not. That's it.
If you can find a single instance of the Russian minister of defence being accused of war crimes in the Russian media, then we can discuss further how the two countries compare. Until then, even the US corpo-infested media landscape remains leagues above Russia's.
While the US commits nothing but war crimes.
Russia on the other hand never tried to invade India, despite the Russophobic British spreading lies since they got a whooping in the Crimean war in 1856. [0]
As for the famines caused by the British in India, and the utterly vile conversions executed by the portoguese in Goa using industrial tools like breast-rippers, the less said the better. [1]
[0] https://academic.oup.com/psq/article-abstract/66/4/618/72516...
[1] https://wikibharat.org/pages/francis_xavier_and_inquisition_...
I suggest you stop regurgitating propaganda.
Case in point: The Ukraine (Stepan Bandera) and Poland. Look it up.
Did any part of India do anything objectionable pre-occupation such that you could apply the same "they had it coming" argument?
If you want to excuse and trivialize the suffering caused by Russians in Eastern Europe, then by the same token you trivialize the suffering of Indians under British rule. All the same excuses apply: some Bandera-Ramachandran surely conspired against the British and therefore the Bengal famine is your own fault.
As for the famines in India, the war criminal Churchill deliberately routed grains to feed his armies during world war 2. Prior to that, it was British policy to trigger famines, not incompetence.
During the Irish famine, again under British rule, the latter were exporting grains and other produce to England. It was not incompetence but malice.
Who is Ramachandran?
You can certainly argue that this was ineffective censorship that could be evaded, but it was, in fact, censorship by the US Government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
It's the same across the world, countries that routinely censor material still have their citizens evading censorship.
Also:
Analysts from Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 57th in the world out of 180 countries in their 2025 Press Freedom Index and they gave the country a "problematic" designation.
Certain forms of speech, such as obscenity and defamation, are restricted in communications media by the government or by the industry on its own.
The GP comment asked for examples of censorship in the US. Examples were provided.
Libel isn't media that is censored in the US and available internationally.
Did senior figures in the crrent US administration successfully (temporarily) have the entire show pulled?
The US practices censorship - it's not overt, the fish can't see the water, but it's there via manufactured consent.
Returning to the actual question I addressed:
> Could you share an example of some censored media in the US that's available elsewhere?
Wikileaks is a clear example of material censorered by the US Government that was restricted from common US employees despite appearing in newspapers and not being restricted from the eyes of other peer military and goverment personal in many other countries.
It might be that our system's reliance on norms has been exposed as a fatal flaw. On the other hand, the executive is only wielding its discretionary powers, so the current campaign of censorship may only last this term. We haven't put up a great firewall. We haven't nationalized news media.
The Wikileaks thing is so minimal that if you wanted to provide examples of US censorship you should have said CSAM and been done with it. The site was not blocked in the US. It didn't affect anyone but federal employees and clearance holders. No one could go to prison for viewing the leaked documents. And wikileaks wasn't arbitrarily targeted, there is a longstanding, opt-in employment policy that classification and need to know apply even to spillages.
To support your original claim - when I was in the military, we were explicitly forbidden to look at anything Snowden leaked as it was still classified and would be a violation of our clearances as we did not have either the appropriate level (e.g., TS-SCI) or need to know. Kind of understandable, but still.
It was easily the best way of clearing the office for some peace - mention the front page of the newspaper and everybody would lock their laptops, pick up their papers and walk.
From what I can gather the fact you know something you shouldn't, even though it's in the national news, it causes problems when renewing your clearances, so...
Now if only democracies wouldn't censor anything either ...
Have fun telling that to yourself when a random idiot that 30% of people voted for has power of life and death over you and your family.
The wealthy already fund politicians' careers, they fund judges, they fund campaigns. The wealthy already run the country. They fund both parties as a tactic. The parties are just "good cop/bad cop".
Dude this is a programming forum. Aren't you "The wealthy"?
Being a crazy authoritarian guy with power of life and death over each of your citizens is one. No government at all is the other extreme, which finally leads always to another crazy guy.
In between there is an ocean.
...and putting everything in the same pot is mostly wrong, but lately it's cool to be anti-everything.
no, the other extreme of "crazy authoritarian" is "liberal democracy"
The other extreme of "no government at all" is "everything is run by the government"
Is it democracy if a group of people totally coopt the electoral process by cultivating all the candidates and their policies behind the scenes and then present a few issues for us to bicker about?
Democracy is supposed to be everybody.
And you may say "but you can pick the person and representatives". But often these are already cultivated by the rich OR the political apparatus has been so corrupted that picking them does nothing.
Not only cause you can't influence policies after you vote, so that voting essentially becomes a pinky promise you make with the candidate. But also because the rest of the govt is so corrupted that an individual candidate, even if independent, is gonna have a hard time working in favor of the people.
You say in between theres an ocean, but for analogy purposes, what can the Millions of us do in an ocean if we don't have a boat?
Where's your think tank and lobbying group?
We can speculate all day, but we should try to analyse these sorts of things from a learning perspective. What can we learn from Russia, China, etc? How are they better?
Well, the last couple sentences is me paraphrasing. But one thing that many in the West boast about is the ability to criticize the systems to improve said systems. Let's see if actions match the rhetoric.
In 20 years we'll look at a lot of things that are normalized today like we look at cigarettes now, in disbelief at how unhealthy it was.