foverzar

In Russia, China or North Korea - nobody believes that.

Well of course, they're all actually super miserable and are secretly begging the government of your country or her stronger allies to liberate them and wisely lead to a glorious bright westernized future.

Don't be naive. It's probably worth exploring where'd you get such a maximalist idea in the first place and measure just how much empirical evidence you have to back it up.

Telegram has also absolutely no filters

Your own head should be your filter. This is literally craving for Big Brother.

so it can be filled with lies and propaganda without any response from the platform

So does any other platform with the only difference being that it's the "right" kind of lies and propaganda that would also be shown down your throat with the rest of your feed. The cope is real.

only if it is russian government making requests

Says who?

Your responses remind me of russian bot playbooks, tbh. Are you one?

Well of course they do, and of course I am. Everyone knows that everyone who doesn't share your opinions and perspectives in 2024 isn't even worth of being considered a human being, duh!

As did (does?) TOR

Yep, TOR is not a solution for hiding from western governments. That's why anything large enough out there gets wrecked as soon as someone makes an appropriate decision.

E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic

The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible

Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled

Why are you trying to build a strawman? That's not what I said. I've said "google kept abusing backbone networks" (e.g. IEXPs), which obviously means it's a matter of the Main Radiofrequency Centre, since it involves nation-wide infrastructure - not some "ISP volunteering".

And I’ve never said that “mobile connection is not being throttled”. In fact, I am stating exactly the opposite, pointing out that traffic shaping is an inherent feature for a mobile ISP. In contrast to broadband, where no one bothered with deep traffic manipulation before, so an ad-hoc throttling solution (yes, typically simply reusing existing law enforcement integrations) works like shit.

This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:

One does not need a synthetic test such as yours. One can simply try playing a video from the same browser, switching connection between broadband connected Wi-Fi and a mobile hotspot and notice that broadband doesn’t seem to be working properly, but mobile actually works, even if it’s not Full HD. How come? Does your hypothesis regarding “not by ISPs, but by government-issued DPIs” explain the variance in ISPs behavior? No, it doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t explain why “blocked” YT seems to be “blocked” completely different from your typical weed growers forum. It works differently from how you imagine it.

Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?

Speaking of which, apparently some broadband ISPs are now trying to implement throttling properly to give them an edge over the competition: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6919868

Government funding?

Mandatory phone number exposure? (or did they finally implement usernames?)

A joke of a "registration lock pin" instead a proper 2FA to protect against sim-swap?

It literally has government funding.

Since 2022 it became nothing but a propaganda tool itself.

How can it possibly be "a propaganda tool" when it has no feed, no algorithms, no suggestions or recommendations? You only get sources you've willingly subscribed to, nothing else.

This reads as such a cope.

And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon

It had already happened with extreme humiliation of responsible agencies.

as Youtube is being banned now

It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)

It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.

Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like

Clearly you are not in touch with people in Russia and have never actually seen their social media. Or just being dramatic.

Spoken like a person who had never ever accessed a single resources in Ru-net, nor interacted with people on their social media platforms.

and the Russian govt has carte blanche access to Telegram

That hardly corresponds with Durov's relationships and history with Russian government.

Russia invaded their sovereign neighbour Ukraine who the f cares about their forums for messaging. yawn.

What does one even have to do with the other? Feels like obsessing a bit too much over a single topic.

US is a no-go for a project like this. No large geopolitical power is.

well, at least Signal

Basically only Signal + Whatsapp.

claiming they don't do anything for privacy.

Well, Signal is kind of a scam in that regard.

Large geopolitical powers are all the same. It's only people who live there that are convinced they are doing better than those other guys.

Yes, that includes people from Russia, China or the US believing they are the ones who are truly free, and everything else are totalitarian shitholes. Each one of them is even kind of right in their own regard.

I have yet to see evidence of this being a huge story for those people

Can you honestly claim that you keep in touch with those people?

I mean, this is an english-speaking us-centric forum. It is somewhat atypical for people here to actually know what happens outside this bubble.

It's been collapsing since digital piracy had first appeared. Then perpetuated by countries being elective at what kind of "intellectual property" rights they choose to respect.

"People with money" are a crucial milestone, because they were the ones who were actually actively benefiting from and upholding this institution.

There is a whole wide world beyond just obsessing over "billionaires" in a tiny us-centric corner of the world.

One could point out China, who totally has so much respect for someone's notion of legality. Or France that had never cared for software patents. Or one could point out good old pirates, who were always relatively successful at giving a middle finger to the notion of "intellectual property". "Billionaires" are simply another straw, peculiar only in the sense that they were the pillar upholding this institution.

And speaking of "not legislatively, but judges": 1. Not every country has a common law legal system 2. Just take a look at Japan's AI legislations.

Is it really? It's all boils down to powerplay, really. And lately lots of powerful entities, from nations to corporations, seem to be poised on disrupting this institution.

Well it's nice to see the whole concept of IP finally collapsing as it should.

most commonly

Says who?

The only reason that's even considered is because the advertising industry

No, it isn't. I've seen a lot of cases when 3rd party cookies were used in complex web based software, especially in enterprise software.

This maximalism is tiresome.

Yet, rich people buy Lamborghinis.

Do they really? Seems more like a case for wannabe rich people.

It is misleading to go from patent infringement to casual theft. They're not the same.

Somehow people aren't that eager to make the same argument when accusing China of "IP theft".

They obviously can't just bail and this whole moody exclusivity is what's truly pathetic.

It is based on various attribution factors. But since it is typically easier to point at the currently hated scapegoat and be done with it, the quality of these attribution factors leaves much to be desired.

E.g. https://blog.sekoia.io/noname05716-ddosia-project-2024-updat...

"The decision not to mandate VPN usage in Russia, especially given their statement “it is extremely unlikely that there will be any problems”, suggests a possible collaboration between the NoName057(16) group and the Russian state."

I imagine you've also heard of attributions like "Cyrillic layout" (used all over eurasia) or "IP pool associated with a Russian AS" (as if VPS renting isn't a thing or commodity routers in Russia aren't hackable and can't be forced into a botnet)

I imagine the attribution factors were something along "we saw IPs associated with Russian ISPs and cloud providers" or "parts of their infra were accessible from Russia without using VPN".

Even Armenia didn't want to defend Armenia, making sure that it is explicitly legally and politically "definitely-not-Armenia" that needs defense.

0 other reasons

Well this is just sad propaganda. Zelensky (and others) had publicly admitted to sabotaging deescalation agreements.

You don't want to fall for "nothing happened in Donbas before 22" bs.

It is really such a weird situation. Western and Ukrainian politicians had publicly stated they were actually going for a fight for a long time, but we still see people doing wired moral posturing.

It wasn't just against China, they were campaigning against all non-western vaccines. Either you get Phizer/Astra-Zenka, or that evil Chinese/Russian/whatever liquid will make your eyes bleed out.

It's not even a "secret", you can just read "Radio Free Europe": the messaging was absolutely obvious.

How else something contradicting western propaganda is supposed to sound like?

all the fault of the horrible people pushing peace and democracy

Please don't push this "nothing was happening in Donbas before 22". It's ignorant at best and just cruel at worst.

Using the peaceful reunification agreement as a way to stall and to prepare for war against dissidents has nothing to do with "pushing peace and democracy".