The erosion in this case is more harmful to many people than trolls showing up to reddit. So I think it's natural that people recede slightly from the idea a globalised common communal identity created by the Internet and look toward their national structures to protect them. As Snowden said in some QA "Our founding fathers did not say that all [US persons] were created equal". Until the irony of that statement is not cleared up internationally and human rights are absolutely universal balkanisation of the Internet will come. Russia, despite being an odd democracy, is only jumping onto a boat that already sailed in Brazil and other locations.
Not even close. This is another regime looking to suppress dissent, just like China has been doing all along. They don't trust their own citizens, not "corporations and other stewards of this medium." You're buying a flimsy excuse for cracking down on free speech.
Their problem has never been that some company cooperates with the US. It has always been that multinationals couldn't be easily strong-armed into cooperating with the local authorities. And no, it wouldn't matter if the US had the same problems.
And, there could even be a third element. Economic protectionism and "keep the money here". Or even a forth element. The lawmakers cousin owns a data center in Moscow:)
Russia, as a sovereign state has the right to make its own mind, including for what it considers dissidents. It's not the place of some foreigners to judge that. Especially since it's a democracy, and people voted for their government, however some foreigners might or might not like it.
Even if you disagree with their current regime, it's the regime the Russian people voted for, and they can also change it in the future. And regardless if it is a good or a bad government, there is really no excuse for a sovereign country to give access to its citizens data to an external power, especially one which treats foreign information like intelligence data and doesn't care at all about their privacy.
Better to be abused by your own government, the one you voted for, even if it's bad and abusive, than by some regime outside your borders.
If Americans had their Facebook/Google/etc data in a third country and those countries services treated them as US services do, they would be screaming bloody murder.
>Their problem has never been that some company cooperates with the US. It has always been that multinationals couldn't be easily strong-armed into cooperating with the local authorities.
And why shouldn't they be strong-armed into cooperating with the local authorities? It's their country, their rules, not something for multinationals to piss all over.
Now, if we're talking about the west investing x billion in "democratic institutions"(Ukraine, anyone?), it makes some sense for Russia to isolate itself. Obviously, it's easy to paint Russia as evil, but the cold war is over, buddy.
No government can act without the acceptance of a majority of the citizens. China's firewall can only exist because the Chinese people are accepting it in the name of protecting children or other such bullshit - brits should watch out, as their personal liberties have been eroded in the name of safety for too long. And if you live in the US, I suppose you're familiar with the Patriot Act ;-)
No, governments don't do this unless a majority approves - that they approve for the wrong reasons, that's another story entirely. But as I kept saying ever since Snowden's leaks happened - the US government fucked things up, they won't even admit to how badly they fucked up and this will have deep repercussions internationally regarding the future of the Internet. A lot of international (mostly US) companies will get hurt by this, because (1) they didn't have a saying in the matter, yet the public views them as being guilty nonetheless and (2) because of balkanization.
And the US can't point fingers and say "look who's talking", as that won't achieve anything. Say that to the Russian public who approves this. The US, as the stewart of the Internet, should have been careful to not fuck things up so badly in the first place. And after Snowden's leaks I would have liked to see some apologies, some heads falling - but ALAS, no, nothing of the sort - only a direct confirmation that they don't care about the rights of foreign individuals and as a non-US citizen, how do you think that makes me feel?
Communal identities are built along lines manned by people with guns. All that's happening now is that the internet has become an important resource, and countries are seeking to control it, like they do with any strategic resource.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
2. http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/apr/04/clarke-defends-se...
No, we don't. I don't agree with your statement and I don't think you should be speaking for other people. None of those places were bastions of any of those things. They were places where like-minded people gathered to talk about common interests. Don't make the mistake of thinking because they represented your interests that these places were bastions of all that is good.
That is such a dim and cynical and solipsistic view to take. I don't agree that the people who came to those networks are trolls just because they showed up after me. This is a natural consequence of networks getting popular, not a bunch of trolls coming to ruin the things I love because I love them. It's like saying that the people who came to America after the initial European colonists were trolls because they had different interests from original colonists.
This is such a common tactic on internet 'debates.' To call someone who disagrees with you a troll, thereby absolving you from the mental work of understanding their viewpoint (I don't need to engage this troll, they're just fucking with me) and dealing with the possibility that someone has different opinions than you.
The only action US companies can do now to avoid more countries doing this (short of US gov creating serious and radical reforms of its spying, along with radically stronger and more transparent oversight - which let's face it, is not going to happen anytime soon), will be to turn more and more of their services in "trustless" services, where you don't have to trust the company for keeping your data protected, because you know solid encryption system is keeping it protecting, along with open sourcing as much as possible of their software (especially if they are hardware manufacturers).
Same with terrorism. When we attacked Afghanistan and Iraq with the War Of Terror. That opportunity didn't escape the Russians, they quickly issues a letters of support of American people blah blah and then proceeded to switch to running their own War of Terror in Chechnya. This was very nice as they just let the US Dept Of State do all the PR for them.
> of their democratic government.
Well presumably our democratic government is terrific. We have great income inequality, we torture people in some hidden loophole prison on a island, we invaded multiple countries with some WMD fake pretest. We are blasting away even our own citizens with drones in countries we are not even at war with. So one can argue democracy is not really that nice, it obviously doesn't work very well or out people are just mean and evil. Which, then, maybe they don't deserve democracy.
Foreign governments owe you nothing, you can't reasonably complain about them abusing your rights if you put them in a position where they can.
Russia restricts free speech and universal suffrage through relatively "efficient" means, compared with China. Putin ensures his power with a lot less effort than the CCP. Also "honesty" in Russian authorities is something of a bad joke...
1) Protecting Citizen's data from snooping attempts of foreign intelligence agencies. Which is state's responsibility imo, which in this case it's carrying out. In this regard, this is good news,
2) Protecting Citizen's data from the state itself. This is a particularly tricky one, since there's no government agency which acts as counterweight to the intelligence agencies. In this regard, I am not so sure if its good news. What if this law was only passed to enable Russian intelligence agencies to gain easy access to all the citizen's data? Which seems plausible and predatory (nobody spies on our Citizens but us).
It will probably take a combination of Technological and Legal changes to really ensure privacy of the people. I can see how it could possibly come about. There's a small set of people (read Big Government) who want to maintain control over Citizens by compromising their privacy. There's a big set of people who stand to get harmed by privacy violations. But there is a third set of people who has influence on first set (read wealthy class in all its forms), but who also stands to lose from privacy violations, and who also has means to fight it legally and legislatively. The third class would probably be the drivers of privacy reforms we'll see in coming years/decades.
I find it amusing that they are doing this in "the name of combating piracy" when right now a certain russian site is hosting 1.2 million (mostly western) pirated ebooks and 28 million pirated scientific articles
Combating piracy is just something west is supposed to react more positively at.
They are making steps to legalize content, such as vkontakte legalizing 70% of their media material.
1) Are there any cloud file storage systems along the Drive/DB lines in Russia that apps providers can integrate with?
2) Not that anyone here knows the answer, but will the cloud storage providers implement data routing that complies with these rules (I guess yes, if the money is worth it)?
If anyone here is interested in country specific SaaS integrations (Germany, Brazil and Russia, for example), my email in profile.
>Data storage ~0.088$ for 1GB per month or ~0.131$ for 1 TB per hour
>Network (outgoing traffic) ~0.023$ per 1GB
>Network (incoming traffic) free-of-charge
They also recently announced CDN option with Akamai partnership at no additional cost
Great, so now I have a deadline to get out of here. Anyone hiring?
Just talk through them and then ask yourself if they are in fact "not present" outside of Russia given all the NSA and GCHQ shenanigans that have surfaced.
They are only moving ahead to level the playing field as much as they can.
Pelevin (the best modern Russian writer) came up with another more appropriate name - "Patsaneriya".
This "protection" of personal data is the same as "protection" of Russian-speaking in Crymea - just an excuse for a grab.
Edit: since I am getting down voted let me explain.
> The EU Data Protection Directive requires that personal data a company collects can not be moved somewhere where the consumer will have weaker protections than in the EU.
Practically it means that data can not be moved outside of EU, since they would be under different jurisdiction. For example court in EU must approve all data disclosures. If data are in US the disclosure could bypass courts in EU, there could be even gag order.
Simply put, the EU can not enforce its law in foreign countries. Safe Harbor and similar are nice in theory, but it still does not put them under EU jurisdiction.
BTW: Irish Google got sued already for sharing data with american mother-ship.
This has required some workarounds, such as "safe harbour" provisions that US companies need to accept in order to receive personal data from EU companies that have collected them from users, which basically boils down to that the US company need to agree to comply with the same basic rules as if the data had stayed in the EU.
End users can pass their data to whomever, whether or not they comply with these rules.
Big companies already have content distribution networks and server farms all over the world. And since Russia is hardly the first country to pass such a law, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others have already had algorithms in place to ensure user data stays local for certain countries.
Now they'll just add Russia to the list.
