Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
> Something tells me you're not much of an ethicist.
Not at all.
Ethicists, in my experience, are hacks that cant actually do, but instead loudly pontificate and deride others who can. They basically run gish gallops and whataboutism to get the real creators to stop.
> "Who am I to refuse medical breakthroughs because they came from monstrous human experiments on prisoners of war? If it works it works!" /s
You can sarcasm-tag this all you want, but the medical experiments the Nazies did against Jews, Romani, Gay, mentally disabled, and others WERE used in this way for the US space and rocket initiatives and the creation of NASA. They were already dead, and the data collected. So yeah, we did use them. And we got further ahead by not having to run more experiments. And the data helped save our people.
Its not a great situation, sure. But whats done is done. No sense in whining and bemoaning "ethics" of corpses. Might as well get some good use out of their abject slaughter.
I hope you're exactly as principled when it comes to buying from the companies paying taxes in the UK and USA due to these countries contributing to or directly aiding the genocide in Lebanon and Gaza.
And USA and UK are primarily on hook for financing of the genocide (USA by providing arms and money, UK for providing intelligence services directly used during Gaza strikes).
Its almost like if Russia used Korean soldiers and you claimed Russia is not responsible. They both are.
The US attacks on Iran is a different event altogether from the Israeli genocide in Gaza. You're conflating discrete conflicts with different parties and different modes of engagement.
The US attack on that school is atrocious and I condemn it. While possibly a war crime, it does not meet the definition of genocide, unlike Israel's conduct in Gaza, which certainly does. There's no evidence of recent US conduct amounting to genocide (much historical evidence vis-a-vis American Indians though).
To the extent you wish to penalise complicity in genocide, go for it, but I will notice if you're oddly selective in which genocides you apply that standard to, and which you don't. (Which countries traded with Burma during the Rohingya genocide? Do you know? Do you care?)
> brown children
What does the children's colour have to do with anything at all? Do we grade the severity of war crimes by the (perceived? assigned?) race of the victim? Horrific thought.
I seem to be not getting my points across, so I'll stop here, only addressing the last one.
Yeah, "the world" ignored killings of untold thousands of the brown and black children but is quick to condem the suffering of the white ones.
See that even investigating the war crimes on the non-white people can get people in the deep trouble.
Horrific but it's time for you to face the reality.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please take a moment to re-read the guidelines, and particularly note these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Don't berate people on HN. We're here for curious conversation, not battle. Please take a moment to re-read the guidelines, and particularly note these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I note the rule reminder, but I very respectfully raise one hell of an eyebrow at the implication that discussions about ranking the significance of dead children by skin colour ought to be conducted curiously, dispassionately and substantively.
This isn’t difficult. HN has existed for nearly two decades and the guidelines have been constant for almost all of that time. Those guidelines apply no matter the topic and there is a very important reason why this line is so close to the top:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
If the topic is one that you’re unable to discuss without being inflammatory and belligerent, it’s not a topic you should be discussing on HN.
Being belligerent towards other commenters on a tech-focused discussion won’t do anything to address the awful realities in the most troubled times and places in the world. But avoiding that style of discussion makes all the difference to our ability to make sense of things.
It’s probably a good time to remind ourselves that this is a discussion thread about search engines, and the guidelines ask us to stay on topic and avoid generic tangents.
Russian is a nationality, not a race. You can say prejudiced, but not racist. In this case it's not even a person, but a product.
It's not prejudice when it's based on a post-facto assessment of the Russian government's mobilisation of their companies for obscene and evil goals like clamping down on free speech, persecuting LGBT people, or trying to destroy Ukraine.
"It's Russian and therefore it's out" is a valid stance in light of all the known consequences of using a Russian product. If Russian people do not like this, they are welcome to break their links to the Russian state by emigrating and founding companies elsewhere, or stay and overthrow their government. Either works for me.
Many Russians have learnt to keep quiet about politics so they can get ahead in Russia, and they seem to harbour some deep-seated delusion that everyone from abroad should play along with this for their own convenience and profit. They whisper 'no war' to one another, by which they mean Ukraine should surrender already, so that this whole unpleasantness (to them) blows over, and the rest of the world goes back to accepting their blood money. No.
Germany has been grappling with its own horrific genocide for a hundred years and still hasn't quite figured it out. Russia is, as of the time of writing, currently undertaking one. Come back in a hundred years, maybe we can talk about Russian products then.
