[kornhole]

Russia to block Google, IOS and Android.

Aleksei Didenko, a member of the Russian State Duma, has said that Google, including its Android operating system and Apple's iOS, will soon be blocked in Russia.

Didenko advised the public not to cling to services like YouTube, stating, "Soon Google will be blocked, along with Google Android. iOS will also be blocked, and this will not be our initiative."

t.me/ForeignAgentIntel

[padthai]

So they will not use Smartphones? I am not buying it.

[kornhole]

Google has been blocked in all of China for many years. They mainly use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and variants without any proprietary Google. Their IOS devices connect to servers in and run by China. Russia can do something similar, but they are giving people some warning and time to migrate. Russia has banned IOS for most government employees after the Operation Triangulation fiasco.

[netsharc]

As sibling commenter says, the China model is probably ideal for dictators. In China WeChat is used for everything: communicating, social media, payment (along with AliPay). And it doesn't take much imagination how effective that is for surveillance and control. They already delete posts that are "dangerous to the harmonious living" (i.e. things that are against the government narrative), and if you're afraid you'll get banned and lose your means of contact with friends (as well as a payment app needed for day to day living), you'd probably censor yourself.

And monitoring payments is another method of surveillance, along with the monitoring of communications (even with E2E encryption, just knowing which people are talking to each other, and with what sort of intensity, is useful for surveillance).

And Elon Musk wants to make a similar universal app out of the corpse of Twitter... ha, wouldn't we all like that. Ironically all the people who still defend him overlap with the ones who are yelling "The woke lefties want to control our speech!"