Apple bows to Kremlin pressure to remove leading VPNs from Russian AppStore — Novaya Gazeta Europe

Pretty much every brand, that was doing business there before, does it the exact same way, but under a shell company name. Capitalism doesn't give a fuck who's doing what, and how wrong it is

probably way more expensive

Nope. iPhone 15 pro max 128 gb could be bought in Moscow for 109490 руб, which is $15 higher than in the US.

Before the war Apple had a weird price policy in Russia when they just multiplied the official US price by the factor of 100 to get the price in roubles. It resulted in a +30-60% increase in prices.

So... the war has actually dropped the price for the Apple products dramatically for regular russians. The only problem with the Apple products the war has introduced is that you can't pay in AppStore

Well, just a month ago they couldn't pay out a bounty to Kaspersky for a 0day exploit they found due to the sanctions, so this seems a little off.

I'm not talking about the people happily living in self-delusion. We have plenty of those in the US too. Free information channels are still important and can be a crushing loss to the people who do care about reality.

The vast majority of russians support imperialism and a majority hold genocidal views (they would never openly agree to this, but on an outcome basis they do support eradication of Ukrainian culture and not only).

That's a major simplification. The fact that russians do not stand against a genocidal war doesn't mean that the vast majority do support it.

The vast majority of russians support imperialism and a majority hold genocidal views (they would never openly agree to this, but on an outcome basis they do support eradication of Ukrainian culture and not only).

Don't pretend there's any difference to yourself in this though. Just different allowed targets.

Even to this day, every russian with a smartphone has access to uncensored youtube available within 10 secs on their phone.

You have access to whole ass uncensored Web yet I'm certain you don't know shit about siege and ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, while the 3 mediators there were (and formally still are) USA, France and Russia.

And the USA representative publicly said they won't allow ethnic cleansing days before it happened. And, say, in case of Ukraine they well knew months before and were very loud with warnings. And after said ethnic cleansing they immediately started talking the way it became clear that they supported it. And no sanctions have been put on Azerbaijan (which is also a big proxy for Russian strategic exports and imports, but that's unimportant, of course).

So being Armenian I say shut up.

Also no, vast majority of Russians don't support anything such, they are just in apathy because kinda big protests were not successful in changing the government.

I'll add that when those protests were happening, "the West" mostly supported Putin by recognizing his stolen elections, just like they did during Chechen wars and, of course, with opposition to Yeltsin's fascist tendencies. Cause there were lots of money to be made in Russia for politicians making those decisions.

Any such moralizing westerner should go to the frontline and replace some Ukrainian life in the total number of the dead.

But there's an important difference here. Sometimes you want the IP address to look like it's coming from a different location because of region locking. Eg Netflix.

Other times you want the origin IP hiding along the data stream to stop snoopers. eg the government.

So changing your IP from the perspective of the receiver isn't much use if you're trying to hide from the government. People who are not very tech savvy may not necessarily realize this important distinction until it's too late. So it's best to explain the difference.

If you’re routing internet traffic via the VPN tunnel then yes of course that’s true.

But you can be connected to a VPN and only direct specific subnets (like the traditional office network example) to it. You’re not always forced to use it as a default route (using the term loosely here).

To access a different LAN, e.g. a network at work, or your NAS at home. You configure it so your internet traffic still goes over your normal connection but only the LAN requests to the specific subnet goes over the VPN. This was the original use case they were built for (roadwarrior businessmen logging into their corporate portal from a hotel or whatever)

when you want to be on a different local network?

To ensure your unecrypted data(which is rare these days) is not clear-text in an untrusted network such as public wifi.

To not disclose to your internet provider the sites you are visiting.

It’s only bad if you’re splitting it incorrectly lol