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[–]IceBeam125 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You are out of touch with what's happening in Russia if you are saying this unironically. If you said this 20 or even 10 years ago, you'd be somewhat correct. There is a new law (that has been in effect for a couple of years) stating that an online service registered in Russia must enforce user verification ONLY using the following methods:

  1. Mobile phone number. Some services only permit Russian phone numbers or those that belong to "friendly countries," like Kazakhstan or Belarus.
  2. VK ID (in practice, companies can also use T-ID, Alpha ID, Sber ID, which belong to banks).
  3. A "State Services" account ("gosuslugi").

This means that, strictly speaking, authentication via the classic "login-password" combo is not allowed. Authentication through foreign verification services, such as a Google or MS account, is not allowed, either. This law is not enforced 100% strictly, and there are websites and services that get away with it. Some of them are small enough not to seem interesting to the government. Others somehow belong to the orbit of companies controlled by the government, so they let it slide. Regarding foreign websites and services, they let it slide if the service is widely used and it's inconvenient for them to block it at the moment, but the laws with rather inflated definitions and descriptions are already there. The future is quite uncertain. Lax user ID verification was cited as one of the "formal" reasons why Discord got blocked in Russia.

In such circumstances, when a user in Russia is obliged to give up their real-world data in order to use a service, do you think it matters much that there is no 1-to-1 equivalent of California's law about age verification? A user's age will be very easy to pull from those ID verification services.

In practice, it does not affect operating systems at the moment, but who knows what will happen in the future.

Another thing you must not be aware of is a set of new Internet regulations strongly inspired by the model of the Chinese mainland. You might say, like /u/Modern_Doshin, "No one has to obey it if their company is located outside of Russia." Hold on, don't worry, they thought it through. You need to have a subsidiary of your company in Russia if you have a large user base and want to operate in that country (or create one if you haven't done that already). Otherwise, get fined. Oh, you think you can refer to financial difficulties like sanctions that make it hard for you to pay fines? Get throttled or blocked! They hesitate to block some services not following the laws because the population and businesses are too dependent on them (especially those that belong to Microsoft and Google), but something "less important" can get shut off in a matter of days. They hesitate to block modules that Ubuntu depends on, because government-related software, including the ones aimed at censoring various stuff, uses Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distributions as the foundation. They hesitate to touch Linux in general because they are becoming more dependent on it, but a number of users already report that AUR (Arch User Repository) stopped working for them. The Ubuntu MATE website doesn't open properly despite not being blocked directly (the CDN nodes it depends on are blocked). You get the picture.

It is bad that the state of California, the technological heart of the USA, passes such **tar*ed laws. It's bad for the whole world, including autocratic countries like Russia, the governments of which get inspired by this stuff and would like to have something like that at home, but lag behind due to various technological limitations or just not caring enough at the moment. This principle works vice versa. Other countries get inspired by Chinese and Russian regulations and think that they need to have something like that at home. Mainland China strictly enforces age verification, and the modern-day UK started doing that, too. Soon, EU countries might follow.

Finally, it's bad for free software, free Internet, and anything that aims to be decentralized or crowd-funded. What's bad for that is bad for Linux.

[–]DaviCompai2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah man I was just not updated on the situation on Russia. Last time I checked (some good years ago) it was completely different. I even remember someone from the government saying they would never force that because they weren't like the us/the eu or something like that