They weren’t just random Russians, they were working for companies under sanctions.

That’s just false. First, nobody in the maillists claimed those specific people were working for sanctioned companies. Second, at least one of the banned maintainers, when advised to contact their company’s lawyers, said he isn’t working for any company at all, just freelancing and doing free work for the community.

What were they supposed to do? Ignore the sanctions?

Yes. It was(and probably still is) literally written on the Linux Foundation website that the US sanctions do not concern open source community. It goes against everything open source ideology is, that is code and contribution is all that matters.

And what’s worse it raises serious concerns what other malicious actions to the Linux kernel and other projects Linus and LF had to take on demands of the government that likes to install backdoors in software.

Yeah, it’s literally whether the publisher wants to install malware with their games or not.

They are still in the mindset of “we are the only player in the field and people can’t live without us”.

No, they are in the mindset “we are a company selling cloud Linux, our legacy products are money drain”. They clearly state it in their yearly reports.

Well Windows wasn’t an important Microsoft product for like 15 years now. It’s been like 7 years when Microsoft is a company mostly selling cloud Linux services. Ridiculous I know, but that’s from their yearly financial reports. It seems their plan is to cash out Windows as fast as possible before dropping it.

but I would be surprised if someone who wanted a new GPU couldn’t continue to get ahold of one in Russia, given enough funds.

From what I saw recently it’s actually cheaper there than in non-sanctioned nearby countries.

Is Discord client code available?

They didn’t claim it though.

They said that all governments do some terrible things but in case of the governments that claim they are not authoritarian they pretext those things with something that will make the public not think they are doing a terrible thing.

In case of restricting Internet freedom or invading other countries it’s usually “but think of children”.

That is my concern with any US based company. With all the information we have how their government agencies used both legal and illegal means to access data how can you ever think those companies can protect your privacy even if they sincerely want to?

They do have the capability to not have the data requested. If they are not required by law(and it seems they aren’t), why store any data? They may have to provide data of the sessions that are active right now but it’s unlikely.

I wish it wasn’t located in the US where you know even though it’s e2ee they send all the data they get(and that’s a lot) to the government or whoever wants it. But e2ee is cool, right. Nobody from the government cares about it though, but it’s cool.

Why should they? Should every mail(physical or not) you receive be opened and read? Should the government have access to everything you do on your phone or pc? Should the government moderate your house? You are full 1984.

The government don’t usually need the text from your conversations, just the metadata who the person talks to, their location, etc. Signal is a US company, they surely provide all that data. It seems Telegram didn’t.

Despite TG being full of government trolls.

That’s the world we live in now. If it’s popular it will be full of trolls, government, corporate, all kind. Just somewhat popular, they are here on Lemmy too.

Well when Russia blocked Telegram it was just because Telegram refused to send them their users data. Simple. Now France seem to be sentencing a person to live in prison because Telegram still refuses to send them their users data. But they claim it’s for the children. Same shit, different excuse.

But the ban was only somewhat effective for like a month, then Telegram found a way to avoid it. In two years no one even felt like it was banned. So what could Russia offer to Telegram? Literally nothing.

I don’t see any agreement possible just because Russia had literally nothing to offer to Telegram.

I can do something about local storage, I can’t realistically do anything about E2EE.

You can enable secret chat. Like press the button. But that’s probably too difficult compared to encrypting you devices.

most smartphones have encrypted storage these days

Encrypted from your girlfriend or yourself if you forgot your gesture, but not from Google/Apple/Government or anyone who actually wants your data.

Again, it’s not, go to their github, check the code of the client, compile it yourself, and make a reproducible build to check that the client they ship to your phone is the same. You are talking nonsense.

It doesn’t matter what Facebook or WhatsApp say they use, their source code is closed, you can’t prove their words, meaning they don’t have e2ee. You can with Signal, you can with Telegram.