The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data (opens in new tab)

> sites like sci-hub for example

To be fair, that is not Google's fault.

It always cracks me up that when you see the DMCA note on the bottom and you click on it, you get to see the hosts anyways:

https://lumendatabase.org/notices/26024315

>but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results

the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...

Why don't you just click on Google Image Search's Pinterest links?

www.tineye.com is also a pretty good image searcher.

>Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments

No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.

> Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

Some recent parts of the government welcome the corruption.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizens-and-russian-intel...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/election-inte...

> Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments

Russia has an asset in British goverbment, in the hoise of lords!

Have you neber heard of Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation??

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev

Current Government was taking political dotations from Russian oligarchs, officially, but somehow thos gets postes

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-58711151

I have a better way to frame this. A hostile country is less interested in low profile users and is not as able/willing to use the data it collects against the user. Committed tax evasion / breach of contract / fraud? Russia is much less likely to care than your own government.

>Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

Brussels, Vienna, and many other European capitals are full of Russian "lobbyists".

But it's a fallacy to see the concern being about them having your individual data, right? The concern is the power of the information they yield when they have access to our collective data.

check how many western politicians went to work for gasprom or other russian government companies and talk again.

The UK is significantly influenced by Russia. Brexit is a prime, recent example, as well as the frequent donations from oligarchs to the Conservative party

I don’t know, you’ve never heard of blackmail? $500 in Bitcoin to some wallet or we leak your search results to your church group?

Many Jews got killed in the 40s because they'd registered themselves as Jews many years back, way before Hitler was a thing.

A lot of Ukrainians suddenly found themselves on Russian [claimed] soil and under Russian jurisdiction just a few months ago.

There are certain nations before which I'm not going to incriminate myself, out of precaution, Russia and China among them.

The classic reverse image search results from Google will not be around for much longer, I've been getting reports about my browser extension no longer working with Google Images in some regions.

Yandex Images also possibly going away or becoming heavily censored is also an issue for journalists and researchers, since it is the best performing publicly available reverse image search engine.

What’s the name of the extension? Didn’t know you could use the old Google images.

> Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.

I understand anti-government sentiment but whenever I see a statement like this it makes me devalue anything that comes after it. You really think there is nothing a foreign government might do with your personal data that your government hasn't already done? You really feel like there's a similar level of accountability at stake?

Unless you live in a shit hole, the worse that can happen is for your government to "just" jail you based on the information you provided. But if you provide that same info to enemy forces, they might use it to get leverage on you, getting you into even deeper shit than you already were. And they'll eventually dump you anyway and you'll be in a much worse situation.

Is the feeling right more or less often than you expect?

What is an enemy of the west and what is a friend of the west? Take a random western country like France. Do you know how many Franco-Russian 'cercles d'amitié' there are? Go search in Yandex... or Google. Many quite old with a noteworthy history of cultural exchange. No idea if that exists in the anglosphere (not my speciality). Washington, Brussels or the guy in the Élysée palace can't really transcend that.

> Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west

Well, either that or the west has decided that Russia is the enemy. I honestly don't buy the saying "Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west". Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?

however for hackers it's pretty interesting to see the code as an example of what apple/google/amazon/facebook are up to when it comes to tracking/sending ads/privacy invasion techniques. We are all quite aware of Russia's attempted genocide of Ukraine.

His family has left Russia back in 2014.

> I cannot in good faith demand

While some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Makukh ) sacrificed their lives in protest of Soviet Russia invasion into Czechoslovakia, timely public statement is the least he could do.

randomly opens a "history of lynching" academic paper while thinking about this...

Nothing to thing about here.

He could've left russia long time ago along with family and friends.

But he enjoys russian money even though he has more than enough for 100 lifetimes.

So yeah, I can in good faith demand from him and most other russians to condemn the war. Because the reason it happened is precisely that everyone does nothing in russia.

Most of them flee the country because they don't want to get into army, and even when they are abroad and in safety - they still don't condemn the war.

So fear has zero to do with their position.

> If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name.

Do Twitter crowds actually do that? Do they keep track of anyone more or less prominent, and write in their comments "Have you spoken out against the war yet?" "I haven't seen you denounce the war"?

>Kazakhstani (born in Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union) ethnic Russian stops mentioning “Russia” in his biography during a period of increased Russophobia.

He is jewish. Just like the rest of the "yandex talents" that moved to work at Israeli office. They all get to be jewish when if suits them.

UPD.

Also, yandex news was (and still is) the pinnacle of russian putin propaganda. And the person in question was complicit with it. Even, given the fact he wasn't living in russia since 2014. He tries to whitewash himself because he is a sanctioned individual. And the protocol to get desanctioned is to publicly state he disapproves the war.

>increased Russophobia

Where in the world is there any "Russophobia"? The far-right in the West and around the world loves Russia and Russians.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

> rather than an abstract "we think they're probably bad".

I think this is the inflection they actually used when they talked about Huawei routers.

They are worried that their populations might work out that Western populations are kept enthralled to the US security state and rebel. Russia is bad but US blows up gas pipeline for democracy and freedom.

Now hand over $800 billion dollars for 'defense'. And $368 billion for AUKUS. And the European bill will be interesting to watch over the next few years.

Just don't think about that F word - fascism.

>Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.

The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies.

I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".

I've wondered that too, and from what I can understand, the distinction is that the Russian Oligarchs don't just have political influence, their wealth itself was a result of political connections with the ruling elites from the start.

I do think they don't use oligarch for all Russian billionaires. For example it isn't used for Tinkov or Durov. In 90s-00s there really were oligarchs, now they use it for the ones that are or were maybe affiliated with government, like the childhood friends of Putin or former KGB/St Petersburg mayor's office employees who all happen to be CEOs of huge companies

Eh, while billionaires enjoy privilege in the West, oligarchs literally run gangs, murder people on the regular, and support Putin's attempted genocide of Ukraine. I would say that's definitely comparing grapes and oranges.

"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later.

It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.

I think the frequent comparisons of GDP leads the West to heavily underestimate Russia.

While GDP may be lower than Italy and per capita is weak, a nation like Russia can probably accomplish an order of magnitude more large scale projects, and also sustain a certain economy climate for much much longer than we think.

So don't underestimate Russia, even though we'd like to think they're soon running out of steam to continue the war in Ukraine.

Is that surprising for a resource oriented economy? Aramco (Saudi Oil) is the second biggest company in the world, yet GDP of Saudi Arabia is about that of Poland

A GPD lower than that of Italy? Here's something better: per capita is lower than that of Bulgaria's. Perhaps Putin's plan is to lower the country's population to increase the per capita ratio?

Yeah but that term is just you know comical. “Giants”. As if meant to inflate one’s ego, cover insecurity, and project power, like those tom and jerry cartoon episodes where they’d call in their giant friends to save the day. It amuses me every time.

So quite similar to the US where oligarchs (oups, billionaires) are invited at the White House and companies provide algorithmic censorship favoring a particular political camp (obvious with Twitter before its recent purchase, YouTube actions against public free discourse on covid, Google removing pages related to a certain laptop, etc.)

> And lobbyists are not lobbyists, they are oligarchs.

???

No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all.

So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".

Lobbyists are not oligarchs. They are middlemen and facilitators of corruption and bribery that provide plausible deniability.