Now the first thing Xiao Lei does when he wakes up every morning is to see what new news there is from the Russian-Ukrainian war, not only as a military enthusiast, to see where this war of the five permanents will go, but also as a media worker, to see what kind of impact this sudden war will bring.
As the Russian-Ukrainian war continues, more and more countries, enterprises, and institutions have been involved, and a number of technology companies have announced the suspension, termination, and suspension of services in Russia, such as the global network social media such as Twitter, Facebook (now called Meta), which are not very familiar to everyone, but must have heard the name of Twitter, Facebook (now called Meta) and other global network social media have begun to ban and stop pushing Russian media information.
In addition to the Internet, many high-tech companies have also begun to act, Intel earlier announced that it will stop selling all its products in Russia, including AMD, Qualcomm, Dell and other companies have also responded, stopping the sale of all high-tech products. Suddenly, Russia has become the world's scientific and technological depression, almost to be stripped out of the modern technology Internet ecology.
Apple's sanctions are also long overdue after almost all Western companies that can call names have begun to "cut off supply" to Russia, and recently, Apple announced that it will suspend the sale of Apple products in Russia and restrict Apple Pay functions. In addition, the Russia Today and Satellite News Agencies apps have also been removed from apple app stores outside of Russia.
When the last piece of the puzzle of U.S. tech sanctions falls, what will happen to Russia next? And what are the implications? How will Russia respond to these external sanctions? If you're interested in these, read on.
Lay siege to Russian tech companies
While there have been mantras like "capitalists have no borders, they are willing to sell their own noose if they are willing to pay," and so on, we have seen the performance of global tech companies in the wake of the war between Russia and Ukraine. When the Western media portrayed Ukraine as a mere victim and completely shrugged off its responsibilities, tech companies under pressure from Western market users and governments had to take a stand.
The reason for this can actually be straightened out by thinking about it a little, although the Russian market is not small, but compared with it is a huge Western market, everyone understands the reason for abandoning the pawn insurance car. Therefore, we can see the dense news of technology companies sanctions in the past few days, from semiconductor giants such as Intel and AMD to small enterprises, all of which are cutting with Russia.
However, the most concerned is that Apple announced that it will limit Apple Pay functions and suspend the sale of Apple products in Russia, after seeing this news, Xiao Lei is also subconsciously shocked, Apple, a technology giant who often stays out of the country affairs, actually has a time to personally go down? Considering that our country's relationship with the United States is far from friendly, will Apple use the same approach to us in the future? Will the iPhone in our hands become a useless brick?
In fact, in weibo, Tieba and other online communities, many iPhone users have expressed concern about this, and some netizens have bluntly said that the next mobile phone will not choose the iPhone again. Although Xiao Lei also has similar ideas, as a responsible media person, Xiao Lei feels that he cannot just look at the reports of the domestic media to determine one thing, and sometimes he still needs to look at the official English original manuscript.
In the sanctions announced by Apple, in addition to stopping the sale of products in Russia, the most important thing is to limit Apple Pay and some services, for iPhone users, limiting Apple Pay is equivalent to restricting most of the App payment, purchase services, and some apps that need to be renewed to use will not work properly.
So is this really the case? In fact, if you want to check the use status of the services provided by Apple in a certain region and country, you can directly query apple's official website, and you can query the operation status of related services after entering the relevant page through the system status.
Taking Chinese mainland as an example, you can see that two of all 56 services are in a state of service interruption, namely Apple Book and iTunes Store, because they involve unauthorized and censored books and streaming entertainment services, so they are not licensed to operate in China.
What about Russia? Through Apple's Official Website in Russia, we can see that the 57 services provided by Apple are in the "available" state, and even the Apple Pay service mentioned in the official document is also in the "available" state. For now, at least, Apple's approach is different from what they say (it may be restrictive to specific apps), and there may be other reasons behind the videos and pictures circulating online that have caused big trouble for Russian users.
In a sense, Apple can be said to be the most resolute attitude of all the technology companies at present, although from the Russian official website to see that the sale of all products is indeed suspended, but after data retrieval, Xiao Lei found that this is not the first time Apple has stopped selling products in a certain region, in the Turkish lira plummeted during the period, Apple also announced the temporary suspension of all product sales, because of the fear that the plunging exchange rate will affect commodity profits, bringing unexpected losses.
Therefore, even without the requirements of the US government, Apple is estimated to suspend the sale of products in Russia, after all, the Russian ruble has fallen by more than 30% in recent days, and the follow-up does not rule out the possibility of continuing to fall, from the perspective of a commercial company, it is normal to stop selling related products online, and many other companies also choose to suspend the sale of goods for the above reasons.
In fact, we can see that many technology companies have not stopped their specific business in Russia in addition to stopping selling products, for example, many car companies have announced that they will stop selling vehicles in Russia, but they have not announced other sanctions. To some extent, it can be considered that these companies do not actually want to completely close their operations in Russia, but under the pressure of the government and the concern about the ruble exchange rate, they choose to suspend the supply of products in order to stop the loss in time.
In this way, the opening sentence may be really true, as long as there are interests, the capitalists may really not care whether their other side is the righteous party. However, if Russia does not need to worry about sanctions on technology companies, it is obviously wrong, in addition to traditional technology companies, the sanctions of Internet technology companies are more powerful and resolute.
The blockade of Russia by online communities such as Twitter has directly led to Russia's "loss of voice" in the Western network society, not only unable to convey its own voice, but also being arbitrarily smeared by Western media, groups, and individuals, resulting in its complete becoming a "villain" in the eyes of ordinary people in the West. For example, a German media posted that Russia bombed the town and caused a fire, and the videos and pictures cited in the text were all materials of the explosion of Tianjin Port on the mainland, but for netizens who are not familiar with this information, they will be directly "misled".
What is certain is that under today's Internet ecology, these Internet technology companies have a very obvious role in guiding public opinion, and may even affect the outcome of a war. Under the one-sided condemnation of the Internet community, it actually directly affected russia's internal stability and the attitude of the masses in other countries to the war.
Obviously, while enjoying the convenience brought by the Internet, we must also clearly realize that the Internet is not only a tool to connect the world, but also a tool that can guide users' views and tendencies. Moreover, the key part of the Internet is still in the hands of a small number of companies, and when your speeches and ideas are not in their interests, they will be blocked, blocked, and even misinterpreted, and you yourself will not have the opportunity to speak up and explain.
Technology has no borders, and now it seems that it has become a distant goal, in today's world, not only technology has borders (such as ASML lithography machine), the Internet also has borders, and the boundaries in the Internet are even more distinct and more direct than the real society. In reality, you can still make your voice heard, while in the Internet, once you are blocked from account or even IP address, you will directly lose all the opportunities to speak.
Moreover, the suspension and ban of related services by technology companies will also have a lot of impact on the daily life of russian people, such as the inability to directly purchase new electronic products. For enterprises, it has a greater impact, because it involves all aspects of various fields, XiaoLei will not elaborate too much, interested friends can search on the Zhihu lighting website, and many people have made a tidying up.
How to deal with the attacks of Western Internet companies?
With the progress of the war, Western countries have also imposed more and more sanctions against Russia, not only various bans and suspensions, but also the network departments and hackers of some countries have also begun to infiltrate Russia's network facilities and websites, directly endangering the information and privacy security of Russian users.
How does Russia intend to respond to this problem? From the current data, the next step for Russia may be to completely cut the domestic network and the global Internet, and form an internal circulation network through the internal network trunk, which is what we often call "local area network", but the scale and number of users of this local area network are far more than before.
According to the information queried, as early as 2019, Russia has successfully conducted an international Internet disconnection test, cutting the Russian network out of the international Internet through a series of technical means, so that domestic network users are protected from the threat of hackers and hostile forces on the international Internet. It is reported that the network is known internally as RuNet, and after the activation of RuNet, domestic network services can operate without access to the global DNS system and the external Internet.
Doesn't sound hard to achieve? In fact, if you want to disconnect from the global Internet, you still provide normal network services for domestic users, and the technology and hardware costs required are very high, not just pressing the button and disconnecting the Internet connection.
The application of the Internet has now penetrated into all aspects of our lives, some countries in the face of crisis, simple and crude disconnection of the network to solve some of the problems, but will also bring a great impact on the lives of the local people, especially in the areas where science and technology, commercial exchanges are developed, the disconnection will directly affect the normal operation of society.
Therefore, how to prevent foreign Internet attacks while maintaining the normal operation of the domestic Internet, has become a big country such as Russia needs to consider things, after technical exchanges and cooperation with China, Russia finally gave the answer is RuNet, a large local area network that completely relies on its own servers.
On the other hand, the mainland has a similar plan and means, through the "Snowman Plan" launched a few years ago, the mainland has completed the architecture of 25 IPv6 root servers in 16 countries around the world, of which one IPv6 server and three auxiliary root servers are located in China. When necessary, we can completely bypass the servers deployed in hostile countries, use servers in other countries to communicate with the Internet, and even completely disconnect the Internet as in Russia, and it is also feasible to use an internal circulation network.
Now it seems that when we isolated the domestic network from the outside network, although we lost a lot of fun, but in exchange for valuable autonomy, at least in the network our country will not completely lose its voice. At the same time, we also need to realize that the future war is not only in reality, but also in the Internet we will face a difficult war.
From the construction of an autonomous network ecosystem and Internet infrastructure, to UnionPay, domestic application stores, Guizhou on the cloud, etc., although these measures have been criticized by many netizens in the past, they are considered meaningless, and even lead to poor mobile phone services. But in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, we should realize that it was these once-maligned systems that gave us autonomy and allowed us to continue to live normal lives without being affected in the face of possible threats.