A state intervention in the form of mandatory app installation that no user can deny is a danger, especially given that the current government has allegedly used cyber surveillance to plant "evidence" in the computers of dissidents like Stan Swamy who subsequently died in custody.
Another anonymous id posting the usual provocative narratives and instigatory tropes.
The Govt. of India has already clarified that the app can be deactivated/deleted by the user if they don't want to keep it.
Given the huge second-hand market for mobile phones in India (especially amongst the large uneducated/unskilled subset of the populace) and their troubling use for all sorts of Scams/Frauds/Terrorism-related activities etc. you need State help to manage the problem.
GoI has not clarified anything. The Telecom Minister has only provided verbal clarification, that too, after the issue gained traction on the internet.
Democratic, fully voluntary, user-driven platform and privacy-first app, activates only with user consent.
Sanchar Saathi app puts citizens first and protects their privacy at every step. It works only with user’s consent and gives full control over its activation and use.
Activates only after user chooses to register
User may activate, deactivate, or delete it any time
Designed to strengthen India’s cybersecurity without compromising privacy
On the other hand, Blender hardly operates like the average FOSS community in any way, shape, or form. Calling it a victory for FOSS methods when it's mostly SV-funded and has a heavily dictated direction is like calling Android a Linux victory.
If you’re going to start throwing qualifiers out there it dilutes your point.
FOSS advocate organizations like GNU specifically claim that open source and commercial sales are compatible. The important part is software freedom, where you can access source and modify it to your own needs and redistribute with a permissive license.
It doesn’t really matter that Blender has an opinionated roadmap or that it’s funded in a certain way. The bottom line is that you can obtain, modify, and redistribute the code in a free and open source way.
It doesn’t matter that Firefox has a bunch of branding to remove and pushes VPN subscriptions and such. The code is open source so you can fork it and redistribute so long as you remove branding.
Even if you have qualms with VSCode, it’s still FOSS. The only bit that’s limiting is the Microsoft extension ecosystem. But the underlying code is all free and available and is the basis for multiple popular forks. A large portion of it still represents a FOSS success.
If I buy an enterprise version of Grafana the fact that the community version is the basis of the application is a major benefit to me compared to buying a proprietary solution like Datadog. I can potentially contribute my own enhancements and fixes, I can inspect a large portion of the source code if I have a bug or question about how the application is intended to work, etc.
Long story short, FOSS has room for commercial interests, and is superior to the alternative of lack of source code.
Anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's what you were recommended based on your watch history or other data points. YouTube recommends me anti-China content all the time.
YouTube has a lot of anti China and anti US content. But you can block channels and subjects and clean it up. But the difference is anti. US content tends to be fake propaganda. Like claiming covid started in the US and was designed to kill people in China? That’s blatant propaganda. That’s anti US. Talking about the US spending money on gain of function research in Wuhan? That’s just reporting on facts. But I don’t consider that anti US.
Anti China content is just facts. If a video comes out saying there’s protesting in China due to zero covid. That’s not fake news. It’s not propaganda. It’s just something happening and CCP bots will scream “anti China anti China”
You can’t do that on tiktok.
I specifically called out Facebook and Instagram. It’s not flooded to death with propaganda.
