[leppr]

I see, that makes sense.

The advantage of a web app is that it can be distributed in any number of ways though. It's trivial to take it and re-host it on different servers, as an onion service, or go the full decentralized route with IPFS or similar.

[jsn]

Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?

[vbezhenar]

Just e-mail people an update from random address with GPG signature. That should be the more resilient and hard to block way to communicate information. It's fun when the old proven tech proves superior to new shiny tech.

[gatronicus]

Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it.

99% of the people are on the big email providers.

Also, you will quickly find out that sending many emails from random addresses (ie: spamming) doesn't work these days, they will be blocked by existing anti-spamming techniques, as evidenced by multiple posts on HN of people trying to do that from their own mail server.

You need to go through a whitelisted mail service (MailChimp, ...) which is another block point.

[vbezhenar]

> Just as the gov required google to remove the app they can also require the big email providers to block all emails with links to it.

You don't need to mail links, you just need to mail required information. Asking Google to filter out some specific e-mail (which could be somewhat randomized for every recipient) probably will not work.

> You need to go through a whitelisted mail service (MailChimp, ...) which is another block point.

Russia can't ask US service to deny making business with US citizen (for example). It's completely outside of their territory.

[gatronicus]

> Russia can't ask US service to deny making business with US citizen (for example). It's completely outside of their territory.

Not sure what US citizens have got to do with this. Russia obviously was able to order Google to block relevant apps and documents for Russian people. Why would they care that US citizens can still access them?

[beebeepka]

Do you really think going through all that would be trivial to the masses?

[leppr]

Not now, but people adapt when there's an incentive.

Already if you go in a country with restrictive internet, you'll find the average working-age person knows how to use a VPN. Regular drug users in western countries know how to use Tor. Hong-Kong protestors were using a bluetooth mesh network app.