Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
> Something tells me you're not much of an ethicist.
Not at all.
Ethicists, in my experience, are hacks that cant actually do, but instead loudly pontificate and deride others who can. They basically run gish gallops and whataboutism to get the real creators to stop.
> "Who am I to refuse medical breakthroughs because they came from monstrous human experiments on prisoners of war? If it works it works!" /s
You can sarcasm-tag this all you want, but the medical experiments the Nazies did against Jews, Romani, Gay, mentally disabled, and others WERE used in this way for the US space and rocket initiatives and the creation of NASA. They were already dead, and the data collected. So yeah, we did use them. And we got further ahead by not having to run more experiments. And the data helped save our people.
Its not a great situation, sure. But whats done is done. No sense in whining and bemoaning "ethics" of corpses. Might as well get some good use out of their abject slaughter.
Russian is a nationality, not a race. You can say prejudiced, but not racist. In this case it's not even a person, but a product.
It's not prejudice when it's based on a post-facto assessment of the Russian government's mobilisation of their companies for obscene and evil goals like clamping down on free speech, persecuting LGBT people, or trying to destroy Ukraine.
"It's Russian and therefore it's out" is a valid stance in light of all the known consequences of using a Russian product. If Russian people do not like this, they are welcome to break their links to the Russian state by emigrating and founding companies elsewhere, or stay and overthrow their government. Either works for me.
Many Russians have learnt to keep quiet about politics so they can get ahead in Russia, and they seem to harbour some deep-seated delusion that everyone from abroad should play along with this for their own convenience and profit. They whisper 'no war' to one another, by which they mean Ukraine should surrender already, so that this whole unpleasantness (to them) blows over, and the rest of the world goes back to accepting their blood money. No.
Germany has been grappling with its own horrific genocide for a hundred years and still hasn't quite figured it out. Russia is, as of the time of writing, currently undertaking one. Come back in a hundred years, maybe we can talk about Russian products then.
It sounds like they use everything to give their subscribers good results. Which is what it sounds like I am paying for.