Russia is locking down the internet: [Reuters] Over the past week, mobile internet has been completely down every day in parts of central Moscow, St Petersburg and other major cities. Russia worrie…
  • BasiqueEvangelist@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    3 hours ago

    I’m surprised that this article talks about Telegram being blocked but doesn’t mention Max, the “national messenger™” they want to replace it with. (Which, by the way, has GigaChat integration as an advertised feature - so it’s very funny that GigaChat is now facing issues with it not being Russian™ enough)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      I’m wondering the extent to which Max is a thing. They force it onto all phones so it claims a huge userbase, but all the numbers are PR numbers.

      • BasiqueEvangelist@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        Well, they aren’t just forcing it on all phones, they’re also forcing students to install it (my university forced me to install it to log in to the university systems, for example), house chats are being forcefully migrated to Max, everyone that they can force to use it is being forced to use it.

        Of course, that doesn’t mean that people actually use it - from what I can tell, people do want to migrate from Telegram, because of it being really slow and proxies working poorly, but to anything other than Max - I’ve heard people talk about imo (or something? I have no idea). My uni group’s Max chat only has, like, three people in it, and we haven’t actually migrated away from Telegram.

        There’s also more stupid stuff about Max, like it forcing you to register a sole proprietorship or LLC to make a bot (and if you make a sole proprietorship, the Max bot’s username will include your full legal name), and it apparently checking to see if you have a VPN installed on your phone, but I don’t really know that much because I don’t actually use it (I just have it installed to read 2FA codes for my uni).

        • BasiqueEvangelist@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          3 hours ago

          I’ve also seen people put Max in the heaviest sandboxes they can find, maybe even put it on separate phones with nothing else on them, so you can tell that quite a bit people really don’t trust the app.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          I can’t confirm it at all, but I read somewhere that at least some of Max’s actual servers are in the UK too o_0

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    Okay but hear me out: if they do restrict it to only Russian training data then it’s gonna end up having a small enough set to fail in truly comical ways.

    • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      We will need someone to infiltrate their network to gain access to this AI agent - amount of possible new memes will be worth it.