Russia could block mozilla.org (in which case 1000s of clones would likely emerge). Mozilla is a not for profit. Why not simply ignore such requests..
The worst? Probably murder.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_assassinatio...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_Russian...
/s
Having said that the list contains many names of people who would be hunted and killed by any government. Imagine Apache starting revolt, murdering civilians, keeping / trading slaves, cutting heads etc. etc. Whoever the author of the article is - they did a shitty job.
This list is a big disservice to true victims of Putin, like Navalny and the likes.
The Apache tribes fought the invading Spanish and Mexican peoples for centuries.
The first Apache raids on Sonora appear to have taken place during the late 17th century. In 19th-century confrontations during the American Indian Wars, the U.S. Army found the Apache to be fierce warriors and skillful strategists.
Chechnya was pacified with regular significant money transfers to the strongman at the head. Indians, hmm...
We saw that when companies like McDonalds could no longer operate in Russia, Russia essentially took the McDonalds and created a knock-off. If Russia decided to ban Firefox, they may just fire up a knock off and sell it to the populace as Mozilla is an evil American corporation so they have created RuskieFox and all that national pride stuff. Would tech saavy people trust the Russian knock off? My guess is the tech saavy people won't and will find ways to get firefox from Mozilla. But the non-tech saavy? Probably not. From this, if we assume Mozilla is doing what it can to protect users (which may or may not be the case), it would be better to comply but Russians get official builds of Firefox than being banned and the Russian government replacing Firefox with their own build.
> Would tech saavy people trust the Russian knock off?
No one with a single brain cell uses the Yandex web browser. It's akin to giving the Russian authorities full access to your entire web presence.
> But the non-tech saavy?
For those Firefox has never existed. Most people in Russia use: Yandex web browser, Opera or Google Chrome.
> From this, if we assume Mozilla is doing what it can to protect users (which may or may not be the case), it would be better to comply but Russians get official builds of Firefox than being banned and the Russian government replacing Firefox with their own build.
Mozilla loses nothing from not complying but gains reputation and trust of not sharing the bed with Putin.
In Russian Hacker News, someone is saying the exact same thing about Google Chrome.
Because no one is helped by that, least of all Russian people wanting to use Firefox. It seems fairly obvious that "all of Firefox is not available in Russia" is worse than "two extensions are not available in Russia".