There is so much content going online, and so much traffic, plus heightened security measures, that make it very hard to identify dissidents on a large scale, at least with the tech we have, without using searches and seizure of one’s devices or other methods unrelated to the Internet itself.

In other words, very hard to impossible.

Great example of the paradox of tolerance.

It’s good that Romania is defending its democracy - Georgescu is a fraud as much as he is a clown, clearly unfit for office as he will not uphold the rule of law and will abuse his power.

With that said, where do you draw the line when barring people from running? Some will see this as an attack of democracy itself, in which anyone is allowed to run for office and is elected by the people. Blocking adversaries from running isn’t exactly the definition of democracy.

Unless the secret service declassifies its evidence that Georgescu is in any way affiliated or promoted by Russia, I see this going downward, with him and his ideology getting even more supporters due to this paradox of tolerance.

An European iPhone, aka an iPhone which will get these features, is identified by a background process named countryd, introduced in iOS 16. Its only purpose is to compute and predict the most likely location of the user (as in country/region) and lock down features accordingly.

These are only some of the factors taken into the equation:

• GPS location
• Wi-Fi location
• Wi-Fi hotspot country codes
• Cellular/GSM country codes
• IP address
• Home and roaming operator regions
• Apple Account region
• Device region
• Satellite reachability

countryd takes in all of these and more as input to provide the most likely country of the user. If that country is in the EU, then 💥 Sideloading, Default Apps, etc etc etc goodies