Posted on 10/09/2024 8:31:23 AM PDT by Alter Kaker
Russia has moved to ban Discord, a popular platform for real-time communication, drawing ire from the Russian military that has extensively used the app to coordinate units on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The ban, announced by the internet regulator Roskomnadzor on Tuesday, highlights a glaring technology lapse within the Russian military. More than 2½ years into the war, it has failed to implement a secure, dependable Russian-made communications system, instead relying on privately owned platforms such as Discord and Telegram.
The ban has also renewed a wider debate about how Russia’s bureaucratic machine keeps frustrating the military effort.
Pro-invasion military bloggers, many of whom have a direct line to units fighting in Ukraine, ridiculed the move, saying that a bureaucratic decision to block Discord caught Russian troops off guard and left them without proper communications.
“A replacement should have been created and commanders should have been alerted to the plans so that the work at the front would simply not be broken in an instant,” one blogger wrote. “It’s called seeing a little further than your nose.”
Discord was created to provide gamers and cyber-sport enthusiasts with a reliable voice and text communication platform for gaming sessions. During the covid-19 pandemic, the platform expanded to serve various interest-based communities, educators and professionals working remotely.
Its key features, such as stable audio streaming between large groups of people and the ability to share screens, proved useful for gamers playing as teams of first-person shooters in Counter-Strike and other fast-paced games. These features were later adopted for real-life warfare by militaries on both sides of the front line.
In battlefield videos recorded by Russian soldiers and shared with friendly pro-invasion bloggers to post on Telegram, the Discord interface can often be spotted on screens in unit command centers.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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