I thought Putin had put a lot of people through windows; why the surprise?
I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…
Wish it would explode in his face
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There are many fine soviet computers to use for pressing a button that does nothing.
Russia has no own processor production. ICL is one of the few Russian PC brands which uses AMD and Intel… So in fact there are no “Russian” pc’s…
Russia has some Elbrus CPUs locally produced, but they are very outdated and very expensive, and also have a different processor architecture, so they find limited use. Apparently, they didn’t bother supplying one for the President.
Agreed, but they have some amazing hacks using older architectures. They do produce motherboards and other components though so it’s still surprising they are using a dell.
But I was informed that Elbrus would be killing AMD and Intel any day now…
He should have used Linux
Considering that Russia has at least 4 major domestic Linux distros (Astra, Alt, ROSA, RED OS), I can only guess why they didn’t.
Voting doesn’t need to be secure in Russia because voting doesn’t actually matter in Russia.
What happened to Astra Linux :(
It exists, but damn I’d rather use any other Russian Linux distro than that
“You can’t go wrong.” Isn’t an observation, it’s a threat.
I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.
Why dont they use Linux so weird.
Because Windows is spyware.
Why would they want people to have more privacy?
Linux doesn’t have to be private or secure. Just look at Ubuntu.
Putin’s a stupid old boomer who can send people to the gulag.
Do you want to teach him a new OS?
p.s. they have multiple nationalised Russian Linuxes i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux
hes too paranoid to use his own.
They’re inept
Russia is so brain drained that they couldn’t even roll their own distro if they wanted to let alone figure out how to at least obfuscate the government malware.
Fact check: Russia has at least four domestic Linux distributions (Astra, ALT, ROSA, RED), all of them perfectly functional. They feature editions complying with Russian regulations for enterprise use, and offer simpler options for personal/educational use.
This can’t be the reason since they still have people like fancy bear and a lot of tools in the hardware hacking scene / piracy are russian, for example makemkv. You also don’t need no scientists to roll out linux. But I would also like to know the real reason since a lot of russian tools are also windows based which is kinda paradoxical.
a lot of russian tools are also windows based which is kinda paradoxical.
If your main target is windows it makes sense.
Working on the system your targeting gives you additional experience but I wouldn’t develop my own tools for the os I am targeting.
And why would these people want to work with the ruzi government? The pay is terrible, the risk is high and limit your future career opportunities?
Russia simply doesn’t make anything consumer facing except weapons and rockets.
I mean like in the case of fancy bear they do work for the government. It gives you immunity to target everyone outside of russia. Look at the amount of ransomware that is operated from within russia.
Immunity for one.
How do you know the pay is terrible?
Qualified people seem to work for drug cartels and slavers. I’m certain a nation-state can provide both pay and conscience better than that.
Maybe it could be great but good devs have the privilege to avoid this risk and go work abroad. I live in thailand and I speak russian so I’m familiar with russian devs escaping russia and tbh it’s very easy these days with how easy it is to open a company in Singapore or Delaware.
Worth noting that rolling your own country wide spying distro wouldn’t be as easy as one might think given that Linux kernel dev must follow US sanctions and there is some serious work there when it comes to hiding spyware effectively for at least plausible deniability, russia is not quite North Korea just yet.
Kaspersky had, of what I’ve head, their hardened OS implementing Linux ABI (of 2.6 times). Was apparently even floating somewhere around the interwebs. Don’t know of commercial uses, but honestly there could be such amounts of money directed at solving that goal that all the Russians in Thailand combined won’t be very significant in comparison, even evaluated themselves as potential organs.
Ok interesting input. To me it seemed like working for the government in russia gives you exceptional privileges above the rest of the society and the opportunity to stay with your relatives. For the spying distro part. It doesn’t necessarily need to be linux based or based on a western distro since harmony os is also linux based and other kernels exist as well. I also thought more about the government itself and not the broad public. For the public they are already establishing their super app Max with such features.
Keep your enemies closer.
You don’t need to be able to build stable functional software to be a hacker. They’re kinda polar opposites
To create a linux distribution under your own control you don’t even need to engineer anything new. You need to create deployment structures but the tools for repository hosting, package managers, build services, automation and pki are already there. It’s more about curating software and sometimes auditing or changing code. Someone who’s capable of reverse engineering Blu-ray player firmware should be able to learn this as well.
Edit: ‘A new distro’ is also a spectrum. It’s a big reach from creating a debian distro with some version differences to something like openwrt or asahi linux
Yeah I mean you can just reskin Debian. Depends what you’re trying to do tho’.
Like saying you don’t need to be a structural engineer to demolish a skyscraper. You need to be pretty well versed in computer science to be able to hack a system to any reasonable extent. If you just go ham at it and just press random buttons nothing is going to happen / you’re going to be detected.
Hackers write programmes all of the time.
Not really. Big different between programs and systems. Saying ‘good at doing teh codez’ is just one set of skills is nonsense. And being a structural engineer is not sufficient to build a skyscraper anyway. In the immortal words of Le Corbusier, they’re machines for living in. Which is why architect is a different career from structural engineer and both get involved. Your exanple undermines your own point.
How do you know?
Jeeves: “Will it be 87% again this year, sir?”
Putin: “Maybe 93%. Maybe.”
93%? Why not 108%?
Nah it will be divisible by 5. They don’t try very hard to hide the irregularities. There is a long history of oddly round results:
Pulled from here: https://github.com/dkobak/elections/tree/master
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense. Why would he give money to Microsoft? In fact, why would you?
As for the PC - there are no Russian PCs, so he has to use something foreign. DELLs are very solid, and great for the price if you get them refurbished.
Not as solid as Lenovo, which also has considerably fewer American companies in its supply chain. But maybe they just got a good deal on a bunch of DELLs.
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense.
No, it just shows incompetence.
pykms isn’t hard…
Or maybe they don’t care if it’s known?
Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.
And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.
And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.
And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.
Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.
it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows
Instead of using Wine it uses Vodka
Or, It’s just a newly set up computer used for a quick photo op and will either go back to whoever’s desk it was taken from or put in a cupboard somewhere. That is not a desktop set up for daily use.
With all the Russian piracy sites, I assume nobody in Russia actually pays for software. I figure they just haven’t gotten around to cracking that machine yet.
I was in Turkey 25 years ago. Their tram system used the Windows warning “BLING” before calling out the station.
I was there last year, and when you go to charge your tram card in the machine, everyone of them has a “This version of Windows is unathorized. Click here to buy a license” message in the bottom left of the screen.
Gotta love the Turks.
This wasn’t the case before 2022, but after MS no longer officially selling licenses in Russia, it’s everyone again.
But it’s different, for things you can’t license because of sanctions piracy is seen as normal, for other things nobody cares, but people stopped pirating.
In general, the ex-Soviet culture of not understanding copyright violations as real crime at all, period, is gone. It’s a few tech-savvy people, sometimes older, and “pirate party” idealists, and communists (not all of them by far).
Those Russian piracy sites are, as a rule, banned in Russia. They mostly started 20+ years ago.
However, those doing copyright protection in Russia are mostly former pirates who legalized their business via some acquaintances. Oops. I also doubt that Aldebaran (the e-book library), for example, licensed all of the books they give for a buck from authors, and with LitRes it’s also highly unlikely. There are plenty of other such Russian paid e-book libraries, movie sites and so on.
It’s a common opinion in Russia that there’s some western “rule of law” which, if applied to Russia, could fix it, I think it’s the other way around, the main problem with Russia’s society is the inferiority complexes, the “rule of law” one among them, leading people to overlook brakes and feedbacks existing in the wild to good effect, when deciding what they want “fixed” and “civilized” to be good.
That “rule of law” idea sometimes leads to following laws set by people who just don’t understand what “acting in good faith” means.
EDIT: What I meant is that piracy situation in Russia is close to what’s it’s in the western countries now, except for sanctions. Younger people pirate, but not all of them. Older and middle age people often see piracy as something bad and shameful. In the “nobody in Russia pays for software” times it was the other way around, most people didn’t understand the concept, and younger and more fashionable people had some licensed copies to boast and would tell their acquaintances that actually it’s very cool to buy official copies, pay for software, give it back to authors, and that otherwise it’d be theft and those people whose names are printed here and here wouldn’t really approve, to say the least.
as it should be
Plot twist: it’s not connected to the Internet. He has a button labeled “PRESS TO WIN ELECTION” installed in his dacha.
