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

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.

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.

Working on the system your targeting gives you additional experience but I wouldn’t develop my own tools for the os I am targeting.

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.

That’s a reaction to

enjoy being left behind I guess

Never said I agree with the rest of the thread. They pollute our waters and waste our energy. They should be worried about their data centers if they wanna keep doing that. Their potential threat prediction abilities are just another reason to target their data centers. If they want peace they should cooperate with the people and not surveil them. Maybe anthropics threat analyst also writes that into his slide-deck.

O let the rest of the world use it until skill vanishes and target their data centers