The fact that it’s quite easy to activate Windows without money or a valid key makes this even funnier. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and neither do the people around him
Or it’s supposed to be an insult? If it was licensed (even thru pirate means) it would look like they paid money to Microsoft.
This way, they have it and are using it without funding an American company.
The part were he is using Windows at all is crazy. Imagine the Pentagon running Russian os
It’s a throw away computer. They went out and got a random shitbox from Andrei Blahblahnov at his corner computer repair shop that no one from any intelligence service would ever think to go to ahead of time.
Use the shit once, literally set it on fire in a field 30 minutes later.
Doesn’t beat this show on a small local radio station in my town, that had a theme music with someone saying “audio jungle” every 20 seconds because they downloaded the demo from that site and never bothered to pay 5$ for the full version. I was selling stuff on audio jungle at that time, and ad to stop on the side of the road cause I couldn’t stop laughing.
Just saying… you don’t need to activate windows. Been using an unactivated copy for years. You lose virtually nothing.
You mean like WinRAR?
I thought Putin had put a lot of people through windows; why the surprise?
Note Putin’s monitor isn’t even plugged in. Just, A+.
He also is not touching anything so maybe he’s using telepathy.
Voting doesn’t need to be secure in Russia because voting doesn’t actually matter in Russia.
It does matter, just not the way you might think. Voting in dictatorships is basically a submission ritual.
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Russia has some Elbrus CPUs locally produced, but they are very outdated and very expensive, and also have a different processor architecture, so they find limited use.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.
Kinda reminds me of how Russia has a whole gun industry but even then they still import AR-15s, though credit where credits due the ARDA 15-2 has one of the sexiest furniture I’ve seen on an Ar-15. I want one so fucken bad.
But I was informed that Elbrus would be killing AMD and Intel any day now…
I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…
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.
There are many fine soviet computers to use for pressing a button that does nothing.
They don’t bother activating his PCs anymore. He always gets frustrated and throws out the Windows.
I don’t think they even bothered plugging it into a power source or a computer either.
The umbrellas slow the descent for a soft landing.
Then he has a nice, relaxing cup of tea.
Why dont they use Linux so weird.
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
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.
How do you know?
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.
Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.
While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.
You’re conflating ability to engineer and ability to launch a 140m user product.
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.
Yes but that’s not what you want as a dictator.
If you’re a dictator of a heavily sanctioned country, you may consider autonomy as one of the priorities. Also, given the current relations, you can make GPL unenforceable and turn Linux into a dictator’s paradise. Take Red Star OS as an example. This is Linux, too!
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.
It really doesn’t unless you’re dumb enough to buy in and play the game but Russia is basically a big mafia and you’re one bad dinner away from offering some brain dead asshole that will end you. While you can just go live on the beach in Thailand and no ine will ever bother you. People underestimate the actual brain drain that is happening. Life is just too good for skilled Russians elsewhere to even bother. This is what societal collapse looks like.
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
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.
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’.
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
“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.
