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.
I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…
Does Russia have online voting? Oof
A nation where Putin has no term limit and claims to have won by more than 87% is one without real voting in general, IMO.
Just like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un being unanimously elected
It’s easy when you can just make up the results
Yeah, I know their voting is corrupt as hell. This kinda explains it.
Red star os is a much better and safer choice for him.
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.
there are no Russian PCs
There do exist domestic-built elbrus(custom soviet arch) and baikal(ARM-derived) -based PCs. Technically, all govt employees are required to use them as there is like a 30% limit on foreign parts, but in practice it is circumvented by padding circuits with junk thats never used. And yes, they’re lagging behind cutting edge chips by a decade and a half at this point, but its still more than enough for online voting and whatever other boomer shit putin needs.
Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.
Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.
I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.
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.
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.
it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows
Instead of using Wine it uses Vodka
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense.
No, it just shows incompetence.
pykms isn’t hard…
Strangely I’m reminded of that time some of the Monkrus dudes who made Adobe cracked softwares turned out to be Russian intelligience officers who ransacked devices.
Plot twist: it’s not connected to the Internet. He has a button labeled “PRESS TO WIN ELECTION” installed in his dacha.
Me using unlicensed windows to jerk off for the 4th time at 3am.
We didn’t need to know that but okay!
And yet you do.
Just know that someone at one point in time jerked off to you or will jerk off to you. This is called the circle of life. For every creature there’s a creature that jerks off to it. But at the very top of the circle there’s a creature that no one jerks off to, that’s the apex masturbator.
😂
Unzips
I switched to Linux after a Windows 10 LTSC security update failed to install. It’s been great, highly reccomend. You should keep a hard drive backup, though.
If you’re on Windows 11 then your machine has a unique global identifier being sent to the sites you visit.
Yes. Thank you for interest in my privacy. I definitely don’t need Windows knowing how much prolapse prolapse I like to watch.
Or even worse, to tell Prolapse sites what version of Windows you use.
Jeeves: “Will it be 87% again this year, sir?”
Putin: “Maybe 93%. Maybe.”
It will be 79%
93%? Why not 108%?
Y’know I’ve often wondered that, but authoritarian propaganda seems to have a penchant for keeping its statements plausible. I mean they could take the piss and say it was 500% and it would be just as well. I’m guessing there’s some psychological benefit to be had from keeping it “real”, gives the rubble some kind of logic to cling to?
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
What are the odds this is just a JavaScript button that goes nowhere?
Why so bloated? Just write
<button>, or<input type="submit">href="javascript:void(0);"
“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.
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.
Kremlin need to step up their game and use linux.
right? . Like wtf don’t they?
Why dont they use Linux so weird.
They’re inept
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Immunity for one.
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
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.
Keep your enemies closer.
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.
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.
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?
Note Putin’s monitor isn’t even plugged in. Just, A+.
He also is not touching anything so maybe he’s using telepathy.
