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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why dont they use Linux so weird.
How do you know?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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