especially considering eugene has no love for the kgb.

That may be a weird way to say he has lots of love for SVR (external intelligence service) or police K department, but not FSB.

Like that conversation in the “Sneakers” movie about FBI, CIA and NSA.

SG-1 vibes really.

Well, maybe it’s good they’ll die finally.

Not sure if that’s very correct. I’d say it’s not about skills, but about such actions still generally not being prosecuted in Russia.

Of course there’s also the issue of low-level reverse engineering skills, which may have been prestigious for longer in Russia due to level of life (old hardware being used longer, at some point with DOS), hacker movies cargo cult combined with Russians feeling the social need to present themselves smarter than they are (for example, all those award papers for stupid competitions in school where children who’ve had in their life an hour-long explanation of, for example, combinatorics or basic discrete math win, and those who haven’t lose or don’t get there).

Well, in those memories you wouldn’t have to go to any market, you’d just see a few tables along the way in busy places on your way anywhere. Maybe even smaller shops (usually illegal construction alongside bigger buildings or even just in the middle of something supposed to be a square).

BTW, about illegal construction - frankly I’m nostalgic of all that. Because yeah, those cheap plastic things were illegal and were all demolished. Instead we now have supposedly legal heavy, tasteless, threatening “shopping centers” here and there, miraculously making the space feel more constrained than those old things would, all belonging to the right people, with nice shiny perfectly legal businesses inside.

It’s somehow relaxing to get someplace backwater sometimes and see towns looking that old way. Though the town I’m thinking about looked differently back then, and I liked it more, but what will you do.

A-and frankly there were plenty of situations where it was perfectly legal (as possible in the Russian 90s), but “the permit was issued by mistake, no compensation is in order, free the building for demolition by tomorrow” for a 20 years old building solves any problem.

By the way, how is apple intelligence different from potato intelligence?

I said you’re a fucking idiot.

And I didn’t say you are a fucking idiot, but this is a clear case of projection.

I remember you coming at me with similarly buttfuck dumb opinions on Unix.

So now I’m saying that you are a fucking idiot, ignorant and arrogant at that.

Now stop talking, please.

That won’t go unnoticed forever, I think.

russia has been the #1 source of firmware jailbreaks and torrents for industrial software for 20+ years. Their government is so awful that their people had to figure out how to work around the world hating them.

These two sentences are unconnected. It’s just that in the 90s and early 00s in Russia incomes were still not very high to buy software, copyright protection wasn’t really enforced, copyright violation being a thing was hard to explain to many people, and lots of things wouldn’t be officially sold. Say, localized versions of video games often wouldn’t exist.

In my childhood I remember that pirate disks were norm and official ones a curiosity, something very cool and unusual. Then official versions (including localized ones from 1C) started becoming more common, as would buying disks in book stores etc, and not in underground crossings or near subway entrances.

There were even companies which technically sold pirate disks, but they could have become official localizers or vendors or whatever. It probably didn’t even occur to them to try and become such.

Those who would do the sending are conscious of this and have a share in profits, I’m sure.

That’s just not true. WWI had a definitive winner in Europe, but not in the Middle-East. And Turks are still killing people unpunished. And Germany wasn’t a definitive loser, despite Entente countries making it really feel that role.

While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate “<T> revolution” from “<T> normal development” for a reason.

I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It’s not all cultures.

That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.

It’s quite possible that they are simply doing all their stuff the old-fashioned way - talking in person with electronics off, exchanging paper notes and burning them, something like that.

It’s not even worth explaining because it’s so obvious that they do.

Do you think tone makes for an argument?

You’re honestly arguing that companies aren’t incentivised to do things like make profit? Or retain employees?

Companies don’t think and thus don’t have incentives.

You are brain-dead lmao

Just go away. Another confirmation that identifying with something Star Trek connected usually marks an idiot.

I had a laptop with it preinstalled, when I wasn’t a Linux user yet.

That video by late John McAffee was good. Even though he was a conspiracy theorist from the most clueless kind of libertarians - that kind who think they can go to a Latin American country with corrupt law enforcement and feel like alpha there. I mean, even if they can, one shouldn’t mix up tourism and immigration, as they say in Russian.

Yes, but then eventually you’ll have to ban half the usual ads if applying the principle consistently, or it’ll be no good otherwise, cause they’ll manage to weasel out.

Social media are just what happens when a few gigantic non-transparent organizations get the usual Goebbels powers plus the ability to match people with content, people with people, people with groups as they see fit.

It’s both a legal and a technical problem. The legal part is about making this no-no. The technical part is by having truly decentralized asynchronous social media. Federation, like with ActivityPub, is insufficient, it has to be homogenous. I mean, I’d like it to use ActivityPub-connected servers as authentication providers and for contact directory, but not the rest.

EDIT: I think freenet.org , as in Locutus and not old Freenet we all love, is aimed at this exactly.

Even less so now, after they insisted on showing the world just how incompetent their military is.

Which, for example, the Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish militaries still haven’t.

Do you realize that a military that doesn’t do a certain kind of activity (like mass warfare) loses capability for it over time? That’s truer for the Russian military with all the corruption, but there’s a little problem, - it has had 2 years with lots of learning.

There were widespread myths about Israeli military professionalism, but in the last few months they’ve shown the reality to be worse than expected too.

and the response from the west would be swift. At least I hope and assume so.

Yeah, see, there’s an element of “what if we feed him <country name> and expect him to eventually choke on it”. International law and allied obligations seem to have become fuzzier concepts in the last decade or so.

Seems a really weird action to invade a Nordic country still. Their policy seems to be about bullying ex-Soviet states to remain authoritarian shitholes.

Everything can be fun.

Yes, the purpose of some of them is not as clear (obviously not for everyone) and their signals reach far, which is why radio enthusiast tell stories about them.

And maybe some of them really do transmit gibberish and not encrypted text.

The world is stupid, so this can be true. But it can also be a troll account. Just a more elegant and intelligent kind of fun, that everyone seems to have forgotten.

Like those ghost radio stations, transferring codes by groups of five.