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Russians Claim Their Hackers the Best In the World
Ant writes "ZDNet UK reports that Russians who once hacked for fun are now teaming up to get rich through cybercrime, according to police. The Russian cybercrime division, known as Department K, has warned that Russian hackers are the best in the world. From the article: 'Everyone knows that Russians are good at math...Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world.'"
...they lost the ACM contest to the Chinese.
I guess by "best" they mean "second best."
In the post-9/11 world, Soviet Russians hack you! Sorry.
This story should be flagged -1 flamebait.
I mean, seriously... back in the days of Soviet Russia (must resist), there used to be propaganda that claimed that a Russian invented the lightbulb, and other stuff like that.
This is no better than American Patroitism. As an American, let me say that we are NOT the best country in the world, and that any time we say that we are, we sound as silly as the russians here.
Anyway, I'd loooove to hear what the Chinese hackers have to say about this.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
...why does their economy suck so much ass?
I belong to the ______ generation.
crackers?
Why do Indians get all the outsourced work?
Nothing to see here
"They realise if you are clever at something then you should use it to earn a living. They are hacking to get rich and uniting over networks."
The article doesn't seem to say what exactly they are doing to get rich, it mentions DDOSing gambling sites, but no money making schemes used by them.
It would be doubtful for companies to hire russians who hacked their systems to fix them (kimbel, anyone?) when there already are so many companies in the computer security business
Business Voyeur
'our hackers are the best in the world.'
A lot of script kiddies claim that..
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
If they were that good at math maybe they should have done the calculations before buying into an inherintley flawed planned economy for 75 years :)
...because they're cheaper.
"From the article: 'Everyone knows that Russians are good at math...Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world.'"
That's great. Maybe you can use them to rebuild your shattered economy, and give India some competition?
That's it, I've had enough of Slashdot for a few months.
In other news, BMW say it's cars are the best in the world, Roces claim they make the best skates, Calvin Klein claimed he made the best clothes, and the French Army said they were the best.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
And the Russian police is the best in the world, in corrupcy !
Oh, sure, their economy's in the crapper, crime is out of control, Chechen terrorists attack Moscow every now and again, the political scene is split between nationalist authoritarians and communist authoritarians, poverty's no better than under Soviet conditions, and AIDS is ballooning in the nation, but damn it, their hackers are top notch!
HKDD (hong kong dangerous duo) gH (global hell) hmm dont see any russ's on their when the whitehouse was done
http://www.thegreynomads.com
Yeah ok, I think not enough of your have witnessed the glory of Goldeneye. As Borris clearly demonstrated, "I am inveincible!" And so it is.
All they need is an IBM computer with 14.400 bps modem 2x cd-rom and and a lot of cigarettes. That's it!
No no.. I know. You say, what about babe.. but no. The 2x cd-rom is what made it magic.
Thats bullshit. That is not a troll. It isn't funny, that is for sure, but it isn't a troll. Overrated maybe, but not a troll.
In school you couldn't hack mathematics.
In Soviet Russia, mathematicians hack YOU!
(apologies, but it's been a while since anyone observed proper form for Soviet Russia-jokes :-)
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
... Russian Mafia-driven identity/credit card fraud against Americans and citizens of other perceived (note I said "perceived") well to do nations.
:(
These Russian hackers will get the top dollar from the Russian mob, and second to them will be the foreign call/data center workers who have access to foreign outsourced financial/medical data. The hackers will be much more reliable foot soldiers than call/data center workers.
Look to the Russian mafia and their hacker flunkies to be in competition with US criminals and Al Qaeda archetypes as the primary causes of global cybercrime.
BTW this isn't meant to be a troll against Russians, Russians as a whole are no more or less cool than the rest of the world... but the Soviet Union did fall apart and their ultra high tech stuff did scatter to the 4 winds, at least 2 of those winds being the Russian Mob...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
-1 meme-bait.
I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbert!
Could you paint a bigger bullseye on your country that to say something like that? Now all the kids are gonna be gunning to shut down vital piece of hardware just to show them up. Unless of course the hardware fails first because of shotty upkeep...
I bet that article will read "CHINESE hackers best in the world" in a coupla hours :)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_mat_lit
1. Japan 557
2. Korea, South 547
3. New Zealand 537
4. Finland 536
5. Australia 533
6. Canada 533
7. Switzerland 529
8. United Kingdom 529
9. Belgium 520
10. France 517
11. Austria 515
12. Iceland 514
13. Denmark 514
14. Sweden 510
15. Ireland 503
16. Norway 499
17. Czech Republic 498
18. United States 493
19. Germany 490
20. Hungary 488
They might be the best hackers in the world, but theyre pretty harmless when they can't afford to get a computer to hack themselves to fame and fortune in the first place.
Unless they got some cybercrime loan or something I guess
I.O.U One Sig.
Bill Gates says you have a stupid .sig
"...Calvin Klein claimed he made the best clothes..."
Actually, according to a question I got in a Trivial Pursuit game a couple hours ago, Calvin Klein admitted that he was "more comfortable" wearing Levi's jeans. FYI
The geek version of penis envy.
...what with all their talk about being phishers of men.
Having worked with three Russians, let me assure you that whatever else they are, they're not way-above-average programmers.
Now, I'm not going to claim they suck. Three isn't a big sample size. But two of the three hard coded their solutions to produce the sample output from the sample test data. They didn't work with any other sample test data... the whole code was a series of ifs and assignments. The third was just a little below average. Mind you, I've been disappointed in nearly every hire in the last decade.
...then how do you explain this game?
t of2004/day3w_12.html
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/bes
"Concocted by a mysterious developer called Stellar Stone--which, on its perhaps purposely vague Web site, explains that it is actually a conglomerate that farms out game-development projects to Russian programmers who will work on the cheap--Big Rigs is the most broken racing game ever put on store shelves."
swing at BMW? I should hope not.
This is Russian law enforcement, that marvel of the 21st century, speaking.
Their logic is probably that because the Russian Police are so good, the fact that there are so many uncaught Russian hackers must mean that the Russian hackers are the best!
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
An Internet troll is either a person who sends messages on the Internet hoping to entice other users into angry or fruitless responses, or a message sent with such content.
This is a result of "former-superforce" sympthom. We were strong (and ugly) and everyone was scared of us. And now nobody gives a damn. It is sometimes scary to see, how many people in Russia think that the main thing for us is too kick the world's ass again (and totally forget about such "small" things as broken economy, personal wealth and Putin's regime). I'm Russian myself, but sometimes I'm so ashamed of beeing one :-(
And some facts
1. Majority of best russian programmers / hackers now work abroad (mostly in US and Europe).
2. Quality of Russian education degraded terribly in the past 5-8 years, so there will be no NEW good programmers.
Go figure...
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
Wow New Zealand is quite high up, I'm suprised. I think it's because of all the Japanese/Korean students that come here though.
However we were force fed Algebra at the age of 10.
From what I've seen, most self-proclaimed Russian "hackers" are little more than script kiddies with large botnets they use to DDoS people. There are types like this in every country, but I bet the reason these particular 'hax0rs' think they're the 'best' is because they haven't been caught, largely due to the fact that Russia isn't exactly the most lawful country on this fair planet.
I'm wondering if Al Gore is a secret Russian spy right about now...
Sorry, formatting got lost in previous message...
:-(
This is a result of "former-superforce" sympthom. We were strong (and ugly) and everyone was scared of us. And now nobody gives a damn about us. It is sometimes scary to see, how many people in Russia think that the main thing for us is too kick the world's ass again (and totally forget about such "small" things as broken economy, personal wealth and Putin's regime).
I'm Russian myself, but sometimes I'm so ashamed of beeing one
And some facts...
1. Majority of best russian programmers / hackers now work abroad (mostly in US and Europe).
2. Quality of Russian education degraded terribly in the past 5-8 years, so there will be no NEW good programmers.
Go figure...
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
You know, like numchuck skills...
Bowhunting skills...
Computer hacking skills...
Opposition in Russia don't have any chance to get into TV, and Internet is the only media space they have. So Russian authorities say, "Look, these hackers are going to steal your money !!! We have to conrol as much as we can to stop this !!!". Nothing new, as for me.
PS. AFAIK (and I am Ukrainian), professional level of Russian ( and Ukrainian) programmers/hackers/crackers isn't differ too much from world's average. Claiming than "We are the best" is so silly ...
its about as stupid as this:1 16tas2. html
http://tanetane92.web.infoseek.co.jp/20050
In your face Germany and Hungary! USA! USA!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
.. that said that 90% of programmers think that their programming skills are in the 1% top percent compared to others.
;)
Cleary the russian don't lack such a hybris
"...at least, they're the best until they get their fingers chopped off with cigar cutters for fucking up..."
americans can suck my big fat cock and allow me to cum over GWB
If you like, though personaly my wet dream is to cum over Natalie Portman, but if you want to do the humpty hump with someone who can't say nuclear feel free!
The Russian police is completely useless, corrupt and inefficient. Criminals do not need to cover their tracks with lawmen like that. Bootleg software is sold openly in Russia, and obvious copyright pirates like allofmp3.com have nothing to fear. The Russians should keep their mouth shut and work to improve law inforcement instead of reminding everybody what a crime-ridden backwater Russia is.
...In Soviet Russia computer hacks you!!
So no need for criminal to be good at it comrade.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
All those numbers tell us is that the average Japanese student is more mathematically literate than the average student from the U.S., France, Denmark, etc. (Russia's not even mentioned). However, the hacking in question would be done instead by the few most proficient hackers (who might or might not be the most proficient mathematically), and certainly not by the hypothetical "average".
you did notice that russia wasn't on even the list?
not that it fairing poorly on such a test would be a surprise, this study studies averages through the whole population (of 15 year olds), even traditionally that hasn't been the best in russia(rather there's been the 'elite' if you will that has been good at science - russia being a big country that elite is fairly big in numbers).
nice stats site anyhow.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Your scores are old. Here are the newest:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/47/34011082.xls
Hong Kong-China 550
Finland 544
Korea 542
Netherlands 538
Liechtenstein 536
Japan 534
Canada 532
Belgium 529
Macao-China 527
Switzerland 527
Australia 524
New Zealand 523
Czech Republic 516
Iceland 515
Denmark 514
France 511
Sweden 509
Austria 506
Germany 503
Ireland 503
Slovak Republic 498
Norway 495
Luxembourg 493
Poland 490
Hungary 490
Spain 485
Latvia 483
United States 483
Russian Federation 468
Portugal 466
Italy 466
Greece 445
Serbia 437
Turkey 423
Uruguay 422
Thailand 417
Mexico 385
Indonesia 360
Tunisia 359
Brazil 356
We should remember that that the recently convicted DrinkorDie group originated in Russia originally, prior to those arrests they were the most prolific warez cracking group since the internet became popular.
:P
So perhaps "greatest hackers 1995 - 2004" would be more suitable.
That line of reasoning lends to some interesting speculation.
U nless you're al gore or a russian mediawhore...
Like this for instance: Everyone knows the best borax is mined in brazil, and it's made into good detergent, therefore Brazil has the cleanest best smelling populace in the world...
Although it may be true that A+B=C, it isn't true that FruitA(apple)+FruitB(cherry)=FruitC(potato)....
But where is the US?
how having the best script kiddies in the world is a good thing
It is averaged across a large population of students. It is not being pushed up by visiting students :)
As a fellow NZer, I say just take it in stride. We're also near the top (if not the top) for average literacy rates.
It appears our education is actually quite good on the whole - it just sucks when it comes to providing advanced material for the brighter students. Oh, and the new NCEA system should destroy our international rankings in the next few years.
Is it just me or does 'Lieutenant General Boris Miroshnikov' lose some credibility by using the term 'naughty boys' in reference to young hackers?
I have no idea what this study measured, but it sure as hell ain't mathematical literacy. If it says Americans are more literate in mathematics than students from Germany, Poland or Hungary.
which I am...
::goes installs mandrake linux and runs sub7 to open his friends disc-drive and hops into his Russian automible which proceeds to drive him and his massive organ around in front of all the ladies::
omg. I'm 1337 and I didn't know it all these years!!!!!
ahem. carry on.
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
In this post-9/11 world, hackers have to move to Russia to work.
By Taiwan companies that have factories in China... they can do whatever the heck they want. If we want to go even lower, since the chip level designs are hacked by EE engineers everywhere, whoever get their product on the market can hack it!
I KEED I KEED... I JOKE VIF J00
"3. New Zealand 537"
;)
That would have to be because the top two have so many students here.
Most NZ-ers can't spell or do math for shit.
Yeah yeah flamebait, troll, whatever, I live here, I have to work with these people
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
That's, no offense, bullshit. I can tell you first hand that the whole soviet block had a school system which is, sad to say, head and shoulder above anything the western world has to offer.
Their society had many faults, and their model didn't work in the long run. But it did stuff people with knowledge, and most importantly it motivated them to learn instead of just being the cool dumb jock or the skinny airhead.
1. Their whole school system was not an exercise in "let's have it at a level where everyone can understand it without effort." The whole school system was a merciless exercise in stuffing people with knowledge that maybe 10% fully understood in any particular subject, and noone could be good in all.
The eastern block school system had in effect, the same function as speed-binning CPUs in a factory has. They kept cranking up the level to see at which point you break. It was a filter to determine how much each can learn.
E.g., they never had a watered-down "science class" at any level. They started in elementary school with real physics and chemistry. By the last year of high school, they'd do quantum physics and advanced organic chemistry. And in maths you'd be surprised how early they got dragged into differentials, integrals and matrices.
Their inter-school contests, called "olympics" for some reason, were supposed to further filter the best of the best. Preparing for a physics "olympics" in high school involved physics manuals from Berkeley and other western universities. Again, they learned that in _high_ _school_.
2. More importantly, they had a helluva lot of incentive to actually learn.
See, your place in society was determined by your grades. E.g., at the end of university they'd be sorted by grades and have a go at selecting where they want to work, from a big list of available jobs nation-wide. I.e., if you did well, you could pick a job anywhere you wanted, while if you barely had passed, you'd pretty much be guaranteed to get a job in some forgotten village at the far end of the map.
Finding a job by personal networking and family friends was a lot harder than in the west. And it was regarded as the blatant corruption and nepotism that it really is. You needed really important friends to pull that kinda thing. (Being drinking pals with a low level team leader didn't even start to count as as a chance. Being a relative of a director or party official, maybe.)
Also wages were planned by the state, and pretty much determined by how much learning was involved in getting that job. E.g., an electronics engineer or doctor would get a lot better paid than a plumber.
3. The whole message society gave their students is "being smart is _good_". Being able to do well in that school system was a thing of pride, not a reason to be ridiculed as a nerd.
And you know why? Precisely because of the above. _Everyone_, including your cool classmates or your girlfriend _knew_ that grades translate directly into salary. The cool jock or the cool prom-queen airhead were cool and all, but everyone knew that they're gonna be the ones who barely scrape a living. (Unless, see above, they happened to be relatives of someone _really_ important. Not many had their luck.) So they had a helluva lot fewer admirers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
American Hacker's claim Russian Hackers smell funny.
Okay, fine, you say that, I'll keep living in a *REAL* first world country making a shit load of money doing what I do.
I know plenty of russians that are horrible at math, in fact I know some russians that are horrible at everything other than doing drugs and collecting welfare. Certainly not all of the russians that I know are degenerates, but who would make a statement as stupid as russians are good at math?
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Isn't most hacking more to do with 'social engineering' and thinking your way around obsticles than actual hardcore programming or math?
Programmers are common, im sure given enough info any well matured programmer could write an exploitative piece of code...it's finding the holes that's the real skill...no?
Don't worry, I'm sure GP meant "corrupcy" as a corruption of the word corruption. Or something ...
Anyways, reminds me of a joke that was doing the rounds during the Cold War in India. An American, Russian and Indian cop meet up at an international police conference. They get to bragging about their respective police forces.
"Y'know, back home in Texas, if a man commits a crime, he'll be safely in custody by the next day. We're that good."
The Russian laughs, and says, "Next day?? Comrade, in Soviet Russia, the KGB track everybody so well, that if somebody commits a crime we know who, what and why, and have arrested the criminal that very day itself!"
Not to be outdone, the Indian cop laughs in turn. "I can't believe how lazy you are in the First World", he says, "In India, the police are paid to hush up a crime WEEKS in advance!"
you forgot Poland.
The best band since the beatles. Yeah, rrright.
On CmdrTaco's Slashdot, I honour YOU! Good one!
* honours Zwets.
Ofcourse they will , however they will never be able to compete with the wests social engineering hackers. To prove this point all I need you to do is send me your credit card details and password for your PC and i can check the list of hacked PCs and stolen credit card numbers to see if your on it and cross reference it with the method that was used to hack it
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Speaking of literacy, the term you're searching for is numerate .
My experience, limited as it may be, is that former Soviet-block programmers come from an environement where a 33Mhz 486 machine with 8MB of RAM costs the effective equivalent of $20K. So they ignore Windoze and write their own drivers in assembler, and use the box as a mainframe to support 12 green-screen terminals in old-fashoned text mode. Yeah they can tweak the max out of each CPU cycle. But they are experts out of necessity. Kind of like the Guatemalans who weld an extended bed and bolt 20 seats to a 10-year old chevy pickup and use it as a public bus.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
"Japan is the most mathematically literate."
...by the Artful Dodger, singing:
We Are the Best Hackers in the World
Note that this survey only includes OECD member countries, of which there are 31. Notice the suspicious absense of China, India, Russia, none of which are OECD members. There are 271 recognised administrative divisions in the world, not 31. Think about this intuitively.
As soon as I saw the word Russia in the title, I knew it was an inevitability. If you didn't do it, someone else would have.
Therefore, in Soviet Russia, forgiveness for the corny post finds you (!)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
At least they have the best online music store in the world. That's got to count for something.
I'm wondering where most of you people come. I would guess America.
It's funny, that the most comments are "Haha, Russia, they are stupid/bad".
Are there some old feeling coming out?
I bet most of you don't know a fucking thing about Russia, not even the capital city, but you flame on them.
And to the topic:
I wouldn't say they are the best hackers in the world.
But Russia definitly has _very_ skilled coders and hackers.
I live in Germany, and from time to time, i see some software from russian Companies.
And all they have in common is, that the software is very good in a technical way.
Most of the time it lacks documentation and such stuff, but the Software is good.
Examples: There is a NTFS-driver for Linux which is very fast and supports writing and enryption, and so on.
I have a DOS-Clone written bei a russian firm in assembler with source code (interesting to learn).
Then: There was a game called Republic made by a young russian, which is also known as a very good mathematic.
And there will be (already is?) a game called Stalker which had tons of Previews/articles in every gamer-magazine, here, because of the nice graphic and some new ideas.
And besides, russia has atlest one offical hacker-school. I think it's in St. Petersburg and made by some well-known hacker.
Thats just what came to my mind..
Stalin was definately the best Social Hacker to date.
*Disclaimer: I'm not endorsing Stalin here, just saying that he was good at what he did.
Don't you mean.. BIZZARO!
Their logic is probably that because the Russian Police are so good, the fact that there are so many uncaught Russian hackers must mean that the Russian hackers are the best!
At first I thought that was the most blatant strawman argument I'd ever seen. Then, after I gave it a moment's thought a better one came to mind.
Leela: We don't need to beg, Bender.
Fry: Well what are you suggesting? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant back? That's the dumbest idea I ever heard.
You're still #2 though. These's no shame in second place.
Some of the best comp sci people Ive ever worked with came from Romania and Russia (I am Austrian btw. have been groing up in the west).
I guess one reason for that is, the prolongued, we have to code lots of stuff in assembler period, which was way over in 1990 in our countries, most of them had to wait until 1995 until the situation was at the point they could afford better stuff.
The other thing is, that unlike the west, who has been celebrating half criminal business people and even more criminal laywers as heroes and basically has been slamming technical people since the mid eighties as freaks, nerds and whatever, in the old soviet union (which was until 1990) mathematicians and technical people were very highly regarded and it was a good career path (my current girlfriend had a father who worked in nuklear research and a mother who basically was a computer technitian) for both genders.
Things have changed by now as well, but that those things are still sort of a aftermath of those years. The reason why the SU never took off technically was because of the communists who basically had the researchers but lacked the mentality and the funds to give them a breeding ground for ideas, also my personal guess is that many of them were thrown into jail as well once they started to criticize the system, which always happens with intelligent people (one of the reasons why a downgoing society starts to beat the bright ones, who usually dont have the mentality to fight back, because they scare the ones in power).
Over here we have different problems, and it sort of is a wonder that we came that far, because the treatment the techies have been given generally is not that good, we probably will see the aftermaths of the current, we dont develop anything we just buy the stuff period in a few years, when the first corporations will crumble because they have become obsolete brands which will be slowly replaced by once outsourcing companies.
I'm a Kiwi, and I might point out, that the study is valid. And it is not due to foreign students, since Kiwis also rate near the very top for literacy rates (and foreign students nearly always struggle with English when they first arrive... which is usually at age 15-16).
:)
:)
It doesn't say that the average person from those countries is a genius - it just says that the average NZer is at place 3 (of those year's results) while the average American for example, was place 18.
This means, that if you meet a lot of New Zealanders who can't spell or do maths, then in America for instance, it is MUCH, MUCH worse
(I'm guessing you're American since you wrote "math" and not "maths". It seems you are a bit lacking in mathematical acumen yourself, if you have trouble understanding what the study results show...)
While we're in the mood for statistics, here's what the web "thinks" on the subject.
You get the same result with damaged too.
In soviet Russia... We aren't allowed to make these jokes anymore because we fear the Russian script kiddies will get us. All hail our new 1337 Russian Script Kiddie masters. (Oh how long they've waited for that; huh?)
(I hear the Klingon translation is also quite good.)
This doesn't apply. It's all about individuals.
The only thing I know about the russian programmers is that most of them are the big names in STL design (Stepanov, comp.land.c++, etc). That however, in my AC opinion, sais that they are not that smart after all;)
But it basically it's about individuals and you can't talk about the IQ of populations.
And what does math have to do with hacking?
Sure, for certain application higher math is required: breaking encryption for example.
But almost NONE of that has anything to do with the hacking they are speaking of. Hacking, in the current context, is more about find holes in systems and exploiting people.
I guess that higher math is needed when you convert Dollars to Roubles.....
And besides, that is sort of like bragging "We have the most talented Arsonist in the world!!"...sounds like a desperate attempt to take pride in something sad...
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Uh huh... Well so far over the last century they lost at just about everything; and their doctors have to strip to feed themselves... so I am not TOO scared. You can't hack when you don't own a computer.
I think the police department in question lacks credibility as an authority on hacking because of mass corruption and Russias past in dealing with other unique threats.
Mass corruption within the Russian government is rife. The statement itself reeks of pride in criminal enterprise.
The Russians have been tough when it comes to warfare (and organized crime could be considered low-level warfare) however I think they lack finesse to deal with hackers as they have had problems dealing with 4th generational creative warriors before with the Chechens and Afghanis. I think that any bureaucracy on Earth can't deal with these guys unless they 'act' like the bad guys. The statement where this General compares software writers to crackers is pretty stupid and kinda shows that this guy might be a bumbling idiot. If he truly knew criminal hackers he would of set up a different set of real world parameters for a guide to who is 'the best', software writing is obviously a skill but I'm talking about economic, logistical and operational backing.
This brings me not my next point. This Dept K General states:
"When governments get [ISPs], law enforcement, public and private sector cooperating, then and only then will we be able to succeed in holding back this type of crime."
Whose government? Does he realise the Russian Mafiya operate without borders? They're the proverbial Hackers Sans Frontieres. Trying to get governments worldwide to cooperate on computer security would add another level of bureaucratic friction into the mix. It won't work unless, IMO, you 'act' like the bad guys and wage war against them covertly. Like Robert MacNamara said in the Doco 'The Fog of War' in order to good, we may have to engage in evil. I actually think this is what was lacking with the hunt for Bin Laden. Sometimes we need to fuck the rules. Anti-authoritarianism is one of the base behaviours of black hats. We should take a play from their book.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145587&cid =12192243
Hong Kong-China 550
Finland 544
Korea 542
Netherlands 538
Liechtenstein 536
Japan 534
Canada 532
Belgium 529
Macao-China 527
Switzerland 527
Australia 524
New Zealand 523
Czech Republic 516
Iceland 515
Denmark 514
France 511
Sweden 509
Austria 506
Germany 503
Ireland 503
Slovak Republic 498
Norway 495
Luxembourg 493
Poland 490
Hungary 490
Spain 485
Latvia 483
United States 483
Russian Federation 468
Portugal 466
Italy 466
Greece 445
Serbia 437
Turkey 423
Uruguay 422
Thailand 417
Mexico 385
Indonesia 360
Tunisia 359
Brazil 356
This is from PISA 2000. I pasted results from PISA 2003:d =12192243
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145587&ci
So, is that why they still use valves ?
Know what you mean - we (Brits) have had that for years... It doesn't get much better... :(
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
Everyone knows that Russians are good at math
Yup, just like when I was 12 and we had math team competitions at school...
We dreaded the team with the asian kid in, as we knew they'd get all the questions with fractions in them.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Now we can fix the hacking problem by cutting the bandwidth on the network line that connects them to us down to 56K.
While we're at it, let's do the same thing to China and get rid of the spam problem, too.
Q.E.D.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
If that isn't an open invitation for script kiddies to swarm over russian websites, I don't know what is.
But in a couple hours, another slashdot article will read "Russian hackers best in the world"
Wasn't Google produced by Russians? :-)
Just an aside, as i have no direct experience of Soviet school systems (though for the top streams i think you are pretty close) . .
:) and those who really couldn't absorb the pressure and were carried along - very effectively - by the overall educational strength of the place. You couldn't be there and not learn, I assure you.
.
:-)
:-)
I was taught at a school here in the UK which effectively speed binned students. You VERY quickly got a layer cake of aptitudes and attitudes.
Speed binning (I like that phrase you coined for education) is incredibly efficient IF all you want is to showw off with stars. It also creates some very complex characters. We also bombed through high level math very fast, e.g., had fantastic teachers who owere intense, and actually enjoyed it. But you had three distinct strata (gross simplification) - those who absorbed the strain and were pushed more and more until they lacked any social skill at all, those who cruised and tried to game the system (i was one of those, huh, so that's why i read Slashdot
But i characterise this as the difference between Intelligent, Smart and Proto-Genius. In the last caategory, when 4 "A Levels" were normal, friends of mine took on as many as twelve in the same period. And passed (pass for this place was 85% and above), and thought it quite the regular thing.
But when it boils down to whether my school prepared anyone for anything outside its walls, I am less sure. That's being diplomatic. I was intimately involved with some of the fallout from that pressure . .
Speed Binning people leads to people being in the bin.
If he wasn't snoring I'd say that to the Russian engineer asleep on my couch right now - a confused casualty i believe of the same approach when he was in school. Well, if you call ending up in advertising a punishment
To the abovev poster, NO grades do not translate directly into salary. Maybe they do if you exist within a confined and structured path from Grade School through Colledge and recruitment . . . maybe. My experience - some of the "dumbest" (N.B. quotes) guys i went to school with haul salaries that put the Proto-Genii in shame. Sorry, no direct correlation, because you assume all is C.P. Pressure changes characters. The secret to any educational system is to provide the social structure wherein the talented can work together over a long period of time. THAT is crucial to the sucess of the Soviet system - engineers who worked together, lived together, studied together. At least in my brief life i do not think there is such a structure available today. Communism removed many of the barriers to organising such intellectual labor, by removing marketplace constraints and the disruption of commerce on talented employees.
I think you lack somee understanding of the processes involved, particularly in the Soviet planning system, and maybe should look closer too at how things are where you are. I sincerely hope you can drive a truck through my quickly worded comments, but in my defense this si an area which has touched me and fascinated me, not least because i saw the casualties of speed binning young talent up close, and became fascinated not to make the same mistakes with my kids.
p.s. just a unfounded thought, but nerds are nerds the world around. i do however have a fairly decent amount of (often anecdotal) evidence that Soviet education created a lot more female (and pretty) nerds than did the UK or US systems. Education is about growing, and that's a LOT easier when you have abunch of chicks you can talk to
(sorry too lazy to fix typos)
Government official: "Russia has the ${SUPERLATIVE} ${SKILL}ers in the world! Now, please to be watchink while we're going to collectively ignore this wonderful asset, and instead of introducing initiatives to aide the growth in this area, we're going to stuff our pockets with free money while bickering with our opponents."
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I know some sucker who lies for fun and profit...is that you karmawhore?
How can you still call yourself Russian with this kind of attitude to your homeland. Pozor.
I'm Russian, and I think parent is very close. Runet WILL be regulated by 2008's elections, no doubt here, and there're regular attempts to find some justification, so this just lies well in row. However I don't think failure to find justification will stop them here, like it didn't stop them (e.g.) from jailing Khodorkovsky and stealing Yugansk.
I always thought that as a programmer, you'd know way too much that you'd be allowed to retire in some way that didn't involve piscean intimacy.
Must be some correlation between this and their tech-IQ:
http://www.fide.com/ratings/topfed.phtml/
When all the western world installed Windows 3.0 on their shiny new 386's, most soviet programmers had to stick with EC-1840, a stolen version of the 8086. :).
If you wanted your program to run at all on that 4.7Mhz machine, you had to write it in assembly.
Programmers at state-owned, bankrupt companies would organize contests among themselves: who writes the most destructive virus in 3 hours, wins a bottle of vodka.
No wonder they are good hackers...
Who would refuse a bottle of good vodka if all you have to do is code a couple hundred lines in assembly
Of course they have skills and experience, because they have all bought protection from the FSB (the old KGB). Anyone who has tried to track them down has always run into a corrupt police official who protects them.
Yeah but they forgot them
yes its tempting, but then we would just like Communist China, trying to regulate what people say.
Some of the most fun games of recent times come from old soviet countries while america got EA games.
Most spam and popups are for american products while the best serials and no-cd sites are in russia.
Saying that russia has the best hackers is pure flamebait BUT it is not entirely without reason. It reminds me a lot of the argument wich space program was/is best. The americans beat themselves on the chest with the fact they went to the moon and the space shuttle can carry a lot of people while Mir was falling apart. Any sensible person will remark that the moon missions have stopped, that the space shuttle is also the most lethal space vehicle if not the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series and that Mir for all its creakiness stayed up for years and years and never killed anyone.
A lot of cybercrime comes from countries were the law enforces got better things to worry about then some rich foreigners getting ripped off. Are russians better at it then anyone else? Maybe but that is hardly something to boast about.
On the other hand we the supposed better west are only hurting ourselves when we laugh of these russian claims. Russian space program is still beating the west even with their ruined economy (how many russians been killed in space since the collapse of the soviet union vs american casualities? Who is currently keeping the international space station up and running?). A whole country whose goverment has no motivation to stop cybercrime is a big threath to the west that want to turn the internet into a big part of their economy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
chekov's behaviour on star trek wasnt based on reality
...most mathimatically literate of the OECD countries. You neatly struck off most of Eastern Europe, Russia, all of Aisa expect for Korea & Japan, Africa and Most of South America.
-- Muppet
Do all of these countries provide a guaranteed public education to every child under the age of 18?
What are the immigration rates (illegal or legal) of all of these countries?
Which students are tested?
Answer these questions and I might draw a meaningful conclusion from these numbers.
Man it aint like it would be hard to exploit half the computers on the internet. Most of them run windows and it is dead easy to get anything you want off of them. The only thing stopping me from doing so is the law and the desire not to be some big hairy dudes bed partner for 10 years.
Got Code?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightbulb
I'll probably be modded down for this...
We are currently recruiting!
Salary very good!
Please submit your resume at www.microsoft.com
!!!
" Do all of these countries provide a guaranteed public education to every child under the age of 18?"
What soes that have to do with anything? I mean if you are educated privately or at home or ny osmosis what does it matter? If you can do maths you can do maths!
Your final point is the only valid one which is who is tested.
On a side note I must congratulate the US on being more murderous than Yemen. (24th vs 26th)
To our once advisary, the cocky arrogant bastards of soviet Russia- I say, 'welcome back'.
We missed you. Without you folks to keep the pressure on us to keep our shit together, we've been floundering.
At least the Russians were a direct an honorable advisary, unlike the freakshows like Bin Laden.
That's meaningless, since you are only talking about averages...
...the worst diplomats in the world. They just picked a fight with every hacker in the world with a chip on their shoulder, too much time on their hands or both.
Given, for the sake of argument, Russian hackers are the best. It's not going to count for much when the whole world gangs up on Russia to prove a point.
This cop is an idiot. They should reassign Lt Looselips behind a desk somewhere away from the press.
hmmmm well lets see.. I could go out and frolick in the -30 degree wether of Siberia, or I could sit inside my nicely heated home and hack alllll fucking day.. i bet anyone could be the best if thats all they did..
either that would keep me motivated, or the russian mafia will..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
Your last sentence makes you a troll. But I'll answer you anyways.
The U.S. educates every child. Now take Japan for example. If a child doesn't do well at age 9, then he or she is chosen to attend a trade school and doesn't receive a general education. So the dumber ones aren't tested skewing these silly world-wide comparisons. If this same system were applied to myself, I would not be in a PhD program at a top-ten University.
I think this article takes a quite "interesting" perspective when it comes to computer security. When most would see this as Russian inability to combat computer crime (therefore, permitted to run rampant), the Russians spin this as their having the best hackers in the world. Anyone ever wonder why Credit Card companies won't touch Eastern Europe, or why all of those illegal MP3 servers are based from Russia ? It is not that they are better than the rest, it is just that Russian law enforcement is that bad. The Western world (particularly the US) has a very well developed and advanced Cyber Crime taskforce that "Department K" could never match.
I went to the site to confirm the rating. Under Russia/Education the data is not available, it's in correcton state now.
Are you kidding? When I was working on djb's UNIX Security Holes class, "Russian Foundry" became a synonym for "Buffer Overflow."
Unless of course they are superior hackers because they have unleashed bug-ridden software to the world that (well, not only) they know how to hack.
Wait a second...
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I've been in IT for 10 years and I've worked with Russians, Koreans and Indians. The Russians were better at deep tech stuff ie. as Cisco engineers, Solaris guys and Security guys. The Koreans were better at gadget stuff like cell phones and pda's. The Indians were... kinda in the background rebooting MS servers (at the wrong time). Anyways, haven't worked with Chinese.
The U.S. educates every child
Debatable.
We mash them through the meat grinder of what we call the "school system" but I'd say 90% of them come out less than educated.
Wow that list is a load of shit.
I don't know about some of the nations, but Canada being #6? By Canada being #6 do you mean the 98% Asian population of University of Waterloo and Simon Fraiser University where 90% of those Asians are immigrants from Japan/China just to learn in Canada?
Man that list is total junk, almost all the posts above show an in depth reasoning of why Russian (and most post-Soviet states) have such incredible "stars" in the disciplines, because of going until the students should break.
and yet so bad at economics?
Riddle me that, Bat-Man.
If they were really "the best", they'd be getting rich on legit contracts. The legit economy is much bigger than the criminal one (excluding the military/oil biz, but that's bait for a different TrollMod thread ;). Russian cost of living is very low compared to their global competitors, except for India and China. And their infrastructure, at least in European cities, is better. If they were that good, their productivity would be high enough to draw contracts from the rest of the world, yet they are not the first choice of global outsourcers.
;). The Soviet empire was a mafia state, and much of that mafia just privatized with its collapse. The Russian economy hasn't improved much (again, those persistently "irrelevant" exceptions ;), except in the crime sector. So the actual talent, though not necessarily "the best", has little legit markets for its labor organized within Russia. Programmers work where managers organize buyers for their labor, and Russian management for programmers can be found largely in organized crime. Such an inaccurate statement as the Department K "victory" claim reflects the Russian government's inability to even officially recognize their economic failures, which of course perpetuates the problem. And cybercops claiming their criminals are the toughest serves to increase cop budgets, and excuse their failures - drawing resources away from investment in the legit economy that would attract these good programmers instead. They believe their own cover story, and there's no way out of their trap. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to live with their crime, too, and without the global productivity we'd get if they went straight.
The real difference is that Russia has the biggest, most sophisticated mafia in the world (except see disclaimer above
--
make install -not war
Hacking started back from TMRC (The Model Railroad Club) Back at MIT in the early '50s I believe. The original definition of hack created by that club was "A useful or creative workaround to a problem or way of improving upon something. In their case, a neat hack would be using a few wires and a couple of switches to control more than what it should control.
Now, if the Russians are the best "hackers" by that definition, could someone please tell me why they've had so many space program problems? No useful hacks to fix their equipment?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In my experience from my school years, and 20 years of working in engineering afterward, middle easterners generally have the best math skills -- especially Persians, but Arabs too. We had a huge Persian influx in southern CA in the 80s. Most of those kids were way ahead in math, with many of them doing college level calculus by the 10th grade. Community colleges had many 16 year old middle easterners in their math and science programs, because high school would have been a waste of time for them. 20 years later, there's still a huge Persian/Arab presence in engineering companies in southern CA. These are global companies that hire the best people from everywhere. The best in this case has remained the middle eastern engineers.
So, since I'm Russian I should shut up and forget about any kind of criticism to my country? This is of course very Russian way of "solving" problems.
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
I find this somewhat offensive. I live near Redmond, and well ... oh nevermind.
Russia has top notch schools cranking out top notch programmers, and no jobs for them. At all. A frightening level of Russia's wealth is concentrated in the Mafia
That's interesting. Look, I'm a graduate of arguably the best university here in Russia, CS dept (I leave judging my worth as a programmer to others). I had a job before I graduated, and I had no problems finding a new job since then. I met my classmates at a reunion party recently, and everyone seemed well-to-do, working a nice clean job home or abroad; I've heard no stories of anyone turning to the dark side. There is actually a shortage of good software engineers here. Inferior schools and small/remote cities may be another story, as indicated by the bust of those two students who were lured in US by FBI. I believe most of those gangs' members are script kiddies with incomplete to none formal programming education.
As for the much-dreaded Russian Mafia, I can't confirm or deny its wealth or influence, because I, just as you I believe, only read about it and never met it face to face.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
English is a killer for these people.
The light-bulb was invented by a Russian scientist, A.N. Lodygin, who for the first time used it to light the streets of Petersburg. [...] A junior lieutnant of the Russian fleet, A.M. Chotinskij, while on a service trip to the USA demonstrated Lodygin's light-bulb (which he had taken with him) to T.Edison. Edison made use of Lodygin technical ideas, introduced some construction changes in his light-bulb, and patented it in 1879.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Or at least according to this
yep thats like saying: "my penis is bigger than yours (american)" just cause i'm from england, accept mine isn't a lie!
sure, and all black people love chicken!
Oh no, the russians! QUICK, HIDE YOUR 8 BIT REGISTER. They hacked my speak and spell.
Dont worry that kind of unpatriotic russian is in the minoirty now. Go immigrate your worthless scum!! PUting will bring us to the NEW EMPIRE and soon RUSSIAN soldiers will wash their feet in the atlantic ocean!!!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Indeed it true,
russian women can hold mathematics and physics converstationgs no problem.
an added bonus is typically only the good looking ones make it over, so yeah having met goodlooking intelligent women, it is no wonder that i support them.
Privit,
Tovarish.
Amazing what they can do with Russian war surplus Kerosine powered 50 pound laptops!!!!!
"The U.S. educates every child."?
o s/ ja.htmlb ook/geos/ us.html
US Literacy:
Definition Field Listing
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 97%
Japan Literacy:
Definition Field Listing
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 99%
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fact
So predictable!
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
Yes, Japan gives every child an elementary education. What about every child receiving a secondary education? Can every Japanese citizen do basic geometry?
and Russian criminals are some of the most criminal criminals of the criminal world.
And Russian hackers (and what is meant is criminal hacking,) are some of the best hackers of the world.
That's obvious, since so many have to do that for living there now. It's a numbers game.
You can't handle the truth.
Nationalist claims aside, this quote just seems bizarre. Mathematics is one skill/talent. Writing code is another. Hacking/cracking into systems is another. The three skills are very different and have little to do with each other. In fact, I'd say they're negatively correlated. The mathematicians I've know were great with equations but they produced awful code, and probably couldn't have cracked their way into a paper bag. And I'd suspect most crackers wouldn't be comfortable in the formal, logical, precise world that mathematicians inhabit.
They're ranked 5th.
Rank Name
1 United States
2 Poland
3 Canada
4 China
5 Russian Federation
6 Germany
7 Netherlands
8 Sweden
9 Ukraine
10 Croatia
Don't be misled into thinking it's all the "Russian Mafia" -that's a Red Herring.
Talent (mathematical, artistic, etc) is rare and a good education system should make sure that no talent is lost, no matter how humble the origin of talented people is. In order to promote all talent a good education system should
1) Be equally accessible to the rich and the poor. That is, free education including college and graduate school. No prep schools for rich (but often stupid) people. Subjective admission systems, based on examining the files of the candidates should be prohibited. There should be written examinations only and the exam papers should have the the names of the candidates hidden (sealed) in order to avoid corruption. If an examiner grades papers with sealed names he/she cannot give a higher grades to the stupid sons/daughters of rich/powerful people. Oral examinations should be prohibited in order to preserve the anonimity of the candidates and to avoid corruption.
2. The parents, media, etc, should encourage education not because college graduates have higher salaries and make more money but because knowledge is fun and fascinating. Stupid money is not everything in life,creativity, knowledge and understanding are much better than money.
The US education is just the opposite of such a system. There are no written examinations in order to open a backdoor and make it possible to admit stupid children of rich people who make big donations to the universities. Think of it, how many janitor's or cleaner's children graduate from Harvard or Yale?. The big education fees are also a barrier which makes it impossible for talented but poor people to enter good schools. Because of all these barriers in the US the education is a (partially) hereditary thing, the children of rich people tend to have a good education while the the children of poor people tend to have no education. There are of course exceptions, but they are mere curiosities, as if they were miracles. (think of Abraham Lincoln)
In contrast, the education systems in former Socialist East European countries were close to the ideal system described before. They were not perfect, but much better than the US system. One thing is sure, talent was encouraged to flourish, whether you were rich or poor. Check out the biographies of Soviet scientists, many of them had very humble origins and everntually managed to became members of the Academy and even got the Nobel Prize. In the US system most of them would have had humble jobs and no education.
My story. I am a 53 year old theoretical physicist. I grew up and got my education in an Eastern European country (I wont say which one). My parents were both peasants with no education. They were both hard working, honest people which grew up before communism. They both wanted to stay in school and further their education (especially my mom). They had however no choice, for economic reasons had to leave school after the seventh grade. I had the opportunity to grow up under communism. I was very interested in physics and mathematics and managed to enter a high school for gifted people and eventually I got my PhD from the best university in my country. Now I work for a very good US university. Had I been born in the US I would have become a framer, a cleaner or a janitor.
Once peolpe get a right, it very hard to take it away. The World Bank pressures my old country to make their education system 'more efficient' and introduce mandatory education fees for college and graduate school. The government was about to do it, but people revolted, there were big demonstrations, etc., and high education is still free.
When I tell Americans about the possibility of free college and graduate school education they are all against it, because it will be baid from their taxes. So what? that this is why taxes are for, support projects for the good of the society. Is it better to waste mathematical or artistic talent in janitorial jobs?
BTW. Under the old regime, in my old country we did not pay any income tax. The only income source were the salaries, and all salaries
Well thank you very much for posting this link. A finger-jerking attack made me follow it, and now i found out the Netherlands tops all others in ... 'malformations of male genital organs' ... And the week only just started.
This talks about the population averages. We are talking here about the top of the crop. And indeed, Sir, among the best students comming out of schools all over the world, the russians are generally top class. Especially the folks comming out of University of Moscow, the two prominent St. Petersburg schools and one more technical institute, who's name I forgotten. Right on par with them are folks comming out of Uni. of Shanghai (china), then right behind you have Uni. of Warsaw (poland) and the top three in US (Stanford, MIT, Berkley), and some other European top grade schools and this one from South Korea. I never heard about really consistently exceptional Japanese University in this filed (CS).
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
In the US, MTV educates every child.
;)
If a child isn't following the latest pop stars and drinking lots of cola by age 9, then he or she is probably attending some weird cult's school... Or being home schooled by some militia group.
Does the K in Department K stand for Kevin Mitnick? ;)
You must not have checked the news lately, as I believe that Prague is no longer in Russia.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
I was hacking on a software project written by a Russian that I couldn't get to work. It dumped core (in a way that completely messed up the entire stack) whenever the locale wasn't set to Russian. What I discovered in his code is that it was complete garbage.
Everyone knows that the essential part of finding software exploits is to get the code to somehow crash. It's that, that I figure, Russians are best at. Maybe it has something to do with not having a clue what C keywords mean in English. Maybe it has something to do with all the vodka. But, for serious software design, I wouldn't trust them.
(Note: the above post was made in jest.)
but...
In Soviet Russia, security cracks you!
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The irony is most of the advanced math prof's at SFU are of Eastern European/Russian background.
but who has the best prostitutes?
Now that the Cold War has cooled, maybe we can just nuke all these hackers and solve three problems at once:
I'm starting to like the idea that nations should be divided by IP ranges to make it easier to exclude a country from your network. It would certainly solve a lot of problems with China, Russion, North Korea.
Hungary with only 10 million people (compared to USA's 293 people!!) was ahead of the USA in the more up to date 2003 figures Pofon Amerikai Egyesült Államok :-) (Angol vagyok !)
SO, lemme get this straight.. The Russian cybercrime division announces "Russia has the best hackers in the world"..
Anyone get the feeling they're due for their annual appraisal and they haven't caught anyone at all?
"the best hackers in the world" may well be a euphemism for "clueless police"
Nobody resent the desgination of the term hacking as being criminal? I mean I hack all the time but it's completely legal. Might they mean 'cracking' instead?
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. T. S. Eliot
"Your last sentence makes you a troll. But I'll answer you anyways."
MAybe so but I did not mean it like that. I have lived in the middle east and even though I have never been to Yemen many freinds have and they said it was pretty bad. Now considering many were form the US I was under the impression that they would be speaking relatively.
There is however always the question of are all murders being reported in Yemen.
Well that is one sure fire way to start an international crackers war!
Expect a fair bit of Internet Mutilation in the name of proving that "Our" hackers are better than theirs.
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
V sovetskom Rossii Komputer hackuiut tebia!
What the hell does it matter whether the inventor of the lightbull was an American or a Russian? They were all just a bunch of descendants from some African ape-men anyway. Do you have any real evidence to think you were any different?
s /Pasteur/Seki/Sun-tzi/Ramanujan/Abel/...
The fact that folks get all worked up over national priority and ownership certainly does provide strong evidence that Darwin was correct with respect to human origins.
Humanity will be a lot better off when we can finally recreate the correct mixture of Archimdides/Gallileo/Feynman/Einstein/Newton/Gaus
in a test tube, instead of having to suffer lesser fools so gladly.
of the Soviet Union:
The soviet radio jammers are the most powerful radio jammers in the world.
The soviet paralysis is the most progressive paralysis.
The soviet lullabye must awake the masses.
Running at the highest level tolerable seems like an odd educational philosophy for a society based on communism or socialism. All but the smartest get left behind. Unless Russians are innately more intelligent than other people, I can't imagine typical elementary school kids grasping the details of physics and chemistry. A few in each class sure, but the general mass of students must feel largely like failures. I wonder if that partially explains the level of corruption at low levels in their system. When you feel inferior you resort to cheating because it seems like your only option.
We really had 4 levels of math (I tutored all 4). You have fundimentals (exists to allow stupid people to fulfil the grade 12 math grad requirement), applied (fairly practical - financial and odds math emphasized, normal (classic, hasnt changed in years), and calculus
Granted we have seen many so called 'hackers' come out of Russia. But all the best work I've seen has either been from Europe or the U.S. I don't know why someone would say the Russians are so 'good at math' when their education system is one of the worst in the world. Of course they have their champions but I think they should really consider the real reason why the Russian hackers are so prevelent. Russian hackers and crackers have nothing to fear from authorities. They don't have the best in the world, they have a handful of decent guys that work unrestrained. ...at least thats what my mail order bride says.
Well, at least on the study quoted. Consistently. It kind of has everyone baffled, as for the last umpteen zillion years everyone talking about the politics of education has been drilling to our heads that the education system is in a terrible state, students are doing horribly and the nation is going to get ruined because of it...
Lol. Well, we all have to be good at something ;)
That's pretty much the case in Russia, so I'd say they're safe.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
By percentages of the population, I'm pretty sure China and India would come out way down the scale - there are just too many people in poverty yet with _zippo_ knowledge of mathematics...
That is not to say anything, of course, about the quality of those who do....
> (Oh, and you're right about Edison being a scum
> bag)
It's easy to criticize others and dismiss their contribution as being unimportant.
It's harder to recognize that even though Edison wasn't a great scientist he still made a great contribution to humankind by innovatively producing and marketing products (like lightbulbs) that created demand for building a nation wide electrical grid.
The fact that nearly every modern home has electrical outlets is partly due to Edison. Edison was an entrepreneurial genius (like Henry Ford), taking ideas and innovatively producing products.
I remember in my old times I loaded one of those music virus simulators when I played tetris (no soundblaster by then). It was fun.
Later i'd play "catching the faces". Remember the little faces that played all over your screen? Well I grabbed my text editor (QEdit), and tried to jail those darn faces using the box characters.
Ahh the good times...
Good at math... Bah, humbug.
Jus wanted to send a line down the wire --- are you really that serious about the shortage of "programmers" in Russia (my home-country too, even if you do not believe it!). '93 Physics dept of the Moscow State -- and which one would be the "one of the best in Russia is CS" now? I hope you do not mean VMK (in my times it was more of a source of nice and quite loose gals, as strange as it would sound to the rest of /. ;-) ).
.signature pun about lisp -- well...
As to your
Best luck, bro, anyway!
Paul B.
Placebo effects work for education just as much as they work for healthcare. By believing that the sugar pills they are being fed are actually potent medicine, patients will themselves to health. Similarly, by believing in their ability to succeed and to handle the material, the kids were able to succeed and handle the material.
The modern North American feel-good approach may be flawed not in its aims but in its methods. If it were making people feel-good about their brilliance rather than their averageness, they would be able to be more brilliant. Everyone wins.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
'Everyone knows that Russians are good at math...Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world.' Although this is not exactly the most intelligent comment, I think that many of you /.er's are being a bit too hard on this comment. Many americans say very similar things, such as this country is the best, it is the land of the free(then why do we travel to other countries?)
it's pride in nationality, in this case the russians are happy to report that they have smart hackers - intelligence.
most countries take pride in what they can
Oh, I know that fortune cookie. I also think it's wrong.
For starters, it's a nice utopia, but noone invented a school system which just makes everyone interested in knowledge. Most people will go to college just because they (A) think it will get them a better job in terms of money/effort/prestige/whatever, or (B) because their parents wanted them to. If you let them just set their own goals, knowledge won't even start to be on that list.
So while you'll have a tiny percentage of people who actually go there to learn, it will be by far not enough to supply the numbers of high education workers an economy needs.
Second, and most importantly, even those won't want to learn everything they really need.
I still remember being in college myself, you know. I was only interested in the programming part, I thought I knew it all already, and counted stuff as maths, data structures, or any attempt at teaching proper software engineering to be a waste of my time.
I mean, phbt, who the heck needs an object when you can use an array? And I'll write everything with "goto" just because it annoys the professor. And hello? WTH do I need maths for?
Needless to say, in retrospect all that was wrong.
Basically for Ralph Waldo Emersons quote to actually hold any water, 18 year olds would have to be a lot more mature and have a lot more experience than actually is the case. Note that I'm not saying that 18 year olds are dumb or anything. The brain sure is fully functional at that age, but the experience to base the right decisions on isn't there yet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It makes sense, if the survey is looking at *average* numeracy. However note also the absence from the list of Singapore, Israel, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, some of the world's highest per-capita producers of human-resource talent. And then there are[n't] Bulgaria & Iran, which as a /. post last year mentioned, frequently show up in the top 10 in international highschool math competitions.
Parent is right, these surveys regrettably ignore the many countries they do not collect data from. Therefore they are useless for global comparisons. They only contain information for comparing the countries involved--though those scoring numbers with no explanation attached hardly even do that much.
On the surface, it *is* hypocritical that Thomas Jefferson would say we are created equal (under the law), but own slaves.
But that was the society back then. That was the environment in which he lived (and after all, people *are* affected by the environments in which they live, are they not?).
Have you ever read books about Jefferson's life, or visited his Monticello home (now a walkable historical museum)? In those and there you will find that Jefferson actually *wanted* to free his slaves, and he wrote about the tragedy of slavery actually quite a bit, and in fact argued for the prohibition of slave-owning in the American territories. But he knew that if he freed his slaves, other, less-sympathetic people would capture them (even though they were legally-free) and treat them far-worse than Jefferson did. So he used his home as sort of a shelter for those lucky enough to make it into his custody. There are records at his home suggesting that his slaves actually were not hateful of Jefferson, unlike other slave-owners they had been with previously...
Jefferson is also well-known to have held the opinion that we should've sent all the black people back to Africa (a view now held with a derisive connotation), because in Jefferson's view, the racial conflicts were going to cause some nasty rifts in this country, because the abuses towards blacks were so bad. And he was quite right -- the slavery of America's past has basically torn this country in two, along racial lines, despite laws (notably the 1965 Civil Rights Act) to bandage up that bloody history.
Would sending blacks back to Africa have solved the problem? Not entirely (people would've complained from Africa about it), but at least had we done so in the 1700s or early 1800s there would've been a *lot* less violence and anger between whites and blacks as resulted from the events occurring since Jefferson's time... It would've prevented the entire chain of racist events our history shows from Jefferson's time to the present.
Not that any of this matters to somebody (like you) who would rather look ideally towards the reality of the past and criticize those who didn't have the comfortable environment of modern society or the convenience of 20/20 hindsight for doing things which in one time period were acceptable, but today are considered quite wrong...
Of course, in 100 or 200 years (assuming the human race survives that long), people will look back on things we've done, and say that we were wrong. Perhaps we are, but we don't know it now. Does that make us bad people? Hardly; people are imperfect - we do what we can with what we have in the time in which we live.
So why hypocritically apply such a standard to a somebody who is as indisputably a legendary historical figure as Thomas Jefferson -- as your quoting usage does?
I'll leave you with this quote of Jefferson's commentary on slavery:
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
American universities fall way behind in programming Weakest result for U.S. in 29-year history of international technology competition ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
View pictures of the hackers at their web site right here.
z0mbie... cased closed