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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.'"
It's a common scheme of blackmailing a site that you DDOS. You offer to call off the bots if they pay. A lot of companies are having problems with this these days.
As an American, I'll point out that the Russians are the best (Black Hat) Hackers in the world.
Why? Simple. They're organized. VERY well organized. There are massive rings of talented hackers who have found ways of cracking into boxes, zombifiying them stealing all the information they can out of them, then using them to send spam and phishing scams. They steal credit card numbers by the thousands.
For the most part, such hackers in the rest of the world work alone, or in small groups. In Russia, there are numerous and large rings of these hackers, backed by the Russian mafia. Thanks to an astounding lack of law in Russia, that means they're basically untouchable...
So yeah. I'd say they're the best in the world. Not that there's much pride to derive from that... Just like the Nigerians are quite proficient at e-mail scams...
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...
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So you're saying they improved on the original inventions by someone else?
I still don't see where the grandparent post is wrong.
Oh, and Edison almost certainly didn't come up with the improvement - he worked a sweatshop of inventors, where he took the credit for other people's work... much like modern corporations.
Edison was little more than a typical businessman with no morals.
No, Edison invented what is essentially the modern lightbulb. Goebel invented a thing which produced light from electricity, but was incredibly dangerous and didn't work that well.
Bell flat out bought the design from Meucci, but it was his own engineering which made the damn thing usable, and Bell's basic design survived for almost a hundred years.
The TV example had nothing of note whatsoever.
This is like saying the Wright brothers didn't invent heavier-than-air flight because 'some French guy rode in a hydrogen baloon'. It's flat out not true. The various people invented what people think of as the products they invented, even if they weren't the first to accomplish the feat, they accomplished it best, or at least better.
(Oh, and you're right about Edison being a scum bag)
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.
See, for example, Acronis products. Far above any alternatives I'm aware of, especially the disk partitioning tool. There are more if you look.
Russian software market is pretty endemic. Ie. you won't know anything about most of quality Russian software. For example, do you know about FAR - one of the best file managers in the world? Or how about RAR? And certainly you haven't heard about the superb mailer "The Bat!".
Besides, lots of software is written in Russia: Microsoft Flight Simulator, IDEA (the best Java IDE) , etc.
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.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/Standings.html China, Russia, Canada, Poland...
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
hold on pal, The Bat! is made by RITlabs, it is a Moldovan company. Moldova is NOT Russia.
Anyway, I know what I'm saying, because the company I work at, has a lot of common projects with RITlabs (their office is nextdoor). I can see the building from my balcony.
I admit that WinRAR is the a great archiver, and Acronis TrueImage does kick Ghost\DriveImage\etc... but The Bat! is a 100% moldovan product.
uhhm... here's their contact info: http://ritlabs.com/en/about/contacts.php
The saddest poem
Come on man, when I'm at work, all I have to do is walk out of my office, then go 7m forward, open a door - and there I am, in the heart of RITlabs.
It is _not_ a russian company; the program is _not_ made by russians.
It is true that their developers speak russian... But you don't happen to know the history of Moldova, do you?
[because of the way things evolved.. everyone refers to any ex-soviet country as 'Russia', and to all the ex-soviet citizens as 'russians'. but this is a mistake]
The saddest poem
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
Saying the US is the best country in the world is nationalism.
"having pride and love for your country" is patriotism.
Patriotism is pride, but nationalism is just arrogance.
Amazing what our society has produced, where if one admits that the US may not be the best country, that it has flaws, and is not superior to all other countries, one is branded as unpatriotic.
On a more related note: above all, I think our schools and society needs to get away from teaching these rediculous absolutes. America is The Best. Edison invented The Lightbulb. Freedom Is Right. Bad People are Bad.
The world is more complex than this.
Those results are from PISA 2000. In the most recent PISA study (2003) the USA is behind Hungary and Germany.
d =12192243
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145587&ci
Germany 503
Hungary 490
United States 483
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.
Actually, no. The shuttle has a 2% failure rate. Compare that to the original Soyuz 7K-OK (1 manned flight out of 8 manned failed resulting in death, unmanned ratio similar), or the redesigned 7KT-OK (2 flights, 1 failure resulting in loss of crew). I think of mission failure rates as more important than absolute crew loss numbers, because a failure on a space mission nearly invariably kills everyone; loss numbers are simply a function of how many people are on a given mission. So, no, the Shuttle is by no means the most lethal space vehicle ever, nor is it the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)