Why So Many Top Hackers Come From Russia (krebsonsecurity.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader tsu doh nimh writes:
Brian Krebs has an interesting piece this week on one reason that so many talented hackers (malicious and benign) seem to come from Russia and the former Soviet States: It's the education, stupid. Krebs's report doesn't look at the socioeconomic reasons, but instead compares how the U.S. and Russia educate students from K-12 in subjects which lend themselves to a mastery in coding and computers -- most notably computer science. The story shows that the Russians have for the past 30 years been teaching kids about computer science and then testing them on it starting in elementary school and through high school. The piece also looks at how kids in the U.S. vs. Russia are tested on what they are supposed to have learned.
Fossbytes also reports that Russia claimed the top spot in this year's Computer Programming Olympics -- their fourth win in six years -- adding that "the top 9 positions out of 14 were occupied by Russian or Chinese schools." The only two U.S. schools in the top 20 were the University of Central Florida (#13) and MIT (#20).
Fossbytes also reports that Russia claimed the top spot in this year's Computer Programming Olympics -- their fourth win in six years -- adding that "the top 9 positions out of 14 were occupied by Russian or Chinese schools." The only two U.S. schools in the top 20 were the University of Central Florida (#13) and MIT (#20).
but they still haven't found Hillary's emails
I want my burger. F!ck the school. I want my burger and beer.
News at 11.
Meh, call me when there is a better version of Amazon, Netflix, or OS that the beancounters will accept for EIS coming from Russia or China.
Until then its nothing but USA products, companies, and services.
I've been watching a lot of Russian language media lately, because I have been trying to restore my language skills. Hackers in Russian movies are much more realistic than in American ones.
One gets asked whether he can get in a secure system? He does not boast, he answers "I will certainly try."
He does not mash the keyboard while he is getting a blowjob, he deploys an arsenal from 'Flashka' or from a alphabetical soup URL.
He examining an air-gapped system, looking for a way to get at the hardware, and mumbling about which patches seems not to have been applies.
He gets asked to get some video records? He asks "Do I have an hour and a half"?
Etc... And that is from police shows, where the staff hackers are not necessarily named characters, and definitely not the focus of the series.
This tells me that that the population at large has some idea about IT... you would not make a movie in the US where the driver will shift three times while driving backwards, would you? I mean... Uh, you get the point.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Maybe the Russians aren't wasting time trying to figure out what bathroom a student should be allowed to use or letting some precious snowflake change the language because he doesn't like to be called "he"?
Maybe the Russians tell the violent kids they're fucking violent and kick their asses out of school, and don't care how it might correlate with racial statistics?
Maybe the Russians have an education system that isn't run by a union intent on playing politics with every damn thing?
In the US, there is an extreme risk-averse culture. Not risk-averse as in "start a company and it might fail" but as in "don't even think about trying to beat the system, someone might sue you for it". So the very thing that causes many of the most succesfull companies to be founded in the US is actively suppressed when it comes to hacking skills.
So the title should have read:
Why So Many Well-Known Top Hackers Come From Russia
Really good hackers don't get caught, and don't even leave a clue that they were there at all.
The really interesting top technical hackers . . . well, we haven't heard of them yet, and probably never will, if they are that good.
Wherever they are . . . or, better said, "are not" . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Most people have been indoctrinated to never make a distinction between any people. It's that discrimination taboo, don't you know. Those of us who have a head on our shoulders see and know that Russia, as well as the eastern block countries, have always been a bunch of godless crooks and they always will be. Corrupt societies breed godless criminals, having no moral compass, thus doing what ever they can do to cheat and steal.
Has been going on for a little more than 30 years. How many "person on the street" interviews have you seen where young adults, heck, even some older adults Can't find their own state on a map, can't tell you who the president is, can't tell you which side won the civil war and on and on. Is it any wonder the government (both R&D's) have been able to strip away rights, bloat the government, encroach on your every waking minute?
My wife grew up in the Soviet school system. She told me all about math training there. People from the former Soviet Union are sought out everywhere as math tutors. American schools just flop around when it comes to math and send students up a grade even if they don't have the skills.
I worked with a Russian-born testing theorist: she and they were really really good and worked insanely hard at anything that was amenable to an academic approach.
--dave (hey, Safia!) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Where are the Russian programming languages?
What is the predominant OS used in Russia?
What are Russian hackers doing for OSS?
The ones with the most newspaper clippings? Or the ones who never get exposed?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Eastern European women are hot when they are in their 20's but they don't age well.
Education has value. The schools teach. People want to learn.
Exams are passed on merit to get into a really great university.
So the math skills are created.
Also consider a long history of maths and science. Computer access and later faster network access.
Other nations tried to do the same over the years. What did Russia get right and so many other nations totally fail at?
The UK had its BBC Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for education and a lot of very poor people all around the UK got so see and use a computer.
Given the funding and early access to computers the UK should have been a very advanced computer nation?
If it was only about hardware the early attempts at computer education would have allowed the UK to advance.
The USA educated generations in science after the 1950's with more funding. That provided a good selection of very good US teachers for the next generations.
The USA filled some of its schools with new computer labs, books, networks, educational software, robot kits and teachers who could teach. A lot of equipment and books got offered to different schools all over the USA.
Some parts of the USA got vast amounts of new funding for very poor students, per student. Did any of it help or change results? Not as much as expected per generation per student when tested given all the new spending.
If it was only about computer access, the best teachers and funding the USA on average would be very advanced given the amount of funding per student in some US states and cities..
What was the difference?
Passing exams, staying with real merit advancement. In Russia getting good grades and knowing things is seen as a good thing.
A culture of math, science, art, languages, music, sport, faith and education is encouraged and supported.
A pride in culture, art, engineering, maths, Russia is passed to each generation who want to learn and study.
For people in the USA trying to get a wide picture of history try Gymnasium (school) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not much on Russia but it shows a different way of approaching education that has shaped different nations.
On Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The key is the exams and the need to pass on merit. The USA and UK selected very different educational systems over the last decades and per student funding.
The results of such very different failed methods show decades later over entire nations.
Too much social promotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in some nations and not enough low cost passing tests only on merit.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Wild guess, maybe because its colder there and people stay indoors more?
Another good indicator is how many so called "geeks" on Slashdot vehemently oppose teaching computer science before university or even high school.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Cool story. The answer is still no, Dave. Stop calling me.
I think the west has a lot more job opportunities in IT. Here you can make a very good career for yourself without having to resort to questionable practices. In fact, having any cyber crimes on your record could close a lot of doors.... so why bother?
In Russia, talented folks sit around without any prospects of a better life, or fear of consequences. A recipe for making good hackers.
...etc.
Face it, most kids are not interested in computers, history, and other esoteric topics. Most kids don't need to know it, and will ignore it in class. So, why spend the money on educating them on it? The kids whom want to learn about it, will learn about it in college. Those whom don't want to learn, won't learn about it.
He claims 200% increase in Russian visits to his "author website". I think Russia just wants to read all his great ebooks with their fun, well-written, insightful, and intelligent stories!
what's been happening is we've let more and more people partake of higher education. Partially to keep them out of the job market since we don't really need them. Most of them don't make it past year of college. A few get liberal arts degrees. On a whole the increase in education still makes society a better place since they've got better critical thinking skills than they otherwise would have.
Recently folks have been hard at work to reverse that trend. Religious leaders don't like that the kids with all that education mellow out religiously. The rich don't like paying the taxes for them and would prefer to just import cheap foreign labor (think H1-Bs). And nobody likes to have to pay for somebody else's kids to go to college.
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I was in grade school in the 80s. They told us in the future everyone will be programmers and software engineers as a basic life skill, not as a specialized profession. They started programming and computer classes in the fifth grade. That was in Oklahoma of all places. They started us off with Logo (which they paired with a geometry class), then Basic and in the seventh grade we did a little Fortran and Pascal.
Starting in the eighth grade we moved to Texas, and I was surprised that there where no computer science classes, even going into high school. Equally surprising no one else I talked to seemed to have those types of courses in grade school.
Needless to say it was a nice kickstart. Not sure why it wasn't widespread or caught on. I mean it's thirty years later and I don't think they do that now.
Most youth do not have avenues to put their talent to productive use. Coupled with a high standards of education in maths and sciences, it is not difficult to see why young Russians end up with such options of last resort that still challenge their intellectual creativity. I would think the lure of money is secondary. These are troubling signs of a society in decay.
It's the education system, they teach kids the openings and middle game tactics in the schools.
Oh, they don't? Well, it must be those computer science classes which encourage kids to play chess games on their laptops.
There are plenty of companies that pay good money for red team exercises, and even have their own red teams (Microsoft has a very highly rated one for example). So if breaking in to systems and networks is what interests you, you can do it legitimately, make good money doing it, and even get sponsored training doing it. SANS has a whole track of courses for red team training.
Thing is, you don't get called a hacker in popular media when you do that since the term "hacker" is used to mean someone breaking the law with computer related things. You are an Information Assurance/Information Security professional. Your skills are the same as what they call a hacker, even your methods, the difference is you have been hired.
Now combine that with the fact that the US has more functional law enforcement than Russia and does at least make some attempt to squash cyber crime and is it any surprise we don't see as many in the US?
In much of the West, crime doesn't pay, or at least pay well. Your average street thug probably makes less than minimum wage. Sure, there are a few that make a lot of money, but it's like trying to make a money as a rock band. Only the 0.1% make a middle-class income, and only the 0.001% make the money you see in movies. Plus, you're likely to wind up dead or in jail.
Consequently, for the most part, only the badly educated or stupid become criminals. There's the odd smart criminal, but having a legit job (if that's available) is simply superior in every way.
And then you have the former Soviet Union, with a ton of really smart, very well-educated, very talented engineers, with virtually no decent job prospects at all, but still fairly good virtual contact with the West.
And suddenly, given a lack of options, you have smart criminals.
And that is a recipe for total disaster.
As a matter of survival of the Western world, we need to open immigration from Russia so that these smart, talented engineers can find decent jobs that benefit us before they find ill-paying jobs that cost us terribly.
(Many of my most capable co-workers have been Russians who were able to leave, and man, we their talent working for us, rather than against us, for both our sakes.)
You can thank the absolute bullshit like common core for screwing things up as well. The ye olde by rote system we learned oddly ~30 years ago worked just fine, then they decided to start fucking around with it. And...scores dropped, then they screwed around more, and more. Welcome to the present. The US isn't the only case either, this is what's happening in Canada as well. Though we're only ~15 years behind the US in following this.
It actually get's a bit worse up here because they've also pushed the entire curriculum to be "female friendly" and those changes over the last 12 years have dropped male scores between 1.40pts and 3.80pts(ratings are on a 10pts scale the provincial average is 6.1/10 - some districts have seen male students as low as 2.20pts while female in the same school are 7.18pts) depending on the school district. You can read about the absolute shitshow going on here if you want. And it is a shitshow, one so bad that a province once known for having some of the top students in north america for math have lost it in a decade.
Om, nomnomnom...
If there's an answer, it's not with the education system.
Given that tests do not control for admission criteria (US having tierless secondary/tertiary, Russia/China having highly rigid tiering), there can be no comparison on educational systems.
They could try again when they factor that and population size out, but it will favor the US a bit too much for them.
A more likely case is that Russia & China have lax enforcement - especially on foreign targets. Another factor is the law of large numbers, something also not in the US's favor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Countries with such systems have less educated people - as they consign people to drudgery if they dont test well or had a bad day.
In contrast, the US educates about everybody and does well once you factor out admission systems.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
To teach K-12 in the US, you need a degree in 'Education' which is for the most part a cultural indoctrination.
Yes, because the extreme minority of transsexuals is the deciding factor here, not the fact that America denies basic science and shifts all the money towards useless managers.
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Grades are stupid, you can fail an entire grade for one subject even music, I almost did. Have the teachers change classrooms or the students and teach subjects because no student should ever have to repeat every subject for being poor at one or two,
It is true that Russia places a much greater emphasis on teaching math, physics, and CS than the West. However, it is only possible because of Russian culture puts more value on knowledge of those subjects. Their knowledge means both more social prestige and better prospect of finding a well-paid job.
BTW, many Russians tend to preserve this attitude to math even when they emigrate to the US. As result, their children do better in math on average than American kids. For example, Sergey Brin has never attended any education institution in the Soviet Union, but he was successful in math and CS. Similar, many Asian kids do well in math, because of their parents.
Anyway, Russia has a large pool of young well-educated people, but Russia does not develop as much software as it could given human resources that it has. As result many young people cannot find a legal well-paid job, and some of them get attracted to the dark economy. Usually Russian authorities will not go after them as long as they choose their targets abroad.
It's just propaganda
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they want money in a shitty country
they don't really care if they offend any morale bounds because they are 17 in suicide rates.
they know their present justice system won't care if it's abroad.
Hahaha Trump does make the best one liners
Most cant operate a modern cell phone let alone understand computer code.
Don't agree? Go to your nearest wall-mart and look around, you wont even need to enter the store, the parking lot should do the trick.
Maybe because Russia is a wild west for the hackers. If a person in the US would do even a portion of what Russian hackers do out there, he would be caught and sent to jail. However, in Russia, laws targeting hacking activity either did not exist until recently or were not enforced. Even now I doubt that law enforcement agencies know how to deal with hacking activities and able to punish hackers.
Additionally, if the hacking activities from Russia target US institutions or businesses, it becomes a "national pride", since US in recent years due to sanctions imposed on Russia, is seen as a great enemy just like in the days of cold war. If hacking activity of this kind is done, it will be seen as a greater good to the country and no one will pursue the people behind it.
CYKA BLYAT MUDAK IDI NA HUI isn't a thing? I could swear CS:GO was full of crying Russians.
It's not the minority of transexuals that are the problem, it's the massive amount of man hours and resources wasted catering to every special interest group that cause a big fuss about minor things, not to mention the huge risk of lawsuits resulting in huge wasting of resources.
While russians are busy hacking, americans are busy scheduling committees to decide on what gender options should be available on a signup form.
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As a former-soviet-state citizen, I think it's because of "deficit". A very well known word for soviet people. You couldn't get anything. Food, clothes, household items. Everything was in deficit. And it came in batches, so you needed to go on hunting trips around town to find some new item in a shop. So naturally, computers were a deficit when I grew up (20-30 years ago). You didn't go to a shop to buy new one. You got an old one from an institution and made do. You got bits and pieces and hacked something together. Software: obviously piracy. Who pays for software!? With piracy comes lots of little hacks and cracks, you get to know and learn the systems. You don't have a support line which caters everything on a silver platter. I don't know. It just feels like this hacking and cracking mentality is coming from that.
rich kids makes the l337est doodles, all around they might start the turtle neck trend next MIT who the fuck has enough money to go there.
Where are all the AFRICAN hackers?
Im form post soviet world and quite connected to Russians and their culture.
Well to understand some culture one needs to observe how they build their homes. Let me explain. Home_sweet_home is central thing to most of humans, so i would classify it as expression of internal state. In USA and UK people rarely build fences, and if they do they are more decorative than useful as devices for protecting ones home. In contrary in RU people build huge fences, there are fences everywhere not decorative at all. This illustrates soul of typical Russian - "trust no-one". Russians dont trust anyone in their society, their biggest enemy is neighbour. Society just does not have any trust inside.
That leads to plus: Russians individually excel, because otherwise they will be losers - someone will take their lunch.
However that leads to way BIGGER minus: Russians as society cant build their nation in effective way, because of this mistrust and lack of trust. They can produce bright individuals, but those individuals will never come together to build successful state.
Russian state is failure in all senses - health, life quality etc. Except intel and militarry. But intel reports will not cure cancer and tanks will not feed old people.
Thats the price for bright individuals that dont trust anyone.
It's like folks who say "all British TV is sooooooo amazing"
no, all the British TV you hear about is amazing, because you only hear about the great ones
you guys are comparing your personal knowledge of all kinds of strata of USA IT workers/students with only the most exceptional of Russian hackers
It's the regulatory environment. There are no rules in Russia so people explore and create. In the US there is punishment for opening/inspecting/being curious. Where are your chemistry kits? Kids who make electronics are accused of making bombs. You need to sue to repair your own devices. You have vicious laws that make the personal cost of opening and looking things very high (DMCA..?)
That's why. You've done it to yourself by allowing your companies to make the laws for them and not for the people.
If i lived in Russia, with access to Russie's networks and proxies, and a sense that some American corporation isn't going to start world war 3 over ransomware... Hacking looks enticing.
If i live in America, with American ISPs logging every sneeze, fart and chair movement. With a federal government that'll throw me in debtors prison after I'm sued for millions or just flat out 'rendition'ed to gitmo. Hacking looks stupid.
Opportunity is the only difference.
"Compared to the United States there are quite a few more high school students in Russia who choose to specialize in information technology subjects."
Because of the jobs. When you see people being showed the door because their IT job is being filled by H1B Visa holders, you tend not to want to gravitate to their professions.
It has nothing, repeat nothing to do with education. It's about choice about professional career and right now IT is being ravaged by H1B Visa holders. So why on earth would you pursue it.
FYI a Microsoft sponsored study does not ad weight to your argument.
... The only two U.S. schools in the top 20 were the University of Central Florida (#13) and MIT (#20).
Having attended schools in several states -- including Florida, very briefly -- I have to say: Americans across the nation should be incredibly embarrassed by this statement.
More like, Russian cultural ethics don't discourage breaking into other people's computers. In the US, phreaking and hacking were despised subcultures well into this decade. Russian culture? No such mores against that.
Go look in the mirror.
See?
Not only does everyone hate you, but you're an ugly cunt too.
Do you argue over real points as well, or just shit you make up in your head?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Well what else are these people going to do? Its not that the skills are better, its that there is no where to apply these skills but criminal endeavors. So you hear about them more. Bring these people to silicon valley and they are in start ups and/or making money.
If you look at the PISA rankings of countries by educational attainment the US beats Russia handily in every measure. In the provinces Russia's education system has been crumbling for a long time and you have to question even the official literacy rate because out the tundra and in places like Chechnya/Dagestan the kids are NOT learning to read and the stats are garbage. Now in Moscow and the core cities things are very different but even there things are not what they were in Soviet times. The Russians are still holding their own in the Comp Sci Olympiad but they have been getting destroyed in the physics and math Olympiads by US and Chinese teams for 2 decades now. They are usually stuck in third or fourth of even fifth place which is still respectable but in Soviet times someone would have been sent to the Gulag for a 4th place showing.
Uhuh...
While russians are busy hacking, americans are busy scheduling committees to decide on what gender options should be available on a signup form.
Which do you think is likely to result in a safer, more prosperous society?
Also, you're a fucking cunt.
Yay police state!
That was true in the Soviet system.
However, the country's education system went to hell in the 1990's.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/russias-universities-rebuilding-collapsed-stars/2018006.article
This article is about the university system, but the school system hasn't fared well either.
Only in European servers
To teach in Russia you also need a degree in 'Education'. There is probably a huge difference in curriculum for that degree though. That is not the point though. Historically, despite that it was never high paid, the role of the teacher was highly respected in the Russian society. So, people who went into the education not for money, secure jobs, good benefits, etc. It was because they wanted to be a teacher and liked teaching the kids.
Also, for a long time, Soviet Union had to rely on domestically produced talent. Unlike the US that vacuumed smart people from all over the world and never really needed decent K-12 education, Soviet Union was forced to eat it's own dog food in education . Bad K-12 (1-10), means bad university students, means bad engineers.Whatever you might think of the party leadership, the society got unshackled from the religion and was dreaming of the great future which would be impossible without lots of smart people.
The free, state-wide, compulsory education had a unified integrated curriculum, which covered all subjects and grade levels. There was the same scope and sequence in the whole country, so you can move across the country and resume education exactly where you left off. The same textbooks, uniforms and even supporting materials in the classroom would be the same. The whole curriculum was incremental and built on the concepts you already know. Nobody would study fractions for several years in a row like in US. No time wasted on reteaching it either because teacher in US never sure what their kids are supposed to know. You would learn them once and then move on to naturally using them in the problems related to some other topic. There was a big emphasis on memorization. Songs, poetry, formulas, numbers, names, historic and geographical facts, mathematical proofs. Kids were trained to remember lots of stuff from the early childhood. In the large cities there were specialized schools for the advanced kids (or kids of influential parents, yes corruption have always existed in Russia) which would have even more stuff added to that curriculum. The education system in Russia now is not what it used to be though. It foolishly adopted a lot of the dumb american things.
The best strategic defense against Russian hackers is:
1. Less animosity towards Russia. The level of the current Russian hysteria in media is almost at the level of Red Scare in 50s. Stop feeding anti western sentiment in Russia with all this crap. BTW, the sanctions hurt Putin and his friends a lot less than regular people and guess what, they blame US and not Putin for that.
2. More legitimate software development jobs in Russia. Yes, some companies are doing outsourcing in Russia, but together with the above will significantly help reduce amount of talent available in the underground economy. Russia is more expensive than India but ROI is probably higher as well.
On other hand, there is a lot of money can be made on the fear and war mongering as well. Unfortunately, this seems to be the route US is taking.
I came to US when I was 19, shortly after graduation from a Soviet high school. I skipped SAT. SAT2 Math was a joke, at the level of a Russian middle school at best. College Calculus 1 and 2, as well as 3 semesters of Physics and 2 semesters of Chemistry were already covered at my high school. We did not have a silly subject like "Science". Teachers had no issue dishing out 'C's to the majority of students so there was an opportunity to learn for those who wanted to raise above the lowest common denominator.
Now I am facing the problem of educating my own children, and it is difficult to push them beyond what they are taught at school because of simple time/availability constraints.
I am a product of post-soviet education of past 20-30 years, from a reasonably large city, and I can tell you that my generation (from which a lot of those hackers seem to come) was not "taught" any computer science, or tested on it, not on highschool, and certainly not in elementary school. Whatever my friends and I have learned was from playing with things on our own. The educational system, however, did provide us with very solid math foundation, geared towards multi-step problem solving, logic, and at least some critical thinking. In my opinion, the abundance of russian hackers is due two a combination of lack of consequences and lack of other as-lucrative economic opportunities. In US, one could easily end up in a world of legal trouble for experimenting with hacking. In post-soviet space, the worst that can happen is one would have to share profits with some thugs (from the government or otherwise).
Those words are common enough they are likely spoken by hundred(s) million more people than the rest of the Russian language =P
"Yes, because the extreme minority of transsexuals is the deciding factor here, not the fact that America denies basic science and shifts all the money towards useless managers."
I think the issue is that transsexuals and all things concerning them is an issue that impacts few enough people to effectively amount to statistical noise and those in power keep us so busy talking about issues like this and dumbing down our education.
If they didn't keep us divided and uneducated someone might realize that almost all of the problems shared by 99.99% of our population could be solved or improved by exercising imminent domain on the half of nations wealth being siphoned off by just 0.01% of our population. Best of all the group negatively impacted is smaller with a much smaller individual impact than the disruptions caused by that group each day. It's the easiest lesser of evils decisions you will ever make and the best choice both for personal and community interests for 99.99% of us. Hell, the worst you are doing to any of them is making a handful of people who have had every advantage in terms of education get jobs and join the working class.
I think more resources are being wasted on scaring people that transsexuals are going to rape their daughters in bathrooms or whatever made up threat they use to distract the unwashed masses while they steal money from us.
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The main reason there's a need for that is because conservatives are scaremongering. The Dems certainly use that as a distraction from more pressing issues, but the GOP makes it somewhat necessary.
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I don't have time for that. My Dad and I are too busy fucking our sister.
And it is a shitshow, one so bad that a province once known for having some of the top students in north america for math have lost it in a decade.
They claim in the article that reading scores are improving while math scores decline, but if that article is any indication, writing scores are also a total shitshow. It repeatedly plagiarizes sentences from scientists word for word, then proceeds to repeat the exact same sentence, but attributes it as a quote the second time. It natters on about correlation and causation, while attributing the old saw to "good math teachers". Its attempt to embed a hyperlink is laughably bad, with line breaks on both sides of it, leaving a comma dangling. And it manages to misspell "minister" in the second to last paragraph.
Standards are falling everywhere I guess.
If there's an answer, it's not with the education system. It's with the law.
Given that tests do not control for admission criteria (US having tierless secondary/tertiary, Russia/China having highly rigid tiering), there can be no comparison on educational systems.
They could try again when they factor that and population size out, but it will favor the US a bit too much for them.
A more likely case is that Russia & China have lax enforcement - especially on foreign targets. Another factor is the law of large numbers, something also not in the US's favor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.