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).

Comments

Their math education was superior for generations.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hackers in Russian media

[Razed By TV]

To GP: Your post is frightening and enlightening.

To anon parent: GP's comment, possibly half tongue-in-cheek, was alluding to American's being focused on powerful cars and high stakes driving, and it being reflected in movies that will accurately portray skillfully driving expensive cars. The Fast and the Furious moviegoer will not, in fact, expect the driver to shift three times while driving backwards, because there is only one gear for going backwards. (For the record, I have not seen a Fast and the Furious movie).

Likewise, GP is claiming that Russian media accurately portrays hacking because it would be insulting to Russian viewers (who are more knowledgeable about hacking) for the hacker to bang out the hack while getting a blowjob, as in Swordfish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfy5dFhw3ik).

Re:Their math education was superior for generatio

[Mashiki]

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.

Re: Consequentialism

[king neckbeard]

Are you saying that the US system doesn't produce "evil people that commit crimes and make the world worse?" Because I'm pretty sure the rest of the world disagrees.