Technology

Or it's supposed to be an insult? If it was licensed (even thru pirate means) it would look like they paid money to Microsoft.

This way, they have it and are using it without funding an American company.

It's a throw away computer. They went out and got a random shitbox from Andrei Blahblahnov at his corner computer repair shop that no one from any intelligence service would ever think to go to ahead of time.

Use the shit once, literally set it on fire in a field 30 minutes later.

It does matter, just not the way you might think. Voting in dictatorships is basically a submission ritual.

He also is not touching anything so maybe he’s using telepathy.

Based on the rumors about putin and his paranoia, I'd assume that computer is not connected to the internet lol

I was in Turkey 25 years ago. Their tram system used the Windows warning "BLING" before calling out the station.

I was there last year, and when you go to charge your tram card in the machine, everyone of them has a "This version of Windows is unathorized. Click here to buy a license" message in the bottom left of the screen.

Gotta love the Turks.

This wasn't the case before 2022, but after MS no longer officially selling licenses in Russia, it's everyone again.

But it's different, for things you can't license because of sanctions piracy is seen as normal, for other things nobody cares, but people stopped pirating.

In general, the ex-Soviet culture of not understanding copyright violations as real crime at all, period, is gone. It's a few tech-savvy people, sometimes older, and "pirate party" idealists, and communists (not all of them by far).

Those Russian piracy sites are, as a rule, banned in Russia. They mostly started 20+ years ago.

However, those doing copyright protection in Russia are mostly former pirates who legalized their business via some acquaintances. Oops. I also doubt that Aldebaran (the e-book library), for example, licensed all of the books they give for a buck from authors, and with LitRes it's also highly unlikely. There are plenty of other such Russian paid e-book libraries, movie sites and so on.

It's a common opinion in Russia that there's some western "rule of law" which, if applied to Russia, could fix it, I think it's the other way around, the main problem with Russia's society is the inferiority complexes, the "rule of law" one among them, leading people to overlook brakes and feedbacks existing in the wild to good effect, when deciding what they want "fixed" and "civilized" to be good.

That "rule of law" idea sometimes leads to following laws set by people who just don't understand what "acting in good faith" means.

EDIT: What I meant is that piracy situation in Russia is close to what's it's in the western countries now, except for sanctions. Younger people pirate, but not all of them. Older and middle age people often see piracy as something bad and shameful. In the "nobody in Russia pays for software" times it was the other way around, most people didn't understand the concept, and younger and more fashionable people had some licensed copies to boast and would tell their acquaintances that actually it's very cool to buy official copies, pay for software, give it back to authors, and that otherwise it'd be theft and those people whose names are printed here and here wouldn't really approve, to say the least.

You mean like WinRAR?

Russia has some Elbrus CPUs locally produced, but they are very outdated and very expensive, and also have a different processor architecture, so they find limited use. Apparently, they didn't bother supplying one for the President.

Putin's a stupid old boomer who can send people to the gulag.

Do you want to teach him a new OS?

p.s. they have multiple nationalised Russian Linuxes i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux

Nah it will be divisible by 5. They don't try very hard to hide the irregularities. There is a long history of oddly round results:

Pulled from here: https://github.com/dkobak/elections/tree/master

It will be 79%