“Do not worry, your vote will be counted. Even if you didn’t cast it!”

Look, if you want to cast one vote then Russian hardware can handle it just fine, but if you have to cast thousands, that needs something faster.

Komrad, I hev meny blekmarket toykens fyor sale.

What are the odds this is just a JavaScript button that goes nowhere?

href="javascript:void(0);"

Why so bloated? Just write <button>, or <input type=“submit”>

At first glance I thought the story was going to be Putin illegally voting in US midterms to give backing to Trump’s efforts to undermine them. One autocrat doing a solid for another. Trump could probably get Dell or even Tim Apple to hook up a new ‘puter for the Putin’.

John Apple, now. Bruh, I’m old…

I feel you… my first home computer was an Apple ][

He cast one vote to the Russian elections and same time a few million to upcoming American elections. And he gets to push the button as many times as he likes.

Strangely I’m reminded of that time some of the Monkrus dudes who made Adobe cracked softwares turned out to be Russian intelligience agents who ransacked devices.

Considering they don’t know about massgrave.dev to permanently activate their copy and it’s Windows 10, they probably also don’t know about extended W10 EOL updates, which means that computer likely hasn’t received a security update since October, 2025.

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

How is he online voting then?

Surprise! He’s not.

It’s “voting”, that’s why he’s projected to win with 101.2% votes

You joke but behind the Iron Curtain the dictators used to win “elections” with something like 98% of votes. “See, we have some malcontents but they’re a tiny minority.” It was all doctored of course but it’s funny that they bothered to keep it believable when everybody knew the truth, both inside the country and elsewhere.

The vote goes to himself. No need for an online detour.

He’s the man and he has the vote

Some photos of him have really awkwardly positioned computers - like no way anyone works like that. Hence why some choose to believe him to be a complete luddite.

I think most of the pictures of him “using” a computer are very much staged and not his actual setup. But they probably have that stupid setup because he doesn’t have a setup because he never uses one lol

Absolutely, that monitor isn’t even plugged in. (No, seriously, look at it!)

i’m gonna guess it was a staged photo using a hastily-prepped pc as a prop.

They don’t bother activating his PCs anymore. He always gets frustrated and throws out the Windows.

The umbrellas slow the descent for a soft landing.

Then he has a nice, relaxing cup of tea.

I don’t think they even bothered plugging it into a power source or a computer either.

They need just that vote anyway, it will count for every citizen comrade too.

Stop pretending that Russia is communist. Russia wasn’t even communist when it was the USSR, it sure as shit ain’t communist now

It sure as hell isn’t a democracy either

Why are you comparing an economic concept and a form of representation concept

Because Soviet communism, and most national implementations of communism around the world, are a combination of system of government and economic model

Because this is a thing about voting

Everybody knows it’s a dictatorship

Okay, but then we also have to stop pretending that the USA is a democracy.

It’s just as much of a distortion of the terms

Okay, but then we also have to stop pretending that the USA is a democracy.

Yes, that is long overdue.

cambridge.org/…/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

I mean I agree, but we still recognize the terms as we use them. Not their ideological definitions.

It’s a meaningless distinction in everyday useage

If Trump had that much power: he would have given himself 127% of the vote.

If a secret shadow organization of oligarchs had that much power; they wouldn’t be struggling so hard against a political party that taxes them and funds healthcare and saves millions of children abroad from starvation, they wouldn’t let idiots like Theil and Musk turn the entire population against the very concept of them, and they definitely wouldn’t have let anybody know about the Epstein Files.

Ooooh the cope is strong with this take – do people really still believe the US is a democracy?

Please keep in mind that it’s a direct response previous comment that Russia isnt communism…

You say the cope is strong with me, yet I’m just responding in kind to the person who said that.

I really don’t understand what IM supposedly coping with. This is a conversation about language and I was merely pointing out a comparison to “Russia isnt communist”

No, my bad, the cope was directed at the downvotes to your previous comment.

Ohhhhh thanks! I was confused lol

What was that whole collective farming thing they were trying at then? I know Stalin was just taking advantage of the whole thing, but Kruschev et al were definitely trying at socialism, albeit failing miserably.

Don’t think that’s what was being done here.

Okay but he didn’t say they were, the word Comrade is hundreds of years old and derived from Latin, though Marx and later the USSR and China (neither of which countries are communist) all incentivize(d) “Comrade” as it didn’t have the hierarchical connotations that Senor, Monsieur, and Mister all have being derived from titles of authority.

Lol, the funny thing is if they had any money left, they could have made a comedic/serious show-off video of him voting on like the war strategy wall sized projected computer with a clicker instead of showing him struggling to see the screen and struggling to move the mouse.

Thinking about the videos he tends to put out about himself, and that he signed off on this one, just shows it’s the best they could do to make him seem manly and powerful now.

Been a long minute since I looked at pre-built machines. That’s a Dell All-in-One. I had to look that up. I’m glad I did, I was about to make a stupid comment that it’s a Dell monitor, but no telling what PC it’s attached to.

With all the Russian piracy sites, I assume nobody in Russia actually pays for software. I figure they just haven’t gotten around to cracking that machine yet.

as it should be

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.

Red star os is a much better and safer choice for him.

Does Russia have online voting? Oof

It’s easy when you can just make up the results

Yeah, I know their voting is corrupt as hell. This kinda explains it.

A nation where Putin has no term limit and claims to have won by more than 87% is one without real voting in general, IMO.

Just like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un being unanimously elected

Plot twist: it’s not connected to the Internet. He has a button labeled “PRESS TO WIN ELECTION” installed in his dacha.

Me using unlicensed windows to jerk off for the 4th time at 3am.

We didn’t need to know that but okay!

And yet you do.

Just know that someone at one point in time jerked off to you or will jerk off to you. This is called the circle of life. For every creature there’s a creature that jerks off to it. But at the very top of the circle there’s a creature that no one jerks off to, that’s the apex masturbator.

😂

Unzips

I switched to Linux after a Windows 10 LTSC security update failed to install. It’s been great, highly reccomend. You should keep a hard drive backup, though.

If you’re on Windows 11 then your machine has a unique global identifier being sent to the sites you visit.

Yes. Thank you for interest in my privacy. I definitely don’t need Windows knowing how much prolapse porn I like to watch.

Or even worse, to tell Prolapse sites what version of Windows you use.

Jeeves: “Will it be 87% again this year, sir?”

Putin: “Maybe 93%. Maybe.”

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: github.com/dkobak/elections/tree/master

93%? Why not 108%?

Y’know I’ve often wondered that, but authoritarian propaganda seems to have a penchant for keeping its statements plausible. I mean they could take the piss and say it was 500% and it would be just as well. I’m guessing there’s some psychological benefit to be had from keeping it “real”, gives the rubble some kind of logic to cling to?

It will be 79%

Kremlin need to step up their game and use linux.

right? . Like wtf don’t they?

Why dont they use Linux so weird.

They’re inept

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. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux

hes too paranoid to use his own.

Russia is so brain drained that they couldn’t even roll their own distro if they wanted to let alone figure out how to at least obfuscate the government malware.

This can’t be the reason since they still have people like fancy bear and a lot of tools in the hardware hacking scene / piracy are russian, for example makemkv. You also don’t need no scientists to roll out linux. But I would also like to know the real reason since a lot of russian tools are also windows based which is kinda paradoxical.

Keep your enemies closer.

You don’t need to be able to build stable functional software to be a hacker. They’re kinda polar opposites

Like saying you don’t need to be a structural engineer to demolish a skyscraper. You need to be pretty well versed in computer science to be able to hack a system to any reasonable extent. If you just go ham at it and just press random buttons nothing is going to happen / you’re going to be detected.

Hackers write programmes all of the time.

Not really. Big different between programs and systems. Saying ‘good at doing teh codez’ is just one set of skills is nonsense. And being a structural engineer is not sufficient to build a skyscraper anyway. In the immortal words of Le Corbusier, they’re machines for living in. Which is why architect is a different career from structural engineer and both get involved. Your exanple undermines your own point.

To create a linux distribution under your own control you don’t even need to engineer anything new. You need to create deployment structures but the tools for repository hosting, package managers, build services, automation and pki are already there. It’s more about curating software and sometimes auditing or changing code. Someone who’s capable of reverse engineering Blu-ray player firmware should be able to learn this as well.

Edit: ‘A new distro’ is also a spectrum. It’s a big reach from creating a debian distro with some version differences to something like openwrt or asahi linux

Yeah I mean you can just reskin Debian. Depends what you’re trying to do tho’.

And why would these people want to work with the ruzi government? The pay is terrible, the risk is high and limit your future career opportunities?

Russia simply doesn’t make anything consumer facing except weapons and rockets.

How do you know the pay is terrible?

Qualified people seem to work for drug cartels and slavers. I’m certain a nation-state can provide both pay and conscience better than that.

Maybe it could be great but good devs have the privilege to avoid this risk and go work abroad. I live in thailand and I speak russian so I’m familiar with russian devs escaping russia and tbh it’s very easy these days with how easy it is to open a company in Singapore or Delaware.

Worth noting that rolling your own country wide spying distro wouldn’t be as easy as one might think given that Linux kernel dev must follow US sanctions and there is some serious work there when it comes to hiding spyware effectively for at least plausible deniability, russia is not quite North Korea just yet.

Ok interesting input. To me it seemed like working for the government in russia gives you exceptional privileges above the rest of the society and the opportunity to stay with your relatives. For the spying distro part. It doesn’t necessarily need to be linux based or based on a western distro since harmony os is also linux based and other kernels exist as well. I also thought more about the government itself and not the broad public. For the public they are already establishing their super app Max with such features.

It really doesn’t unless you’re dumb enough to buy in and play the game but Russia is basically a big mafia and you’re one bad dinner away from offering some brain dead asshole that will end you. While you can just go live on the beach in Thailand and no ine will ever bother you. People underestimate the actual brain drain that is happening. Life is just too good for skilled Russians elsewhere to even bother. This is what societal collapse looks like.

Kaspersky had, of what I’ve head, their hardened OS implementing Linux ABI (of 2.6 times). Was apparently even floating somewhere around the interwebs. Don’t know of commercial uses, but honestly there could be such amounts of money directed at solving that goal that all the Russians in Thailand combined won’t be very significant in comparison, even evaluated themselves as potential organs.

Immunity for one.

I mean like in the case of fancy bear they do work for the government. It gives you immunity to target everyone outside of russia. Look at the amount of ransomware that is operated from within russia.

a lot of russian tools are also windows based which is kinda paradoxical.

If your main target is windows it makes sense.

Working on the system your targeting gives you additional experience but I wouldn’t develop my own tools for the os I am targeting.

Fact check: Russia has at least four domestic Linux distributions (Astra, ALT, ROSA, RED), all of them perfectly functional. They feature editions complying with Russian regulations for enterprise use, and offer simpler options for personal/educational use.

Yes but that’s not what you want as a dictator.

If you’re a dictator of a heavily sanctioned country, you may consider autonomy as one of the priorities. Also, given the current relations, you can make GPL unenforceable and turn Linux into a dictator’s paradise. Take Red Star OS as an example. This is Linux, too!

Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.

While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.

You’re conflating ability to engineer and ability to launch a 140m user product.

Because Windows is spyware.

Why would they want people to have more privacy?

Linux doesn’t have to be private or secure. Just look at Ubuntu.

How do you know?

Voting doesn’t need to be secure in Russia because voting doesn’t actually matter in Russia.

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

“You can’t go wrong.” Isn’t an observation, it’s a threat.

I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.

What happened to Astra Linux :(

It exists, but damn I’d rather use any other Russian Linux distro than that

His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense. Why would he give money to Microsoft? In fact, why would you?

As for the PC - there are no Russian PCs, so he has to use something foreign. DELLs are very solid, and great for the price if you get them refurbished.

Not as solid as Lenovo, which also has considerably fewer American companies in its supply chain. But maybe they just got a good deal on a bunch of DELLs.

Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.

And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.

And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.

And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.

Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.

it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows

Instead of using Wine it uses Vodka

Or, It’s just a newly set up computer used for a quick photo op and will either go back to whoever’s desk it was taken from or put in a cupboard somewhere. That is not a desktop set up for daily use.

His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense.

No, it just shows incompetence.

pykms isn’t hard…

Or maybe they don’t care if it’s known?

there are no Russian PCs

There do exist domestic-built elbrus(custom soviet arch) and baikal(ARM-derived) -based PCs. Technically, all govt employees are required to use them as there is like a 30% limit on foreign parts, but in practice it is circumvented by padding circuits with junk thats never used. And yes, they’re lagging behind cutting edge chips by a decade and a half at this point, but its still more than enough for online voting and whatever other boomer shit putin needs.

Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.

Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.

I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.

Well, damn. That’s honestly way more impressive than I expected from Russia. Now I’ll be reading about those instead of going to sleep lol

Russia has no own processor production. ICL is one of the few Russian PC brands which uses AMD and Intel… So in fact there are no “Russian” pc’s…

But I was informed that Elbrus would be killing AMD and Intel any day now…

Agreed, but they have some amazing hacks using older architectures. They do produce motherboards and other components though so it’s still surprising they are using a dell.

Kinda reminds me of how Russia has a whole gun industry but even then they still import AR-15s, though credit where credits due the ARDA 15-2 has one of the sexiest furniture I’ve seen on an Ar-15. I want one so fucken bad.

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.

He should have used Linux

Considering that Russia has at least 4 major domestic Linux distros (Astra, Alt, ROSA, RED OS), I can only guess why they didn’t.

There are many fine soviet computers to use for pressing a button that does nothing.

I thought Putin had put a lot of people through windows; why the surprise?

Wish it would explode in his face

I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…

I’m not even kidding you, you do not even need to click the links, you can Google, “Windows 10 reg key” and it will be in the results maybe page 3 on Google.

It’s such a fucking joke.

Note Putin’s monitor isn’t even plugged in. Just, A+.

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

The fact that it’s quite easy to activate Windows without money or a valid key makes this even funnier. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and neither do the people around him

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.

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.

The part were he is using Windows at all is crazy. Imagine the Pentagon running Russian os

Doesn’t beat this show on a small local radio station in my town, that had a theme music with someone saying “audio jungle” every 20 seconds because they downloaded the demo from that site and never bothered to pay 5$ for the full version. I was selling stuff on audio jungle at that time, and had to stop on the side of the road cause I couldn’t stop laughing.

Just saying… you don’t need to activate windows. Been using an unactivated copy for years. You lose virtually nothing.

You mean like WinRAR?