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.