This thread is mostly full of jokes, and that's cool. But more seriously I'm exactly the kind of person I suppose this is meant to appeal to. I've spent the last 2-3 decades breaking into systems. Many of these systems comprise what the US calls "critical infrastructure". That's pipelines, power generation, transmission, distribution. Air traffic control systems. Government agencies.
I'm based in the US. The problem is that the US, unlike Russia, will not simply agree to allow attacks against foreign targets so long as its suits their strategic purposes. And I suppose that's for the best. In the meantime, myself and people like me simply aren't going to risk our entire careers to retaliate. I suppose if we felt strongly enough we would've joined the NSA and done this legally. I wish Ukraine the best and hope our "official" hackers are doing their best to assist or will be unleashed soon.
* It looks like there won't be a Ukrainian government to speak of in a few days.
* Manipulative behaviour has been identified on twitter and Facebook almost every day for the last few years, and it hasn't really led to much anything. The Ukrainian government can't do anything about that, if the independent banana republics of FAANG don't decide to act, nothing is gonna change.
* Likewise for patreon. It's a private Company and thus sadly, regrettably, out of reach of public scrutiny or regulation. Thoughts and prayers are free and abundant though! Besides, what is the Ukrainian government gonna do with money right now? I bet tanks and air defense systems have long lead times these days, chip shortage and all.
Sorry for the overboarding sarkasm... I guess. But these are my points.
Edit:
Collecting downvotes for that. Not surprised, but I'm not seeing any counterpoints, really. It's okay if you just need a valve to let off your frustration, have at it, but what the parent suggested seems.... pointless, sorry to be blank.
I mean, this sort of soft influence might be useful, but we ("the west") have been proving, on an ongoing basis, for multiple years now, that corporate decisions shall not and will not be questioned by our governments, that essentially an american-based platform has unbridled control over what they want to do, and that if they don't care about trolls and bots and harassment and nationalism andandand then there's not much "we" (read: the government, first of all the US government) can^Wwill do. What is the ukraininan government gonna do with more intel on russian propaganda? What's the actionable on that? Start a war with twitter?
As for the first point. Yeah... I don't see the mechanism by which any of this will slow down the physical process of soldiers marching on Kyiv. No NATO state will enter into this conflict, Putin has been pretty openly threatening with nuclear annihilation. And I would doubt that the russian soldiers will be hanging out on twitter enough to really get distracted by some well thought-through anti-propaganda measures.
And the legitimate government can operate in exile, ready to return if it becomes viable. Inusrgents fighting on their behalf could coordinate with them. I'm very out of my depth but it seems like this must be a common scenario, particularly when the displaced government is legitimate.
You are probably downvoted for - voluntarily or involuntarily (I cannot judge) - running the errands of the enemies of the free world by suggesting that it is hopeless while it is absolutely not.
(Why is it not hopeless? Russian forces suffer large losses and their morale is breaking, after all, what sane person wants to shoot their peaceful neigbours and relatives? Russians are already taking to the streets to protest the madness one day into this stupid war, who would have expected such bravery from the already suffering Russian people? Half of the European population is already looking for anything they can do to support Ukraine, ordinary Russians raising up or to make Putin and his closest people suffer. Pro Russian trolls who were previously tolerated since we wanted to hear all sides are now kept down. The list probably goes on.)
Every free human is now at war, and for now, for us it is information warfare.
So lets make sure the madmen get nothing for free. Don't run their errands.
The phrase "the free world" rubs me the wrong way. I'm obviously against what Russia is doing, any sane man would be. But as a middle eastern, the US to us has been 10x worse than Russia: They killed a million Iraqis, they killed Syrian civilians by bombing hospitals and schools. They overthrew a functional government in Libya, and they supported Syrian/Iraqi separatists (Kurds). They forcefully tried to build a military base in Lebanon. Not only that, but they also tortured, raped, and humiliated innocent Iraqis in Abou Gharib, without any major repercussions.
Just because the US did it, doesn't mean that Russia is justified or less wrong, both are wrong, and neither get to call out the other for humanitarian reasons.
Yes, UK and US foreign policy has been, and in many places around the world, is currently, ethically, morally questionable.
As a UK citizen, of voting age for 20 years now, I'm guilty as charged. I voted for Blair before the Iraq war, but like many others protested on our streets in the build up (and I haven't voted for them since).
I'm right there with you. I voted for Bush in 2000 based on his education platform; when it was clear the war was a major mistake that he wouldn't admit to, I tried to vote him out in 2004.
Voters aren’t responsible for war crimes unless war crimes were part of the election program. But blame yourself all you want. Your impotent guilt is not my problem.
If you think the US has been worse for the Syrians than Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of its cities, I cannot take the rest of your argument seriously.
The US overall has been worse to the Middle East overall than Russia is my argument. You knew that, of course, but you chose the vaguest claim in my argument, and ignored the rest which are also valid just to make yourself feel better. Which is fine, of course.
Reading this for a second time and sticking to what I said about being ashamed for many of the things the west did I'd also like to remind that Russia hasn't really done much at all in the middle East.
But I can remember stories from my childhood about Russians tying up Afghan fighters and driving over them with tanks to make an example, so again without defending drone strikes on weddings or Abu Ghraib or anything other spectacularly bad I
1.) think it wouldn't have been much better if it was the Russians who went in
2.) think the reason why the Russian government hasn't been involved in more badness in the middle east until recently has not been its peaceful nature but the fact that they have been cash strapped.
Looking at history, Russia seems like the lesser evil here. It makes far more sense to have security concerns over your backyard. Attacking the local mosque on the other side of the river, because a Muslim robber came by is not self-defense
Your first response is very respectful and much appreciated. As for this comment, you have a fair point. I don't doubt that if you ask Ukrainians right now, they will say that Russia is 10x worse than the USA, and they would be correct. Looking at the big picture, all current superpowers are genocidal power hungry tyrants, to various degrees.
While I think that’s true to some extend, I have the feeling that Afghanistan is regressing now, which means that it must’ve arguably been better than it was before. at least for some half of the population.
You can certainly question whether that was worth the cost.
If you want to be historically (more) accurate, you might want to go back to Churchill's decision to extend UK power to this region of the world, in an attempt to get the UK fleet to move from coal to oil power.
You could also look at some of the responses and choices made by the people/cultures native to this region over the years since then. Yes, "cultures" is plural.
> good people like yourself can hold them accountable
Seems to me you can't really hold the US military to account, any more (or less) than you can the US police. Maybe a win here-and-there for political PR, but overall no.
Lol, what? Remember when US Navy shot down a commercial airliner, killing some two hundred people? None of the responsible was punished for that; they got decorated instead.
I suppose then if Nazi Germany just killed Jews and other undesirables in Germany and didn't try take over Europe then we should just stand back and do nothing because otherwise millions of Germans would also die? I wonder why people here seem to consider violent dictatorships and other such governments in equal standing with democracies.
Well in a perfect world yes we would. However the world is not perfect, and most "white" people so to speak care more about white people than some Muslims in the Middle East or some Africans in Africa, that's just the reality of the situation. Hence why they're more interested in what goes on in European countries than in other ones.
Yes but at least the US had probable cause to go into Iraq. The world was pretty much behind that decision. We were attacked, civilians were attacked directly, none of that conflict would have occurred if Iraq or neighboring countries stopped their terrorism.
The world was not 100% behind the US invasion of Iraq, or even 20%. The US had the world's support, after 9/11, to go into Afghanistan. The US was emboldened by that and attacked Iraq with very little global support, for reasons unrelated to the 9/11 attack.
Uhuh, isn't any different from calling Ukraine fiction, that it basically never existed, everyone is neonazi. Annexing Crimea, East of country and then attacking under deluaion claims.
I would question if you were alive at the time then because the world basically thought our evidence was bullshit to go into Iraq but we went in anyway and the evidence turned out to be bullshit.
Assad and Putin intentionally bombed hospitals in Syria
Not the US. Maybe they did some time unintentionally, but with Putin it was part of his plans.
> they supported [the] Kurds
Of course, the Kurds and the US and Iraq were fighting together against Daesh (the so called Islamic State).
You're giving the impression that you like Assad, Putin, Erdagon, possibly Daesh as well. What kind of person are you, I start wondering.
Agreed that the US has done lots of bad things in the middle east though. (Eg helping the Talibans climb to power, supporting Saddam Hussein for quite long etc)
USA unsupervised services created Daesh, and supplied most of its weapons. This was done to destabilize Assad, and of course to enrich the weapons manufacturers. The idea that Assad and Daesh were ever allies is bizarre.
It is if you look at the state of Libya today. They overthrew Ghadafi for the sole reason of him being anti-Imperialist, killing and ruining the lives of millions in the process.
I'd like (or hate, actually) to see what would happen to the US if a foreign power was able to fund a terrorist militia and overthrow their government. You have too much faith in the morals of humans who don't have a strong leadership that can hold them accountable.
Obviously that's an important point, but OP's assertion has more to do with the cultural and practical history playing a role in the aftermath of a government falling. The US has been at relative peace internally for 150 years and has a relatively strong bent towards republican government. That's not something that can be quickly undone. The government "falling" in some countries is as simple as a particular leader being eliminated. In the US a leader being permanently removed from power on a regular cadence is not only normal but required. If someone came in and eliminated the current president (and his cabinet), the most likely outcome is we would just elect another. The second most likely is we would fracture into sub-nations / states, but still elect another. I don't see the scenario where we all start trying to kill one another -- there's very little difference between people across the US and most of us have family on both sides of the political spectrum / physical location.
The difference is the voters of the U.S. punished the presidents who did those things with huge political defeats that have now made most oversea invasions and hawkishness very unpopular political positions at the moment. Russians have a much tougher road to hoe to do the same thing, but it needs to be done for the moral reasons you lay out here.
> no sane person wants to shoot their peaceful neighbors and relatives
and this is the case for all Russians even most of the ones in the army in Ukraine, right now. People do not want war. Period. For a human being to go to war, he/she needs to be heavily indoctrinated to the point of partially losing is normal references. Even today, with heavily indoctrinated armies, only a small subset of the forces are effectively shooting bullets.
War is decided by crazy leaders (and I am polite) far away from the lines.
Luckily this also favours the defending side somewhat I hope:
From listening to people who grew up with the veterans here in Norway I've learned that:
- Germans were told they came here to protect us against the British so they would - in the beginning of the war - shoot to suppress, not to kill. I guess Russian soldiers coming into Ukraine has been tricked to believe the "peace keeping" nonsense too and had a rude awakening.
- Norwegians however were already mad and shot to kill. I guess this holds true for Ukrainians too. This is natural and we've seen it in Afghanistan, Iraq etc too I think.
- German soldiers would cryingly admit to POWs already at the start of the war that they were absolutely not voluntarily there, they'd just be shot if they refused.
>German soldiers would cryingly admit to POWs already at the start of the war that they were absolutely not voluntarily there, they'd just be shot if they refused
No shit they weren't there voluntarily, no sane people want to go to their death, but those were the rules for mandatory conscription for them back then.
Even today some European countries still have mandatory conscription, and while they won't shoot you for refusal, if you don't show up for conscription, military police will come to your house and arrest you, and if you run away, an arrest warrant will be issues on your name.
So yeah, you have to do your mandatory service, even if you don't want to.
Ironically given the comment you replied to, Norway is one of them. I had military police trying to reach me the last few weeks before I moved to the UK to try to hand deliver a conscription notice as a necessary step before charging me if I again failed to show up (I'd ignored several prior notices).
I didn't leave because of that, but I did delight I telling them I was beyond their reach. Finally picked up the phone the very day I left.
My dad and uncle both served 3-4 months in prison for refusing as a matter of principle, and my intent was to do so too until we decided to move our startup at the time to London.
Of course the main reason for that conscription was the Soviet Union/Russia. It's gotten very lenient since I left in 2000, as the size of the Norwegian military has been scaled back to the point they only need a small portion of potential recruits.
In Austria and Switzerland military service is also compulsory, but not really because of defense (Austrian military is a joke if push came to shove), but because it's an vast source of free labor for the state.
Unless you decide to go full career in the military, once you're done with the month long boot camp, if there's no war, national crisis or natural disaster that will get the grunts mobilized, the rest of the 5 months of service, are spent by the recruits dicking around on the taxpayers' money, doing useless busywork around the garrison.
And there's almost no way to avoid it unless you suffer from a severe physical or mental illness making you unsuitable for service, as even after you get out of prison for refusal, you'll be drafted back in.
PS: funny that you moved from Norway to London as many Brits I've met look up to Norway as a role model, so I'm really interest in your story
> PS: funny that you moved from Norway to London as many brits I've met look up to Norway as a role model
If you're a lower earner, quality of life in Norway is much better, but if you're a higher earner, London is great. And at the time funding in Norway was tricky. But, yeah, I look on British politics with great bemusement and a some sadness - so many lost opportunities.
My grandfather on my dads side refused military and got away with prison.
My grandfather on ny mothers side served and helped hold the nazis back for a few days in his home country and maybe helped some people get away. He later had to surrender and spent a short time in a POW camp before being released.
I respect both very much but I decided to do as my dad and serve.
It absolutely felt like the right thing to do for me.
I absolutely think there are situations where the right choice is to serve and I don't have an issue with people choosing to do so.
My main objection was not with the service in itself, but with it being compulsory under threat of prison. Of course today the "compulsory" nature of it is mostly a charade - if you want out it's trivial.
I'd sit in a jail cell before I got drafted into an unjust war. Doesn't seem like a hard decision to me. Now if you're repelling aggressive invaders, that's a different story.
FWIW going abroad has so far always been voluntary for drafted soldiers in most (all?) NATO countries as long as article 5 is not invoked.
I shyed away from education / officer training because I felt the risk of being sent on peace keeping to the middle east, but 20 years later I see I could safely have done it.
"what sane person wants to shoot their peaceful neigbours and relatives?"
Apparently ethnic Russians were being killed in Ukraine (or they have been the last 8 years, but more serious shelling started on February 17, 2022) and that is why Russia invaded.
Luckily Russia had anticipated the increased shelling months before and therefore just happened to have 180000 soldiers surrounding Ukraine before this increased shelling happened right?
Wow, I guess it's hat-eating time. Glad to see they are holding up much better than I anticipated. I mean, not surprising that I'd be way off-base, given that I know jack shit about all of this.
I'm guessing you're getting downvoted for aggresive tone.
But you are right that social media networks are strong enablers of evil and helpers to enemies of freedom and democracy. Facebook and Twitter could easily stop (almost) all the misinformation and propaganda, but they don't because it makes them money.
I think we confuse though doing data science on historic data to spot these manipulative communities vs doing that same data science in near real time to have any real counter effect on it.
I really doubt they could stop propaganda before the message is sent without deleting a ton of accounts that are false positives.
> What you consider misinformation and propaganda I may consider valuable vantage points.
If they are actual misinformation and propaganda and you are unwilling to even admit existence of that category, then you yourself are threat to freedom - of speech or otherwise.
> I also should point that any defense of the freedom of speech also defends freedom of misinformation and propaganda.
Nah. Defenders of free speech not being willing to criticize misinformation and propaganda, calling those "valuable vantage points" and being quick to criticize and attempt to shut up criticism of those is what is dangerous for free speech.
Pointing out misinformation and propaganda as such is a good thing.
I agree, drowning out normal voices in fake news and bots is as much censorship as banning them outright - it is just a form of censorship that (some) free speech advocates are complicit with.
But the biggest issue in my mind is that fake news, misinformation and bot bullying makes social media money, so they are never going to stop it.
And I agree that this is exactly the problem - winners are who have more energy and opportunity to speak. "Drowning the voices" as you pointed out.
But, how to determine which voice is normal?
Per your suspicion that fake news and misinformation make money, fact checking is alleged to make money to Facebook and fact-checking Facebook affiliates. The links on fact checking materials divert viewers from one arrticles to other and increase clicks and retention at Facebook.
Yes, you are right again - misinformation may bring money to FB, at the very least, when FB tries to fight it. I guess it is a nature of capitalism, to try to make money out of everything.
> No NATO state will enter into this conflict, Putin has been pretty openly threatening with nuclear annihilation
This basically means 2 things:
1. NATO is dead.
2. Putin is free to do whatever he wants wherever he chooses.
"Ukraine made the decision to completely denuclearize. In exchange, the U.S., the U.K. and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum." [0]
We can see this security guarantee in action right now. Same will happen with NATO's mutual defense guarantee.
I don’t know how that means NATO is dead. Ukraine is (unfortunately for them at this moment) not a part of NATO, so the response is different. If Russia continues and invades Lithuania, etc, the rest of the countries are obligated to defend it.
Ukraine VPNs are probably still up - in which case, another way you could serve is by doing analysis and writing documentation on Russia's cyberattack methods, where they come from, patterns in their design, but most importantly, how they may best be prevented or reduced in their effectiveness.
Documenting the behavior and collecting intelligence is a difficult skill and intensely valuable even if it is not direct retaliation.
I have a limited understanding of large scale networking. Can you explain how using a vpn to an endpoint in the Ukraine allows someone to observe behaviour?
I imagine if you are on an isp or IX backbone you could observe flows of packets. But how do you do that from a vpn?
Or should they break in to target systems first, shore up the defences, and then document who else tries to break in?
I wonder if Reuters is trying to create a cyber war much like the BBC has been blasted by some in the UK for sparking Xmas panic buying and the fuel crisis.
So let me get this straight, on 27th September it’s the BbC causing panic, despite every petrol forecourt in the country having the print press on display showing these headlines
The BBC broke the news first. Today's media are quite rapid and who knows what's been discussed down the pub the night before.
When looking at the 30-40min delays in filling in which was largely concentrated in cities, how many people sat queueing for fuel were considering an electric car? And then those filling up were limited to £20 or £30 of fuel so they experienced the same range anxiety as someone with an electric car.
Sometimes its not the message that is important, its the resulting changes that are more important. So the fuel crisis created an uptick in electric vehicle sales.
Its not just Govt discounts for new tech like solar cells that cause a change in behaviour, other entities can also take advantage of situations, or just be manipulated into reporting it.
> I'm exactly the kind of person I suppose this is meant to appeal to.
Quote from the article:
> "Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country," the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.
If you're not Ukrainian, I guess the request is not aimed at you. Probably exactly for the reasons you mention. And if you were, the request is to fill in the form, not to go rogue.
Edit: @dang maybe change the title to "[...] calls on its hacker underground [...]" to make this a bit more clear?
I am surprised this is the top comment. Not that it's not well argued but what seems to imply of the reading by most of the current situation.
The joke of sanctions implemented by the EU and the US, and they are a joke, since EU continues to import gas from Russia, and SWIFT use continues by the Russian Federation, is a symptom of the same attitude seen on many Ukraine residents just 48 hours ago.
A kind of cognitive disconnect between the obvious war coming your way, and a refusal to accept it, until it is at your door.
You have a ex-president of the United States openly praising the Russian president on the media, and also US TV networks openly doing the treasonous job of promoting Russian views in the US. If the Russian army quickly overtakes Ukraine you have Russian troops staring across the border to Polish troops. Some of the small countries that are now members of NATO, still have small pockets of Russian speaking communities. You think Russia will not claim they are also being discriminated and need another peace keeping operation?
In case of a conflict between Russia and a NATO member, it's mushroom clouds we are looking into. So I find your legalistic concerns incredibly detached from the seriousness of the current situation.
> sanctions implemented by the EU and the US, and they are a joke, since EU continues to import gas from Russia
Arguably, gas is of military value, so maybe it's more advantageous to allow Russia to have the money and have the gas than the other way around. Depends on if the money goes towards other armaments - but I'm sure Russia has plenty of those in any case.
That said, why wouldn't Russia stop selling? Hmmm.
> ex-president of the United States openly praising the Russian president on the media
> US TV networks openly doing the treasonous job of promoting Russian views in the US
Can you clarify, I feel there might be a dubious definition of 'praising' and 'promoting' at play here.
That Op-ed is shocking TBH, is discredits Flynn as an advisor. However I think you still need more to back up the accusation of Flynn, let alone Trump, being a (compromised) Russian asset. There seemed to be a lot of politicking around his prosecution, for example (complicated by the fact that these kind of coercive plea-deal threats are actually common in the US). Also, The headline is partially (but not entirely) manipulative in describing the op-ed as "Support For Russia" - it sound like a whole lot of shilling, esp the stuff justifying Russian opposition to NATO and border fortification, but it's not wholly supporting it either; the fact they cram the incitement into the headline shows what message they are trying to convey.
But I think the other stuff (Flynn in Trump admin) is old-news; Biden administration had also talked of better diplomatic ties with Russia recently, before the invasion started. Dems have been somewhat more pro-China than Trump also, and I'm somewhat hesitant to distinguish being "pro-China" vs "pro-Russia"; both are strong mutual allies, at least in backing each other up both in terms of resources and PR.
Also, could you respond in full e.g. "Flynn was pardoned by Trump, meaning that..." so I don't have to guess what you mean.
EDIT: ok it was done, thanks. Although I'd add he was caught not disclosing talking to an ambassador (he is afaik allowed to do so), and then accused of lying about it to the FBI.
Per my post, there was a lot of politicking in that incitement that by itself would have justified the pardon.
TBH, I just don't know - which is what I mean by "politicking"; The more I read the more I feel I'm either missing something, or fed mis-information or a skewed perspective.
There was a whole thing about altered or manipulated notes during the Flynn incitement - yet Wikipedia page for Flynn barely mentions it, or McCabe, and McCabe's page mention his firing (which he says was based on an attempt to discredit him) but barely mentions Flynn..
Was that important? Was the DOJ justified in dropping charges, or was Barr corrupt? Was the Pardon justified given the FBIs shady tactics (although shady tactics might be their modus-operandi..), or not? Or maybe the pardon was more motivated by Flynn being "inner-circle" than anything FBI or Russia based. I just don't know.
What politicking there is, on a active and retired US military travelling to Russian since 2013, having high level contacts with the Russian government, and then lying about it, to its own country Law enforcement?
Again, these characterisations are easy. They are made on both sides. I can construct a similar line about the FBI incitement, casually throwing in disputed or hard-to-verify facts.
I'd pick you up on "lying about it" - I consider the FBI to be heavily politically active, esp in the Trump/Comey times, so describing them as "law enforcement" in these situations is misleading.
I added detail to my previous comment, but I don't really trust the outcome of an incitement where the FBI held all the cards - you get the same thing when people accept one-sided plea deals from the police - "they even admitted they did it".
There's a whole lot of context around this. For example, you can characterise the FBI as simply "Law enforcement", but you could characterise the DOJ-under-Barr the same. If you have reason to doubt/discredit the DOJ, them you should equally allow for the same wrt the FBI-under-Comey.
In 2015 Flynn was on RT, a Russian state-controlled international television network, funded by the federal tax budget of the Russian government. He advocated
for the US foreign policy actions across the world to work closely with Russia.
He was paid $45,000 for his appearance, but again "forgot" to report that income. What is the US bar for the word "treasonous"?
That’s a good point. I visited Latvia a few years ago and was struck by how large a section of society there identifies as Russian, to the extent that in some places you were more likely to hear people speaking Russian than Latvian.
Poland would be a more difficult target to justify than the Baltics; only 0.1% of Poles speak Russian; 30% of Latvians are native Russian speakers. I could see Putin going there next.
>An attack on any NATO member requires a response by NATO.
I am not, even slightly, sure that this is the case anymore. Economic sanctions is as far as anyone is willing to go anymore it seems - and half-assed ones at that.
I absolutely cannot see the US, England, or any other NATO countries sending people to die in Latvia. There just is zero stomach for that in most of the world.
And people like Putin know that, is the problem, I think.
That is exactly why the situation is so dangerous. If there is even a hint that the US and the whole of NATO will not come in strong, then yes there is the possibility that he could go further.
There is another very dangerous scenario that has not been considered. A Russian inspired coup in one of the existing NATO countries with a not so small large Russian speaking population. That government then saying they want to leave NATO.
On another side, it's not even mentioned that in the middle of the war action in Ukraine, nobody seems to have noticed Putin just annexed another country, Byelorussia. The Russian troops were supposed to leave at the end of their 3 week long exercises, but they are now leaving...never.
> On another side, it's not even mentioned that in the middle of the war action in Ukraine, nobody seems to have noticed Putin just annexed another country, Byelorussia. The Russian troops were supposed to leave at the end of their 3 week long exercises, but they are now leaving...never.
Belorussia has been a Russian puppet since the collapse of the USSR, nobody's noticed it because nothing has changed.
True, but weeks ago their dictator was still trying to maintain the farse that the Russian troops were only present for exercises and would leave then. And its rumored the "referendum" planned for 3 days from now will settle it.
I'm not an expert, but sounds to me that Germany halting the nord stream pipeline, influenced Putin to go over the already under russian controlled area. I ask myself if removing Russia from SWIFT wouldn't make Putin just keep rolling over until the German border. In another hand, from the strategic point of view, Europe should have one more economical pressure option in case Russia doesn't stop in Kiew, and the SWIFT is this last option before War.
Yes and No. For Putin, the control and Donetsk and Luhansk was already planned. Everyone in the intelligence scene could note some details like: The Russian Tanks with extra fuel tank and the national guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_Russia presence in the region. What came next, IMO, was decided after the Nord Stream 2 halting. Russia will be now in the Polish border and therefore it gets more power in the negotiation table.
> Not sure what you mean by SWIFT being the last option before war, war is happening right now.
The War isn't happening for NATO. NATO as we all know won't do anything regarding the Ukraine invasion. If Russia starts to bulk troops on the Polish border - or any other NATO member, EU will try to solve it diplomatically using the SWIFT option before really going to War.
He means its the last card the west can play short of war. If they unleash all of their cards now they have no chance at dealing with Putin in the next few days. As small as the hope sounds, its possible Ukraine could resist enough and possibly hold some ground, and Putin could be convinced to stop his advance at some point with the threat of swift being revoked.
Our cards won't change in the next few days. If playing them now or a few days ago wouldn't have stopped Putin, why do you think those same cards would work better once Putin has gone even further and owns Kyiv?
I mean, it's probably legal for you to fill out the application as a US citizen, as the Ukrainians are also asking for defensive help. If you have or want a US security clearance there may be issues in helping a foreign power, but absent that you can probably stay on the right side of the line.
Obviously, you'd want a real legal opinion.
I do wonder at what point the US just declares Russian computer systems beyond the protection of US law. At some point, that happens, right?
I remeber a video from the grugq where he said he has a "friend" who pirated Iran targets directly from US IPs because he knew he had no chance of being extraded.
Defending an ally from an enemy is not something the US government punishes people for. If you want to help the people of Ukraine then #standwithukraine.
This isn't true. You can certainly be prosecuted for committing crimes against enemies of the state. There's a reason we distinguish between law enforcement officials and civilians. Blur that line and things can get nasty.
Russia is a pariah amongst the world for their invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian American veterans flying to Poland to defend Ukraine right now are also breaking US law, but there will not be any legal consequences for their courage and bravery.
For another country to go after US citizens, the country has to first file paperwork in US federal court, and then, have a judge care enough to proceed.
What drugs are you on to think Russia has any standing in US court regarding _anything_ that happens in Ukraine?
Yes, exactly. And some of us have been subject to the whims of prosecutors in the past. It's relatively easy to say that you trust the US to do what is right compared to Russia, it's much harder to put your faith and your future in the hands of any government.
Exactly. Prosecutors goals are to prosecute. Even if they don't see the prosecution through to the end because it becomes politically unfavorable, you might still sit in pre-trial detention for a decade before they drop the charges.
Note that Biden just worked hard, and, it seems, effectively, to round up Russian hackers targeting US infra after the pipeline hack. I doubt he wants to undo this progress.
The US does not currently have a legal permission to be in Ukraine. Ukraine does not have a defense agreement with the US that could land troops, Ukraine is not a NATO member, so forth. Right now, for the US to cyberattack Russia would be a direct act of war and quite literally cause the Cold War to become the Hot War.
For this reason, just like how our troops are not in Ukraine but in surrounding countries watching, our NSA hackers are most likely standing down as well, as tragic as it may be.
The US and Russia agreed to defend Ukraine after Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The Russians are violating this agreement today, and the US would be following it to defend Ukraine from Russia’s invasion.
When the Budapest Memorandum was signed, having one of the defenders be the invaders was not expected.
As a result, even if that binding is still in power, is it worth defending Ukraine by going to war against Russia? That would literally start World War III. Letting Ukraine fall is terrible, awful, painful - but it's better than WWIII.
There are plenty of independent clandestine attackers from the US and they interact with the US government through DISA, which might confuse you if you take their name literally. The government is looking the other way and isn't looking or trying to bring their domestic hackers to justice.
Not that anonymity goes a very long way, but I can vouch for USG not giving a shit.
I used to work for an anti-phishing firm that you’ve likely never heard of. We routinely disrupted and dismantled phishing campaigns and bot networks being used by Russian crime networks as well as suspected IRGC (those folks have to get currency somewhere and importing an crack cocaine is apparently not their style)
Our malware research and SOC folks were pretty much all former Feds or Military Intelligence. They would routinely counter-hack servers we couldn’t take-down through legitimate means. While it was most certainly a “let’s not discuss this in an email” it was understand and briefed by our legal department that it was a “grey area” and that the USG would never even bother us as we were hitting adversarial nations anyway.
If you’re gonna play hackerman for UA, just do it smart.
Based in the US, which law prevents you from committing cyber attacks in Russia? Genuinely curious how you would be prosecuted and how this would cause you to risk your entire career.
So in general (i.e. not specific to cyber), and even under the condition that Congress had declared war on Russia, it is illegal for civilians to engage in acts which harm the enemy. Only the military is allowed to attack.
read up on "unlawful combatant" and "irregular combatant"
Now if look more specifically at cyber, then there are laws such as
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
The Stored Communications Act (SCA)
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)
The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA)
which define certain activities as criminal. If a person is on US soil and engaging in activities described in these laws, they may be in violation of criminal law. The location of the victim has little to do with it, it is location of the actor.
By analogy, if A does crime to B, it isn't B who prosecutes, it is the appropriate governmental organization.
Informative, but these seem hazy.
What is soil in the cyber world?
Or is it the passport "A" is carrying?
As many have indicated, unlikely anyone in the west will prosecute?
There's a seemingly endless collection of crimes you could be charged with if you're hacking a foreign country from inside the US. From wire fraud to conspiracy and everything in-between. A federal charge of conspiracy carries a mandatory minimum of 5 years in jail.
I can say that I know people who are much less skilled than you and also less ethic, that are hacking into any low hanging fruit that they can and selling a shell (access) to those systems to FSB. I imagine that Ukraine would have a similar program to pay for such kind of access on Russia infrastructure or government systems.
Since there is no way to contact you directly. I am interested in learning how to pen test etc. Do you have a recommended path to take? I'm lacking a good starting point.
I take it you hack into critical infrastructure systems legally, as part of security audits and such? After all if you were doing it illegally, and therefore are clearly fine doing illegal hacking, claiming that you won't risk hacking Russia because it might be illegal would seem like a weird defence to make.
I think it's reasonable to assume that for at least the next few months, you have a strange form of "diplomatic immunity" for attacks in Russia. No jury in the US would convict you, even in the unlikely event someone wanted to prosecute (which would be political suicide here).
Reminder to people who didn't grow up in the US: Americans are by and large a bloodthirsty, vindictive lot and pay an astounding amount of attention to who their friends are. This is sometimes a force for evil, sometimes a force for good, but it is what it is.
It never ceases to amuse me how ignorant I am in my comments despite my attempts at being smart, wise and fair.
Of course you are right.
That said, this invasion is still a crime and I am utterly fed up by Russian actions in neighboring states, their constant lying, especially after MH17 was shot down, getting more or less away with state sponsored cheating in sports, simulating bombing raids against Swedish power plants etc. We should have seen this coming a long time ago.
(In my defense however, note that from the very start of this, even before the protests in Russia were known to me I think I have not said a bad word about the Russian people, barely a bad word about the men in boots and only after they started aggression and mostly - I hope - just about the leadership.)
>> They've also suffered a lot to end two world wars that they didn't start.
> This is even more true of the Russians
No, it is not. The First World War was started because Russia backed up Serbia's refusal of Austria's ultimatum after a Serbian operation assassinated Austria's crown prince (and France & the UK backed up Russia, while Germany backed up Austria, and the whole powder keg blew up). The Second World War started because of the German invasion of Poland — and who else invaded Poland sixteen days later? The Soviet Union, which had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with its supplementary German-Soviet Frontier Treaty. Moreover, modern-day Poland is really an amalgamation of western Poland and what used to be eastern Germany: the Soviet Union kept about one third of what had been Poland.
In context, I don't think there are actually talking about the American populace, but those "in power" who may seek, or be able, to harm you, aka - agents of the state.
Not that I would ever apply my considerable talents to this purpose, but seriously, who from the west would ever go to Russia in the next few years without family ties causing one to do so. I don’t think that is a tangible consequence for most of us capable of waging a cyber security attack in a nation state.
A sort of side comment, but I absolutely despise this type of thinking.
"before you cause someone to go to jail"
If you take legal advice from pseudo anonymous users on aggregate websites you deserve to go to jail. Even in writing that, the users did not "cause" anyone to go to jail; the moron reading and acting on that comment did. Have some respect for individuality mate.
I looked at your recent comments - in almost every one of them (!) you are insulting, mocking, being a total jerk to people on here. Please stop doing that. You will be banned very soon if you keep that up. Read the guidelines - most of your comments break more than a few. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Oh come on man. If being a dumbarse and engaging in dangerous behaviour was a jailable offence, then we'd need to arrest every single male under the age of 21.
(To any dumbarses reading this comment, launching cyberattacks against adversarial nation states will land you in prison if you're lucky, a body bag if you're not)
I guarantee you there are American veterans who are flying right now to Europe with the intention of making their way to Ukraine to help on the ground -- there were crazy fucks doing this in Syria a few years ago.
I'm not trying to talk anyone out of anything. I'm just explaining how many people in my industry see this request. It's noble if some want to risk their livelihoods and supporting their families to help support the effort. Not all of us can make that sacrifice.
I wish there was another option. I wish people in Ukraine weren't suffering.
Bur remember that by treaty US and UK (and Russia of course) promised to defend Ukraine in exchange of their nukes. At least if they try to go after you, you can still argue that you were trying to comply to a treaty that both countries have decided to ignore.
Yeah: my city signing an MOU saying they will enforce parking restrictions doesn't mean I have the OK to camp out on the street and write my own tickets.
In criminal law, incitement is the encouragement of another person to commit a crime. Depending on the jurisdiction, some or all types of incitement may be illegal. Where illegal, it is known as an inchoate offense, where harm is intended but may or may not have actually occurred.
Am not from the US but this seems very risky. Is there someone at the government who can clarify such guarantees. Am also curious what are the high level logistics to carry out something like this. Do you seek an untraceable route to Ukarine from US ? Do you unleash a worm like Stuxnet that will eventually cripple all Russian cyber attack infra ?
The idea is that a jury is allowed to make its decision without any outside interference. A jury can acquit a person even it they think the person is guilty. Thus a jury could give you a fee pass on hacking Russian systems, but you'd be relying on them to realise that and then think the moral reasons for acquittal out weigh the legal reasons for conviction.
Obviously courts don't like jury nullification try to prevent it, without harming a juries independence.
So possibly not a good idea to rely on jury nullification as your get out of jail free card.
It’s also not necessarily a legal strategy even as a Hail Mary.
California’s state Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that jury nullification is not a valid decision… and my understanding is if the outcome case can be attributed to “jury nullification” (i.e. could be as obvious as the defense suggesting it as an avenue to the jury, which ironically itself is legal, or as technical as the jury refusing to consider or explicitly refusing a piece of evidence that is entered in the record— think a moral objection to the law, or “evidence undeniably shows the defendant left the scene at 7pm, but we the jury contend it was 6pm”) it legally would be considered a mistrial and allowed to be re-litigated— and the sole person who has the power to attribute something to jury nullification and/or declare mistrial? The judge.
There is no guarantee. There is really no one that could even make such a guarantee. Opinions of DOJ change with administrations. The president could issue a pardon after the fact. Congress could make a law. Perhaps the executive could find some loophole to deputize people into US Cybercom but that would likely make them a lawful combatants which has other entanglements.
1: Small website with simple JS to ddos a list of russian gov and propaganda websites. Works anywhere where those are not blocked (e.g. Ukraine). Link - https://stop-russian-desinformation.near.page/
Windows: Right click on desktop, add new shortcut, Add the target as "[PATH_TO_CHROME]\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --disable-gpu --user-data-dir=~/chromeTemp , Click OK.
OSX: open -n -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --args --user-data-dir="/tmp/chrome_dev_test" --disable-web-security ,
Linux: google-chrome --disable-web-security
It's "not escalating the situation further" for the last few decades that's allowed this to happen. A good strong dose of escalation in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea might have nipped this in the bud. If we avoid escalating now, Taiwan is next.
The cost of inaction has gone up, and up, and up. Now the Ukrainian people are paying that price in blood and subjugation. How much higher should we allow it to go?
DDOS-ing a website is nonviolent. Severe, crippling economic sanctions are nonviolent. We should wage all-out economic war and accept the costs, which will be real and painful. Gandhi and other pacifist leaders didn't advocate inaction, he advocated forceful and determined nonviolent action that caused as much inconvenience and difficulty for his opponents as possible. We should at least be doing that, surely?
Iraq was a sovereign country. My point is that it is ok for "us" to invade sovereign countries for "reasons" but not for "them" for any reason. It is hypocritical.
That's what I mean. I can see you are frustrated by downvotes and suspect this big anti-Russian conspiracy - but did it occur to you that people would respond differently if you actually read what threads are about rather than just spamming your talking points everywhere? Case in point: here, we talked about whether DDoSing is an escalation to an ongoing invasion or not.
I'm talking about dehumanization, about "one standards for us vs. another standards for them"
It is so ingrained that people like you, don't see anything wrong with it.
P.S. I don't care about downvotes. I'm surprised the account is not shadow banned.
See, and people like you put words in other people’s mouths, are unable to understand and follow a conversation and then conclude that the whole world is against them. But that’s not a problem because they just want to hear themselves. It’s just annoying for everybody else.
Direct quote, nobody puts anything in other peoples' mouths: «Russians are pure terrorist nation. They have larges Russian IT-community called Habr (Habrahabr) and most of IT Engineers started supporting invasion and killing innocent children because "west started blocking IT services for us".» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30641888
Russian 'news' is claiming Ukrainian Nazis are massacring ethnic Russians. They don't need a legitimate excuse.
Anyway, most Russians probably thought this was all bluster by the West and Russia wasn't going in. They need to know they're engaged in an actual war.
this. Not sure why this comment is downvoted. For anyone not speaking Russian, just head to Google News (with Chrome), pick the Russian news and translate into English and read the headlines (or if you're too lazy open this URL under Chrome https://news.google.com/topstories?hl=ru&gl=RU&ceid=RU:ru).
The comment above is a pretty accurate picture: protecting Ukrainian civilians, soldiers defecting to Russian side without even a fight, military generals telling success stories of their daily peace keeping operations and other face palming tales such as indeed a repeated idea that they fight against nazis to protect motherland under threat from evil NATO and the Americans.
I mean, do you deny that the Ukrainian army has been shelling civilians in the separatist regions? A fellow countryman moved there since no one of the press bothered to report over the years and she confirmed it. And even apart from that, it's not like reports from the OSCE and UN aren't available.
Furthermore, considering that the Ukrainian government enacted language and racial laws (can be easily looked up) and employs right-wing extremist military groups like the Azov Battalion as National Guard...it should give you something to think about. But well, most just blindly consume US(-controlled) media without doing some basic fact-checking even, let alone engage in critical thinking.
There is a serious issue with neo-nazi's in Ukraine who the U.S. supports because they are anti-russia. (I feel like I am living during the beginning of the Iraq war all over again.)
Depends on which country you are from. There wasn't exactly reporting from it (at best only at the beginning) here which is why she moved there. Additionally, now the general tenor is that "Putin" invaded Ukraine basically without any reason even though there were several said by him. He even warned the Ukraine of consequences should they continue with the aggression when Russia formally acknowledged the separatist regions. In response, the Ukraine even increased the aggression (shelling etc).
You mean like paying social benefits (pensions etc)? Possibly. After all, Ukraine was supposed to do that according to Minsk II but they violated the agreement in more than enough points. Personally, I see the NATO sending weapons and establishing bases...ah, they don't call them "bases" but "mission" instead to train military and the like as destabilizing factors.
(Then there is also the interesting issue of American biolabs in Ukraine (and other countries bordering Russia). There were reports of what the US does there but we will see whether the Russians can still find anything or whether it's too late.)
Anyway, it's pretty much already over and the West won. Putin/Russia got painted as the baddies + more sanctions (e.g. Nord Stream II suspended, so now the US can sell their shitty, overpriced fracking stuff to the EU). The Ukraine got screwed over/played by the West but they had already achieved a lot of goals (getting access to all the rich soil + controlling it for example as well as dividing brothers and sisters by supporting nationalists to the point where we now have those language/racial laws). But hey, apparently a lot of Western people support such a government. "Slava Ukraini/Heil Ukraine", as they say.
I love that HN has all sorts. To read a pro-dictator, pro-invasion, pro-authoritarianism argument is still a surprise, but at least it's something new to read.
> Really, how much defensive value does this have for Ukraine?
No defensive or tactical advantage whatsoever.
It just means that they have nothing to fight with. Internet field marshals that are doing last minute squeaking towards Russia. They are at best reactionary attacks which are predictable and easily mitigated against.
It is the job of the Russian people to stand up and refuse to participate in this conflict. Anything that makes their lives harder so they are more likely to do that, as opposed to just sitting around on their ass, is a good thing. The Russians need to band together and topple their dictator state, they are acting unethically and there needs to be a groundswell of support to oust someone like Putin. Simple democracy will not work there to change things like it could in the U.S. (voters were able to get rid of Bush for being a war monger).
Maybe they're giving the US credit for not giving Bush more terms than he was legally allowed to serve, which is more than you can say for Russia/Putin.
Yes. It is. What's your point? If the truckers of Canada try to shut down the country over a vaccine mandate, seems the Russians should consider this a reason to do their best to shut down Russia.
My point is _look how well it went for them in an incredibly non authoritarian regime_. Look how effectively they changed policy! Look how little personal cost it has had!
People like to act as though they'd be the person in the crowd who would rush a lone gunman first. Sure - you'll die, but the group will get the gunman and everything will be better. They definitely love to proclaim that some other bugger in that situation should be willing to take the bullet.
I, personally, hope I never have to make the decision between dying doing the right thing and living doing the easy thing. I've no intention of judging those who do.
Yeah but it was a very small minority that were protesting. Why? Because they were protesting a vaccine mandate which isn't literal evil. Every Russian that isn't a piece of shit should be protesting this and shutting down the entire country.
Please see my other comment in this thread. Either there is some hypocrisy involved or you just called basically everyone here (probably including yourself) a "piece of shit" for not shutting down the USA during its various invasions in the last 20 years.
Just because a country claims to represent you, you don't have the moral obligation to oppose it while risking your personal wellbeing.
I am still learning how to code certain things in JavaScript, I'll take a look on the site to see how this is implemented and will record a few weeks of response times so I can analyze the variance.
Windows:
Right click on desktop, add new shortcut,
Add the target as "[PATH_TO_CHROME]\chrome.exe" --disable-web-security --disable-gpu --user-data-dir=~/chromeTemp ,
Click OK.
OSX: open -n -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --args --user-data-dir="/tmp/chrome_dev_test" --disable-web-security
Linux: google-chrome --disable-web-security
No. What you clearly teaching is utmost harmful for the security. Are you going to be responsible if someone lose money from their bank account? And please don't expect all hackernews reader to understand the meaning of cors. Not all of us are fronted developer right?
The best way is to create some node or binaries (rust/go/c++) and run them.
I have tried looking at DNS amplification but their are no guides or publicly accessible software for it and people are not particularly happy when I asked around about it
Not in Vladivostok, but it seems that all satellite uplinks of Russian TV channels are hacked now https://twitter.com/a_latkovskis/status/1497627592677117952 . It means that all of remote Russian regions relying of satellite feeds for local TVs are now watching documentaries on Putin's golden loo, and Ukraine war feeds.
I'm Ukrainian activist for 10+ years, have been on Maidan, etc, know many other activists.
Unfortunately, we have not seen understanding with any government.
Looks like, all people who got to government or state organizations, work on classical totalitarian scheme - "for friends all the best, for all others - severity of the law".
Mean, system is so much disbalanced, that any government got totalitarian power and does not account on people. And laws are created, to make all people offenders, and with very wide possibilities of interpretation, so state officials and their friends become above law.
If you really want to help Ukraine, better to contact volunteers-entrepreneurs, who where on Maidan, and who struggle for economic freedoms, and support Ukrainian army as private persons, without government/state.
You could just donate, or you could create some business opportunity, so Ukrainians will make business, export working hours, or export some products to world.
Business opportunities much better, because Ukraine now have critically huge dependence on Russian market, close to 50% of all trade, need much-much more export to world.
US folks: Call your congressional representatives and demand they back harsh sanctions against Russian oil/gas immediately. Perhaps even a full embargo until aggression is stopped. That is the _only_ leverage the US has against Russia, and as of yet the US has steadfastly refused to do anything that would interrupt the flow or price of oil to itself.
More importantly, Germans, Austrians, and Italians should call their representatives to support excluding Russia from SWIFT because these seem to have been the main governments who blocked the proposal.
You know why this is not being done? If Russia and China stop buying oil using the U.S. Dollar guess who gets screwed? If you do not know that this is mostly what this conflict is about, well, hello.
This is going to be a tough sell to the significant percentage of US Congresspeople who vocally support a man who currently vocally supports Putin's actions.
Europe has some gas reserves. We could "see out winter if Russian imports stop" [0]. I personally don't mind wearing an extra sweater or jacket inside if it stops Europe from paying billions to Gazprom.
> While a complete loss of Russian gas imports, currently making up almost half of Germany’s gas needs, “will lead to bottlenecks in some European countries”, supply shortages “would be limited to up to 10% of demand”.
You don't mind wearing a sweater but I'm willing to bet you're not elderly, nor poor, nor living in substandard housing. Any of those would make your sacrifice simply one more example of an action that hurts the most vulnerable in society while claiming to be a good thing.
I'm sorry to have triggered you. I didn't mean to sound like that was a sacrifice.
Elderly and poor will be hurt the most, that is true. If the source I linked to is correct, it claims it would only impact 10% of demand. While I don't know what that would look like in practice. I sincerely hope (and expect) that it would not lead to anyone, including the vulnerable, freezing to death, or getting seriously ill.
If you want to talk about people being triggered then I may as well talk about virtue signalling but it won't lead to an interesting discussion.
People in privileged positions often talk about making small sacrifices to fulfil some grand end. It always impacts the least privileged the most, whether that be through poverty or something like old age. We've just had 2 years of it with the pandemic, and now we're seeing it with war, and you've extended it to the boycott of a company providing a very necessary resource.
> it would only impact 10% of demand
What would it do to prices? My advice to you is to try imagining what it's like to run out of money before the end of the month and have to freeze your way to the next, then as an elderly person. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Not really. Europe would experience a temporary shortage and soaring prices but that's it. The alternative is to let dictator Putin go unpunished, which means he will in the future likely attack another country. There is no doubt about it. Without a strong deterrent and corresponding internal opposition, dictator Putin would seize the first opportunity as long as (in his mind) he'd be reasonably certain that other European states wouldn't use nuclear weapons anyway. The older he gets, the more likely he is to make such errors of judgment. The new security imbalance due to an emboldened Russia would drastically increase the likelihood of a nuclear war in the future.
Avoiding WW3 should have higher priority than short-term gas imports.
Not at that time of the year, we won't. There are reserves still.
If we don't stop this madness now, we may freeze in 1-5 years running away from war moving through Latvia, Estonia, Poland etc.
But Germany thinks it will save its economy still buying gas from RUS, so there's that...
Electric heating, oil heating and so on. Not sure if the grid would cope with such a load, but there are always options.
Another option is just to give up with your kind of argument, and pay up Russia. That's looking increasingly like shooting our own foot in long term. The idea he will stop and be happy just with Ukraine is dangerously naive and ignore his own steps and statements.
If this won't be a wake up call in Europe then nothing will. Ramp up military budgets (I hate the idea, but that's how you deter bullies and we have one greedy fucker right now next door), and prepare infrastructure for withdrawal of anything russian. Long term that's good for Europe and world too.
A lot of people in Europe and the UK are already struggling to pay bills. It's been described as "eat or heat", since some can't afford to do both. Rising cost of living, reduced job security, and lower wages are all killing tens-of-thousands of people already.
You're treating an aggressive war in Europe like a minor calamity. It is an obvious responsibility of the state to help people pay for substitute heating and ease the negative impact of conflicts like that. In the worst case, even the military could step in. Helping citizens in times of conflict is one of the primary functions of governments and state institutions. It's much better to face these kind of negative consequences now than to embolden a dictator and later wonder why you sit in a bunker while Latvia or Poland is overrun. Just because this is not an armed conflict (yet) does not mean it should be treated lightly.
> You're treating an aggressive war in Europe like a minor calamity
I have absolutely no idea why you say this, and I can assure you that I am not doing this.
Fuel poverty in Europe and the UK are among many reasons why those nations should take what's happening in the Ukraine very seriously. My concern is that the ruling parties don't take these things seriously enough.
To reassure you: I completely agree that states should look after their citizens who cannot eat or keep themselves warm. Unfortunately, this demonstrably does not happen.
The situation in Ukraine is dreadful, and I certainly do not think it is minor. Quite the opposite.
And also next winter. We absolutely have the means to get rid of our dependence on Russian fossil fuels (and fossil fuels in general). But we won't be able to do it within one year.
> If you really want to help Ukraine, better to contact volunteers-entrepreneurs, who where on Maidan, and who struggle for economic freedoms, and support Ukrainian army as private persons, without government/state.
> You could just donate, or you could create some business opportunity, so Ukrainians will make business, export working hours, or export some products to world.
This makes sense, but I wonder if this would help in the short time. Maybe investing would help over the years; if Russia invades, investments may not help avoid the consequences?
What I see now, kremlin for sure have not prepared for long term war campaign, they just have not built hospitals for wounded (thanks to western sat photos, provided by official sources), and this is extremely important, because in real war, 80% wounded die within 24h if have not received medical care in nearest 1-2 hours.
And if will be resistance, attacking forces will have very large number of wounded, so they will be forced to stop attack, because have not enough medicine institutions to heal wounded.
So I think, kremlin accounted for similar to 2014 behavior of Ukrainian soldiers, I mean, in 2014 many Ukrainian soldiers or even officers just drop weapons and surrendered, to avoid bloodshed, because they think it is not war, they think it is provocation.
Now I have some under the hood tools, and with them I see totally different reaction.
I know that border guards tried to stop occupants; I know that pilots got very clear instruction "You could fire if you sure see enemy"; I know, in many places, air defense fires on "unknown aircrafts".
And it is important, that count of Russian military forces, prepared before occupation, where close to current Ukrainian army.
And technical power of armies are similar now, except of aviation - Ukraine have approx few tens military planes and helicopters, but occupants have more than hundred, same thing with tanks.
But Ukraine now have Stingers, Javelins, Bayraktars, and some other modern weapons, so powers similar.
So, I think, in approximately 30 hours, hot phase of war will end, and will continue similar to "ATO", mean struggle on east, but possible in few additional places.
Or if You have good understanding of Israel history, or history of Korea, their hot war phases, usually does not last more than few weeks, some oven few days, and between of those hot phases, where very-very long periods of economy struggle or just information wars.
I have before analyzed Japan success, and I think, they have V-shape economy grows on every big earthquake, because they had to rebuild lot of things from scratch, this is very good for market competitiveness.
Ukraine before 2014 does not seen so large examples of market falls, because of this Ukrainian business was not ready for real life, and I think, now its time to change selves.
Thank you for the insight. Godspeed. If you have links to organisations we can support from far away (with money, labour or lobbying), those would be appreciated.
I just donated to the Ukrainian army. They’re people too, and deserve the best medical and logistic support money can buy.
The ruling class in Moscow isn’t just attacking some other ruling class. They’re attacking _my_ Europe.
I don’t care about any military-industrial complex, or even the military in general.
But the moment that some misguided person decides to launch rockets at Europe, I’m not willing to just sit back and let that happen.
> no different than donating money to the United States military
Which Americans did. In World War II.
With donations, war bonds and by accepting massive sacrifices to their quality of life through rations, price controls and more. We did this when we felt threatened. Last I checked, the Canadians weren’t rolling tanks into Syracuse.
This is an inchoate line of argument. You ask for precedent and then object to it being in the past.
WWII was the last time America was attacked by a foreign state. Ukraine is being attacked by a foreign state. The analogy shouldn’t be lofty enough to go over one’s head. If Russia rolls tanks into the Baltics we’ll have a new analogy for the ensuing half century. For the time being, I’m fine letting the precedent age.
...in Europe. There was war all over the world, hence, World War. The Soviets suffered tremendously _before_ and during that war (mostly at the hands of their own gov't). They didn't fight for their gov't, they fought for their home.
Please do not try and take an immensely complex topic and boil it down to the point it has no meaning.
Yes, the Soviets defeated the Nazi's with some distraction, tech and assistance from the Allies. China did a whole ton of work against Japan, they fought the longest and hardest.
Also, without the Marshall Plan (of which the Soviets were fearful of and denied themselves participation), Europe would not be Europe right now. Maybe Russia wouldn't be an economic wasteland today, forcing their gangster gov't to use an invasion of a sovereign country to prop up their oligarchy.
The Nazis are the eternal scapegoats of the Western elite mania. This mania underwrites their irrational doctrine and propaganda that defines current international affairs. And they never consider the preceding circumstances which led to the Nazis coming to power. It’s incredibly vacuous and irresponsible.
Germany designed its current constitution specifically around the lessons it learned when the Nazis exploited the Weimar system.
Every German high school student spends several months learning about the Nazi era, including the economic and geopolitical context.
You literally can’t escape it.
Don’t worry about our level of education. We’re fine, thanks.
Mine doesn’t involve the United States at all. Try putting yourself in the shoes of a citizen of Europe who wants to live in peace, but feels their community is under attack by a nostalgic Russian dictator with an inferiority complex.
Not resisting and not getting involved is what my grandparents did when the Nazis were rising to power. I’m not going to make the same mistake.
9 Eastern European countries in the former Soviet sphere joined NATO and the EU and are currently going through one of their longest periods of growth and peace in their history.
That's true. I know because I am from Bulgaria. We're vassals one way or another. Bled dry is correct. The entire eastern block was sold out for peanuts during the 90s. I guess that was the price for joining NATO and the EU
However, being US/EU vassals is better for us. I personally think that's mainly because the so called west has all the money in the world. That's the root cause. Not culture, values, etc. Those are all secondary to having money for so long.
While I understand the stated reasons for the invasion, and they are much more valid then America's struggle to steal as much resources as possible from all over the world under the guise of "democracy" and "WMDs", I fear we'll be next. I don't want to be under their boots. My family has suffered enough under the Soviets
I agree. Bulgaria was on the right track until 2009. It's almost as if different countries face different realities.
Corruption does not happen in a vacuum. Ultimately, the responsibility lies to those with power. What I am saying is geopolitics are not decided by the common person. You seem to disagree and that's fine
I think we're probably more aligned than you think :-)
I think society is a slow, lumbering beast that's hard to turn around, and very unpredictable.
I think that elites generally control things and the average person can't do much.
But if <<only>> elites control <<always>> things and only in <<their>> favor, then we can't explain how developed countries happened.
Long story short: the common person can't do much in general, but sometimes they can. Otherwise we can't explain stuff like Taiwan or South Korea or Estonia or Czechia or Slovenia or Ireland or whatever. So that means that the common person has a super low chance of changing anything, but that's their only hope. Giving up means that you have <<no>> chance, <<ever>>. And that's how you end up with Ukraine pre-2008 or Moldova pre-2014.
Yes, I agree with everything you said. Voting and protesting matter. Expression matters and is very important despite everything I said earlier. Otherwise everything would be even more alike than it is now. Your logic is sound.
It is a real pity because the same amount of money applied effectively instead of looted would have made Bulgaria the Switzerland of the East by now. I've visited your country and love it there - and love the people - but the road to go is a long one.
That's true, the brain drain is going to be impossible to stop without giving people a credible future and for that to happen the corruption needs to stop.
Unfortunately my business colleagues are not answer fast, most probably all extremely busy, evacuate families and help army.
So at the moment, I could suggest most trustful for me organization and person, who are ready, and please be patient, I believe, after Monday hot phase will end, and people will answer faster.
Also I will give more info as will got news.
For others, either I think they are ineffective (like official government organizations, which accumulated huge money, but don't have spent them), or they have not created reliable system organization, or I just don't know them good enough.
> because have not enough medicine institutions to heal wounded.
They might not care? Significant casualties might be part of the calculation, if it's an all-or-nothing move by their leaders. The existence of their mobile crematoriums suggest something like it.
I know Russians very deep, they are not demons.
Russian outlook, as I know, is very close to just ordinary beggars, some are criminal, but not many.
So most of them have not strong moral values, but they don't want to be wounded or die.
So they will not care too much, if they just need to press button or "just attach box to pipe in concentration camp".
And we also know, that Russian army is in reality not high tech army, most their weapons are based on 1960th technologies, no electronic computers at all, paper maps, old analogue radio, etc, so their technologies cannot work without people (US have large number of modern automatic weapons).
And even before invasion, we know about very low morale in Russian army, but if Russian soldiers will conclude, that nobody will care wounded, they will surrender just after see Ukrainians without any shoot.
I'm not the person you asked, but the very well-known understanding, going back probably to Napoleon or earlier (among foreign policy experts), is that Ukraine has geopolitics. Geography is far more important to national power than non-experts realize.
Without Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Russia loses sea access to the Black Sea and thus the Mediterranean for their navy (and also for trade), which historically has been a primary determinant of Russian military influence in Europe. Otherwise, they only have northern ports which are frozen and easily choked off (and ports way over on the Pacific - imagine having to sail your navy around Eurasia in order to attack or defend).
More importantly, Ukraine's geography is easy to move large forces across, in that respect a major battlefield (with due respect to Ukrainians). Napoleon and the Nazis both crossed through that region on their way to Russia, and when Russia attacks West, they go through Ukraine. Russian wants to control it and to prevent others from controlling it.
By controlling Ukraine, Russia can put more pressure on, have more influence over, Ukraine's neighbors, including Poland, and further cut off Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from their NATO allies.
Finally, Putin wants glory - don't underestimate the personal characteristics, such as ego, of unaccountable dictators - and to recreate the Soviet empire and the illusion of power. An independent, democratic Ukraine both undermines that appearance (and perception is everything for dictators) and embarasses Putin's claim to power as an authoritarian dictator.
> Without Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Russia loses sea access to the Black Sea and thus the Mediterranean for their navy (and also for trade),
That's untrue. Sevastopol is the main port and naval base in the Black Sea, but Russia has plenty of others, and some are even undergoing expansion - Novorosiisk ( the backup one). Sevastopol is in Crimea, but was shared under an agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian navies. So in reality, Russia gained nothing there besides an extra front for their current invasion of Ukraine.
They gained exactly what they wanted by taking crimea, the inability to deploy nato forces and equipment there and domestic contorl of their leased naval port in crimea.
Basically nato stated that yep, ukraine (and georgia) should join them, later on when the ukraine coup happened and got a pro western government, russia was going: yep - possibility of nato on crimea and losing our haval base there is not going to happen, it's ours now.
But that didn't achieve anything. NATO can still deploy forces and equipment in Odessa or Mykolaiv, or in Romania or Bulgaria or Turkey, and can still easily block access to the Mediterranean.
It all depends on your point of view - the russian point of view is that nato controlled crimea is much more unwanted, and would and leave them much more cornered compared to nato controlled Odessa and Mykolaiv (and that point shouldn't be too hard to realize by looking at the map). And they wanted to keep their naval base there, which they now can.
Romania, Bulgaria doesn't border Russia , Turkey is not on the land border and they have decent relations with them. But sure, they're likely not happy with that either - they just can't and will not do anything about it. With Crimea/Ukraine - they could.
> That's untrue. Sevastopol is the main port and naval base in the Black Sea, but Russia has plenty of others, and some are even undergoing expansion - Novorosiisk ( the backup one).
I have never seen someone claim that Novorosiisk was a sufficient port. Maybe it's a capacity issue?
> Sevastopol is in Crimea, but was shared under an agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian navies.
It is in a foreign country, an unfriendly one. That greatly limits Russia's freedom of action.
Novorosiisk is undergoing expansion for precisely that reason. And Ukraine wasn't exactly unfriendly before the invasions, the Sevastopol lease was prolonged just before that.
That naive geography positioning reasoning is far from reality. From that point of view Belorussia is more valuable.
That "Mystery of Russian Soul" lies among the lines of "Kiev - mother of Russian cities" (term of 12th century Primary Chronicle) and too many other historical facts. Like Wild Steppe (south of Ukraine) were fought for and liberated from Crimean Khanate by Russian Army. Modern Kherson, Nikolayev, Sevastopol, and Ekaterinoslav(Dnipro/Dnepropetrovsk), were established by Gregory Potemkin (Empress Catherine times) and populated by peasants from Russian heartlands - Tambov, Ryazan, Pskov, etc.
All that is well known and well remembered facts by Russian public. So we should not expect that Russian people will be so against all that. If in doubt then see the above.
These nationalistic narratives are means, not causes. Russia wants to control Ukraine, so they teach these narratives to create public support. It's done in many places about many things. You can see people on HN repeating them about their countries.
There is a Wendover Productions video on YouTube that describes "Russia's Geography Problem" and then this whole thing mostly clicks. It is all geopolitics to them.
I wouldn’t use the word desperate. This campaign seems to have been planned out over a decade or more and carefully timed if you ask me. Observe how the new German leadership can’t bring itself to block SWIFT access in winter after recently turning off nuclear power capacity, because it will cause an energy crisis. That isn’t a coincidence. Neither I think is that all this happened while it is Russia’s turn chairing the UN security council.
The fact is that democratic countries with leaders elected yesterday are at a disadvantage to these perpetual dictators with low accountability and strong convictions.
Putin is a snake. I would say he’s the most dangerous man in the world. He absolutely cannot be trusted, and his agenda really does involve damaging and weakening other sovereign nations seemingly for the sake of it.
For one, Putin seems to want to reassemble the USSR as a vanity project. Further, this all started (years ago) when the Ukrainians removed out their Moscow friendly president. Putin doesn't like reminders that months of sustained protests can really effect change and remove leaders, especially so close to Russia.
Crimea is the only "warm water" port that Russia has access to to gain access for the end and the Atlantic.
The Ukraine has a ton of farmland. This may be more valuable soon because China imports a ton of food and if you're planning on a Sino-Russo alliance cut off from western powers, food is important.
Similarly, it shares a lot of the fresh water sources with the rest of Europe. I don't know if it's something he can attempt to monopolize, but controlling water into the region is at least as good as natural gas, and less seasonal with less ability to diversify like to green energy.
The USSR located some specialty heavy industry in Ukraine. If it still exists, it might be valuable. I read, but can not confirm, that it was part of the strategic goal of the USSR to make sure each constituent state wasn't self sufficient to encourage national unity. But that could just be BS. Reasoning like that is almost certainly why Crimea was given to the Ukraine.
It's not your fault. They've been peddling this, as well as conquering Constantinople for the same reason, since the time of Peter the Great.
Its straight out of Imperial Russia's propaganda book. Kind of proof that Russia since ~1600 has always been the same country, just with a different coat of paint (the one between 1917 and 1991 happening to be red paint).
You're wrong about Crimea ( Novorosiisk), but mostly correct about the rest. Ukraine has a lot of specialised heavy industry - tank, engine, ship, aircraft building. Important parts of it are needed by the Russians, which is why there were many joint programmes before 2014 - Russian ships used Ukrainian produced turbines and engines, there was collaboration on new cargo aircraft, etc.
I didn't mean the government of the USSR. I meant the geographic reach.
But you contend that Putin doesn't want the western tip of Ukraine, but instead to reclaim Finland, Alaska and parts of Poland? Because that's the only difference in his territorial ambitions.
For Russians, this is geopolitical question.
What I mean, they feel themselves imperfect, if size of their country does not correspond with their weight in world.
Very similar to what WW1 and WW2 causes.
- In approx 1900, Germany becomes one country (before, there where many small principalities, and no central power lasts long).
So appear new country, powerful country, and they look on world and see colonial system, where nearly ALL powerful countries has colonies.
I mean whole world where divided between top countries.
First, Germany tried to reach an agreement with top countries, to cut some colonies from other countries and assign to Germany, but without fast success, because pre WW1 agreements system where extremely sophisticated, and they just cannot rebuild this system fast.
Than German powers conclude, that they could faster got wanted if make war, that's all.
To be more precise, Russia is large, but economically, it's position is worst in world, except Mongolia.
- Russia have longest in world size of land borders, near no borders on mountains, very little number of possible sea ports; extremely large territory is just ice, nothing could grow there.
- Russia really have reliable access to sea only in few places - Baltic, Black sea/Azov, and on Pacific, this is extremely little, for so large number of citizens (approx half of US).
BTW, current Russia situation is much better, than for example 200 years ago, because that time they had neighbors, who demand very high fees for access to sea.
To solve this, Russians occupied their neighbors - 300-200 years ago, Russians near constantly invade neighbors and assimilate them into their empire, so now they have another problem, google Belfast.
Now, Russians trying to work less crude, they trying to place puppet governments in all neighbors countries.
Ukraine have borders with three EU countries, and is one of the largest counties on Black sea, so Ukraine is extremely interest for logistics.
And unfortunately, current Ukraine don't have effective government system, as I said on another comment, current Ukraine officials are extremely corrupted and extremely illiterate.
So Russians concluded, that Ukraine could be easy target for occupation and/or to place puppet government, and prepared for invasion and invade.
"What does Ukraine really have, that Putin so desperately wants? "
It's not 'what it has' it's 'what it is'.
Putin views the Ukraine as 'part of Russia' - that's it.
I don't understand why people have such a hard time with this.
Imagine if Mexico invaded Texas in 1950 and 'won'. A lot of Americans would want to 'take it back'.
Now I don't believe that this analogy is real in terms of the Ukraine situation (Imagine if those Mexicans wanted to be Mexicans and definitely did not want to be part of the USA...), but you can see how Putin + Co. propaganda would like you to see it.
I'm wary that there will be much of an insurgency in Ukraine - it's big, open, spread out, there are few places to hide.
Not a very good analogy. No western country ever invaded Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed Ukraine was granted its independence without a shot being fired.
A better analogy would be Australia and Canada. Both were part of Great Britain and both became independent after the British Empire collapsed.
Yes, but that doesn't in any way change the fact that they aren't really independent if an official appointed by a foreign power can dismiss and appoint cabinet ministers at will.
Yes, but this quote leaves out the distinction they made. The GP goes on to note the difference caused by who the people in the region support. In real life, as far as I can tell, most people in that region ended up supporting independence or later accession to the US, which seems slightly more similar to the more complex Ukraine situation in the GP comment than Mexico simply wanting Texas back.
Biden is not war specialist, he depends on analytics, and he is political person, he may sometime exaggerate things, to save lives.
Analytics said, Russian have TECHNICAL resources for war, but unknown in which condition those resources.
This remember me old anecdote, in 1960th, American analytics count overall area of all Russian secret enterprises, than compare it with American rocket enterprises, and give to Senate defense comitee prediction, how many rockets USSR already build, to suggest huge increase of defense spending.
Members look on this prediction, and asked one simple question: how they could been sure, that all those enterprises made just rockets?
And where Soviets build cars, trains, other mechanics?
Analytics could not answer to this, and where got out with shame.
Returning for technical resources, we have not before invasion know, what will be used.
And sure Biden insured for worst possible case, he thought, and we also thought, that Russia will attack with modern high precision weapons, but fortunately, this does not happen.
Now we know exactly, that Russian army mostly have extremely old machines, approximately 1970th if account from Western technical level, not Russian.
Thanks for sanctions on Russia, they have not modernized much machines for modern level.
And 1970th machines, are totally depend on people, they are not automatic at all, and to be exact, they are just support for infantry, which is extremely vulnerable for Ukrainian weapons.
Second question where, if Ukrainians will resist, or like in 2014 will drop weapons and surrender - we have Great answer for this question.
If Ukrainians where not resist, Russians would be used Ukrainian medical infrastructure.
So, kremlin mistaken. To be honest, all mistaken, underestimated Ukrainian forces and Ukrainian people, and overestimated Russians.
Because of these mistakes, I could talk to you from Kiev, and we still resist, and I believe, we will win, all world will win, with independent Ukraine.
I browsed Ukraine web shops and found at least Spar has an open webshop: https://shop.spar.ua/ . If anyone has an address to order for I'll try ordering some goods for the front line, bunkers or what do I know.
In the longer term I'll do what I already do to China:
I happily pay 20% more for small goods not made in China and in fact I try to avoid buying Chinese.
At the same time I'll happily pay even a bit more for Lithuanian goods after their brave stance the last few months. (Lithuanians, make sure "Made in Lithuania" is visible on everything you ship. You guys rock!)
> Lithuanians, make sure "Made in Lithuania" is visible on everything you ship. You guys rock!)
In some cases smaller European countries' manufacturers prefer to put "Made in the EU" because it's more reputable. No idea if the Lithuanians do it too.
Most long term solutions don't work in short term, but you need to start them some day.
One of the reasons why Russia attacked is weak, corrupt Ukrainian government. Other is economic dependency making everyone think twice before retaliating.
> support Ukrainian army as private persons, without government/state.
How do you hope to defeat Russia without coordinating with the lawful and most powerful institutions in the country? Note also that probably all foreign government assistance, especially the motherlodes of assistance from NATO states, including cyber, will be going through the Ukranian government.
> You could just donate, or you could create some business opportunity
How will creating business opportunities do anything to protect the freedom of the Ukranian people or defeat the Russian invasion? It seems like a major distraction from a crisis.
> any government got totalitarian power and does not account on people
Calling the Ukranian government undemocratic is a leading talking point of Russia and their allies. How do we distinguish what you are saying from them?
All your points seem to reduce support for and divert it from the Ukranian government and their military. Isn't that absurdly dangerous in this moment?
> I'm Ukrainian activist for 10+ years, have been on Maidan, etc, know many other activists.
With due respect, in this atmosephere, how can we take the word of an anonymous person on the Internet? Would you trust such a person? How would you distinguish them?
>All your points seem to reduce support for and divert it from the Ukranian government and their military. Isn't that absurdly dangerous in this moment?
Almost none of the people on HN have anything to contribute to the Ukranian military. At the same time, all of the things related to actually living as a person in any country, at war or peace time, revolve around jobs, the economy and technology, things people on HN have a lot to do with.
You can donate money to the Ukrainian military. It's not very convenient (no PayPal etc.) but the military is accepting foreign donations via wire transfers.
It is pouring in money to the Ukraine state from other state's money printers. Donating to the government in this case seems extremely pointless. Ukraine does not need money they need AA and AT weapons a month ago.
If you want to donate I would try to find some small scale relief effort that probably has no free Central bank money raining over it.
Given the success of Turkish drones against older Russian weaponry during the recent conflict in Artsakh, maybe the Turks could be convinced to test the drones against more modern versions? Although your point is correct, that the time to have arranged this has passed.
> Almost none of the people on HN have anything to contribute to the Ukranian military.
Many people here could participate in their cyber efforts, and/or know others who could. I would think HN would be an especially fruitful recruiting ground.
Also, public support worldwide is essential, as is evidenced by both sides' intense investment in it.
> How do you hope to defeat Russia without coordinating with the lawful and most powerful institutions in the country?
Unfortunately, Ukrainian government extremely corrupted, and Ukrainian army affected by this corruption.
- Ukrainian officials so much feared about potential military junta (btw, like Putin and all officials of exUSSR countries), so purposefully hold army weak, make all possible to assign least initiative army tops, and slow down reformation of army.
For example, I hear from insiders, that to build in Ukraine factory of NATO standard rifles/shells, West have to "hook Ukrainian tops balls", because all normal human measures where ineffective.
Other important thing, you may not believe, but just today I seen calls from most trusted Ukrainian activist, to buy to Ukrainian army food.
Tell me, how possible, army in Kiev does not have normal food supply?
- Even in USSR regulations, written, that every military unit, should have long last food supply for at least 10 days, and today is just 3rd day of invasion, and we hear calls.
I think their supplies are just plundered by officials.
If you interested, later I will supply long list of what where designed for army in Ukraine, but Government does not made payment or used some other bureaucracy tricks to not buy those things.
> probably all foreign government assistance...will be going through the Ukranian government
Sure. Western officials MUST at least show, they act openly, because Western people will not understand.
But in exUSSR countries, many things are not done acting openly, because extremely large part of officials here working from USSR times, they just do not have modern habits.
And even young officials are not ordinary persons from street, but mostly relatives of old officials.
For example, after 2014 revolution, activists created database of Ukrainians with good western background, even from ivy League, who want to become officials, even considering extremely low compensations and begin from very beginners positions.
- Totally about 3000 persons enroll, but less than 200 where accepted by govt organizations, and in just one year only about 30 still worked there, all others quit, because of extremely toxic atmosphere.
- In Ukraine now near 300k people considered government workers, and approx 80k officials.
> How will creating business opportunities do anything to protect the freedom of the Ukranian people or defeat the Russian invasion?
You remembered me words of Poroshenko, who once said words, which every person lived in USSR or in other totalitarian country, understand absolutely right, as: "do not critique me! Or Putin will invade!"
And it is extremely important, that Russia invades its neighbors all few hundreds years it exists.
And I have not seen any serious scientific foundations that this Russian behavior will end in some observable future.
So we have situation, very similar to Israel-Iran, one of our neighbor will be our enemy forever, constantly waiting for good opportunity to attack us.
You really think, we should not make reforms now?
Sure, I don't ask to drop support on official channels just now, but hot phase will not last more than cup of weeks, and than we will return to the same words, "do not critique me! Or Putin will invade!"
> Calling the Ukranian government undemocratic is a leading talking point of Russia and their allies. How do we distinguish what you are saying from them?
Easy. I talking with people, I answer all questions, and I learn, and act, but nearly no one of exUSSR presidents will.
We name this phenomena, "they become bronze man".
> in this atmosephere, how can we take the word of an anonymous person on the Internet? Would you trust such a person? How would you distinguish them?
I'm understand your words very well. Because I have worked as CTO of startup, and have to hire people I cannot get much info about.
So what to do? - I have talked with few candidates, asked them questions; than I have tried to work with them; for some of them I created test assigns, etc.
And yes, some of my choices where mistakes, but others where good enough fit.
You may say, that we in Ukraine should make similar, again and again choose new officials on elections, but Ukraine have elections for more than 20 years,and results are very far from good for now.
For example, Poland is just few years ahead, but their results far better, even 10 years ago, they perform much better, and last year I hear opinions, Poland just become country of 1st world.
So I have made conclusion, that I have to make something more, something other, than just participate in elections.
I'm not too much scientific person, to write foundations to trust me, I'm practitioner.
I reckon this is a seriously good idea, with the only sad caveat being that a lot of Silly Valley money seems to be very risk-averse and scale-seeking, and this is high risk and low/no-scale.
Very annoyingly.
(I can only chalk the downvotes (this comment was grey at time of my reply) up to pOlItIcS)
And Bank of Ukraine accept wire transfers as well.
But I just donated to Come Back Alive cause I don't trust the bank of Ukraine effectively using the money.
Conservatives tend to emphasize loyalty, authority, and purity as fundamental values, over and above the more widely-shared values of care, fairness, and liberty.[0] These "binding" values are a foundation for in-group vs. out-group thinking. And because loyalty and authority compete with fairness (and win out over it) there is less of a priority on the law as treating everyone equally.
So many gross Russian apologists on HN. Ukraine would be in a much better financial position if kleptocrats like Yanukovych hadn't siphoned billions of dollars of public money into their own pockets with the help of American collaborators like Paul Manafort. Something like 1/2 of a year's GDP stolen by Yanukovych and his cronies.
So what? Why is that the EU’s and NATO’s responsibility? He was legitimately elected.
We never came up with a reason for war in Afghanistan for 20 years and haven’t been out of Afghanistan for 2 months, but Americans are already bending over backwards to start another one. Unreal.
He was narrowly elected and then had to flee the country once he started machine gunning unarmed protesters. Turns out his "narrow election" was at least partly due to the massive bribes he was paying out of the public coffers to election officials, opposition parties, & anti-corruption authorities.
Literally nobody wants another war, hence why everyone is outraged at Russia for invading a peaceful Ukraine based on the paranoid delusions of a mad man.
Oh, please! You’re just reciting the ridiculous American media. US leaders have been aggressively rallying for war with Russia for many many years, and it has been especially intense over the past few months.
Putin is insane, but the US has given him every reason to believe that striking sooner than later is in his best interest. They didn’t have to do that, ya know. Americans have plenty of problems at home, and it is absolutely shameful that they can’t focus on them. Many parts of America are utter slums.
It doesn’t matter if tyrants are democratically elected. And he was a tyrant, indiscriminately slaughtering protesters.
Once you are violating human dignity and human rights in such an obvious way you are in no way a legitimate leader. Election victories can never be a justification for blatant human rights violations.
(This doesn’t even touch on whether the election was legitimate in the first place.)
Also, whataboutism isn’t very helpful in the current situation. It’s a pointless distraction and doesn’t make anything Putin does currently any less wrong. In general, whataboutism is just so incredibly unhelpful and pointless. It’s extremely dumb (or extremely clever in an evil way if you have an agenda).
(This is dangerously close to whataboutism, but just another point: you mention the EU removing him, however as far as I can tell there was no EU involved in his removal.)
Western liberal dogma holds that democratic consent justifies global terrorism of virtually any kind. As Chomsky says, the US state apparatus is the world’s largest terrorist organization.
Ukraine is being invaded here. By Russia. Neither the EU nor NATO are involved. You make literally no sense at all.
Also, the tyrant slaughtering his own people was disposed of by them. You can make all the legalistic arguments in the world, that won’t change that his own people disposed of him. So you talking about the USA literally makes no sense.
So what if I were to agree that the US is the largest terror org in the world. Doesn’t change a thing and is pure irrelevance.
Not at all the person you're responding to, and don't agree in the slightest with their viewpoint, however from what i recall Hillary Clinton was selling herself very tough on Russia in the last election she lost.
When Hillary was running, Russia had just invaded Ukraine the first time. So Russia intervened in US elections to get someone more pliant elected. This war and any “aggressive” posture toward Russia is entirely of Moscow’s making.
Russiagate has been handily debunked, and its premise was always stupid. No country on Earth has meddled in nearly the number of foreign elections as the USA. This is universally understood history. It’s not up for debate. Only the propagandized American domestic population would have even considered Russiagate a newsworthy scandal. And only the propagandized American domestic population would have interpreted it as anything short of a failure on the part of America’s own leadership and commercialized election system.
Ah yes. "Debunked". There's literally no serious doubts about whether Russia interfered to assist the Trump campaign. The only real question was whether any of it was coordinated.
Who spear-fished Podesta again? As well as the DNC? And 4,000 other Clinton-related email addresses? And why did that same group also attack the World Anti-Doping Agency, MH17 researchers, senior NATO members and Russian political opposition and journalists?[1]
Who was Manafort providing internal polling data to, and why was that worth forgiving $20 million worth of loans? [2]
When even the Republican Senate Intelligence committee has this to say, it's clearly "debunked"[3];
> The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Parts of this effort are outlined in the Committee's earlier volumes on election security, social media, the Obama Administration's response to the threat, and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
Here's what Mueller had to say, sure, "debunked"[4]:
> The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016. In June, the Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer network. Releases of hacked materials—hacks that public reporting soon attributed to the Russian government—began that same month.
A DDoS attack is hardly a ‘complex’ attack against Russia and is easily mitigated against these days vs a malware wiper already spreading all over Ukraine. A DDoS is not even remotely considered a ‘hack’.
Anonymous is not exactly sophisticated like the ‘Equation Group’ and these sort of DDoS + shodan.io lookups are what script-kiddie jokers do. They have nothing to fight with compared to Russia.
Ukraine needs higher calibre cyber security teams to defend itself, not predictable script kiddie DDoSers.
I am not familiar with RT, what "propaganda" were they spreading? I've known of "rt.com" for a while, seeing it posted occasionally, and it never was anything that gave me pause (didn't even known it stood for Russia Today until today).
They're pretty interesting because they have an incentive to be reliable in order for people to trust them. They are also generous with appearance fees so they gets lots of famous Americans on the screen Larry King, Glenn Beck and Ron Paul come to mind. Funny, when googling for examples of Americans appearing on RT a couple of Quora posts came up that may illustrate RT's angle:
> Why does RT (Russia Today) claim that Americans are forced to use unsanitary public laundromats because federal law prohibits hanging clothes on clotheslines to dry?
> The TV show "Russia Today" said the USA is collapsing because of the super rich. Is this true or not true?
It seems to me RT does not necessarily lie to its viewers, it just never skips a chance to make America look bad. Many more examples in the article, "Russia Goes Viral: How the RT network built a US audience":
Yea it is a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at western readers. It sometimes even has good reporting but everything is curated to serve the kremlins interests.
RT is a well-known Russian propaganda operation. The fact that your response to it was "it never was anything that gave me pause" is a sign that you did not detect the propaganda and that it may have been working on you.
I always find it interesting how when western countries have state-owned media (like BBC) they're considered normal media networks, but when Russia, or another non-NATO western-aligned country has state-owned media it's "a propaganda operation".
Meh! RT is no different from BBC or Al Jazeera or any other state media. They will have more balanced take on most news compared to any corporate propaganda outlets like CNN or Fox.
The state news agencies are only problematic as sources when they are writing about their own government or immediate enemies... in that they will tend to prefer publishing what their leaders are saying vs what the enemy is saying about them.
Whenever I see RT mentioned, it's always called a "sophisticated propaganda operation" (or something along those lines), and I must say I can't help but physically cringe.
Almost as if every other news network and media company is not a propaganda operation meant to serve interests, and RT is the odd one out.
Yes, more comparably to the BBC. The only one unique enough to have a royal charter to be the state broadcaster in the UK. They will defend the interests of the country that they are operating in.
So the next time a giant scandal about Anonymous's secrets is uncovered or if the BBC airs something that Anonymous doesn't like in the UK, maybe they will run a DDoSing tool against them?
there are /some/ intricacies to DDoS, it's not all just "build a botnet and send packets". DNS amplification[1] is a good example of a non-straightforward augment, and there are all sorts of funny ideas people have that make it difficult to mitigate a dedicated attacker. the issue is that it's mostly (s)kids renting out botnets and spamming video game servers with layer3 packets.
That's where it started, but they're entirely separate banners now.
It is actually not allowed to organize raids or other Anonymous-style hacktivities that are against US law on 4chan. So, calling for cyber war may just net you a warning from moderators. The board is not the bastion of absolute unregulated free speech people think it is!
More broadly, outside of the current geopolitical context, trying to pick a target and rally anons against it is in bad taste. If you try, you may be told that "4chan is Not Your Personal Army" (NYPA).
As a result, the various "Anonymous" groups really don't have a home there.
The "real" Anonymous was. Now some other hacktivist group uses the name to cash in on the clout. People get really excited when they hear Anonymous is back at work.
4chan is so big these days, a mere board like /pol/ will have 30 million unique IP visits per month, that is (perhaps unfortunately) more than just kids these days. It's the main free speech board of the internet, it draws people from all over the world.
When I didn't know better I thought them as some kind anarcho libetarian group, but behind every effective cyber offensive there is always a powerful actor.. mostly a state or private interest.
Any time someone refers to Anonymous as if they are actually some kind of cohesive group it's a clear indicator they have no idea what they are talking about.
Currently Russia is suppressing all the civil protests against war in their own country, and they go as far to make people go to jail for just tweeting about it.
If it will be possible to use hacking or similar techniques to generate noise so:
1. Who wants to protest is harder to detect online ( i.e. can be arrested only once in square actually protesting )
2. The information about Russians protesting against war spreads to how many Russians as possible, so every person that wants to join will know and will can
I believe protests in Russia can help resolving this situation.
Unfortunately I don't have any knowledge on how to help with this possible plan, but in this thread there're people with that knowledge
> Currently Russia is suppressing all the civil protests against war in their own country, and they go as far to make people go to jail for just tweeting about it.
Sounds remarkably similar to the actions of western governments in response to recent protests about mandates. But now Russia bad so forget all that.
A general comment on cyberwarfare. The Russian government/military is probably one of the most formidable cyberwarfare forces in the world (a quick googling lists US, UK, China, Russia, Israel as the top 5 cyberwarfare states, and I assume no non-state organization compares). One would expect them to have deployed their cyberwarfare "forces" against Ukraine. And yet the results were... pretty minimal? Internet traffic went down by ~30% in Kharkiv for a few hours. Have there been any other consequences? Yes it is possible that Ukrainian military communications were disrupted in a way that is not publicly visible. But none of the things people worried about like the electric grid, cell network, transportation, power plants seem to have been affected. So is cyberwarfare really just a minor concern if a country has basic defenses?
Weren't a bunch of Ukrainian banks hit just before the invasion? Also there's reportedly a malware that wipes your disk currently spreading in Ukraine.
I wouldn't assume the "results" would be very visible or civilian facing. More along the lines of accessing military systems, intercepting communications, etc.
Am I the only one who thinks this is well intentioned but kind of silly?
I don’t know a lot about this space, but I don’t know especially how many skills translate from offense to defense.
Is this basically just a call for folks to turn in their 0days and access or something? Seems wt least marginally more useful than trying to train up a bunch of script kiddies to fight GRU…
They're not requesting script kiddies, and they're not asking for a bunch of vigilantes. They want applications:
> "Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country," the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.
You'd be amazed at how well offensive skills translate to defense. Some of the best blue-teamers are former red-teamers. If you don't have offensive skills, it's very easy to overlook things, especially when it comes to pivoting and exploit chaining.
> asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.
So it's effectively a free honey pot for Russia to get information on Ukranian cyber security professionals and a free pass to infiltrate them?
Also if you're a diligent red teamer, you're investigating the impact of your attacks to understand the noise you're generating. That's fundamental to evasion and persistence. Easy to deploy the same knowledge in a defensive context.
This seems extremely silly, if for no other reason I would bet 75% of the applicants will be Russian agents/intelligence officers applying to learn intel or mess up the operations.
Going on the offense can create problems for the aggressor, drawing resources away from their attack.
That said, the law in most places isn't going to allow/support this. It could maybe even interfere with state sponsored operations.
It would be interesting to see a sort of privateer license in this space. If I remember correctly, Russia pretty much doesn't care about people violating cyber laws in Russia so long as the victims are in other countries.
It's a request to submit your resume (which can be as simple as any malware or exploit you created) for cyber offense or cyber defense. If you can help secure Ukrainian government systems they want you and if you can install malware in the Russian's tech they want you.
Be careful when going outside. A cyber attack might be in progress!
But what actually would be good cyber warfare is hacking Putin’s family. Notoriously private and says his family is off limits and he never talks about them. I’m sure his kids aren’t normal like he claims.
John Oliver found his daughters dance/gymnastic performance and aired it a few years ago as part of something. For the daughter of a billionaire dictator, John Oliver made her sound fairly normal.
Fullstack developer with Javascript experience reporting to duty. I'll unleash hell with my extensive experience in pop-ups, pop-unders, alerts, ads and auto loading loud videos.
Change of plans, sir. Huge fight just started in my Javascript community - someone just pushed a new version of some extension and it's now injecting ads. Big drama sir. I'll report to duty next week - need to post angry emojis on the project's github repo till then.
Probably I'm just naive but I really don't understand this cyber warfare theater. Why aren't all internet operators in the free world just blackholing all russian ASNs (complete with the other allied bullies) from the internet routing tables? Wouldn't this be enough to avert all the nasty attacks on critical infrastructure?
If we did that, Russians wouldn't be reading HN and Twitter now and wouldn't be seeing images of abandoned/destroyed Russian vehicles, captive Russian soldiers, wounded civilians (who likely have Russian relatives). They probably wouldn't know that the tiny Ukrainian air force has downed multiple Russian aircrafts.
They wouldn't see the outpouring of support for the brave souls in Russia who take to the streets to protest the madness.
They wouldn't be able to keep contact with friends, family and ex-colleagues who can provide them with unfiltered (or at least with other filters applied) information.
This won't work at all. They'll just attack from a point of presence inside our borders. Any cyberattack that can be traced to a country is because they want it to be traced (eg to send a message)
It'll be a possible sanction because it will hurt the Russian population and businesses. But it won't avoid any cyberattack.
You'd have to cut literally every cable and satellite connection and radio transmission in and out of the country. With something as geographically distributed as Russia, that sounds very hard to convince every country to convince every operator to... and even then, there's some wireless options.
Presumably there's a Pareto 20% (or smaller I'd imagine) of connections that carry 80% of the traffic? At very least the increased latency of being forced onto suboptimal paths would be a statement
Sure, but whose traffic is truly going to be disrupted? There's a reason they had this stuff about being less dependent in the past, I seem to remember they disconnected DNS traffic to the outside for a day as a test a few years ago. This 80% will impact the netflix/youtube streams, video takes a lot of bandwidth (megabits per second) compared to push-to-talk audio (kilobits per second) or plain text (~21 bytes per second is the average american reading speed). Sure there will be overhead and webpages are crazy nowadays so you need more than 21B/s, but e.g. email can work very easily on 20% of the typical bandwidth (probably also 2%, but it depends on the specifics, e.g. QoS would help a lot there).
And even if you reduced it to a few megabits snuck in and out for the whole country, the military would use that and what's impacted is civilians. Bad for the economy? Meh, if all countries were already convinced to be against russia, then trade would be at a standstill and no comms for civilians would not matter that much financially.
That's not to say it's not worth a try, but I expect it won't be effective, or if it is, I'm skeptical that it would hinder them much more than any traditional trade limits already could.
I don't think it's necessary to physically cut cables.
What if critical infrastructure is isolated from savages by just not having routes to/from them?
I mean, in a similar way the Team Cymru UTRS[1] works by publishing a list of BGP filters to be imported in routers.
Agreed, it was a metaphor and not really meant as a call for physical damage that would (presumably) later have to be fixed again anyway. I should have written that more clearly.
Russia has a lot of spy satellites. A bunch of them could serve as bridges between Russia and regular homes in EU/US with a good fiber connection, datacentres, etc. Also microwave or fiber connections through the border to the many countries around them.
In the case of a hot war involving hundreds of thousands of troops and the 4th vs 7th largest militaries, maybe free access to papers isn't the most pressing issue.
Keeping as much communications channels open is of severe strategic interest. Transparency is a weapon of democracy. In the age of information media images can help in a war and cutting off any lines would only solidify the grasp of domestic propaganda for everyone.
There's a balancing act there. Open communications are strategic. However, bidirectional communication that can be used for cyberattacks is a weakness. I mean, how much citizen-to-citizen communication to Russians is worth compared to the cost and probability of a well-organized cyberattack.
The item represents a pseudo-flag with a separatist connotation and outrages the Flag of Ukraine. Namely: the russian coat of arms on the National Flag of Ukraine with a provoking "Odesa Republic" (Одесская Республика) и "Novorossia" ("Новороссия") or "New Russia" labels.
This is NOT acceptable and the only usage of the item is separatism agitation, the outrage of the Ukrainian national symbols.
I certainly sympathise much with that call, given the west is basically saying now -- we'll put in sactions, hopefully in a few months/years Russians will notice, in the meantime lets Russians bomb and occupy Ukraine. And to be honest it is not clear if the west can do anything that wouldn't lead to a direct confrontation with Russia and therefore nuclear war. But in the same time you'd hope in the modern world there would be ways to put real pressure now on a rogue state behaving insanely. It's not clear if SWIFT is an effective measure or not, but certainly prohibiting the oil/gas imports is -- the west just considers it too costly for them -- I guess it makes sense, they are not dying under the bombs, Ukrainians are.
Sure I get the silence but there was no need to blame the US media in the first place. Silence in the first place would have been fine for the Kremlin.
Given that people here are apparently specifically looking at Ed's words, maybe it wouldn't though. The first thing to die in war is the truth, I've heard said. The Russians need all the good publicity they can get, every bit they can reduce blame or normalize the actions is going to result in lesser sanctions. Ed might have been politely asked and realized it was not a question or suggestion; we don't know.
Considering that he's sheltering in Russia right now I would strongly suspect he's going to keep his mouth shut no matter what his opinion is about it. If Putin kicks him out he will be extradited and thrown in a US federal prison solitary confinement cell indefinitely while 'awaiting trial'.
Maybe he only now realized he's just an asset. (As opposed to Assange in the Equatorial embassy, which was given asylum for purely humanitarian reasons)
He retweeted Suchkov's summary of Putin's "address to the nation regarding his decision on Donbass" (https://twitter.com/m_suchkov/status/1495831112102338563). No surprises there about where Snowden's loyalty currently lies.
If you have to ask, lone wolf behavior is more likely to end up with you in jail than to do anything that helps Ukraine. If you are serious and are a citizen of a signatory to NATO, consider enlisting with your country's cyber force.
They're not looking for lone wolfers. They are asking for applications:
> "Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country," the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.
As long as you're in a country where it's not illegal to help the Ukraine, I say put in an app and see where it goes :-)
What does being a NATO signatory have to do with anything? Ukraine is not a part of NATO and I’m not aware of NATO authorizing any direct military or digital action against Russia.
NATO has not authorized direct action, but seeing as how NATO states border Russia and Ukraine, and given the alliance's founding principle of deterrence of the historical USSR, it has an obvious concern. And NATO signatories have more than likely engaged in cyber-offensives against Russia already (e.g. [1]).
If you are a member of a NATO signatory, that's associated with a lot of formal cyber rules and leaders who won't look well on cyber activism. I took it as a rule of thumb, not direct cause/effect.
Only if you’re an amateur. I got shell access into some public utilities that had old versions of Windows in Russia that I’m looking at right now. Maybe I can turn off some power grids.
If SWIY wants to turn the cursory into well-versed…ery.
Anonymously set up a Bitcoin VPS in a country that won’t care about a little heat, only connect to it using SSH over Tor, preferably from a public wifi. I think this the BEHIND SEVEN PROXIES of 2022, but still not watertight based on a traffic correlation attack from one of the many glowing Tor nodes.
Or just practice in your home lab, like me. If you have a computer and internet, it’s free.
Almost certainly not. This isn’t jacking accounts from some corporation or breaking into the network of some jihadi cell/far right group this is a state level actor and can only be equaled by other state level actors of which their only a handful of their caliber.
The most practical avenue of support is to provide tools and techniques for maintaining the ability for resistance groups to communicate autonomously once normal channels fall under the control of the invaders.
However, that is functionally equivalent to equipping a protracted, bloody insurgency, and it’s far from obvious that that would be a good outcome for anyone.
It's not clear what we can actually do to help. I work as a web-sec machine learning researcher, and I'd like to help. But anything I can do is probably illegal in my country or a breach of contract with my employer :(
I find it interesting how often the reason "but that's illegal" comes up since I've moved to Germany. In France : sure, we generally keep to the law because that is the point, but when a situation calls for crossing a red light because it's 1am, you're on foot, there's no one on the road in sight or hearing distance, and your last train is about to leave, you bet virtually everyone would make that judgment call and cross the street independently (in germany it would really depend on the person from my impression).
It's tricky, though, talking about illegal things online. I feel like the internet was more free ten years ago. If anything was illegal then you put a "for educational purposes" disclaimer on it but the information was available or hypotheticals could be discussed fairly freely. People can think for themselves if they want to put anything into action, and might decide more based on morals than, say, their employer's contract. Indeed one does not hack russia, inform their employer in writing, and advertise their name in the tcp handshake in case they want to send them vodka.
How would you act if it was your country being attacked, would you still think "but that's illegal" ? Not saying that, thus, you must now do something illegal. I don't want to push you in either direction. But if you want to do this by your own morals (not anyone else morals) then, well, that's the thing the submission is calling for, not for consulting with your employer because their legal department is going to tell you to not do anything ever.
It would be a shame if some hackers combined opencv, a camera, a raspberrypi, drone parts and buck shot shells into something useful to defend against mean helicopters.
This does bring up the idea of "information sanctions." How adversely would Russia be impacted if NATO just black-holed or reflected all their traffic?
> Modern day internet architecture is very secure.
Seriously? That doesn't seem to match the outcomes of regular breeches, 0-days, etc. - many reported right here. The state of security is often considered terrible and unrepairable; experts advise assuming you have been breeched.
Ah, yes. Things are so terrible now. Definitely not like the days in which http didnt have TLS, and NFS was used over the internet. All credentials and secrets free of any in transit encryption. Much more secure back then.
I guess in this era every little thing "helps" like imaging something on the internet changes something but other than "boots on the ground" START SEIZING PHYSICAL ASSETS.
Only oligarchs are going to stop Putin and the only way to get them to do anything is take away all their toys in every other country.
Take their yachts, take all those apartments like in Florida and New York. Take them all.
Sanctions unfortunately also splatter and punish the rest of the people in Russia who have zero control over this.
But you take their yachts and real-estate in every other country, suddenly there is some motivation where it counts.
In my haste scrolling through the headlines, I initially read this as the Velvet Underground rather than hacker underground. Given that only Cale is left standing I was very concerned what Zelensky and the Ukraine government thought a single Welsh musician could do against the might of the Russian military.
I have a limited experience in security field, all I could do was to donate money. Yet if I did fucking trust me I'd be putting all my spare time into this.
To anyone with the required skill set. Please, this is you chance to remotely help UA.
It’s rather straight forward: You first get in touch with Razor and Blade, you can find them DJing at the local night club, and they make a series of calls and the hackers of the world unite around them.
This was covered in the 1995 documentary “Hackers”
Things are pretty ad-hoc, peer to peer. Sometimes signal, sometimes old-fashioned irc (usually people have their own clients for e2e). Pubkeys are often shared around more general discussion on onion boards.
It's easy to personify what we could call "brands" like Anonymous, but the reality is there are many "tribes" who range in size and culture, frequently working collectively towards disrupting power structures.
I realize you are probably joking (which is rather insensitive in a situation where actual people are dying).
But yes. It would help. It would hurt those that are a victim of the war already most, though. The Russian economy is hurt bad. This will reach moms&pops soon, if not already.
Leading to unrest, potential bankrun, local protests and even deserting of troops.
If you believe putting up Russian people against Russian authorities helps, then taking the livelihood or extra income of thousands of these people, will be adding to unrest.
It is disturbing how the moderators of HN are condoning the comments in this thread (the top comment by 'neonsunset' provides tools that enable DDoSing a foreign government website) that are encouraging cyber warfare against a nation-state that is considered an 'enemy' of their state (the USA).
Had a Russian/enemy state website had a similar thread that condoned cyber-attacks against the USA critical infrastructure, they would be flagged as terrorists and 'empire' publications like major US newspapers would be all over it as "war against the USA".
All this bluster from capitalists merely reflects hypocrisy.
> Had a Russian/enemy state website had a similar thread that condoned cyber-attacks against the USA critical infrastructure, they would be flagged as terrorists
Look up the difference between belligerent and victim, and the word compassion.
I don't see why you're dragging another political topic, capitalism, into the conversation when it's about thwarting what you call terrorists. It seems flamebaity but I'm replying in the hope you're seriously interested in the conversation.
Im going to report ycombinator to the Russian authorities. This thread has people advocating and planning terrorist attacks against Russia and it's being condoned by the moderators. This thread wouldn't survive for a minute if the target was the US.
And the passive tone at which those of contrarian opinions express their doubts. Just say it outright so we can have an actual conversation, do you not think that Ukraine is the victim?
Just like nobody would even talk about Nord Stream 1, or EU didn't want to cancel Swift, and EU leader is literally talking about a 'pretty lit up building' in 'support of Ukraine' - while Ukraine is begging for weapons ...
I'm wary that this is a little too late.
If you want to help, call your Senator and demand that they supply Ukraine with as many Javelins and Stingers as they can, unlimited small arms, equipment and medical supplies, naval defence missiles, mobile surface to air missiles with radars, drone and possibly some cruise missiles.
And then for the US to scuttle a few Russian ships and blockade all of their ports.
And then to sabotage their infra, their internet, their pipelines, railroads and electricity.
Because that would actually be useful.
The events unfolding right now are as big as 9/11 and we will witness similar tensions over Taiwan. After the loss of Hong Kong and 'cutting losses' in Afghanistan - and a global pandemic - it's vey bad for the world.
I'm wary that reading headlines on seems a whole lot less meaningful than it did a few days ago.
Folks, I remember the tail end of the Cold War as a kid and it was not a happy time.
I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR collapsed it was like a giant global fear lifted from everything. We used to make movies and TV shows all the time about global nuclear annihilation.
I believe that's why maybe GenX and Boomers are less afraid of 'Climate Change' - because it's something we can and will eventually conquor - we've been there before.
But living with an intransigent Russia who is hinting and 'things which have never been seen' (aka some kind of nukes) while invading a country - and having the West mostly twiddle their thumbs and watch, is ominous for what it means in the future.
We could see another few generations of really existential angst, where, once it sets into everyone's psyche's, we kind of 'forget' what normal peace feels like.
You need to evaluate the situation. Supplying weapons might feel good as a sign of defiance, but it will only prolong the conflict and lead to more dead. Nobody wins if you die a martyr in this conflict. The political capital is on the Ukrainians side, so any situation aside from a direct war is preferable. There are direct conflicts, but they are also involved in a proxy war.
And no, I would not enjoy suggesting surrender to any Ukrainian either and I understand that people want to fight. But a better future can only be build with acknowledging the present and taking options from there.
Of course there could be opportunities if Ukrainians hold out as long as they can, but either case of getting outside help or being able to repel the invaders currently seems almost impossible. You can make the war more expensive for the Russian, I guess, but that would cost more lives and might result in the same end.
One of the most sane comment imo. Ukraine simply can’t win this by continuing to fight. It will just end up getting more people killed and same end result. And there’s no appetite for sending US and other troops in to fight as that would create an even bigger war with far dangerous consequences.
I think the best solution would be for Ukraine to see the writing on the wall - declare itself neutral and not be part of NATO.
Great comment, particularly your summation of the 1980s Cold War zeitgeist. It was very real for our generation and nuclear war drills and fallout shelters were part of the life for school kids in many places, especially my South Texas town with its (then) five military bases.
I don’t agree with you on blockading Russia or escalating conflict over Ukraine but it will be a different situation if Russia makes a move on Estonia or Latvia or—God forbid—Poland.
For me, my response to increasing global instability is the same as it was during the riots of 2020: get the heck out of cities, especially coastal cities. It’s not going to get better any time soon. In a small town in a flyover state, I can at least grow my own food and raise my own family with minimal worry about the outside world, aside from diesel prices.
You cannot escape 'global instability' by moving to a flyover state. Everything is connected, a few extra miles means nothing other than for few things like less noise pollution and urban crime.
Every, little, thing you consume has a long supply chain of value add at each step, that's what makes it all work.
The reason that we have to care about Ukraine, is because otherwise, we are faced with a mother Cold War. That is very bad.
This war is a battle for the future of the world order, in which everyone is a part.
An easy victory for Putin almost guarantees the Chinese Generals will be pushing for Taiwan and Xi will listen.
A costly bloody failure an economic ruin and a political coup in Russia means Xi knows the price for failure in Taiwan will be his head, almost literally.
Aside from geopolitics, there is a moral issue in all of these situations - Ukranians deserve to not live behind another Iron Curtain. Just like Poles, Czech, E. Germans etc..
Removing Russia from SWIFT is the financial equivalent of a nuclear option. It will block Russian banks and businesses to receive or pay for goods and services in the short term, effectively cutting them from the rest of the world.
The message that weaponizing SWIFT will send is that the platform is no longer as reliable for financial purposes. In the long term, it will increase the interest for alternative solutions that will further fragment payments and markets.
Bankers do not like uncertainty. They will find ways around this restriction and likely keep the alternatives. If this happens, SWIFT is not coming back to Russia when this is over.
If what you said were true, western countries would not be divided on this issue. It just so happens that Germany are being cowardly over this issue, and the Germans are dependent on Russian energy.
SWIFT was already questioned when it was already used against Iran, a supposed exception. The service relies on neutrality towards any transaction, it is not a vehicle for war.
I wish there would be more people could do than "protest".
Inside Russia the Kremlin eliminated most voices of opposition journalists. Those in power now are only hard-line Putin cronies. The NGO's have been expelled, the media silenced or murdered, and anyone who could be a strong contender to take Putin's place is in jail.
They have sent murderers to Europe to carry out assassinations, downed a civilian aircraft, infiltrated our political systems by funding racists and fringe-group fuck-mongers, and continue to laugh at us for being weak simply because we prefer diplomacy over violence.
If you're living in Russia and the only thing you're prepared to do is protest then have at it if it eases your mind. But if you have some skills you could do a lot more if you really wanted to help:
- leak financial records,
- if you have access to ICS take them down
It would help see bank details, company formation documents, info on shell companies, or transactions between RU based shells and Cypriot, Maltese, London banks.
You could help highlighting old stories that haven't aged well - that show how Europe is still complicit by not having acted over the past decades other than with "a frown, a concern, or a stern warning" here some stories but there are actually dozens of high traffic headlines for every country:
- Arron Banks & Nigel Farrage using Russian money to finance Brexit,
- Austrian politician Kneissel inviting Putin to dance at her wedding,
- Gerhard Schröder and many in German politics parachuting into board seats of Russian businesses.
- Marine Le Pen accepting Russian money to fund her racist party
- Russian stooges inside the GOP, ...
We need to throw shit at those responsible in our own countries to make it clear what happens if you defend dirty Russian money under the pretense of diplomacy.
asap and reject Russian, ban all Russian state media from Tech platforms, etc. I'm afraid that any form of help which goes beyond mere lip service will never be accepted by Europeans (or US) because it means accept some risk/suffering ourselves. And Putin has many people in EU / US / UK government who own him a favor.
Also don't remove Russian banks from SWIFT because this hits mostly the lower income groups and not those strutting around EU capitals with their Chanel bags and designer clothes who anyway have their assets tied up in EU real estate.
To fix this we have to set the offshore financial system on fire and have more transparency over who the beneficiaries are in inbound/outbound financial transactions.
Also if you have the stomach and skills then hunt down people close to the Russian state pretending to have a civilian life in Europe. This includes RU embassy employees, employees of RU state media who been poisoning our own culture with propaganda for years.
Nobody who works for a country that fires missiles at Europe shall ever feel safe in a European country. The West (and especially Europe) must speak a language that they understand. Time for diplomacy is over when war goes kinetic.
I’m not American and haven’t been in the United States in several years. Why should a foreign country’s laws impact what I read?
Going even further, a democratically elected leader asked their citizens to help. Once again, why does American law matter?? Does America claim sovereignty over Ukraine now too??
I'm no expert on this stuff, but I don't get the partisan nature of this Ukraine Russia debate at all.
Putting aside the politics of what side the US government is on...
It seems very equivalent to me to when some southern states declared secession from the northern states (in 1860), there was a civil war. To Russians, Ukraine is integral to them and their identity, even if that has been the case since 1991 (a situation forced on Russia at the time).
So, if we can leave the politics aside, accepting that there are institutions such as countries etc, what would be the right thing here?
Why should Western countries even involve themselves in this? I mean - Russia certainly is going to roll over Ukraine - how does it help anyone to arm them - isn't it just inviting more retaliation - isn't it making a bad problem even worse?
You are incorrect on so many levels - I have no idea where to begin.
Ukraine is a sovereign state independent from russia. russia dreams about soviet union comeback. Some countries are out of reach now, e.g. Baltic states which became EU and NATO members.
After russians being assholes to their neighbours for decades (if not centuries) - some neighbours decided that it's time to leave abusive relationship.
To russia Ukraine is integral only for couple of things - land buffer from the west influence, land bridge to the black sea (Crimea).
Ukrainians see how russia abuses them (e.g. frequent embargoes or price jumps for gas, and other tightly coupled economical relations they are not allowed to escape) and attempts to leave this. That's a deep blow to russia and their maniac dictator cannot allow this. F
For ages - instead of russia attempting to build proper strong and attractive economy are using force on their small neighbours. I think every single neighbor of russia (or russian empire or soviet union) was either at war or occupied in previous 100 or 200 years. Neighbouring nations (the people, not the politicians or greedy oligarchs) are attempting to flee russian influence zone, due to constant economic pressure and imminent danger. russia now attempts to paint this as "NATO expansion" or "US imperialism", but they are just old-school bully.
Hmm.. I think you're stuck in the idea that there are good and bad actors, that this stuff isn't propaganda, that it's not just about power, all of it bad... I'm sure if you're in Russia the exact opposite arguments are being made, and make sense to their citizens.
My point really is that - to an outsider with no dog in the race - if you take a long view, it seems equivalent to the US civil war. What you just said, couldn't you equate Russia/Ukraine to US/southern states?
Ukraine is an independent sovereign nation _de facto_ and _de jure_, recognized by probably every single country in the world including the aggressor russia to.
Why you thing I have "a dog in this race"? It's just old-school war, russia does not know how to use it's soft diplomatic power. It's threats all the time, and when Ukraine does not give up on idea to westernise for at least 8 years - russia treat is a threat - thus they invade.
If I'd compare - I'd compare it to Winter War. When WW2 started - they saw that Finland is too close to St.Peterbug for russias comfort - thus they started the war. Same here - Ukraine wants to free themselves from post-soviet economy and modernise to western model, it's a threat to putin - because then the "western" economical and political borders will be too close for his comfort.
I'm based in the US. The problem is that the US, unlike Russia, will not simply agree to allow attacks against foreign targets so long as its suits their strategic purposes. And I suppose that's for the best. In the meantime, myself and people like me simply aren't going to risk our entire careers to retaliate. I suppose if we felt strongly enough we would've joined the NSA and done this legally. I wish Ukraine the best and hope our "official" hackers are doing their best to assist or will be unleashed soon.