I find it amusing that the biggest supporters or Russia in its current war of aggression against Ukraine are/were Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia -- precisely the countries that should know better, since they were the principal recipients the "love and friendship" from Russia:
Older people in these countries have good memories of that time, employment and housing were basically a given, healthcare and public transportation were solved, etc. They're very easy to manipulate, promise them a 13th month of pension and they'll vote for you.
I don't think you understand how bad globalization fucked up these countries, people live with their parents until they're 30+, young people can't find decent jobs, etc.
Geopolitical decisions aren't made by countries, they are made by individual people.
Sometimes those people are a plurality that organically endorses that decision and votes some representative in. Sometimes those people are a plurality that has been brainwashed by compromised media to do it. Sometimes those people are just a small ruling elite that get voted in by people who didn't think very hard about those particular geopolitical decisions and just want, I don't know, their political and cultural enemies brutalized and $1.99 gas.
My brother visited some of these countries. He said most people there are oblivious to what happened to their countries. They simply don't care. It also didn't help that everyone he met (agricultural sector) was a day-drinker.
That's why they're doomed to repeat it. Again and again.
It's almost like people who are simply trying to survive don't have the time, energy, or space to worry about international, or even national affairs. Weird.
The Slovaks ultimately got federalization of Czechoslovakia from the crisis (1969), which both distracted them and made their memories less negative.
As far as Hungary goes, I asked my friend who studied Hungarian history. He explained to me that while the Soviet invasion was very traumatic, the subsequent Kádár "goulash socialism" was a lot more lenient on the people than all the other Soviet Bloc regimes, and that the Hungarians made an incorrectly confident conclusion that losing a small war to the Russians is not catastrophic.
Of course, this is NOT the experience of basically anyone else who happened to be in a similar situation. A potential puppet regime of Russia in Ukraine wouldn't look like Kádárs by any means, it would rather look like the Kadyrovian microstate in Chechnya, minus the Islam of course.
A lot of Eastern European countries have oligarchs who largely made their fortunes with help from the Russians. In Czechia one such example is the prime minister Andrej Babiš, who was a bureaucrat in a state owned business who then sold it to himself in the 90s (with the help of some "Swiss" money) and became a billionaire. He's consistently been as pro-Russia as he thinks he can get away with (the positive is that Czechs hate Russians a lot).
Also in these countries there's a lot of old people who have never been able to adapt to living in a free, capitalist society, so for them, there's some nostalgia for communism.
And maybe they mistake current Russia for a communist country? It has every single ingredient of Stalin's Russia except the pretense of socialism or communism.
It doesn't matter what Russia actually is. They play both sides with their propaganda. Old people who thought positively about communism still support Russia.
Fico and Babiš for example were both communist party members and both pro-Russia politicians today.
Are there any other wars that are not of aggression? What do you gain by parroting the legalese speak? Implying that it is extra bad and extra illegal war? Not your run of the mill PG-13 war? This one is X-rated kids.
Everyone knows who the attacker is - just some people root for Russia for their own reasons. Usually tied to the internal politics of their countries - like hating for unrelated reasons the political actors from their states that happen to support Ukraine.
Slovakia is heavily influenced by Russian propaganda, which started way before Corona times.
It's mainly the older people that are influenced by this, and a lot of young people either left the country already, or have concrete plans to leave.
It's really sad, how these old people are ruining the future of their children and grandchildren, really crazy.
You can say a lot about Russia, but they are very good with misinformation, it's a real threat for Europe.
My wife is from Slovakia, so I have front row seats on the whole situation. The kinds of misinformation these older people are willing to believe is really nuts.
The majority of school teachers grew up under the Soviet side of cold war propaganda.
And in history education in particular, we are told that "we" have always looked towards Russia as a role model, to fight Hungarian nationalism (since the country was just part of Hungary for most of its history).
That is possible, but I also see people who used to be very anti-Soviet, now to be anti-EU and anti-Ukraine. It's kind of like they hated Russia in the past, but now are convinced that EU and Ukraine are worse.
When in the past they would claim that the Soviet times were bad, now they would claim that it wasn't that bad in the end. That is of course because of all the horrible things that are happening in EU, like gay and trans people, and vaccinations. Terrible! Let's bring those good old Soviet days back!
That's a pretty harsh and uninformed take. Russia operates by capturing foreign governments and making their leaders beholden to Russia's interests. When it succeeds, it happens regardless of what the populace actually wants. They've been grooming Trump (along with a dozen or so other potential up-and-comers) since the 80s (Trump was considered a long shot and too unpredictable, but fortune favors the prepared - better weak support of their enemies than full belligerence).
The Belarusians aren't too thrilled that Russian troops are operating in their country either, but Lukashenko needs Russian support to stay in power, so he walks a tightrope. Notice how noncommittal he is about pretty much everything...
In the case of Slovakia, it's purely Russian misinformation that was able to capture a large part of the population, mainly older people. First anti-EU, then anti-vax, and now anti-Ukraine and anti-EU.
it's not about Russia being good or bad, they will do anything in their interest like every other country. What's bad is Slovakia apparently not being careful enough about that.
God forbid for national politicians to think about their națion first! Remind me again, how many British and French soldiers died protecting Poland in 1939? Tens of thousands, isn’t it? The same Brits who were fricking thinking of invading Finland in April of 1940 for daring to sign a peace treaty with the Soviets.
Fico get all the free shit from Europe to build his country and a boat load of free money from his personal investments in shady businesses, so in that case he does get both upsides.
ceding sovereignty and to many degrees cultures to another nation to kinda like be a vassal state is quite literally not thinking about your nation first lmao. even less so when the other nation funds your political ascension, like.. that's the opposite of thinking about your nation first. that's flat out doing it for the other nation man.
It would be extremely stupid of Russia not to spy on Slovakia. If they had properly spied on Ukraine, they could have turned around 2014 and all of Nuland's "regime change" machinations. They have learned their lesson well now - do as the Americans do and spy on everyone - and most especially the "friendly" nations - by any and all means.
"learned their lesson well now" - I don't think Russia has learned any lessons at all since Ukraine. Russia's sheer incompetence keeps getting worse and worse, as Prigozhin exposed on the inside. The war went from total failure to achieve any objectives for 5 years, to now 4 hour lines in Moscow to fill up your car at the gas station - i.e. Russia went from "failing to capture Kyiv in 3 days" to now "getting hit in the center of Moscow regularly".
Given the level of incompetence that Russia has demonstrated on both the political and military front, I highly doubt it could've turned anything around in Ukraine even if knew everything about 2014.
So they bought the cameras and some people pointed out they look exactly the same as Russian cameras. The government denied this but after they figured out the serial numbers matched the Russian cameras they started this investigation.
Good they investigated this before using them, but this sounds like a big fu...
> multiple reports in Slovak media that linked the purchase to a Cyprus shell company with fake certifications.
We're talking about this as if it's some precursor to a James Bond plot, but it really fizzles after learning Nina in the sourcing department skipped the compliance paperwork. James Bond doesn't need to leave the bed!
Trojan exploits aside, I just assume that it'd be easier for someone in SVR/GRU to bribe an admin.
> We're talking about this as if it's some precursor to a James Bond plot, but it really fizzles after learning Nina in the sourcing department skipped the compliance paperwork.
That's exactly the sort of thing that James Bond would do.
You've got a point, a fuck-up and a fuck-you are somewhat different in this context, though I was assuming both had malice in my original interpretation.
There is a video somewhere of a Finnish university professor from around the time the war started (maybe a bit before), explaining the Russian attitude to sportsmanship, or whatever you want to call it.
Basically he suggested cheating is not considered unethical in Russia. If you are not using all means available to reach your goal you are leaving something on the table and are weak. This applies to all levels of society.
I would be cautious of such generalisations normally. But the industrial scale cheating at the winter Olympics says a lot.
generalizations about a group of people are not “racist” when not talking about race, they’re also not inherently pejoratives either. reduction is to know what to expect
still buy the cameras, still buy the natural gas
just dont go on the public record saying its not backdoored knowing the supply chain
but assuming there was some introspection you were hoping to reveal, which culture were you considering to be racist?
There is a small number of cameras which broadcast the video publicly. For example, Moscow: [1] (Taganskaya square), [2] and Saint-Petersburg: [3] (Nevsky prospect and Gostiniy Dvor). Sadly the quality is not great and in reality those places look much better. For example, many of the small 2-floor buildings on Taganskaya square are over 100 years and have a nie classical architecture but one cannot see any fine details in the camera view.
The comments here seem to presuppose that somehow Slovakia is the only ones who would need to worry about this, and not, say, any town with Flock in it
Most cameras are insecure by default. Check out: http://www.insecam.org/en/ or https://www.shodan.io/ The first isn't even using default access creds, which I suspect is what was 'discovered' in this case, but cameras that immediately hook up to the internet with 0 restrictions to access.
For the goal of recording a cat scratching their car or catching an imaginary thief neighbour (a magpie or fox stole that thing that one time, you dullard) people will plug into Chinese, Russian, and American video surveillance networks in no time and pay for it.
It seems like a silly mess. But its easier than it sounds to end up in such a situation. We're are a lot of HN Kagi users that just have to trust that the Yandex collaboration is fully watertight.
I think synchronized operations could really disrupt the grid — think thousands of inverters switching backfeeding to the grid on/off, causing waves and disruption. Or thousands of inverters having their grid sync disabled, simultaneously operating to shift the frequency of the grid (very bad).
I'd be worried about the inverters in large commercial solar plants. On a sunny day you could easily cause a blackout by turning enough solar capacity off at once. Maybe shut down the entire grid when the sudden power imbalances trip the self- protection in half the grid. That's a pain to recover from. Spain went through that not too long ago
But maybe rapidly switching residential solar on and off in a coordinated way can also do funny things to grid equipment
There are always some “stable” power sources kept on standby that can be activated within minutes, for example gas turbines. In European electricity markets, generators can actually be paid simply for keeping this reserve capacity available, even if they are not producing much electricity most of the time.
The problem is that a few minutes is still too slow when a large power source suddenly drops out. The grid needs an immediate response, which can come from fast reserves such as batteries, hydro, pumped storage and other generators that can react automatically.
Pumped storage is basically gravitational energy storage: you pump water uphill when electricity is plentiful, then release it through turbines when power is needed.
DDoS, anonymizer proxy, and turn off power in large commercial installations. They kinda deserve it for investing in solar. US holds all the power in social media, can't blame China if they want to utilize their lead in solar for something too.
Hopefully mutually assured annoyance keeps everyone at bay.
To piss away decades of hard-earned trust in its products for some short-term one-time political 'pwn' of the enemy.
If that goal sounds stupid to you, that's because it is. I would expect some countries that are not China to act with such a capricious lack of foresight.
The detail that gets me is the Ministry saying the cameras were safe because they'd be on a closed network, while the backdoor can apparently be triggered via SMS from hardcoded phone numbers.
That's a pretty good demonstration of why "it's not exposed to the internet" isn't a security boundary if the device itself has an out-of-band communications path.
Add Secure Boot being disabled and unauthenticated live streams and this seems less like one unfortunate backdoor and more like nobody established what the trust boundary was supposed to be in the first place.
Imagine a headline reading, "People are starving in [city]." Someone might reply to that news by pointing out that starvation is as old as humankind. ...older even.
Most people talking about Slovakia wouldn't even be able to put it on a map or know what currency they use, but they become instant geo political expert.
They don't even know how to pronounce Fico properly... Give me a break lmao
You reap what you sow, MFs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_opposition_to_sanctions...
- Hungary: November of 1956
- Slovakia: "spring" of 1968
- Serbia: the Stalin's betrayal at the end of WW2
I don't think you understand how bad globalization fucked up these countries, people live with their parents until they're 30+, young people can't find decent jobs, etc.
Sometimes those people are a plurality that organically endorses that decision and votes some representative in. Sometimes those people are a plurality that has been brainwashed by compromised media to do it. Sometimes those people are just a small ruling elite that get voted in by people who didn't think very hard about those particular geopolitical decisions and just want, I don't know, their political and cultural enemies brutalized and $1.99 gas.
That's why they're doomed to repeat it. Again and again.
As far as Hungary goes, I asked my friend who studied Hungarian history. He explained to me that while the Soviet invasion was very traumatic, the subsequent Kádár "goulash socialism" was a lot more lenient on the people than all the other Soviet Bloc regimes, and that the Hungarians made an incorrectly confident conclusion that losing a small war to the Russians is not catastrophic.
Of course, this is NOT the experience of basically anyone else who happened to be in a similar situation. A potential puppet regime of Russia in Ukraine wouldn't look like Kádárs by any means, it would rather look like the Kadyrovian microstate in Chechnya, minus the Islam of course.
Also in these countries there's a lot of old people who have never been able to adapt to living in a free, capitalist society, so for them, there's some nostalgia for communism.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-says-communism-comes-bible-co...
It doesn't matter what Russia actually is. They play both sides with their propaganda. Old people who thought positively about communism still support Russia.
Fico and Babiš for example were both communist party members and both pro-Russia politicians today.
Everyone knows who the attacker is - just some people root for Russia for their own reasons. Usually tied to the internal politics of their countries - like hating for unrelated reasons the political actors from their states that happen to support Ukraine.
There are concepts like wars of necessity or just wars (e.g. of liberation), but that depends on how cynical you're feeling.
It's mainly the older people that are influenced by this, and a lot of young people either left the country already, or have concrete plans to leave.
It's really sad, how these old people are ruining the future of their children and grandchildren, really crazy.
You can say a lot about Russia, but they are very good with misinformation, it's a real threat for Europe.
My wife is from Slovakia, so I have front row seats on the whole situation. The kinds of misinformation these older people are willing to believe is really nuts.
The majority of school teachers grew up under the Soviet side of cold war propaganda.
And in history education in particular, we are told that "we" have always looked towards Russia as a role model, to fight Hungarian nationalism (since the country was just part of Hungary for most of its history).
When in the past they would claim that the Soviet times were bad, now they would claim that it wasn't that bad in the end. That is of course because of all the horrible things that are happening in EU, like gay and trans people, and vaccinations. Terrible! Let's bring those good old Soviet days back!
The Belarusians aren't too thrilled that Russian troops are operating in their country either, but Lukashenko needs Russian support to stay in power, so he walks a tightrope. Notice how noncommittal he is about pretty much everything...
Is he? I don't see that in his comment at all. Can you point out that part to us?
Perhaps your handlers never taught you that two things can be bad at the same time.
but pointing "huh huh duurrr Russia is bad" while doing the same shit Russia doing is peak level irony
You don't have moral high ground
Being pro-russia is being anti-Slovakian though. You get zero upside for teaming with terrorist state and all the downsides.
How are any of those false flag? They're state sponsored, by different state actors.
Given the level of incompetence that Russia has demonstrated on both the political and military front, I highly doubt it could've turned anything around in Ukraine even if knew everything about 2014.
Good they investigated this before using them, but this sounds like a big fu...
> multiple reports in Slovak media that linked the purchase to a Cyprus shell company with fake certifications.
We're talking about this as if it's some precursor to a James Bond plot, but it really fizzles after learning Nina in the sourcing department skipped the compliance paperwork. James Bond doesn't need to leave the bed!
Trojan exploits aside, I just assume that it'd be easier for someone in SVR/GRU to bribe an admin.
That's exactly the sort of thing that James Bond would do.
There is a video somewhere of a Finnish university professor from around the time the war started (maybe a bit before), explaining the Russian attitude to sportsmanship, or whatever you want to call it.
Basically he suggested cheating is not considered unethical in Russia. If you are not using all means available to reach your goal you are leaving something on the table and are weak. This applies to all levels of society.
I would be cautious of such generalisations normally. But the industrial scale cheating at the winter Olympics says a lot.
still buy the cameras, still buy the natural gas
just dont go on the public record saying its not backdoored knowing the supply chain
but assuming there was some introspection you were hoping to reveal, which culture were you considering to be racist?
Are these cameras in use in Russia? Can people outside of Russia look in at Russian traffic in this way?
[1] https://gidcam.ru/camera/moskva-panorama-centra-stolicy-s-ma...
[2] https://gidcam.ru/camera/moskva-volgogradskij-prospekt-i-plo...
[3] https://camguide.net/ru/europe/russia/saint-petersburg/nevsk...
But maybe rapidly switching residential solar on and off in a coordinated way can also do funny things to grid equipment
The problem is that a few minutes is still too slow when a large power source suddenly drops out. The grid needs an immediate response, which can come from fast reserves such as batteries, hydro, pumped storage and other generators that can react automatically.
Pumped storage is basically gravitational energy storage: you pump water uphill when electricity is plentiful, then release it through turbines when power is needed.
I quite fancy electrical grid.
same issue with large loads like boilers, this stuff should never be connected to the internet, but it is
if you can control enough load on the grid you can do real damage
Hopefully mutually assured annoyance keeps everyone at bay.
In the end it's all about trust. Right now I don't see why China would like to burn down their market.
If that goal sounds stupid to you, that's because it is. I would expect some countries that are not China to act with such a capricious lack of foresight.
That's a pretty good demonstration of why "it's not exposed to the internet" isn't a security boundary if the device itself has an out-of-band communications path.
Add Secure Boot being disabled and unauthenticated live streams and this seems less like one unfortunate backdoor and more like nobody established what the trust boundary was supposed to be in the first place.
Would that remark be on topic? Would it be noise?
They don't even know how to pronounce Fico properly... Give me a break lmao