Just saying… you don’t need to activate windows. Been using an unactivated copy for years. You lose virtually nothing.
Doesn’t beat this show on a small local radio station in my town, that had a theme music with someone saying “audio jungle” every 20 seconds because they downloaded the demo from that site and never bothered to pay 5$ for the full version. I was selling stuff on audio jungle at that time, and ad to stop on the side of the road cause I couldn’t stop laughing.
The fact that it’s quite easy to activate Windows without money or a valid key makes this even funnier. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and neither do the people around him
Or it’s supposed to be an insult? If it was licensed (even thru pirate means) it would look like they paid money to Microsoft.
This way, they have it and are using it without funding an American company.
The part were he is using Windows at all is crazy. Imagine the Pentagon running Russian os
It’s a throw away computer. They went out and got a random shitbox from Andrei Blahblahnov at his corner computer repair shop that no one from any intelligence service would ever think to go to ahead of time.
Use the shit once, literally set it on fire in a field 30 minutes later.
Note Putin’s monitor isn’t even plugged in. Just, A+.
He also is not touching anything so maybe he’s using telepathy.
I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…
Wish it would explode in his face
I thought Putin had put a lot of people through windows; why the surprise?
There are many fine soviet computers to use for pressing a button that does nothing.
He should have used Linux
Considering that Russia has at least 4 major domestic Linux distros (Astra, Alt, ROSA, RED OS), I can only guess why they didn’t.
Russia has no own processor production. ICL is one of the few Russian PC brands which uses AMD and Intel… So in fact there are no “Russian” pc’s…
Russia has some Elbrus CPUs locally produced, but they are very outdated and very expensive, and also have a different processor architecture, so they find limited use. Apparently, they didn’t bother supplying one for the President.
Agreed, but they have some amazing hacks using older architectures. They do produce motherboards and other components though so it’s still surprising they are using a dell.
But I was informed that Elbrus would be killing AMD and Intel any day now…
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense. Why would he give money to Microsoft? In fact, why would you?
As for the PC - there are no Russian PCs, so he has to use something foreign. DELLs are very solid, and great for the price if you get them refurbished.
Not as solid as Lenovo, which also has considerably fewer American companies in its supply chain. But maybe they just got a good deal on a bunch of DELLs.
there are no Russian PCs
There do exist domestic-built elbrus(custom soviet arch) and baikal(ARM-derived) -based PCs. Technically, all govt employees are required to use them as there is like a 30% limit on foreign parts, but in practice it is circumvented by padding circuits with junk thats never used. And yes, they’re lagging behind cutting edge chips by a decade and a half at this point, but its still more than enough for online voting and whatever other boomer shit putin needs.
Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.
Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.
I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense.
No, it just shows incompetence.
pykms isn’t hard…
Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.
And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.
And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.
And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.
Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.
Or, It’s just a newly set up computer used for a quick photo op and will either go back to whoever’s desk it was taken from or put in a cupboard somewhere. That is not a desktop set up for daily use.
it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows
Instead of using Wine it uses Vodka
What happened to Astra Linux :(
“You can’t go wrong.” Isn’t an observation, it’s a threat.
I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.
Voting doesn’t need to be secure in Russia because voting doesn’t actually matter in Russia.
It does matter, just not the way you might think. Voting in dictatorships is basically a submission ritual.
