Putin Wants to Push Microsoft Out of Russia in Battle with U.S

[TomCADem]

Source: NBC News

In his battle with the United States, Vladimir Putin has a new target — Microsoft.

The Kremlin is backing a plan to rid government offices and state-controlled companies of all foreign software, starting with Moscow city government replacing Microsoft products with Russian ones, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

The Russians have also moved toward blocking LinkedIn, the U.S.-based networking site that Microsoft is in the process of buying. The company is appealing an injunction, with a decision expected Nov. 10.

The intelligence official said Putin is going after Microsoft because it is the biggest American name in information technology and because it's easy to convince Russians that the company works with the U.S. intelligence community.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/putin-wants-push-microsoft-out-russia-battle-us-n674781

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What happened to Putin dismissing claims of cyberespionage as paranoia? Also, how long before Trump starts siding with Putin against Microsoft? Maybe Trump will finally side with U.S. interests.

[secondwind]

1. Maybe he and Trump are going "into the business" together. n/t

[Democat]

2. Putin keeps punishing his own people

Just like Trump wants to punish Americans.

[uawchild]

3. Putin doesn't trust Microsoft?

Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. lol


(Mac/linux user here)

[dembotoz]

4. what the hell would happen if they came out with something better

and not that apple crap

[Sunlei]

5. LOL!, guess all 20 Putin's government computers got the 'not authentic MS software lock of doom'

[ffr]

6. Donald with side with America when it benefits him

and the fact he's siding with America is inconsequential to his decision.

Money rules his world. Everything else is secondary. Quality of life does not even show up on his radar.

[hunter]

7. Putin and I have something in common but that doesn't make me a gangster nationalist with nukes.

It's amusing to imagine Putin ordering the use of some highly locked down Russian Chrome OS clone, similar to the machines increasingly used in U.S. public schools, machines crippled by ever-increasing layers of abstraction, everything written in Javascript (ahem, I meant ECMAScript), with legacy software from COBOL onward running on awkward sandboxed ECMAScript emulators. (Want to play "classic" PC games on your browser? Take a look at archive.org.

AT&T is payed by the U.S. government to spy on people. Why would Microsoft be any different?

I use Linux on my personal machines. People drone on that it's more secure than Windows because it's Open Source and many eyeballs are reviewing the code, but I don't believe that. The Linux ecosystem is much like Wikipedia, with many different players defending their own bit of turf, including quite a few players with suspect motives.

It's my opinion the cults of Apple or Microsoft keep a lot of computer repair guys in business. If grandma only uses her computer to cruise pinterest and facebook, for email, to share photos of their grandkids, then the traditional Apple or Microsoft desktop comes from the factory loaded with pitfalls, thousands of different ways to screw up a machine, to slow it down, to fill it with spyware, to open the door to attackers who will take control of their machines for nefarious purposes.

Putin knows the score. He's got guys who know Microsoft better than Microsoft knows itself.

[lanlady]

8. Except that most of Russia's talented engineers have left

Writing billions of line of code is not something that Tsar Vova can farm out to his FSB goons, like he does with everything else. Russia's massive and ongoing brain drain has deprived it of people with the skills and knowledge to write software - the smart ones have left for Europe and the US.

[uawchild]

9. "A Russian startup is beating Google with eerily accurate facial recognition technology"

From Business Insider:

NTechLab is only a year old, but the Russian startup is making headlines with its controversial facial recognition technology.

The company rocketed to the top of this nascent industry when it beat Google in the “MegaFace” facial recognition competition held last year in Washington state.

With 30 successful tests under its belt and 300 pending orders, the company is ready to take its facial recognition system to the world.

The company plans to make its cloud-based facial recognition system available to corporate, government, and law enforcement clients.

This cloud-based service allows an entity to upload a database of photos and use it for facial recognition purposes. Later this year, NTechLab will release a software development kit for third-party developers and will roll out a factory security system powered by its facial recognition tech.

NTechLab sets itself apart from its competitors with its high level of accuracy and its ability to search an extensive database of photographs. At the MegaFace Championship, NTechLab achieved a 73 percent accuracy with a database of 1 million pictures. When the number dropped to 10,000 images, the system achieved a jaw-dropping accuracy of 95 percent.

“We are the first to learn how to efficiently handle large picture databases,” said NTechLab founder Artem Kukharenko to Intel iQ. “This advantage is the key to solving real-world problems, such as finding a criminal in real-time or identifying a regular customer from store surveillance cameras.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/ntechlab-google-facial-recognition-technology-2016-10

cough.

[uawchild]

10. "China And Russia, Not The United States, Have The Best Software Developers"

The United States is home to many of the most recognizable tech brands in the world. But it may not have the best software developers.

According to a recent study by code-based challenge and recruitment platform HackerRank, China and Russia boast the most talented developers over a number of programming disciplines.

Chinese developers are extremely proficient at challenges based on mathematics, functional programming and data structure and Russian developers crush algorithms.

Across all the posted challenges accepted and completed by developers, China had an average success rate of 100%, said HackerRank in a blog post. Russia was only slightly behind with 99.9%. Seven out of the top 10 countries in HackerRank are from Europe. Japan and Taiwan rounded out the top of the developer chart, which was limited to the 50 countries with the most developers that signed up to HackerRank challenges.

The U.S. and India—which provide the majority of the 1.5 million developers in the HackerRank community—are a long way back, ranking at 28th and 31st out of the top 50 countries analyzed, HackerRank said. Average scores for those two countries were 78% and 76%, respectively—an indication that the home-grown developer community in the U.S. will have to play catch-up … at least when it comes to completing HackerRank challenges.

https://arc.applause.com/2016/08/30/best-software-developers-in-the-world/

cough.

Who is HackerRank and why should we believe them? From Wikipediaa:

"HackerRank is a technology company[1] that focuses on competitive programming challenges for both consumers and businesses[2] and has an online community of over one million computer programmers.[3] HackerRank's programming challenges can be solved in a variety of programming languages (including Java, C++, PHP, Python, SQL) and span multiple computer science domains.

On the consumer side, when a programmer submits a solution to a programming challenge, their submission is scored on the accuracy of their output and the execution time of their solution. Programmers are then ranked globally on the HackerRank leaderboard and earn badges based on their accomplishments to drive competition among users. In addition to individual programming challenges, HackerRank also hosts contests (often referred to by HackerRank as "CodeSprints&quot where users compete on the same programming challenges during a set period of time and are then ranked at the conclusion of the event. HackerRank is seen as a market leader in the growing gamification trend within competitive computer programming[4] and the consumer-side of their website is free for coders to use."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackerRank

Again, cough.