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Comment by ChefboyOG | Hacker News Reader

@mods - I changed the title from the original "Russian Software Company May Be Entry Point for U.S. Hack" to be more clear, as "Russian Software Company" felt vague and linkbait-y to me. Apologies if this violates the "No editorialized titles" policy.

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Is JetBrains even Russian? I thought they were Czech.

Russian founders began the company in Prague and opened a Saint Petersburg office soon afterwards.

Most of the software developers are still in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Russian founders opened a Czech company because being Russian, they could not easily reach world markets.

Actually, I believe the reason was simply that the founders were living in Prague at the time they founded the company.

The title and lede state they are "Russian-Owned" and a Czech company. Perhaps NYT edited title after publishing or original poster misread the title.

Russian-Owned Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States.

The title has been edited at least twice since it was published.

The original title:

> Russian Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hack

Which was changed to:

> Russian-Owned Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

Then later changed to:

> Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

"Russian-owned" is still largely misleading. The company is owned by Russian speakers that lived and studied in Russia before starting JetBrains. Most (if not all) of them have two citizenships by now, one is Russian. The company is not owned by the Russian state and has never been.

In Europe, words like Russian or Czech typically mean ethnicity. Even if you live there for 20 years, learn the language and get citizenship, people likely won't call you Czech. Maybe you can be called Czechian (if it's a real word) or Praguer since those don't imply ethnicity. I don't live in Czechia though, so take this with a grain of salt.

> The company is not owned by the Russian state and has never been.

This is true however, and NYT did (predictably) poor job here. Unless there is any indication that JetBrains were involved in the hack, mentioning "Russian-owned" in the title is misleading.

>In Europe, words like Russian or Czech typically mean ethnicity.

Well, then, suddenly all those fines on some obscure Russian (alright, alright, half-Russian) company called Google all make sense now! Just another part of the sanctions!

Title has subsequently changed (possibly again):

> Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

Seems the reporter got a fair bit of flack from folks on twitter.

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