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As mentioned in the article, they have to be extremely careful to keep the local authorities off their backs. Thus, they are not really into taking chances in that way. Having Russian language installed at all is so rare in US/UK/etc, they they are unlikely to change this strategy. Finding the real location of systems is very hard to do.

Yeah and it probably wouldn't pay to change it anyway: it would suggest the user is at least slightly security-conscious and probably correlate poorly with profit margins. Like how spammers intentionally use typos to filter out the even semi-bright.

> Seems to me it would be rather easy to detect a system with 1 Russian keyboard vs a system with a default English keyboard and and secondary Russian keyboard. It will probably take about 10 minutes to adapt to this defense.

Modern computing environment is pretty much unusable with just Russian keyboard. You need some way to enter URLs, email addresses, shell commands, etc. Russian keyboard is an addition to English, not a replacement.

Pretty much everyone in Russia uses at least two keyboard layouts - Russian and English. Having the English layout as a default is quite common as well.