Russia considers legalizing piracy of software from sanction countries | Hacker News Reader

Russia considers legalizing piracy of software from sanction countries

kommersant.ru

56 pointstrhway24 comments

Google translate picked out a key paragraph here:

However, according to Moscow Digital School teacher Oleg Blinov, piracy resolution is not a very effective step: “Today, most of the useful software is made in the form of subscriptions to a cloud product, this allows developers to secure the code that remains on their servers. Without subscriptions and access to a regular service, many tools will stop working.”

Most software packages have an offline product. All you have to do is check out torrents to see that.

Most software packages do indeed often have offline-installers and runtimes, but the quote seems to be about SaaS which almost never has offline/self hosted options. It's part of the value of building SaaS in the first place, if source doesn't get leaked, it most likely will never end up on TPB et al.

Most probably have an open source alternative, which could benefit everyone in the world with an army of Russian devs polishing/maintaining.

What would be sad is if instead Russia just made Russian SaaSs.

Plus, you risk angering the cloud companies that can decide to terminate all cloud services in Russia. Imagine if tomorrow Azure disappears...

If you would disable microsoft products you would only help them

So business as usual then

Was it meaningfully illegal in Russia anyway?

My understanding is the only cyber crime that gets prosecuted in Russia is Russian on Russian. As evidenced by the fact that Russian droppers are often written to avoid deployment on machines in Russian timezones or with Russian keyboards.

Can confirm, ransomware devs excluding Russian machines to not get in trouble

Lifehack: install Russian keyboard layout on all devices to avoid malware attacks.

yeah, for businesses piracy is prosecuted if caught

I mean, there's enough open-source software out there you don't ever 'need' proprietary software. But I know middle income countries always have some weird stigma about open source and would rather pirate shitty commercial software. Based on how well their military operates they probably won't figure it out...

This is a predictable feel-good move but of course it doesn't come anywhere close to fully offsetting the sanctions' impact, or they would have done it before!

This will keep all non-subscription software from being sold there for a long time.

Software vendors can deliberately leak "pirated" copies of their programs to Russian torrent sites with backdoors and other malicious code added. That could be an effective countermeasure.

How do you prevent that they don't spread to other non russian torrents?

You don't. That's a way to punish all users of pirated software.

Thats still a crime.

You can't rob someones house even if they they are a burgler.

Can a vendor be held responsible for anything an unauthorized pirated copy of their software does?

Can a car manufacturer be held responsible for built-in features designed to maim or kill unauthorised users?

If he put the malware in, yes.

Are you aware that torret tracker sites are heavily invested in uploader reputation? It doesn't matter if you create a new user to upload a torrent with a backdoor. Nobody is going to download it because it's coming from an untrusted uploader.

This was talked about, and passed by the WTO in the Caribbean after the USA blocked their gambling sites -

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/01/29/pirates-of...

What would the world do? Block all Russian sites? Russia could do some damage. Their crippled software devs turn to piracy as a profession?

Along with ransomeware it could be a strong source of income in IT.

It's an interesting idea. Not sure it'd work. People would fight it more than blown up buildings of foreigners. It's still hard to pay for it. And they'd have to compete with piracy as well.

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