Russia May Force Tech-Savvy Prisoners To Perform Low-Cost IT Work For Companies, Report Says (krebsonsecurity.com) 78
tsu doh nimh shares a report from Krebs on Security: Faced with a brain drain of smart people fleeing the country following its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Federation is floating a new strategy to address a worsening shortage of qualified information technology experts: Forcing tech-savvy people within the nation's prison population to perform low-cost IT work for domestic companies. Multiple Russian news outlets published stories on April 27 saying the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service had announced a plan to recruit IT specialists from Russian prisons to work remotely for domestic commercial companies.
Russians sentenced to forced labor will serve out their time at one of many correctional centers across dozens of Russian regions, usually at the center that is closest to their hometown. Alexander Khabarov, deputy head of Russia's penitentiary service, said his agency had received proposals from businessmen in different regions to involve IT specialists serving sentences in correctional centers to work remotely for commercial companies. Khabarov told Russian media outlets that under the proposal people with IT skills at these facilities would labor only in IT-related roles, but would not be limited to working with companies in their own region. "We are approached with this initiative in a number of territories, in a number of subjects by entrepreneurs who work in this area," Khabarov told Russian state media organization TASS. "We are only at the initial stage. If this is in demand, and this is most likely in demand, we think that we will not force specialists in this field to work in some other industries."
Russians sentenced to forced labor will serve out their time at one of many correctional centers across dozens of Russian regions, usually at the center that is closest to their hometown. Alexander Khabarov, deputy head of Russia's penitentiary service, said his agency had received proposals from businessmen in different regions to involve IT specialists serving sentences in correctional centers to work remotely for commercial companies. Khabarov told Russian media outlets that under the proposal people with IT skills at these facilities would labor only in IT-related roles, but would not be limited to working with companies in their own region. "We are approached with this initiative in a number of territories, in a number of subjects by entrepreneurs who work in this area," Khabarov told Russian state media organization TASS. "We are only at the initial stage. If this is in demand, and this is most likely in demand, we think that we will not force specialists in this field to work in some other industries."
What an excellent plan! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:5, Insightful)
And thereâ(TM)s no way that people with a bone to pick would ever weaken the security of Russiaâ(TM)s companies given the opportunity.
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:5, Funny)
I can just picture it now. The password "FuckYouPutin!" gets you into any account with full admin rights.
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Would you please stop giving away company secrets?
By the way, why again must this be hardcoded as the root password?
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:4, Insightful)
Being shot through the head may discourage hackery far more than the FBI's habit of using them as informants to "catch the big fish".
That's always been the strategy. Sabotage was a big thing in Nazi occupied countries in WWII. There was a great wartime manual which showed that the best thing to do is often things that look like normal programming mistakes but have fatal results. Forget to extend your test case to include 0 or skip checking edge cases. Whenever you close a water tap in times of shortage, don't do it fully, leaving just a little stream running. When someone tells you about this, do the opposite and close the tap so hard that the washer breaks.
If the overseers then start punishing mistakes and carelessness that's even better because it will create paranoia which will slow all the work down. Imagine making hundreds of overlapping test cases all of which retest the same thing in slightly different ways and will end up breaking when the code is slightly changed, the names of which talk about something important sounding but unrelated to the value of the test case. The possibilities are endless
Prisoners in the Nazi work camps used to put lice with Typhoid into the SS uniforms they were cleaning. Obviously, if they were caught, they were shot, but if you make someone live with lice, how do you prove they are bringing them around deliberately.
All the fires going on in Russia right now, which are clearly to some extent caused by Russian internal resistance, are a great sign.
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:3, Informative)
Hey now. Half their space program was designed in the gulags back in the day...so there's precedent for some level of results.
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Well, no.
Koroljow spent quite a bit of time in a Gulag, where not only his health deteriorated which led to his early demise and also cost the Soviet Union the focal point of their rocket development, if he didn't waste away there but could have actually continued his work through the war, it might well have been that Russia blasted off the first rockets, not the Germans.
Those guys won't get near a computer (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how we brought back slave labor in America. I'm just surprised Russia isn't doing more of it.
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Are you cracked? Have you seen the people that show up on work details, much less the ones that go to halfway houses??!?! They straight gangsta. What kind of alternate reality are you living in?
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I wonder how productive even non-violent prisoners would be. I imagine many of them would be dissidents of various kinds, and though intelligent enough to do the work, would not have much enthusiasm for supporting a regime that they oppose. Intelligent people who have got into trouble with the law might not be trustworthy, which is I presume why they are in jail. Your average thick thug caught dealing drugs is probably not IT material. Apart from anything else, they demonstrate a lack of intelligence by get
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They're extremely productive.
I think there is evidence that forcing people to do what you want is not productive, compared to rewarding people for their efforts. If you treat an intelligent person as a mere drudge, then drudgery is what you will get, as people are generally so eager to please.
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Most American inmates can't even get a work detail. If you're lucky you can go to a halfway house, eat much better food, and get paid to work. The pay isn't great, but you'll be making twice what your typical illegal immigrant laborer would make to do the same job. Plus it can cut down on your time AND bolster your resume for when you get out.
Or, you know, you could just go back to thuggin yo. Whatever.
In any case, slave labor? Not even.
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Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Added bonus: leaving the country is more difficult if you are in prison.
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Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict lots of "IT savy" people will be getting arrested so they have to work for free.
And I'm sure IT workers in Russia (I mean, the ones not in prison yet) are feeling extra patriotic now, and not motivated at all to leave the country...
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Yep. Show any signs of wanting to leave the country, and it's off to the gulag with you. Business as usual.
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:1)
The article fails to mention they already captured lots of Ukrainians and forced them from Ukraine to Russia.
More than 1M Ukrainian civilians have been forced into Russia.
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I predict lots of "IT savy" people will be getting arrested so they have to work for free.
There is plenty of precedent [wikipedia.org] that Russia would do just that. They have a decades-long track record of getting incarceration-on-demand.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re: What an excellent plan! (Score:2)
Maybe in this situation, people will actually read what they receive for a commit instead of the current "Looks ok'ish, here, commit done".
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I have a feeling that they mean people who know how to post on Twitter and Facebook. The Internet Research Agency employs thousands of people, many of them spending 9-5 Moscow time posting Russian disinformation on social media. It's all copy/paste stuff.
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Or how discount IT services are a good way to save on IT costs.
I mean, it worked so well when you outsource to India because India was cheaper.
I think this is a literal case of you get what you pay for. And I'm sure the prisoners will know how to game the system to get the results they need. "Have you tried rebooting? Call back once you're tried it. *click*".
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Not to be outdone, their Belarusian allies are freeing up human labor by training foxes to guard henhouses.
Inmates/Asylum (Score:4, Funny)
So they want to assign convicted sociopaths to perform IT functions. Basically, business as usual in Putin's Russia.
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I mean, tbh, I would prefer that to being force to fight forest fires in Kamala's United States: https://gizmodo.com/the-climat... [gizmodo.com]
Per your link
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) had been struggling to recruit candidates for this program in recent years,
While the article points out some legitimate questions about CA's policies; recruit is a bit different from force.
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Russian prisons (Score:1, Redundant)
Do you still get the ink if you kill someone remotely by making a power plant blow up or make a draw bridge flip a bus full of people into the water?
Shawshank Redemption (Score:2)
> Forcing tech-savvy people within the nation's prison population to perform low-cost IT work for domestic companies
Should be obvious how this ends.
How many (Score:2)
How many IT people are in jail in Russia? Seems this couldn't have a huge impact.
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How many IT people are in jail in Russia?
I suppose Putin will just keep making otherwise normal things illegal until they meet their quotas. They pretty much did it already with homosexuality.
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it could also be the Great Putini just ordered this idea float to give the Russian people he on top of the situation. it seems more likely than Russian businesses being for such a stupid idea.
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Good point. At this point it's also just a rumor.
Re: How many (Score:1)
Putin just took 1M Ukrainians at gunpoint and moved them into Russia. Plenty of people that have some tech background since the country was a primary source of low cost tech labor in the EU.
This is the same tactic used in other communist countries, like the USSR before did the same for their nuclear, microchip and space programs; same thing China has been doing, hell, China has gone as far as kidnapping Taiwanese engineers which is an independent sovereign country.
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I can think of one [wikipedia.org]assuming he is still alive
The return of the zeks (Score:3)
Cut the cost of labor (Score:3)
When you have an overpriced IT person, just work with the cops + jail and get them back, but at a much cheaper rate! Bonus: They no longer have to worry about paying rent/mortgage and other bills. Win-win all around.
Russia is considering... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, Russia is considering doing what has been happening in the U.S. for decades. Only it isn't limited to IT slavery.
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No, Russia is considering repeating what the Soviets did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And if you commit a computer crime (Score:2)
Then it is double secret prison for you, and two IT support call shifts for the remainder of your sentence. That would soften up even Navalny's resolve, more effective than poison.
Here's an idea (Score:2, Troll)
Put Snowden to work.
Re: Here's an idea (Score:1)
Nobody trusts a traitor.
Well this can only end well (Score:2)
The 'ole IT Support Gulag (Score:2)
Failure to categorize and close out those tickets means 11 lashes and two weeks in solitaire.
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Intellectual slave labor = recipe for sabotage. (Score:3)
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The Russian government is not playing with a full deck.
The Russian economy was already in decline for years before the invasion of Ukraine, and subsequent economic sanctions. From what I read recently in the Washington Post, Russians are generally well educated, but those talents are under-exploited, because Russian industry is moribund. One consequence of that is a steady brain drain, as people seek opportunities abroad. This has evidently accelerated recently.
Clapped out industry is what you get with a corrupt economy like Russia's, where the oligarchs suck m
Precedent for prisons (Score:2)
How does one force a specialist to work as a non-specialist? Considering every employer wants more 'specialists' that are also multi-skilled, that's quite a non-sequitur.
No-one's mentioned the precedents of Nazi Germany or US for-profit prisons: First, littering becomes a hard-time offense. Second, prisons demand longer sentences.
ransomware (Score:4, Interesting)
Beats crushing stones. (Score:4, Interesting)
Better than crushing stones.
But who knows, with enough of a demand, maybe Russia will have an incentive to jail more IT workers. Capitalism at its best.
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Don't worry about the low pay (Score:2)
The CIA is willing to pay the difference.
Wow! REAL IT-slaves for once (Score:3)
Don't give them ideas.
Modern slavery (Score:2)
There was a time when a great deal of the "top dog" wealth was gained by employing slave labour. If slave labour was that essential to the economy, then you might expect the abolition of slavery to cause a massive collapse in the economy. This did not really happen. I know America fought a bloody civil war on this issue, but that is beside the point. In England, there was certainly slavery in the colonies, in Jamaican sugar plantations, for example. However, the ending of slavery did not destroy the sugar i
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That time is still here, we just optimized it.
Just like we optimized colonialism when we noticed that we'd have to defend our colonies, we installed proxies. The proxies now run it, and they pay for our weapons to defend their position, and should they get ousted, no biggie, only means we have a new proxy. Way more efficient than having to run, staff and defend that shit ourselves. Just keep them dependent on your money and they'll have to hand over what you want anyway.
Works the same with modern slavery. W
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I think the idea of workers selling their labour is pretty fundamental to any modern liberal economy. The basic idea is to pay sufficient wages so that the worker can buy their food and clothes, pay for housing and transport, and so on. Compared to a slave, whose owner is responsible for all that basic upkeep, the free worker can decide how to spend their money and time, for what they judge to be best for them. The fact that this may save employers money, compared to some kind of slavery, does not necessari
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Or we could take a look at the less radical solutions some countries found. Because you'll find that neither the stove nor the ice box offer sufficiently comfortable temperatures.Moderation is the key.
Let's take a look at the Austrian model. Austria has no minimum wage. No, really, they don't. Well, they do, but in a very weird way.
What they have is a "social partnership" and "collective contracts". Basically, the representatives of industry and workers (and yes, these things are actually entities close to
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Moderation is the key.
I agree with that. One of my favourite political philosophers is Karl Popper. After tearing into pretty much every philosopher since Plato for promoting dangerous ideologies, Popper's own ideas are rather boring, in the form of piecemeal social engineering. I am all in favour of boring politics. I am too old for revolutions.
There is something of a problem with trade unions, as a social mechanism for fair bargaining about work conditions and wages. There is the pernicious idea of class war, so that the relat
Educated slave labour. (Score:2)
in other words... (Score:1)
setTimeout(() = "call rm -rf /", 1000000) (Score:1)
Maybe not so blatantly, but I would definitely build in trap doors and self destruct mechanisms in anything I was forced to build. - I have done so in the past, when working for clients that wanted demos before they had paid their bill... Various sub systems that checked for certain conditions and if they were not met, overwrite the main databases with randomized test data. That way, the usage of the system seems completely normal, until you all of the sudden have lost your configuration, your customer data