They’re not actually unconnected. The skills built on recreational software piracy simply remain useful for industrial software piracy and sanctions-avoidance.
russia has been the #1 source of firmware jailbreaks and torrents for industrial software for 20+ years. Their government is so awful that their people had to figure out how to work around the world hating them.
These two sentences are unconnected. It’s just that in the 90s and early 00s in Russia incomes were still not very high to buy software, copyright protection wasn’t really enforced, copyright violation being a thing was hard to explain to many people, and lots of things wouldn’t be officially sold. Say, localized versions of video games often wouldn’t exist.
In my childhood I remember that pirate disks were norm and official ones a curiosity, something very cool and unusual. Then official versions (including localized ones from 1C) started becoming more common, as would buying disks in book stores etc, and not in underground crossings or near subway entrances.
There were even companies which technically sold pirate disks, but they could have become official localizers or vendors or whatever. It probably didn’t even occur to them to try and become such.
Hawke@lemmy.world 1 week ago
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Not sure if that’s very correct. I’d say it’s not about skills, but about such actions still generally not being prosecuted in Russia.
Of course there’s also the issue of low-level reverse engineering skills, which may have been prestigious for longer in Russia due to level of life (old hardware being used longer, at some point with DOS), hacker movies cargo cult combined with Russians feeling the social need to present themselves smarter than they are (for example, all those award papers for stupid competitions in school where children who’ve had in their life an hour-long explanation of, for example, combinatorics or basic discrete math win, and those who haven’t lose or don’t get there).
elvith@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Anyone remember or been to those markets in eastern europe, where you could buy bootleg CDs, copied CDs, cracked games, counterfeit products, etc?
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Well, in those memories you wouldn’t have to go to any market, you’d just see a few tables along the way in busy places on your way anywhere. Maybe even smaller shops (usually illegal construction alongside bigger buildings or even just in the middle of something supposed to be a square).
BTW, about illegal construction - frankly I’m nostalgic of all that. Because yeah, those cheap plastic things were illegal and were all demolished. Instead we now have supposedly legal heavy, tasteless, threatening “shopping centers” here and there, miraculously making the space feel more constrained than those old things would, all belonging to the right people, with nice shiny perfectly legal businesses inside.
It’s somehow relaxing to get someplace backwater sometimes and see towns looking that old way. Though the town I’m thinking about looked differently back then, and I liked it more, but what will you do.
A-and frankly there were plenty of situations where it was perfectly legal (as possible in the Russian 90s), but “the permit was issued by mistake, no compensation is in order, free the building for demolition by tomorrow” for a 20 years old building solves any problem.
pycorax@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not Eastern European but I do remember these in Singapore about 20 years ago. Stores or roadside tables would open up with racks hung full of disks in plastic sleeves. Interesting times.