Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visits an agricultural exhibition at Russia's Exhibition Centre in Moscow October 11, 2008. REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Alexei Druzhinin/Pool (RUSSIA)
Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic: What Putin Really Wants
Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.
I. The Hack
The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.
Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.
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WNU Editor: After reading this rather long post .... I only realized it at the end .... Julia Ioffe who wrote the above post has no idea on what Putin really wants.
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