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It is literally a pro Russian action, to be against sanctioning Russia for their war against Ukraine.

Tell me how it’s not advantageous for Russia to enable trade with them.

Hungary and Slovakia are largest importers of Russian natural gas in Europe. France is third as I remember.

Geopolitical decisions aren't made by countries, they are made by individual people.

Sometimes those people are a plurality that organically endorses that decision and votes some representative in. Sometimes those people are a plurality that has been brainwashed by compromised media to do it. Sometimes those people are just a small ruling elite that get voted in by people who didn't think very hard about those particular geopolitical decisions and just want, I don't know, their political and cultural enemies brutalized and $1.99 gas.

Older people in these countries have good memories of that time, employment and housing were basically a given, healthcare and public transportation were solved, etc. They're very easy to manipulate, promise them a 13th month of pension and they'll vote for you.

I don't think you understand how bad globalization fucked up these countries, people live with their parents until they're 30+, young people can't find decent jobs, etc.

>precisely the countries that should know better, since they were the principal recipients the "love and friendship" from Russia

Goes to show that 1984-style conditioning really does work, decades later.

Remarkably, it can even be passed through generations, as it gets ingrained into the mentality of how parents raise children: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Don't rock the boat."

Which was a survival trait in those times.

The current incarnation of Russian propaganda is different, but is even more virally poisonous:

> I'm not political. Politics is dirty. There's nothing you can change anyway. "Two sides" is an illusion. Everybody is lying and has an ulterior motive. Only naive fools believe otherwise, only naive fools ever trust. You can't know anything for sure. What you think is true is actually a lie. The only thing that's real is who you're with. That's the only truth. That's the only thing to look for in anything anyone says, that's the only thing one really says. That's what makes something true or false. The words uttered don't matter at all.

You might have seen this kind of mentality spouted by your friends on either side of the political spectrum.

Remarkably, whatever the political persuasion of people who have it is, the end result is the likes of Orban/Fico coming to power.

Sadly, this thing not only spreads, it also sticks.

If you know of an antidote, please tell me what it is.

The Slovaks ultimately got federalization of Czechoslovakia from the crisis (1969), which both distracted them and made their memories less negative.

As far as Hungary goes, I asked my friend who studied Hungarian history. He explained to me that while the Soviet invasion was very traumatic, the subsequent Kádár "goulash socialism" was a lot more lenient on the people than all the other Soviet Bloc regimes, and that the Hungarians made an incorrectly confident conclusion that losing a small war to the Russians is not catastrophic.

Of course, this is NOT the experience of basically anyone else who happened to be in a similar situation. A potential puppet regime of Russia in Ukraine wouldn't look like Kádárs by any means, it would rather look like the Kadyrovian microstate in Chechnya, minus the Islam of course.

My brother visited some of these countries. He said most people there are oblivious to what happened to their countries. They simply don't care. It also didn't help that everyone he met (agricultural sector) was a day-drinker.

That's why they're doomed to repeat it. Again and again.

A lot of Eastern European countries have oligarchs who largely made their fortunes with help from the Russians. In Czechia one such example is the prime minister Andrej Babiš, who was a bureaucrat in a state owned business who then sold it to himself in the 90s (with the help of some "Swiss" money) and became a billionaire. He's consistently been as pro-Russia as he thinks he can get away with (the positive is that Czechs hate Russians a lot).

Also in these countries there's a lot of old people who have never been able to adapt to living in a free, capitalist society, so for them, there's some nostalgia for communism.

Are there any other wars that are not of aggression? What do you gain by parroting the legalese speak? Implying that it is extra bad and extra illegal war? Not your run of the mill PG-13 war? This one is X-rated kids.

Everyone knows who the attacker is - just some people root for Russia for their own reasons. Usually tied to the internal politics of their countries - like hating for unrelated reasons the political actors from their states that happen to support Ukraine.

And Japan was the sole recipient of nuclear "love and friendship" from the US

Old people are ruining their grandchildren’s lives everywhere, not just in Slovakia.

It's rooted in the education system to this day.

The majority of school teachers grew up under the Soviet side of cold war propaganda.

And in history education in particular, we are told that "we" have always looked towards Russia as a role model, to fight Hungarian nationalism (since the country was just part of Hungary for most of its history).

Sounds like boomers everywhere.

In the case of Slovakia, it's purely Russian misinformation that was able to capture a large part of the population, mainly older people. First anti-EU, then anti-vax, and now anti-Ukraine and anti-EU.

Silver Fox is a very vaguely defined Chinese cybercrime group of malware and actors...or are you referring to something else?

> Recent false flags are a thing: 2018 Olympic Destroyer, Marble Framework, Silver Fox, MuddyWater Chaos

How are any of those false flag? They're state sponsored, by different state actors.

"learned their lesson well now" - I don't think Russia has learned any lessons at all since Ukraine. Russia's sheer incompetence keeps getting worse and worse, as Prigozhin exposed on the inside. The war went from total failure to achieve any objectives for 5 years, to now 4 hour lines in Moscow to fill up your car at the gas station - i.e. Russia went from "failing to capture Kyiv in 3 days" to now "getting hit in the center of Moscow regularly".

Given the level of incompetence that Russia has demonstrated on both the political and military front, I highly doubt it could've turned anything around in Ukraine even if knew everything about 2014.

That does not make much sense. In 2014 Yanukovic was in power, who had been bought off by Russia. Lets not forget that Yanukovic ran on a pro EU platform and then reversed a day or so before signing the EU association agreement. Naturally the people went to the streets and eventually Yanukovic fled. Not sure what you would have wanted to spy on.

Current government is extremely pro-russian to the point of treason, and people involved in this case double so.

This wasn't some oversight of the proverbial Nina in any way. They just did sloppy job from both sides covering tracks, not uncommon with current government. They are loud (and racist, xenophobic, and often dumb), not competent smart people.

> Nina in the sourcing department skipped the compliance paperwork.

Well the interior ministry didn't really demand one (yes really) but the opposition people have read the documentation for the cameras and the hash of the supplied software was exactly the same as the hash for the russian simicon camera.

> We're talking about this as if it's some precursor to a James Bond plot, but it really fizzles after learning Nina in the sourcing department skipped the compliance paperwork.

That's exactly the sort of thing that James Bond would do.

A big fuck-up, but some people prefer (nobly even if I don't abide by the same rule) to keep some words out of their mouths.

fuck up

I made the logical leap that the firmware enables this. I don’t have the code in front of me, so that may have been an incorrect leap.

I think synchronized operations could really disrupt the grid — think thousands of inverters switching backfeeding to the grid on/off, causing waves and disruption. Or thousands of inverters having their grid sync disabled, simultaneously operating to shift the frequency of the grid (very bad).

I'd be worried about the inverters in large commercial solar plants. On a sunny day you could easily cause a blackout by turning enough solar capacity off at once. Maybe shut down the entire grid when the sudden power imbalances trip the self- protection in half the grid. That's a pain to recover from. Spain went through that not too long ago

But maybe rapidly switching residential solar on and off in a coordinated way can also do funny things to grid equipment

Any idea what happens to the grid when a significant chunk of solar power suddenly disconnects?

If you had enough systems under control in an area, you could probably create a brown out or some other type of scenario by turning off 1000 houses on the right day.

nah, the ones connected to the grid... you turn them all off during peak sun hours at the exact same time

same issue with large loads like boilers, this stuff should never be connected to the internet, but it is

if you can control enough load on the grid you can do real damage

DDoS, anonymizer proxy, and turn off power in large commercial installations. They kinda deserve it for investing in solar. US holds all the power in social media, can't blame China if they want to utilize their lead in solar for something too.

Hopefully mutually assured annoyance keeps everyone at bay.

To set roofs on fire?

In the end it's all about trust. Right now I don't see why China would like to burn down their market.

Some of those are networked I think?

To piss away decades of hard-earned trust in its products for some short-term one-time political 'pwn' of the enemy.

If that goal sounds stupid to you, that's because it is. I would expect some countries that are not China to act with such a capricious lack of foresight.

Track usage patterns to know when people are at home and then rob them.

The HN version of "I have nothing to hide."

That is your argument? Omg, the level of it...