Ask HN: Is JetBrains Russian? Is it safe to use?
JetBrain is company registered in Prague, Czech, however it was created by three Russian developers and currently is hiring a lot of people for their Russian offices[1]. There was also some allegation of malware being embedded in their tools[2].
In the light of recent development is it safe to assume that JetBrain products are not use for Russian espionage?
[1]https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html
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They made a statement. Not sure it removes all risk from their software, but I’m using it right now.
We should be discouraging alarmism, especially given the political situation.
Suddenly, because US/EU sh#t foreign policy that led to this Russia /Ukraine war, Jetbrains became a problem?
What kind of brain washing is this?
> In the light of recent development is it safe to assume that JetBrain products are not use for Russian espionage?
If you don't trust the software you are using, just don't use closed source software, use only free, open and libre software or compile it yourself. Since all closed source software is essentially 'malware'.
That is safe to assume.
All people that want more sanctions should read his book carefully and think about it before doing stuff they might regret.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/64425-when-goods-do-not-cro...
Your quote doesn’t apply here.
This post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459985#30461340, praising JetBrains, is not flagged. Also, interesting.
Kasppersky is (was?) the world's most widely deployed anti virus. It was founded by a former KGB officer and is closely tied to the Russian government.
It was found to be uploading files to Russia when their algo figured it was good docs for the Russians to have.
JB is probably in the same boat. (So is Zoom and lots of other software, but that's for another day)
If you are writing software for the Ukrainian army, don't use JetBrains. If you are a small time dev in the U.S. it is likely within your risk profile.
If you just want to punish Putin, and therefore you would stop using Russian software, that's another story, and one that I have a harder time justifying.
Kaspersky ;)
Kasparov was a chess grand master :)
> It was found to be uploading files to Russia when their algo figured it was good docs for the Russians to have.
Not documents, but malware-looking files. This is normal.
The problem came about when people working with government malware had Kaspersky on their computers and it happened to upload samples of that government malware, but presumably just about any other AV would’ve done the same.
there are too many small features, like the local history which has saved me multiple times from blunders like running git clean forgetting that I hadn't yet committed the files
OTOH, since webstorm indexes the project, the refactors across multiple files are more reliable than for ex. vscode
A citizen of country X should never assume that intelligence agencies of country Y are not spying on them or their communications through any and all available means.
The statement applies even when Y = X.