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Ask HN: Is JetBrains Russian? Is it safe to use?

42 points by AndyJames ↗ HN
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

23 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] thread
sinyug
> is it safe to assume that JetBrain products are not use for Russian espionage?

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.

gostsamo
Being russian is not a crime yet. The possibility of compromising the russian office is not zero, but it would mean that all internal checks has failed in the Check HQ as well. Again not zero, but I'd be against ruining a good company due to suspecian only.
rvz
So being Russian is bad now? I don't think that is safe to assume that.

> 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.

o_m
Being Russian is a disadvantage now, yes. There are talks about locking out all Russian companies from American cloud services. If this happens suddenly it will be quite devastating for Russian companies.
rommel917
"When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will" Frederic Bastiat, 1844

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...

rk06
Soldiers have already crossed borders, why give them supplies & money?

Your quote doesn’t apply here.

KptMarchewa
Trade was the strategy for 30 years with Russia. As you can see, it did not work.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
user3939382
Reading this post all I can think of is Dr. Strangelove and what danger I might be in having played many hours of tetris.

We should be discouraging alarmism, especially given the political situation.

sam_goody
It is said that dictatorships like Russia and China will use any of their very large corporations that provides services to foreigners to help them reach their own goals. This is logical and probably true.

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.

warrenm
>Kasparov is (was?) the world's most widely deployed anti virus

Kaspersky ;)

Kasparov was a chess grand master :)

rosndo
Lol, your comment makes it particularly clear that you have no idea how antivirus software usually works.

> 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.

BlueWizardCz
JetBrains is not offically russian company (but founded by russian citizens). They have headquaters and are registered in Czech Republic, so company is in european legislation area. They have R&D centers around a world but mostly in Russia. The reason why they are registered in CZ are that they do not trust russian goverment and businness in Russia. I don't think that it's security risk to use JetBrains products, but I expect that delivering new versions and support will be postponed or cancelled for some time.
sAbakumoff
I think that for any JB product you can find better and free alternatives.
Aldo_MX
I think the opposite. I think that JetBrains has a level of quality that is almost impossible to find in the free alternatives.
sAbakumoff
name one Jb product for which you are not able to find an alternative
Aldo_MX
that's an easy one: webstorm

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

sm001
Is Android Studio safe from Russian spyware? Is Android Studio's safety assured by Google?
thrower123
This is extraordinary and irresponsible FUD
akagusu
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other US companies spy on us and let US government do the same using their software.

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?

masijo
I need to stop using HN until this whole conflict ends, reading these posts is killing my brain cells at an unprecedented rate.