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by perihelions 421 days ago
I think it's relevant context DOGE employees were very recently operating commercial web domains in Russia,

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...

- "“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”"

edit: Here's the old HN thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756 ("Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com' (krebsonsecurity.com)" — 1895 comments)
2 comments
RajT88 421 days ago
This administration colluding with Russia? I feel like we tried to get people to care about that before.
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_fat_santa 421 days ago
What is interesting to me is how those two things are mixing. Theoretically any one of us could own a russian domain and any one of us could get a job at NLRB (or another gov agency) but our jobs and our ownership of that domain are two entirely separate things.

What's interesting here is how these two things are seemingly mixing. At this point I have two pet theories:

- One of the DOGE staffers is a Russian agent: This one I'm putting in the camp of "highly highly unlikely" but still possible given those login attempts from Russia.

- The more likely theory is this is just some braindead attempt to "own the libs". If we look back 6-8 years to when all the Trump Russia stuff came out and turned into a nothingburger. This could be some idea like: "Yo I've got this VM in Russia, let's own the libs and make them thin the Russians are invading again!"

- It could also be completley innocouous. Like right now I have a Mullvad VPN setup on my machine that points to Algeria. Ubuntu will auto start this VPN at login. What if one of DOGE staffers just happened to have a VPN running with an exit in Russia when they tried logging in.

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