How to Waste Russian Government Time

I can’t say I entirely approve of this. But I do understand the desire to inconvenience the Russian government given the Ukraine invasion, and the humor involved in the chosen method.

Fully Automated Luxury… Something Something?

From BoingBoing comes some bizarre news ^[1], even by the already amiably bizarre standards of BoingBoing.

Some wags use the amusing cognomen of “Obfuscated Dreams of Scheherezade” (@ringringrussia on Twitter), by which they apparently mean to spin amusing stories without being caught. Fair enough.

They have (somehow!) a database of thousands of phone numbers of Russian employees of the Duma, mid-level administrators, high-level politicians, and the people at the Ministry of War and Economy (interesting that “war” and “economy” go together in the Russian government, no?). So far, so good.

But these latter-day followers of Till Eulenspiegel provide a web site with single-click ability to call 2 of those numbers simultaneously, and then drop out of the call. From the point of view of the 2 hapless Russian bureaucrats, they have apparently called each other. They will then, in Frauenfelder’s words, “waste precious government time asking each other what the hell is going on”.

It’s pure schadenfreude (though without the requisite pie, apologiae ad familiam Scalzi). I’m also sure it’s illegal, if only for the reason that somebody is always trying to make everything illegal.

But it is hilarious.

I won’t link to it directly, though I do smile in their general direction.

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Notes & References

1: M Frauenfelder, “This website lets you randomly connect two Russian bureaucrats by phone to waste their time”, BoingBoing, 2022-May-18. ↩