It was the right move, but this needs to be expanded. Assume there are state actors from all of the major countries installing backdoors.
The digital war front will be getting hit from all sides. We need extreme paranoia to protect all of the innocent bystanders. Don’t assume even your own country is trustworthy in this.
Don’t assume even your own country is trustworthy in this.
My country is one of the world leaders in mass spying software development and even gave themselves the right to basically do deep packet inspections on everything going through it a long time ago, so…
I’m pretty certain my country banned Kaspersky because they kept outing western backdoors and malware. And I would bet my life that Windows has supported free use government backdoors since at least Windows 10.
One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”
It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.
In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.
While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.
They weren’t kicked out, iirc. Their contributions just aren’t automatically merged anymore
And they are all welcome back if they can satisfy the Linux Foundation that they’re not affiliated with a sanctioned entity on the SDN list.
But that headline is provocative, it gets people going.
Does it? Russians can’t do Russian stuff anymore isn’t really controversial.
It is somewhat chucking the baby out with the bath water but I doubt anyone’s losing sleep over it.
No, this is clearly evil and racist and true nazism, and we must reverse it even though it doesn’t hurt anybody but the west, and therefore Russia actually wants it, but not really?
I’m sorry, the talking points are confusing here, can I have my lines again?
They were removed from the maintainer position of whatever they did. Bizarre enough.
Don’t work for war criminals 🤷
Unless they are Israeli or American.
No, refer to my first comment you dipshit.
I might have interpreted your first comment wrong. But I did not read the booted maintainers directly worked for their government.
Because they did not.
Damn. Cuts deep
Did you watch the “collateral damage” video? Just wondering.
Not all Russians are war criminals. Neither are all US citizens.
Doesn’t effect all Russians. Just 11 Russian maintainers that work for sanctioned Russian companies. Who can still contribute, they just can no longer make changes to the kernel with no approval/oversight.
All this noise because 11 drunk fuckers won’t find a job at a company that doesn’t mainline killing civilians.
What a weak reason to be upset.
For being employees of sanctioned companies…
Where are the tankie posts now?
Well confined in their instances for now. Wait until .ml and the Grad starts overflowing.
There is a theory that sanctions against a country with a tyrannical ruler hurt the common people more than the oligarchs / dictator. But eventually they do make life more difficult for that ruler
The common people are the ones who overthrow the dictator eventually
Iraq Afghanistan North Korea
So only 3-4 left to go :-)
Jk
But letting the dictator free reign is even worse, look at how many people putin has killed in the unnecessary agression of Ukraine. That’s not some slight “suffering”, that’s death and everything that comes with it for the families left behind.
Anywhere in the modern era basically
That happens relatively rarely. Remember the protests in recent years in Thailand, Hong Kong, Iran? They went exactly nowhere.
TF you on? Just because there weren’t immediate, drastic regime level changes doesn’t mean they went “exactly nowhere”.
There have been many changes at smaller levels not being reported in mainstream western media. Public pressure called for MANY local officials to step down along with changes in law that have already started effecting everyday life, and at least in Thailand, some pretty major changes in how public officials are held accountable via more expansive auditing channels, thereby increasing transparency.
Not everything is a fucking hollywood movie wherein you have some Hunger Games style uprising against the elite.
In fact, it’s fucking insulting hearing people who haven’t an ounce of global exposure beyond whatever 2 or 3 media sources they shove their heads into saying “those protesters got nothing accomplished”.
Never let anyone tell you protesting doesn’t work.
Absolutely nothing happened in Iran. The morality police was given some practice in beating up teenagers and young adults for a couple of months, but the protests went exactly nowhere.
There are more and more confrontations with that police being reported than there were before the massive protests. Just yesterday, a woman was caught stripping in front of the morality police as a sign of protest.
Again, we don’t live in a Holywood reality. Grow up. What these people are doing is pretty brave, and Iranians don’t need dooming killjoys.
Do you have family in Iran? Cousins? Uncles? Anything?
It could have worked. It was worth trying
But not if the pressure is mostly coming from the external. Or worse if we look at Egypt, where now an even worse dictator than Mubarak rules, after the Egyptians have elected people the West didn’t like, and getting couped quickly.
Oh noes, I bet lemmy.ml users all switch.
Oh so That’s why they are offline :-D !
They probably blocked that user since all he does is spam anti .ml propaganda on .world.
All while .world admins remove any criticism of their instance for “instance bashing”.
Which user?
And nothing of value was lost
Except their privacy—oh they didn’t have it to begin with.
You can’t lose something you never had
Isn’t the point that they like a dictatorial government? Presumably they’re okay with their every move being watched.
They like it because they either work for it or hope to work for it and be in a position of power.
Considering how many trans folks exist on those instances, they think they are one of the “good ones”.
Let’s just ask our ol’ buddy Ernst how that goes.
They will go down with the Russian ship.
Anything involving a ministry in Russia is not a serious plan. They’ll receive funding, hire a couple of bash script writers, well, maybe a couple of people who’ll write drivers for Elbrus, Baikal or something that’s sort of developed and produced in Russia, but nobody really uses it even in governmental structures.
Omg I bet lemmygrad is crying in their panties!
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Then you would understand. Even if you are benevolent, your account existing in russia is a threat to Linux
They weren’t just random Russians, they were working for companies under sanctions.
What were they supposed to do? Ignore the sanctions?
They weren’t just random Russians, they were working for companies under sanctions.
That’s just false. First, nobody in the maillists claimed those specific people were working for sanctioned companies. Second, at least one of the banned maintainers, when advised to contact their company’s lawyers, said he isn’t working for any company at all, just freelancing and doing free work for the community.
What were they supposed to do? Ignore the sanctions?
Yes. It was(and probably still is) literally written on the Linux Foundation website that the US sanctions do not concern open source community. It goes against everything open source ideology is, that is code and contribution is all that matters.
And what’s worse it raises serious concerns what other malicious actions to the Linux kernel and other projects Linus and LF had to take on demands of the government that likes to install backdoors in software.
They can just wait for someone to approve the pull request like everyone one else.
Yeah it sucks, imagine further that you are a linux user with a compromised machine due to an insistence on tolerance in thr face of intolerance.
It’s a shame they didn’t consider moving the LF foundation to Europe or something. If the choice is kick out contributors to support sanctions or operate without political pressure, the second is far better.
I cannot stand Putin or Russia’s action, but punishing individual contributors just trying to write code and build Linux isn’t helpful.
Unless evidence is found of malicious commits, it is pretty harsh on those caught up with this.
Let’s remember that many Russians will probably be locked up and/or killed for coming out against Putin. Punishing them achieves nothing.
Moving to Europe where… there’s an even greater level of sanctions against Russia, and the population is more anti-Russia?
I mean sure, I’d like that, but it wouldn’t have the effect you want it to lmao
And no, maintainers for sanctioned Russian companies were removed from their positions (where they can push kernel changes with zero approval).
Now they have to wait for their changes to be approved like everybody else. Oh no the horror.
They removed russian maintainers that are associated with sanctioned companies. Individual russian contributers were unaffected by this.
boo you read the articles! how will we manufacture outrage now!?
/s
They removed russian maintainers that are associated with sanctioned companies
Your are voluntarily spreading fake news and you are getting upvoted for that !
They have removed every person they suspected to be russian or have a russian “.ru” domain name in their email from the maintainers list.
Sorry bot, only those working for companies under sanction. And this doesn’t mean they can’t contribute, just that their contributions need to be approved by someone else.
But I’m pretty sure the Russian git repo will allow us based Microsoft employees be on the mantainers list… Right? Russia state is nothing if not honest, consistent and
imperi…friendly with other nations
To my complete lack of surprise, Russia
isseems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.Did you get your education… inside Putin’s butthole
Classy comment.
Thanks, obviously people enjoyed it.
Free to maintain a kernel that is their own and which does not belong to “ThE wEsT”.
Free at last, free at last. Thank Putin Almighty we are free at last.
And this is based on what
America bad
No.
The fact that Russia does not remove maintainers for political reasons.
Is this excluding the bit where they made criticising their war in Ukraine punishable by up to 15 years in prison?
Why remove a maintainer when they fall out of the 14th floor of their penthouse after shooting themselves in the back of the head twice?
Which open source developer has been killed in Russia for being a Russian developer?
I couldn’t tell you, not much real news escapes the iron curtain.
Kinda like how not a lot of dissidents escape the iron curtain.
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dipstick
The most normal Linux user showed up, I see.
This wasn’t a governmental decision this was a single person making a decision.
According to governmental regulations, yes. Please read up and try again.
To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.
What does the United States have to do with this? Since when is Finland part of the United States? Linus Torvalds is Finnish.
Linus Torvalds has been a US Citizen since 2010 and lives in Portland, Oregon
The Linux Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco. It’s a US 501c non profit. Therefore, they must abide by US sanctions.
Well, most of the software is pirated, so free like theft not free like free.
Source?
The internet.
