Do you agree that the CCP was responsible for thousands of deaths during the Tiananmen Square massacre? Do you agree that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs?
If you agree, think you might agree, or don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, you shouldn’t be on lemmy.ml
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.
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.
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
wait is there problem with .ml ? I've been using this account for more than an year.
Is that the reason I see hexbear posts (I want to block this instance, but don't think it's possible from account)
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.
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.
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.