Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#91

Post by LtWorf »

michaelmrose wrote: post #55
JdeBP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.

So 3% of the pop uses Linux. I shouldn't be surprised that 3% of those use Debian. I WOULD be surprised to find that more than 1 in 10k has EVER used xsnow 1 in 1M running it continually. Note this is actually wildly overstated. I have not even touched on the settings which would show flags. Then we have to imagine they run xsnow all the time and somehow don't notice the dangerous political stuff OR run it for the fi…

How many victims should something generate before considering removing it from Debian?

Funny thing how here we are talking about keeping it despite it can apparently cause people to die, while Debian was so quick to decide that the offensive fortunes that nobody had complained about for the past 23 years were incredibly harmful and had to be removed right away :D

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#92

Post by kstrauser »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #84
kstrauser wrote: post #45

I could not be less sympathetic on this. If you don't want people protesting your actions, don't, like, invade their country. "But what if it was the US doing the invading?" Yes, even then. If some Iraqi author made an Xsnow that waved little Iraq flags, that's their right. Even if I disagree, it doesn't harm me, and it might inspire me to consider our actions. "But what if it makes someone's boss get mad at them?" I…

the problem isn't protesting someone's actions - it's supporting the other side do you really want to support country that kidnaps its citizens off the streets and honorary reburied Nazi criminals?

It's well documented that Russia is kidnapping its citizens off the streets to send them on an invasion of a sovereign country, but I hadn't heard that they're honoring nazis now. I'm not sure I believe that.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#93

Post by giancarlostoro »

epistasis wrote: post #19
krunck wrote: post #14

One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing: " People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a…

And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

> if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

Sheesh, how different are the languages? Would it be an honest mistake to say a word in Ukrainian and not realize?

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#94

Post by giancarlostoro »

netsharc wrote: post #39
krunck wrote: post #14

One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing: " People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a…

When the war started, Europeans were forcing famous Russians living in Europe to denounce their government's evils. For example an opera house demanded a Russian opera singer to say something against the regime or be "blacklisted". As if it's so fucking easy to denounce a dictator who has murderous tendencies and who rules your homeland, as if it's so easy to insult him, and then what, not be able to return home and…

> not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?

Assuming they're still alive.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#95

Post by throw_a_grenade »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #93
epistasis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

> if they do something like speak Ukrainian. Sheesh, how different are the languages? Would it be an honest mistake to say a word in Ukrainian and not realize?

No it won't.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#96

Post by throw_a_grenade »

LtWorf wrote: post #89
dgellow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, tell me, who is ever using xsnow in a place where that would be problematic? It’s such a niche software. Again, complete non-issue.

> who is ever using xsnow We don't know? Debian doesn't spy on users.

popcon shows 302 users as of now: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xsnow

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#97

Post by epistasis »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #93
epistasis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

> if they do something like speak Ukrainian. Sheesh, how different are the languages? Would it be an honest mistake to say a word in Ukrainian and not realize?

When I've looked at academic language comparisons, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian are all about the same distance from each other. Somewhere in the range of distances of Portuguese/Spanish/Italian, which have lots of very similar words. A single word isn't going to get somebody in trouble, but a sentence? Going to raise eyebrows, and likely capture unless you've got people to vouch for you being a patriotic newly Russian citizen, just trying to catch up to the new reality. The areas that are currently occupied, as well as Russian lands that border Ukraine, have a mixed vernacular called Surzhyk, which uses Ukrainian sounds and grammar but lots of Russian vocabulary and idioms.

Early on in the occupation, one form of resistance was simply graffiti with a letter that's in the Ukrainian alphabet that's not in the Russian alphabet, like ї. That sort of symbolic resistance has been replaced entirely by far more strategic resistance these days, according to recent reporting.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#99

Post by jzb »

asveikau wrote: post #8

I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream? I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted: https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332 if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48()

Sorry if it sounded like it was only in Debian; that was not my intent. I tried to make clear that the Debian package maintainer and upstream maintainer were one and the same, and that the change was upstream first. That was the reason cited by the person who complained, that he didn't file a bug because the maintainer was the one who instituted the changes upstream.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#100

Post by periodjet »

This change to xsnow is obviously an unalloyed negative, and the simplest test to confirm this to yourself is to imagine the political statement being something you disagree with, e.g. if the locale were set to an EU country, only the US flag would show.
Post reply on HN