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Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1079385/3d7a57da58b41aa9/
51•6581•1h ago

Comments

Svoka•38m ago
How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

jszymborski•29m ago
Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.
Svoka•20m ago
But also it is showing how russians think that Ukrainians existing is somehow discriminatory against them.
galdauts•26m ago
Very much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.
4bpp•18m ago
The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.
Svoka•3m ago
Not sure you know what discrimination is.
epistasis•16m ago
Given the number of colonized people that speak Russian, including residents of Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. etc. I think this sort of Easter Egg based on language rather than geographical location is quite appropriate.

My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...

bradrn•15m ago
This point in the comments made me think twice:

> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; 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 beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Svoka•8m ago
Oh no! Imagine the horror of losing your job. It compares nothing to literal genocide their army perpetrating.

And yes, it is their, not their government, not some mysterious leaders. Russians reelected same government for 35 years with it invading neighbours pretty much every 5 years.

orbital-decay•2m ago
Imagine living in the occupied part and being sent to the basement for this. Probably not that black and white now...
7bit•14m ago
How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.
neilv•22m ago
I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:

> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:

> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.

belorn•13m ago
The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.
JdeBP•8m ago
It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.

asveikau•17m ago
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() < 0.3)
     tt = MAXTREETYPE;
hexagonwin•11m ago
it is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.
kjs3•16m ago
Most do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...
cloudie78•16m ago
So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what?

Shit like this erodes trust.

adamrezich•16m ago
I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?
krunck•15m ago
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 beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."

epistasis•10m ago
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.
sombragris•3m ago
Slackware-current upgraded xsnow to the latest version in June 20th but applied a patch from ALT Linux that removed the protestware bits just because of this reason. I support this.
dgellow•2m ago
They don’t have to use the software. It’s such a non issue. Xsnow is closer to art than critical software, you can easily ditch it
_0xdd•13m ago
One of the comments that struck me on the lwn.net site is the (albeit small) possibility that someone in Russia could be running the software and unintentionally land themselves in hot water if someone discovers these images on their computer. I'm sure that's not the intended consequence, but I could be problematic.
weare138•4m ago
The issue with that claim is xsnow already displayed the Ukrainian flag regardless. And it's in no way a critical app most people would even have installed to begin with. I had no idea it was even still being maintained.
weare138•7m ago
Has anyone confirmed who this 'Alexander Ivanov' person is or even if this is a real person and not some AI bot? I searched for the email address used and it only appears recently in these handful of posts about xsnow.

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