6 ms·
Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
- cloudie78 3mo agoSo next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what? Shit like this erodes trust.
- Svoka 3mo agoHow 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 3mo agoYah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.
- Svoka 3mo ago[flagged]
- samat 3mo agoYou lack context
- 4bpp 3mo agoIt's still selective degradation of functionality, as presumably people who download a snowglobe animation program don't do it to see any sort of statement apart from normative depictions of wintery things. The problem would be the same if it showed Russian flags only to users with Ukrainian locale, or ads for Mountain Dew only when the user's locale is set to French, or even just something as impossible to interpret as offensive on its own as adding lots of little cactus men whenever the locale is Dutch.
- jszymborski 3mo agoright, which means the software is less useful and as such you might not want to use it. Plenty of software like that listed on repositories, which I think is fine.
- stonogo 3mo ago> presumably So it's "selective degradation of functionality" based entirely on your assumptions regarding the motivations of the users? How is this a useful description?
- galdauts 3mo agoVery much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.
- 4bpp 3mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Svoka 3mo agoNot sure you know what discrimination is.
- epistasis 3mo agoGiven 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 3mo agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]
- Svoka 3mo agoOh 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 3mo agoImagine living in the occupied part and being sent to the basement for this. Probably not that black and white now... although seeing both activist and slacktivist types being very loud about the land but not the people over and over again, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if you don't care.
- DiabloD3 3mo agoAs a reminder, the most dangerous job in Russia is "opposition leader".
- Svoka 3mo agoyou mean nationalists/imperialists like Navalny whose main beef with current russian administration is that is corrupt, meaning it is not being effective enough? Honestly, not sure why westerners yearn to find good fascists.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- 7bit 3mo agoHow can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.
- nosioptar 3mo agoIt's not even an anti-Russian statement! I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.
- neilv 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoThe 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.
- smw 3mo agoThe maintainer and upstream are the same person
- neilv 3mo agoThat might be responding too narrowly to this objection. Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten). The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.
- belorn 3mo ago
- asveikau 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoit is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.
- jzb 3mo agoSorry 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.
- kjs3 3mo agoMost do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...
- adamrezich 3mo agoI 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?
- ferongr 3mo agoIt seems like the "we support the current thing" crowd disagrees with you.
- adamrezich 3mo agoI just wish impotent slacktivism was rightfully looked down upon rather than enshrined as something noble and worthwhile, man. Is that really so much to ask for?
- krunck 3mo agoOne 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 3mo agoAnd 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.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago> 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?
- throw_a_grenade 3mo agoNo it won't.
- epistasis 3mo agoWhen 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.
- _0xdd 3mo agoOne 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 3mo agoThe 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.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoNo it didn't, the ukrainian flag was a recent addition by the guy who took over xsnow to add this protestware. Just go look at the repo history on sf.
- weare138 3mo agoHas 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.
- LtWorf 3mo agoDebian doesn't require to create an account and submit your national ID to allow you to open bug reports or write to mailing lists.
- kstrauser 3mo agoI 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?" If my boss saw an Iraq flag on my screensaver, I'd say "huh, look at that! I guess that was added in the new version. I'll change it to another screensaver." And if you live in a country there the likely reaction is that your boss might execute you, your government are the baddies.
- tryauuum 3mo ago> don't, like, invade their country I did not invade any country At least this app just displays the flags and not prints such accusations
- sssilver 3mo agoIsn't there discrepancy between that and The Debian Linux team removing “offensive” quotes for the “fortune” application[1]? [1] https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1952340426892984580 https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1952340426892984580
- striking 3mo agoI think there is in fact a discrepancy between displaying flags and advocating directly for gendered violence: > Debian contributor "NoisyCoil" said that they had wanted to argue in favor of keeping the packages, but after looking at the content they had decided against it: > > I went peeking at the package and, unless I'm completely missing something, the second offensive Italian fortune says that women's "no"s should be interpreted as "yes", while the third one explicitly calls for violence on women [1]. Like, it literally says women should be beaten on a regular basis. I'm afraid I can't help you here, sorry. from https://lwn.net/Articles/1031750/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1031750/, linked in the fine article
- 3mo ago
- Insimwytim 3mo agoSo, if someone were to modify a Debian package to show Palestinian flag for Hebrew speakers or Iranian flag for ...Enligsh speakers, the change won't be instantly reverted and the user won't be restricted, right?
- pwdisswordfishq 3mo agoOr LGBT flag for Arabic and Persian speakers.
- estebank 3mo agoA lot of people talking about how displaying the flag at all could get somebody in Russia in trouble. You could see the increasing of the likelihood as helpful then, because the flag could always appear. By making it come up more often it communicates to the user that it can appear it gives a chance to the user to notice it in a "safe" situation and not use xsnow if they are in a situation where it could cause trouble for them. The existence of the flag is not quite mentioned at https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/ https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/, and the site is loading too slow to see if it is shown in https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/visuals/index.html https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/visuals/index.html.
- saltamimi 3mo agoProtestware as a whole has never worked to solve anything. Awareness of a particular issue is the only positive thing "protest" software has successfully tried, with the second order effect being better supply chain management. I don't use Linux or Xsnow but it baffles me how distributions would allow something like this. Sure, it's just flags now, but if you look at faker and colors.js, you'll see the other side of the coin of what happens when you allow software like this.
- LtWorf 3mo agoDistributions didn't "allow" anything. The author just uploaded it. That's all there is to it. The asset file isn't called "ukraine flag" so unless you open all the images or run this as a russian you will probably be completely unaware of this behaviour.
- saltamimi 3mo agoSorry, the article didn't really say if it was upstream or only in Debian. I assumed it was only Debian. I still stand on the point that stuff like this should be frowned upon regardless of stance on issue.
- bill_mcgonigle 3mo agoI haven't heard of this package personally and it's not on my desktops so it must not be pulled in by any of the task- desktop environment metapackages I use. So you probably have to go looking for it. I really don't care about this package or protest but what might be more interesting to consider is what if this were in a default package and what if the affected locales were different? If I make a list of all the countries who have recently been at war or are currently engaged in hostilities or have ethnic animus towards each other and just choose to taunt them all, that would really be a dick move and it's probably OK for Debian to drop the package. FWIW I'd rather see them adopt a kindhearted fork than override an author/ maintainer when possible. If there's no special pleading for the ru/ua conflict then it's not too concerning.
- LtWorf 3mo agoThe debian maintainer and the original author are the same person. If they added this feature in the original version, I doubt they will drop the package or fork it and place the fork in debian.
- periodjet 3mo agoThis 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.