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Notepad++ issues attacked by Chinese commenters
- infinity0 7y agoObviously, exposing state surveillance and oppression is a good thing. However a lot of western media and commenters conflate this by adding their own propaganda twists into their message, either surreptitiously (being anti-Chinese and using "freedom" as an excuse to attack China) or perhaps innocently without realising it (ignorantly, thinking their are really about "freedom" and not realising their own prejudices). This unnecessarily inflames the situation and a more balanced message would have worked better without triggering the sensitivities of very nationalist people. > The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese but live in China’s so-called autonomous Xinjiang region. The region’s name suggests the Uyghurs have autonomy and self-governance. "Chinese" is not an ethnicity, you probably meant "Han Chinese" as the ethnicity. Saying that Uyghurs "are not Chinese" is like saying Northern Irish people "are not British". Of course this is going to piss people off, pro-Chinese Uyghurs included. Indeed many of the Github comments are about accusations to split China, and of course if you go into Northern Ireland and talk about how all those people are "not British" you will understandably get the same sort of accusation, that you are trying to split up a nation. Indeed the pro-British Northern Irish call themselves the "unionists", the very word the direct opposite meaning to "split". The naming of the region as "autonomous" is also historical and unrelated to the current surveillance and oppression (which is appalling) but to say this in your second paragraph makes it sound like there is some conspiratorial connection. The region in fact does have more legal autonomy than the other provinces of China.
- timendum 7y agoI love how many comments are anti-USA, but the author is from France.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago"France" you mean :)
- creshal 7y agohttps://donho.github.io/ https://donho.github.io/ Looks pretty French to me.
- have_faith 7y agoHow did this post move from page 1 to page 4 so quickly? in the space of pressing the back button.
- infinity0 7y agohacker news has automated algorithms to deprioritise posts it autodetects as "controversial" or "troll bait"
- edjroot 7y agoWow, I didn't know the effect of the deprioritization was so strong. Now I wonder if there's some unofficial HN client that sorts by "controversial" (just like Reddit).
- yorwba 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active (via https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists )
- blaser-waffle 7y agoThat's not controversial though, just what is seeing a lot of posts and voting. That could imply it's controversial or trollbait, but not per se.
- dgellow 7y agoTriggered by the blog post announcing the relase of "Notepad++ v7.8.1 : Free Uyghur". https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/ Excerpt from the blog post: > At least 120,000 members of Kashgar’s Muslim Uyghur minority have been detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps which aim to change the political thinking of detainees, their identities, and their religious beliefs. Reports from the World Uyghur Congress submitted to the United Nations in July 2018 suggest that 1 million Uyghurs are currently being held in the re-education camps. > Here are some actions you can take to help them: https://uhrp.org/what-you-can-do https://uhrp.org/what-you-can-do > The fact you have just learned such information is already an action in and of itself. But you can involve more people to focus on this issue and hopefully apply additional pressure on the Chinese government to stop their oppressive actions and crimes concerning the Uyghur people. People will tell me again to not mix politics with software/business. Doing so surely impacts the popularity of Notepad++: talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid. The problem is, if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us. We can choose to not act when people are being oppressed, but when it’s our turn to be oppressed, it will be too late and there will be no one for us. You don’t need to be Uyghur or a Muslim to act, you need only to be a human and have empathy for our fellow humans. > Hence Notepad++ Free Uyghur Edition:
- aembleton 7y agoCache because the notepad++ website is currently unavailable: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dMqHQfpMBI0J:https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dMqHQf...
- betty60088 7y agoHaha..You need to go there and see for yourself if Uyghur or Tibetan people are oppressed by the communist party instead of seeking news from western media, which we all know are very much biased and anti China...no one likes to be represented by a stranger from a foreign country who has no first hand knowledge about the issue..
- favorited 7y agoGood on the Notepad++ devs. They've had Tiananmen-themed release notes in the past as well. Edit: Remember when GitHub started allowing removing issues, rather than just closing them? People got all wound up saying that issues shouldn't be totally removed and there should be a public record of the maintainer closing it. This is a perfect example of what that feature enables. The maintainers can, if they want, just go in and remove all these issue reports. It totally removes any power that troll accounts have.
- thinkingemote 7y agoFrom the notes: "People will tell me again to not mix politics with software/business. Doing so surely impacts the popularity of Notepad++: talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid. The problem is, if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us. We can choose to not act when people are being oppressed, but when it’s our turn to be oppressed, it will be too late and there will be no one for us. You don’t need to be Uyghur or a Muslim to act, you need only to be a human and have empathy for our fellow humans."
- senectus1 7y agoits great when simple facts can obliterate the propaganda. Politics isn't about humans, its about power.
- dekken_ 7y agoPower over humans. No humans, no power.
- tareqak 7y agoI have wondered about the following question in roundabout ways, but this note has finally made the phrasing clear to me: if humanity finds a way to weed out the people who speak up for themselves and for others over a long-enough time scale, then what happens to humanity game-theoretically in that scale and on a longer scale? Please feel free to replace “humanity” with “a population” if it helps you think of an answer. Edit: replaced “in terms of game theory” with “game-theoretically”.
- LilBytes 7y agoWhat the fuck is happening here? Context? Edit: "Notepad++ v7.8.1: Free Uyghur" I love it.
- staz 7y agoRelated: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/
- Groxx 7y agoSite was relatively slow to load for me, so an archive.org mirror just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20191030003924/https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191030003924/https://notepad-p... Edit: wow, downvotes appeared pretty quickly. Hopefully this whole post becomes training for detecting malicious behavior.
- riffraff 7y agoRespect for people who take a stand for important issues. I understand the value of not wanting to bring politics into a shared large tech community, but at the same time you should be able to do what you want with your own software, and using it to push your ideals is legit. We must remember though that this should also apply to ideas we don't agree with.
- thinkingemote 7y agoI am finding it fascinating looking at the abusive accounts and their repositories and history of issues and pull requests over various other repositories. I wonder if some kind of pattern could be apparent? (Currently the few accounts I have visited are front end JS developers) Could some of them be active in your own communities?
- ahbyb 7y agoSo they should be ostracised for not thinking like the West wants them to think? My issue with this is that some people think that all online supporters of the Chinese government are paid shills or just bots. It might surprise you to know that there are normal Chinese people, just like you and I, that simply like things are going in China. I see no reason to disrespect or ostracise them for their politics.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoNo one cares, they can take their political shit posts somewhere else.
- pavelludiq 7y agoChina is a genocidal state, and the supposedly hundreds of millions of supporters of that state policy in China are also genocidal by definition. I see no reason not to disrespect them. This is not "a difference of opinion" it's an ethnic cleansing, not something you brush off to polite disagreement. Yes, absolutely ostracize them, that's what you do to people who support genocide. 100% of the time any civilized person should resist them in any way they can.
- cm2187 7y agoYou mean posting an issue titled "fuck you" is "not thinking like us"?
- ahbyb 7y agoThis might be the equivalent of a street protest. Why is throwing rocks at cops good but writing "fuck you" in an Internet forum not good?
- ArchieLeach 7y agoIt's astounding how well insidious daily propaganda works. I'm sure these guys mean well but they've been manipulated as much as the 'other side' has been. Edit: What news are reported and how they are reported in not random [1]. There has very clearly been a campaign against China and this shows that it is working. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
- Bootvis 7y agoCould you tell what "insidious daily propaganda" you have obeserved and how about sides are equally manipulated?
- DarkmSparks 7y agoThis commentary by Jimmy Dore is a fairly good commentary on what it looks like. https://youtu.be/aT7WEkvCWeM https://youtu.be/aT7WEkvCWeM
- catalogia 7y agoIf the CIA has dedicated manpower to fucking with the Notepad++ dev so that HN could see it and think critical thoughts about the Chinese... then I think they might have some misplaced priorities. The far more likely explanation is that this is organic. Edit: I stand corrected. Wow.
- joecool1029 7y ago>If the CIA has dedicated manpower to fucking with the Notepad++ dev so that HN could see it and think critical thoughts about the Chinese... then I think they might have some misplaced priorities. I mean... the CIA did fuck with Notepad++ in the past: https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_26968090.html https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_26968090.html
- Freak_NL 7y agoMore specifically: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/13415/v7-3-3-fix-cia-hacking-notepad-issue https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/13415/v7-3-3-f... The CIA replaced a DLL dependency of Notepad++ with a hijacked version on compromised Windows systems.
- hkitdog 7y agoNotepad++ devs are doing the right thing.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI prefer my software politics free, but it's their right in my opinion to do it, and mine to choose whether or not to use the software.
- zouhair 7y agoSo you don't use any Free Software at all?
- chocolatkey 7y agoAre they maybe irritated at the author because they won't be able to use N++ anymore in China due to censorship? Or is that a silly idea. Some of the issues seem to just be made of text that's purposefully made to be censored, including e.g. "winnie the pooh". Or maybe they're trying to show that they're "good citizens"... Update: looks like 4chan has started their trolling...
- jeroenhd 7y agoReading the few comments that were (machine) translated into English, it seems they are angry that the dev dared to speak badly about their country. This is just Chinese people being angry at someone calling out China for its concentration camps.
- Freak_NL 7y agoThere seem to be two groups of commenters. Chinese — who I suspect are mostly self-appointed keyboard warriors, not some government backed troll-factory like the Russians have — and trolls trolling the trolls — e.g., imageboard counterculture; these are the commenters mostly just copy/pasting the keywords that get services and Chinese netizens banned or flagged. If there is a coherent English comment in there anywhere making a reasonable case (i.e., beyond not liking it) for not including a phrase like 'Free Uyghur' in their release notes, I haven't found it.
- Hamuko 7y agoYeah, I'm seeing a lot of that famous Chinese copypasta. https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/a5cq6g/a_copypasta_that_causes_china_to_ban_the_site/ https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/a5cq6g/a_copypas...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ryanlol 7y agoSo is Github going to ban all of these accounts of chinese devs spreading their nationalistic nonsense? I know they've handed out bans for much less in the past. Many of these accounts seem to be very active outside of the Notepad++ repo.
- tus88 7y agoIf current corporate trends prevail, they will ban notepad++ amd hand over the account to the CCP.
- jeroenhd 7y agoI must say that I've only now realised that there is no "report abuse" button on github. Regardless of politics and Chinese propaganda, hurling insults at someone on Github should be reason enough for action against their account. You can say that the news media is lying and all that, that's just daily grind for most English-themed media as well now, but yelling "fuck you" and "wishing a rotten vagina" upon people is not something that should ever be tolerated.
- gorbachev 7y agoThere is. It's on the user profile page. It really should be on each comment and issue the user has created.
- jeroenhd 7y agoAh, thank you. Reporting specific comments would make a lot more sense, but I guess github isn't expecting people to use issue trackers as conversation battlegrounds.
- teraflop 7y agoYou can report issues, pull requests, etc., but only if you have write permissions to the repository. https://help.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/reporting-abuse-or-spam#reporting-an-issue-or-pull-request https://help.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-communit...
- gorbachev 7y agoReporting the accounts to GitHub results in this: "We've received too many requests from your IP address recently. Please wait a few minutes, then try again."
- Freak_NL 7y agoI get this after successfully reporting just one troll. The threshold seems to be quite low for GitHub's abuse filters. Unfortunately, that means you can't report a group of bad actors easily unless GitHub moderators with access to the anti-abuse tools start reporting or banning them themselves.
- noirchen 7y agoI can read Chinese and it looks to me that both sides are attacking the other side. And most are using simplified Chinese so they are all from the mainland. I'm not surprised because just as Americans have heavily polarized opinions towards Trump, Chinese people, especially the educated, also have a huge divide in their political views. You don't see that in Chinese websites because they know what not to say there, but on GitHub, a foreign website without a high risk of being blocked, both sides just unleash hell on anyone who they do not agree with.
- kinow 7y agoThanks! I thought all those comments were one sided. Interesting!
- 0xcase 7y agoGitHub should take a stand and remove the accounts of everyone involved. No matter if they're spreading Chinese Nationalism and attacking people over it or those who think it's an excuse to use racist swear words against Asians. This should be a platform for collaboration, behavior like in a YouTube comment section shouldn't be tolerated
- flohofwoe 7y agoThe accounts used in those scripted attacks are obviously throw-aways, removing them won't change a thing.
- Hamuko 7y agoI'm seeing some non-throwaway accounts used, although not really in a spammy sense.
- hokkos 7y agoI see a lot of legit account but used sporadically.
- tandr 7y agoSometimes these are "sleepers" accounts, and they are very valuable in astroturfing and trolling business. Not all of them - I suspect some people are real, and upset about "some developer teaching us how to live". I wouldn't surprised if there is a quite significant chunk of accounts on any soc media sites that are dormant until "the call" comes in.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI think we will have to go to strong AI to cull these useless commenters or just live with it. Another solution is to allow a project to only accept bug reports from verified (some sort license?) github members. Maybe that old timer Bayesian filtering would work on obvious cases like this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- honest_tovarich 7y agoI made a remark about the author(s) of Notepad++ naming his release "Free Uyghur", quite unpopular I would say, I meant it to be like that, I told him/them that Uyghurs are just a ethnic group of China, not a nation, etc... But in this case , bloating someone's project for political reason's is just plain wrong, is awful. Github should have something in place to protect open source projects against something like this.
- Hamuko 7y ago>Github should have something in place to protect open source projects against something like this. Github should have something in place to protect projects from their copyright owners?
- yorwba 7y ago"bloating someone's project" i. e. spamming. The person you're replying to seems to have a nuanced view on the issue.
- bouncycastle 7y agoWhy is it wrong? It's quite courageous of them to support human rights, and they have the right to do so, especially when they have been developing and giving away their software for free. You have no obligation to use it. Also, If they are "just an ethnic group", then why are so many being sent to prison? Why the mass surveillance, restrictions, arrests and 're-education' camps? "Free Uyghur" doesn't necessarily mean they should be given their own nation, but at least be able to practice their culture and religion freely.
- fuckthewhites 7y agoBlack People should have their own country in America!!!! @Notepad++ dev, publish the Black People version!!! Fucking the White dogs
- rypskar 7y agoGood that they take a stand, more should dare to do that. I did see this as a good enough reason to make a donation to Notepad++, and added the comment "Supporting the Notepad++ v7.8.1: Free Uyghur release".
- endymi0n 7y agoHere you go: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/donate/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/donate/
- ivanb 7y agoI take this opportunity to remind us that Notepad++ used to have a backdoor.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- t0astbread 7y agoSources?
- Freak_NL 7y agoPlease don't post such claims without a source to back them up. It's trolling. Notepad++ (and many other Windows executables) was found vulnerable to loading a hacked DLL dependency on a compromised Windows system. Notepad++ itself contained no backdoor as far as I can tell. This issue is explained here, as well as the actions taken to prevent it from happening again: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/13415/v7-3-3-fix-cia-hacking-notepad-issue https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/13415/v7-3-3-f...
- ryanlol 7y ago>was found vulnerable That is stretching the definition. A privileged local attacker could (and can) modify Notepad++ and any other software, that is not a vulnerability or issue of any kind.
- cltsang 7y agoWill probably be downvoted to oblivion: This incident is a perfect example showing why embracing China and hoping they would be more open to modern values like freedom of speech, democracy, etc., is a total illusion. Too many Chinese people are brainwashed to the core that even if the great firewall is switched off today, nothing will change. The currently brainwashed people simply despise anything against Chinese official rhetoric; they don't put any thoughts to follow other people's reasons. And this brainwashing will pass on from one generation to the next. I've met too many mainland Chinese use only Baidu to search, use only WeChat to do messaging, read only Weibo and watch only CCTV to update themselves on current affairs, even when they are physically outside of China. Sure there are still some reasonable Chinese, but 9.9 times out of 10 they are very reluctant to speak up, since they still have some stakes in China. If they do speak up, their family back in China will get locked up, harrased, wealth get taken, you name it. It happens all the time. That's why powerful external force is necessary for China to change. And if we don't force China to change, China will erode the rest of the world's modern values, which is the foundation of our civilization. China's export of oppression, like recent news about NBA and Apple, has been actually on-going for a very long time. In Hong Kong here, we see it all the time all around us.
- xhruso00 7y ago> "That's why powerful external force is necessary for China to change." Until rich people understand that China money stinks, nothing is going to change.
- creshal 7y ago> And if we don't force China to change, China will erode the rest of the world's modern values There's another option: Treat them like North Korea. No trade in, no trade out, let them be whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone outside China. It's the least profitable option, of course, but much easier to pull off than overthrowing a government armed with nuclear weapons, and un-brainwashing over a billion people.
- thewholeview 7y agoIt's interesting that Chinese used to believe that the West is more fair and just and are respected, evident in the fact that foreigners receive higher regards and even the police would prioritize such cases. In recent time, there has been more voices in China where notion regarding the West being "brainwashed" by the western media starts the emerge, which had never happened before. I think it's interesting to note this as it's easy to be one-sided when you are hearing only the narrative and values from a certain belief system. As such without discussing the actual merit of each individual belief, care should be taken perhaps to at least recognize the implicit meaning behind any claims of "brainwash" to ones other than your own.
- aembleton 7y agoNow the Notepad++ website seems to be down. https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/notepad-plus-plus.org.html https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/notepad-plus-plus.org.html
- bArray 7y agoConfirmed from NZ. Now the question is, state or privately backed DDoS? The third option is that they took it down themselves due to a different kind of abuse, i.e. a report form or something.
- creshal 7y agoCloudFlare is handling it now, so doesn't seem to be too severe.
- datafl4sh 7y agoConfirmed from FR
- julianlam 7y agoNodeBB team here. We host Notepad++'s forum. We're keeping an eye out for suspicious activity on the forum as well, as these types of spam dumps occur often. That said, the Notepad++ forum has been the target of a low level DoS attack for the past month...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bArray 7y agoSeems as though GitHub are now responding to this... Just received a response from GitHub support (I removed their name): > #### (GitHub Developer Support) > > Oct 30, 10:38 AM UTC > > Hello, > > Thanks for taking the time to let us know. Our team is currently > investigating the account in question. > > Please let us know if we can help in any other way! > > Thanks, > ####
- b0ner_t0ner 7y agoHere is what happens when you speak out against the Chinese government: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dp5422/dont_become_chinese_advice_from_a_chinese/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dp5422/dont_becom...
- Neekerer 7y agothe site isn't blocked in China yet. Don't see proclamations like that often here without a VPN.