5 ms·

Do people think the people protesting like this don't know that this is damaging? They presumably feel that the issue at hand is more important than that damage

• duxup 5y ago
  I don't know what the next step is after "I've deleted your files... now listen to what I have to say." That makes no sense. It sounds more like an excuse for acting out.
  • BaronVonSteuben 5y ago
    Once your hard drive is wiped, you're supposed to automatically realize it must be a legitimate open source developer protesting the war, rather than some other type of malware. Then, rather than the natural human instinct to blame the person who did it, you're supposed to realize that your government must be lying to you and must actually be evil, and you're supposed to start a revolution to overthrow Putin. I guess that's the thinking?
• slackfan 5y ago
  If the intent is to disrupt, why be surprised at people being pissed off about it? Seems like a natural progression of the conversation.
  • Latty 5y ago
    Was anyone surprised people were pissed off?
    • slackfan 5y ago
      About half of the comments here appear to be.
      • Latty 5y ago
        Are they? I don't see surprise: I see people defending the action (to some degree), but I can't find a single case of anyone who is surprised at people reacting negatively to it.
        • slackfan 5y ago
          I suppose condescending smugness can read like surprise in certain cases.
    • 46Bit 5y ago
      Indeed, judging by the response it seems like a very successful protest (aside from the reports of lost NGO files.) Not something I’d have done, but I understand the idea.
      • krsrhe 5y ago
• grishka 5y ago
  As a Russian, you already notice this and you already have many things in your everyday life disrupted. Someone deleting your files as an act of shoving politics where it doesn't belong helps absolutely nothing. If anything, it's not an act of protest, it's an act of vandalism. Causes don't matter here — vandalism is simply never okay.
  • ahtihn 5y ago
    > vandalism is simply never okay Neither is invading another country. Someone didn't delete the files. You deleted them yourself by blindly trusting 3rd party software that you got for free with no guarantees of anything.
    • grishka 5y ago
      > Neither is invading another country. Indeed. Except, did I elect this president? No I did not (and elections in Russia are more of an illusion anyway). Can I do something to stop him? No I can't. What's the point of this act then? Putin and his allies don't use npm. This can't affect them by any stretch of imagination. > Someone didn't delete the files. You deleted them yourself by blindly trusting 3rd party software that you got for free with no guarantees of anything. Yes, of course, npm is at fault here for downloading untrusted code and running it with no sandboxing whatsoever on behalf of your OS user. This kind of stuff used to be called an RCE vulnerability and used to cause people to issue urgent security patches, but somehow, now it's considered a perfectly normal way of doing things. At the very least, there should be a permission request if this untrusted code tries to access anything outside of the project directory.
  • Latty 5y ago
    Vandalism can be a form of protest. Again, every protest ever has had people saying that the disruption to them is over the line. It draws attention and coverage to the issue. It forces people to listen. Protest has to be disruptive to the norm to achieve that, and there will always be people who don't like that. That's the point. As I say, I don't think this one is effective or proportional given the lack of control someone in Russia has over the situation, but just saying "nothing should ever be damaged in protest" is, I think, naïve at best. If Russia were a state with a reasonable guarantee of a fair legal process, I would argue a moral obligation to disruptive protest to end the war. If the UK (where I am) were to invade another country like this, I would hope for a general strike, and civil disobedience of all kinds, including vandalism. The fact that Russia has such a hard line against dissidence makes this obviously more morally difficult, although I greatly respect those that still choose to protest, I can't expect it of anyone. People will disagree about how effective a thing is, and how justified it is. What the Russian state is doing is monstrous, and that increases the level of justified disruption to me. That doesn't mean this was justified—I feel it wasn't—but pretending that all "vandalism" is inherently never reasonable as protest is, in my view, wrong.
• shkkmo 5y ago
  The problem is that that the node.js filesystem deletion "protests" was an indiscriminate digital attack that harmed people who are doing a much better job of actively opposing the invasion. I believe that the developer who implemented that attack should face criminal charges. Our ability to trust our open source is a critical part of our economy. People who abuse that trust to directly harm others should know they will face criminal charges for their actions.
  • Latty 5y ago
    I agree, to some extent. I think it was largely ineffective and poorly targeted protest. The media coverage is not really necessary as it's already highly reported on, and the people harmed have no control over it. With that said, disruptive protest can be (and often is) illegal. I may think it's justified in some cases, but also if I do something illegal I expect to face legal punishment for it. Some people lay down their lives to protest: to some people committing a crime is a cost worth paying. Again, my point isn't that I agree with the action, just that the idea that protest should disrupt no one is counter to the whole point of protest.
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      I think that blocking your software from running on some computers would be very disruptive but should be legal. (Edit: not endorsing this, just trying to clarify where the line lies) Actively trying to harm those computers is simply not OK and goes beyond "disruptive" protest into harmful. To analogize, if your protest blocks traffic, it is disruptive. If you protest goes looking for property owned by Russian speakers to burn down...you have moved beyond disruptive protest an into being a harmful attack. I do not think the latter is anywhere even close to justifiable.
      • Latty 5y ago
        I don't think the line is so simple. I agree that the "any Russian person" aspect of this makes it unjustified, in my eyes, but harming property more generally? Well, denying someone their property is certainly harm of a sort, and if I were asked if it was justified to seize or destroy an oligarch supporting Putin's property or yacht or whatever, then I'd say absolutely. In a similar way, there was a case in the UK recently where a statue of a man who was both a philanthropist and a slave trader was thrown into a river. This was charged as a crime, but the accused were found not guilty (commonly believed to be jury nullification). Was this right? Well, the guy had actively limited his philanthropy where anyone was anti-slavery, people had tried getting a plaque added to the statue to explain context, but this had been blocked. I think this was a reasonable act of protest, and clearly a jury of their peers agreed. More directly, what if they found their software was being used in a Russian weapons factory that was being used to produce munitions killing Ukranian people? In my mind, that would significantly raise the justification to cause damage to that property. Harm, especially when it comes to property rather than people, is tricky. I don't think it can always be ruled out when it comes to justifiable protest.
• sirius87 5y ago
  This is exactly it. For some people, a world that they relate to is coming to an end, and anything they could do, however insignificant, no matter what the side-effects or personal reputation cost, is worth doing. This isn't some brainy impact-analysis based action. "Something must be done". The disruptions caused by these rogue packages will make it to newspapers and the media, and maybe, just maybe, parrying the news of war and destruction. I don't support having this. But I can see how a single-contributor package author would feel emotionally compelled to "Do something, anything".
  • shkkmo 5y ago
    Not everything people feel compelled to do is OK. It is not OK to go out and find Russian Americans and go vandalize their property to make a point. If you do so, you should face criminal charges. I similarly think that the node module maintainers who deliberately abused their trust to make an indiscriminant attack of people's digital property should face criminal charges and civil liability.
    • sirius87 5y ago
      Yes, people affected should absolutely go to court. Let the courts decide if this activity of this nature in violation of the law. I absolutely support that. Package authors who did this are also going to be ostracised by the community. So they will most likely pay a price.
  • jraph 5y ago
    In that case, targeting only Russians is sub-optimal, They could as well have targeted everybody, it would have had more impact. There's no reason to target Russia inhabitants in particular, who, I would guess, are mostly against the war.
    • hippich 5y ago
      From polling results (both Russian and western) majority of Russians are supporting the war.
• abnry 5y ago
  But what is the limiting principle? Once you allow yourself to cause disruption and hurt people, when is it too far?
  • Latty 5y ago
    A good question I don't think there is an easy answer to, and one that depends on how you perceive the action being protested and the protest action. A recent case in the UK involved people vandalising (throwing into a river) a statue. It was charged as a crime but they were found not guilty by a jury (in what most believe was an act of jury nullification). There are a lot of loud people who felt this was disproportionate, but when it came down to it, a randomly selected jury from the UK clearly felt it was justifiable. If my government was doing something morally abhorrent, that justifies greater disruption in the name of trying to stop it. Given there is no obvious way to judge the objective moral value of things, let alone one consistent across people, there will never be a hard rule about what is correct. If we say there can be no justification for disruptive protest, then we lose the ability of the people to fight back against a tyrannical government doing things against the will of the population.
• Aunche 5y ago
  This isn't so much of a protest as much as an nonviolent indiscriminate vigilante terrorist attack. > The intent is to disrupt. Presumably the intent is to help Ukraine. People need to stop and think about how their disruptive "protest" is actually going to help their cause rather than blindly chase awareness.
  • merrywhether 5y ago
    A lot of protest is more about emotion than logic. Most individual actions of protest are not logical, like each of the individual protesting Russians who know they are likely to go to jail. But when enough “illogical” people do enough “illogical” things visibly enough, the Overton window (as it were) can start to shift as they prompt others to ask why they see more and more “illogical” acts in favor of a position. Some will go to far, some not enough, but it’s hard to predict what acts will move the needle.
• mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  Digital arsonists who do it for the attention