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Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
by wruza 4y ago
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
- FredPret 4y agoSo true. It's truly sad that some people can hold tight to their cynicism even as they build up their technical skills
- criley2 4y agoThe people who do this are likely not American or Western European, likely not from a wealthy background, likely don't have access to high end tech jobs, and probably can't even make 5% of what a Facebook or Google employee makes. These people might feel spite and anger towards the western world for the extreme lavish excess that developers enjoy. It's not hard to imagine a world where developers can learn some skills but are locked out participating like we do, and thus decide to weaponize those skills against us for whatever profit they can.
- themitigating 4y agoBeing jealous isn't a justification for any action
- criley2 4y agoI think you mean to say that you don't respect actors who justify their actions through "jealousy". In reality, jealously is a fine justification for actions and arguably the most used justification for any action in human history. Hard to think of a historical war that wasn't based on "jealousy", in the end. I kind of feel like your comment is like saying "Being poor isn't an excuse for stealing bread", and while completely and totally true, it really works hard to miss the point.
- ozim 4y agoNo he means “being poor isn’t an excuse for being asshole”. Just like keying your neighbor car because he could afford nice one is not acceptable whatever you feel like.
- criley2 4y ago"Keying your neighbors car because they have a nicer one" is not an analogy that works for anything here. What is happening in NPM is not a car being keyed. There is a profit motive for doing this. Perhaps you could say "Stealing 1 gallon of gas from your rich neighbors car to feed your starving children makes you an asshole", that's an analogy that seems to fit what is happening here, and an opinion I would disagree with.
- alexb_ 4y agoWhat is your opinion on catalytic converter thieves?
- ozim 4y agoIt works perfectly fine. IF you steal gas from neighbors car to feed starving children does not make you an asshole. If you do it in a way to minimize damage. If you come over and mess his whole car up in the process just because "he is rich" - that makes one an asshole. The same with spamming NPM, OK I can understand they feel the need to earn money - but they are messing up something useful for others in bad way. They probably could still put effort to do many other things that would bring profit and would not mess up thing that many people will start loosing trust.
- Dudeman112 4y agoAh, the age-old mixing pointing out the reasons for why an individual might act they way they do with morally absolving them Ever common amongst people who have never seen or felt the consequences of abject poverty
- tremon 4y agoOn the contrary, jealousy is one of the major drivers of consumerism.
- amerkhalid 4y agoWow Trust me if you are struggling to make ends meet, you don’t have time for these kind of childish revenge. Only reason you see developers from some developing countries developing spam related products is because it pays bills. When your livelihood depends upon such products, it is hard to do the right thing. Just like so many people in the west working for very questionable companies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>Trust me if you are struggling to make ends meet, you don’t have time for these kind of childish revenge. sure but once you start making ends meet you might think, now I can take some time to screw over other people! It really depends how pissed off you are. Although if you were really that pissed off I doubt this is the way you would go.
- oleks 4y ago> The people who do this are likely not American or Western European Maybe not natively, but they may be working in the US or Western Europe, making upwards 50% of a Google/Facebook salary, if not working at Google/Facebook indeed. Plenty of companies pay a decent salary for mediocre work, and will take the less morally sound developer, because the sound one isn't willing to work with their legacy code or less moral product (e.g., oil industry, financial services). Making good money in tech != good morals. Finally, being physically in the US/Western Europe doesn't necessarily imply that you don't think that russia deserves to be treated better.
- robertlagrant 4y agoI mean. Given the world as we know it would become impoverished overnight without them, it's hard to see how oil and financial services industries can be seen as immoral. Imperfect, certainly, but immoral?
- FredPret 4y agoYou're correct, though I think part of the reason there's more cybercrime from distant countries is the lack of consequences. I will add that this mentality does not exactly build up their societies to fix the problem. When I moved from Africa to the first world, the high level of trust and conscientious behaviour by everybody blew my mind. My point being that wholesome behaviour and net worth are linked in a virtuous cycle.
- xenophonf 4y agoMy (former) friends who built thousands of websites to manipulate pagerank back in the day were definitely wealthy westerners purposefully gaming the system to make even more money for themselves, to the detriment of the rest of us.
- MikePlacid 4y ago> These people might feel spite and anger towards the western world for the extreme lavish excess that developers enjoy. Oh, let me tell you my “lived experience” of spite and anger that I once felt towards western developers. So, it was late 1990s and our sales guys got hold of a presentation paper that competitor guys gave to a customer that both our companies were trying to win. I never read such a collection of blatant lies in my life! And I came from a one-Party country where newspapers were… uhm notorious for their lying. But not like this! Specifically a feature that I’ve spent more than half a year on, and which we were proudly shipping - was marked as not existent. Imagine somebody trying to scratch half a year of your life, and a rather intense half a year to that - out of existence. With black, lying ink. And I clearly remember sitting and thinking: why are they doing this? The competitor was a well-established company, long time in business, probably employed citizens, provided them with pension funds and other perks - why don’t they compete with us, mostly new emigrants on a work visas - why can’t they compete on _merits_? They have everything to just sit, work and compete - why lie? Yes, I was feeling spite and anger, true. But, about 20 years later, just around that your famous President inauguration - this exact competitor went bankrupt. The stopping point for a buyer was - they did not want to fund pensions 100%. It was like watching Karma working right and clear in this material world - a rare moment, no?
- codedokode 4y agoWhile in Russia talented developers make less than a newbie developer in the West earns, their salaries are relatively high compared to non-IT jobs. You won't die in the street if you are a developer. The reason why those people spam is either because they have low technical skills and cannot find a decent job (most probably) or simply because they believe that work is for losers; successful men take money from others instead of working like a slave. As they lure people into Telegram channels in hope to scam them, I assume that the conversion is low and this is not very profitable and they do this because of lack of skills.
- Tade0 4y agoThe charitable summary of your comment is that it is inaccurate. For one, tech salaries outside of the developed world have been going up at a higher rate than in it for the past 20 years or so - the pandemic and proliferation of remote work only accelerated this process. As for spite and anger: a tech worker in a poor country is easily within the top 10% (if not 5%) earners there and is usually too financially secure for such nonsense. The whole crypto debacle showed that scammers are largely evenly distributed around the world - it's just the type and scale of scam that differs.
- Joker_vD 4y agoHow do technical skills and cynicism are supposed to affect each other?
- themitigating 4y agoYes but they don't care. Some people don't care if they are immoral. That's why you need regulations and punishments to stop them.
- swyx 4y agoand yet the collateral cost of regulations and punishments on good/innocent people is often far worse than the damage caused by spammers. "regulate all the things" people often underestimate how poorly regulation solves the problems they set out to solve and how it often creates new ones.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI guess my AmazingProject https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject that I made 97% as a joke when someone was running a code camp or whatever and a bunch of newbies where creating projects with the word Amazing in it would be grounds for punishment under a lot of regulatory regimes.
- madeofpalk 4y ago> but doing that to an open source repository meh. It's owned by Microsoft - aside from the regular morals of spam and whatever, I don't think it's especially bad to target a Microsoft property. How much of the NPM registry actually is open source?
- lookdangerous 4y agoHow about instead of who owns it, ask who uses it?
- Nextgrid 4y agoI don't think this would affect most developers? The value of NPM is a host of packages that you reference in package.json, not its web UI. The spam on the web UI is dangerous for victims that land there via search engines, but I don't think this would affect NPM's actual users that much?
- lookdangerous 4y agoThanks for clarifying the situation
- madeofpalk 4y agoI use NPM regularly and I've never been impacted by this spam.
- delfinom 4y agoIt's owned by GitHub first and foremost. Microsoft owns GitHub but there's independence between the two.
- kaba0 4y agoMy city’s public transport system is owned by a private company, am I not harming the very public (over the private entity) if I were to make a mess in a tram?
- oleks 4y ago[flagged]
- bowsamic 4y agoLife makes much sense when you consider it to have the ethics of professional motorsports racing. There, there is no sense of ethical behaviour, as long as you act within the rules you can do anything. That is how modern F1 driving came to be. The F1 team engineers say that designing the cars consists of looking at the new rules and working out how to bend and subvert them. All of life is like this. People exploit anything in order to make a living, and that is fine. The solution for this is to make it so that people do not need to do such things just to make a living. EDIT: More succinctly, if you want the world to make sense to you, you should not expect people to put your personal ethical viewpoints above their improvement of their material conditions.
- nonethewiser 4y agoPeople can, should, and often do have a sense of morality that is different than “whatever is technically legal.”
- Joker_vD 4y agoYes, people often have a sense of morality that readily accepts doing illegal things, everybody knows that. Whether they should have such sense is debatable because in the end it's a question of opinion: you may be alright with that, I may be not and the others may not even care about what we think about it.
- 11235813213455 4y agohuman life maybe, because more natural life is about survival (without established rules or specs), sometimes at the expense of another, but not for fun, entertainment, nor with a huge pollution footprint as well
- wruza 4y agoI think you ignore(?) an important detail that the world is as good as it is due to most people not subverting the rules. While I understand the philosophy and a sort of realism you’re suggesting, I prefer to separate morals from holes in rules internally. They may or may not feel guilt for this. We may also remove this feeling from our reasoning completely. But that wouldn’t prevent it from glueing things together well enough for them to function. Living in a welcoming environment, with all ethics attached to that, is a fundamental human desire, apart from psychopathological cases. F1 teams managed to negotiate that between themselves and now they’re okay with it - it’s a hard competition all in all. But you’ll have a hard time negotiating $subj’s morality with an open source community of developers and users. The one who spits into a pot of a free meal - is a rat in all countries and cultures. I doubt that F1-ers refrain from spitting on a road just before another box because there’s a rule about it.
- vidyesh 4y agoI don't think this kind of spam is new. Its just your perspective that determines this is immoral. An argument can be made that any tool built to gain SEO advantage is also borderline immoral and those tool exists for almost a decade now. There are and have been bots to generate SEO content and/or spam websites and custom plugins for Wordpress which achieve that. All to game the search engine. This too is immoral as it created what junk websites we have on the internet. And it was developer who started building it and/or was hired to do so.
- millerm 4y agoMany years ago I quit my job at a search engine company for my personal ethics, because they had me start manipulating search results based on who paid for their entries.
- vidyesh 4y agoGood on you to stand by your ethics. This is the way.
- millerm 4y agoCurrently unemployed now (not due to ethics, but due to culling of tech jobs). I'm screwed. I won't take an unethical gig though. I have mentioned it before, I think my time is done here. :-/
- waterproof 4y agoI’ve made similar choices, ultimately taking a deep pay cut to do work that matches my values. But I’m aware that I did that out of decent financial security, not out of some deep moral courage. If writing spam was my only way out of poverty or to feed my family, I’m sure I would act differently.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ar9av 4y agoProbably an unpopular opinion, and I realize I'm kind of ranting on a relatively unrelated subject, but I have become really dissuaded with the Node ecosystems dependence on seemingly boundless dependency trees. The fact that Window's file system can't handle moving project directories (without deleting the node_modules), and relatively simple projects using megabytes of raw text to work... anyways. While I understand that you don't want to re-invent the wheel, it seems like the this is an important enough part of your project that your own implementation would be the only one without compromises.
- 11235813213455 4y agoas a developer you can also keep a relatively low number of dependencies, and mainstream or simple ones
- Kye 4y agoThat takes awareness and discipline. The last time I tried to learn Node, all the guides led you down a road of dependency hell.
- 11235813213455 4y agothat takes experience, like everything you want to do well
- cableshaft 4y agoThat same comment, translated to gamer speak 'just git gud, bruh!'
- nonethewiser 4y agoNot following a guide takes awareness and discipline too. Furthermore, if you are simply learning Node, aren’t the downsides of dependencies moot?
- 4y ago
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eddieroger 4y agoYou don't know what circumstances the other party, the spammer, is under in this situation. On one end, maybe they just don't care, which is certainly their choice. Maybe this is the difference between eating tonight or not, or feeding their family. We may think it's immoral, but those are in the light of our own circumstances.
- zaroth 4y agoThis is way beyond moral relativism and even ends justify the means type thinking… It makes no sense to equivocate over the bad things people do by asking everyone to assume the perp had a figurative gun to their head. What this dev did was absolutely immoral. Trashing a commons in an attempt to scam end users is objectively wrong. Seems very strange to chastise OP for pointing this out based on a wild theory that the dev literally had no other choice.
- smallerfish 4y agoI think "immoral" is a reach as a description of spam, and to be crystal clear I'm not defending spam. How is spam any more immoral than ads in a web page? Both are inserting advertising into a channel that a user is accessing information through, as a way to raise revenue or change behavior. (Spam is not by definition phishing, any more than banner ads are innately phishing, though phishing can be served through both mediums.) If spam is _immoral_ then why is adtech in general not _immoral_?
- sbarre 4y agoBecause, like so many things, context matters. Ads have a place in the world, where we expect to see them (whether we like them or not), and typically most ads are not trying to pass as non-ads (yes of course there are exceptions to this). The difference here is that these exist in a place where ads should not be, as per the description and use of the service. And it also subverts the experience the service owner is trying to provide. Imagine if you accept a "free sample" box of cereal and you get home and open it and it's just full of flyers, instead of being full of cereal. Or this is why you can't just go to any private space like a shopping mall with a megaphone and a sandwich board and start advertising your services without permission. Security will ask you to leave, because the owner of the mall didn't agree to this.
- bleep_bloop 4y agoMuch more eloquently composed response than mine.
- smallerfish 4y ago> Or this is why you can't just go to any private space like a shopping mall with a megaphone and a sandwich board and start advertising your services without permission. Security will ask you to leave, because the owner of the mall didn't agree to this. You can certainly go to any public space and do this, however. People do it all the time (admittedly less frequently with megaphones). Are all of the people on street corners doing twirlies with cardboard signs immoral? Billboards would be a gray area example whereby they're hosted on private resources (land) but intrude into public space (view from highway). > Imagine if you accept a "free sample" box of cereal and you get home and open it and it's just full of flyers, instead of being full of cereal. Imagine if you accept a "free social media feed" of information about your community, and you "get home" and it's full of ads. Or you accept a "free article" from a website by clicking on a link, and when you load it (consuming bandwidth on a line that you paid for), it contains just as many ads as it does paragraphs of information. As I said, I'm not defending spam in general (which is obnoxious), or the act of the person/people who polluted/vandalized the npm repos. I just think "immoral" is a little strong unless you also want to paint much of the rest of the ad world with the same brush.
- delfinom 4y agoThe world is based on making money. This can easily be a real developer working somewhere where their wages are dirt and this is a easy way to make money. Ethics and feelings don't make money or keep food on the table.
- tremon 4y agoEthics and feelings don't make money or keep food on the table. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve that situation?
- segasaturn 4y ago[flagged]
- squarefoot 4y agoHaving known very well someone who, despite being quite wealthy, practiced online fraud, served jail for this, and now happily works in a middle east tax haven (geez, I know someone else who lost their job just for knowing that guy, talk about having the right connections), I can assure you that although your point is valid , it is not always the case.
- kaba0 4y agoAd absurdum I should just steal food then. There are much easier ways to make money even in poorer countries, and some form of internal moral compass is literally what separates us from the animal kingdom. Of course context matters, but I am sure that creating spam is never a life-death situation.