Diseased Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[emuemuemu]

there is no fucking money in Linux exploits because it's only used by a subset of greasy neckbeards.

Maybe if you have zero professional experience you might not realize the entire cloud infrastructure that powers the internet runs Linux or that you are surrounded by literally billions of tiny single purpose ARM chips running Linux.

But even the dumbest 12 year old /g/tard knows that Android is Linux and way more people have smartphones than personal computers now. Especially in the developing world. There's no excuse for this level of exceptionalism.

But do they get these kernel updates? I would imagine that the servers do, but the embedded systems?

You say that like new embedded systems aren't being created everyday. If code makes it into a longterm release branch, then it's going to end up in embedded systems somewhere.

Yeah but there's a lot more money in exploits for personal computers than there is for servers and embedded systems.

Some zeroday brokers publish price lists so there's no need to speculate about what's worth more than what. Don't forget that supply is also a big part of it not just popularity. Vulns on platforms with better security will be worth more even if there are relatively fewer users e.g. iOS.

From what I see there are comparable prices for linux server stuff and windows server/windows desktop stuff. Routers, baseband and wifi probably count as embedded systems and aren't worth that much relatively speaking. The big money though is in smart phones.

Apple especially are pushing the envelope on security by wrecking entire exploitation techniques like return oriented programming on iPhones. Which obviously pushes up the price of exploits that find a way around the mitigations.

God damn it. Guess I'm going to have to find a different sound editing program then.

If you're worried about such things you should look into configuring your firewall to block internet access to programs that don't need it. Then you don't have to rely on the good nature of random developers.

 

[Burning Urethra]

Audacity got bought out, the users don't have any say. Best/worst case they'll close the PR after too much pressure, and implement it anyway behind a closed-source license in a couple months.

Very disheartening to see that this is happening at the hands of a guy (Tantacrul) whose "content" on music I've quite enjoyed. I guess being a lefty does not discourage one from doing shit like this.

 

[glow]

Very disheartening to see that this is happening at the hands of a guy (Tantacrul) whose "content" on music I've quite enjoyed. I guess being a lefty does not discourage one from doing shit like this.

It's amazing how quickly those principles evaporate once enough cash is waved under your nose.

 

[Least Concern]

There appears to be some controversy surrounding Freenode, the IRC network on which many popular tech projects, and in particular open-source projects, host their official IRC channels, to the extent that such things still exist. (If you're not aware, IRC is a protocol for text-based realtime chat; kind of like Discord, but with no multimedia and with clients that use kilobytes rather than gigabytes of RAM and with admins who, generally speaking, are less likely to try to fuck dogs and/or entice minors.) It appears that the corporation that managed the Freenode assets was at one time held by a staff member named christel, but she sold it to Andrew Lee of Private Internet Access a few years ago. Lee didn't assert any control over Freenode's operations, so nobody cared, but recently apparently christel resigned from staff and since then Lee is trying to assert more control over the network. Many other staff members have since resigned, and some have quickly spun up a new IRC network for the same niche as Freenode called Libera.Chat (warning: vom-inducing web site).

This summary explains one staff member's stance and has links to "resignation letters" from other staff members.

I'm unsure to what extent this concern over Lee's involvement is legitimate or if there's something else people are flipping out about here - the above-linked summary expresses concerns about "users belonging to at-risk communities and demographics," so is it just that Lee once tweeted wrongthink or something? If anyone else has any info or opinions, please share.

 

[Shaka Brah]

I'm unsure to what extent this concern over Lee's involvement is legitimate or if there's something else people are flipping out about here - the above-linked summary expresses concerns about "users belonging to at-risk communities and demographics," so is it just that Lee once tweeted wrongthink or something? If anyone else has any info or opinions, please share.

Sounds like the trannyjannies found an excuse to move to a platform they have the reins over.

 

[Least Concern]

Looking further into this story.

I won't bury the lede of the most WTF part I've found so far: Andrew Lee is the crown prince of Korea. No, really. The Japanese yeeted the Korean emperor from the throne when they took over (because of course the Japanese emperor is the true and correct living god on Earth), but the royal family lived on and kept making kids, and the guy who's currently recognized as who would be emperor if the royal family were still enthroned designated Lee as the crown prince despite not being his son - and despite looking like your typical SoCal burnout.



Seriously, I never met the guy, but I'm pretty sure he's already sold me kush.

I'm finding more credence to the idea that some people just don't like the guy at least partially because he's an incredibly wealthy capitalist (he and his wife bought a comically opulent SoCal mansion back in January for over $12 million). This resignation post (a) starts with:

As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire.

(I've yet to see any actual connection Lee has had with cryptocurrency but it's being mentioned here and there.)

What's Lee's take on the situation? Here's a post (a) from him with the timeline of events from his perspective. Notably, some of the comments to the post take ideological stances, suggesting further that ideology might be at the root of this:

I stopped using freenode when it became a woke culture, post-meritocracy movement, elect joe biden, sjw fuckery. You're doing the right thing. The other networks have your back with resources aplenty if you just ask for them.

thanks for ruining freenode capitalist shitcoin scum

nice capitalist propaganda

Before, only some woke volunteers, with only their own known intentions, had access to users' personal data, and now suddenly someone else wants to get the same lol. Personally, I have more confidence in Andrew Lee than in "sjw volunteers"

So if you want to take a view of the situation which is charitable towards Lee, you could say he's an unwoke bajillionaire who is trying to support a project he cares for but is perhaps doing it in a hamhanded way by getting involved more than he should or needs to, and certainly more than the politically unaligned leaders of the system want him to, and now some of them are trying to start their own IRC network with blackjack and hookers.

I haven't checked out Libera.Chat yet myself. I suspect I'll have to take a look if/when any of the "official" project channels that I lurk in migrate over there, but that hasn't happened yet - there doesn't seem to have been any change in the day-to-day operation of Freenode yet and it all just kind of feels like a tempest in a teapot that will blow over soon, save for some unfortunate fragmenting of what is already a declining userbase.

But as before, if anyone else knows more about this situation than I do, please chime in.

 

[Besachf Jhakut]

I can confirm the one in theory purely technical Freenode channel I follow has become infested with entryist troons and overt off topic SJW discussions where the sane who can be canceled don't feel free to respond. It would take some heavy handed moderation from the very top to fix this since too many people on the channel and in tech and FOSS in general have a live and let live attitude until they themselves start getting canceled.

I read the posting by the "Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire" and while I have no idea what the truth is, he does come across as completely sane, refreshingly so. And can write a concise and focused document which is becoming less common.

 

[ditto]

Libera.Chat

That logo looks like a trans Sonnenrad.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Something I stumbled on the other day: Glimpse (the fork of GIMP that does nothing but change the name) officially shut down.

A Project On Hiatus | Glimpse

glimpse-editor.org

I'm surprised they kept up the charade as long as they did. I wonder if they ever had a user.

 

[Govt. Shitposting Machine]

Something I stumbled on the other day: Glimpse (the fork of GIMP that does nothing but change the name) officially shut down.

A Project On Hiatus | Glimpse

glimpse-editor.org

I'm surprised they kept up the charade as long as they did. I wonder if they ever had a user.

Well I tried installing it to see if it was any better than default GIMP but shit didn't build right and failed to install multiple times, so take that for what it is.

 

[Least Concern]

Something I stumbled on the other day: Glimpse (the fork of GIMP that does nothing but change the name) officially shut down.

A Project On Hiatus | Glimpse

glimpse-editor.org

I'm surprised they kept up the charade as long as they did. I wonder if they ever had a user.

I completely forgot it existed after the initial news blew over.

Our problem was not a lack of financial contributions or users, because the project was still growing in those areas. Our main issue was that we could not find contributors willing to step up and help with non-code tasks like moderating communication channels, triaging bugs, fixing packaging problems, working with the GNU Image Manipulation Program contributors, monitoring our social media accounts, running servers, testing/documenting new releases, and answering questions that users reached out to us with. As a result, we struggled to scale the project to match increasing demand.

Damn, it sounds like they were just so successful, they couldn't find enough people to do the busybody power-hungry stuff that people who care more about what things are named than how well they work would typically excel at. A victim of their own excellence. What a tragedy.

 

[ditto]

Damn, it sounds like they were just so successful, they couldn't find enough people to do the busybody power-hungry stuff that people who care more about what things are named than how well they work would typically excel at. A victim of their own excellence. What a tragedy.

The only real contributor to this project seems to have been "Bobby Moss" who left the project a few months ago.

Looks like he tried to rename libgimp to libglimpse and failed spectacularly and limited his future contributions to fucking around with the installer and CI and updating the all-important CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

After all that, there is still over 5k references to Gimp in the source code.

Search · gimp · glimpse-editor/Glimpse

Fork of the GNU Image Manipulation Program 2.10.18 - Search · gimp · glimpse-editor/Glimpse

github.com

 

[moocow]

Looks like he tried to rename libgimp to libglimpse and failed spectacularly and limited his future contributions to fucking around with the installer and CI and updating the all-important CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

JFC I love watching the incompetent struggle to achieve the simplest tasks. Looking at the reverted commit, I see a man entirely unfamiliar with GNU Autotools naively tiptoeing into its lair thinking he could just do a simple s/gimp/glimpse/g project-wide and be done with it. Capital El-Oh-El. Poor bastard never had a chance.

It also looks like this was babby's first CI pipeline as well.

I get all the fucking around with the installer (because Windows installers are -- by virtue of having to deal with Windows -- schizophrenic and insane), but I don't get why he committed after every little change instead of just getting it working locally and then committing, or at the very least squashing the commits when he was done.

 

[Shaka Brah]

JFC I love watching the incompetent struggle to achieve the simplest tasks. Looking at the reverted commit, I see a man entirely unfamiliar with GNU Autotools naively tiptoeing into its lair thinking he could just do a simple s/gimp/glimpse/g project-wide and be done with it. Capital El-Oh-El. Poor bastard never had a chance.

Even the thing about this is, after you've done that then what? Even if it worked 100%, what was the endgame here?

This is an example of a project undertaken with a complete lack of foresight.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Even the thing about this is, after you've done that then what? Even if it worked 100%, what was the endgame here?

This is an example of a project undertaken with a complete lack of foresight.

See also: literally every other thing that SJWs do.

 

[clownworld]

Looking further into this story.

I won't bury the lede of the most WTF part I've found so far: Andrew Lee is the crown prince of Korea. No, really. The Japanese yeeted the Korean emperor from the throne when they took over (because of course the Japanese emperor is the true and correct living god on Earth), but the royal family lived on and kept making kids, and the guy who's currently recognized as who would be emperor if the royal family were still enthroned designated Lee as the crown prince despite not being his son - and despite looking like your typical SoCal burnout.

View attachment 2192752

Seriously, I never met the guy, but I'm pretty sure he's already sold me kush.

I'm finding more credence to the idea that some people just don't like the guy at least partially because he's an incredibly wealthy capitalist (he and his wife bought a comically opulent SoCal mansion back in January for over $12 million). This resignation post (a) starts with:



(I've yet to see any actual connection Lee has had with cryptocurrency but it's being mentioned here and there.)

What's Lee's take on the situation? Here's a post (a) from him with the timeline of events from his perspective. Notably, some of the comments to the post take ideological stances, suggesting further that ideology might be at the root of this:









So if you want to take a view of the situation which is charitable towards Lee, you could say he's an unwoke bajillionaire who is trying to support a project he cares for but is perhaps doing it in a hamhanded way by getting involved more than he should or needs to, and certainly more than the politically unaligned leaders of the system want him to, and now some of them are trying to start their own IRC network with blackjack and hookers.

I haven't checked out Libera.Chat yet myself. I suspect I'll have to take a look if/when any of the "official" project channels that I lurk in migrate over there, but that hasn't happened yet - there doesn't seem to have been any change in the day-to-day operation of Freenode yet and it all just kind of feels like a tempest in a teapot that will blow over soon, save for some unfortunate fragmenting of what is already a declining userbase.

But as before, if anyone else knows more about this situation than I do, please chime in.

Can anyone find any more info on this Tomaw character? I can't find a straight story on the libera side of things. All I can find is struggle session chat logs.

I think your summary is correct. It was more of a troon staff mutiny than a hostile take over. IRC has been dead for a while thanks to discord, and stupid bullshit like this. The time of large servers serving wide user bases is over, gotta run your own server basically.

Lee posted more chat logs in the attached PDF (Link)

Still digging through reddit


EDIT:

Tomaw: https://github.com/Tomaw Tom Wesley
realrasengan: https://github.com/realrasengan

All I have to say is, man, after idling for years on freenode, I never got to hang out with the crown prince of korea.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I see a man entirely unfamiliar with GNU Autotools naively tiptoeing into its lair

And in that moment I pitied him. Here be dragons.

 

[Least Concern]

Can anyone find any more info on this Tomaw character? I can't find a straight story on the libera side of things. All I can find is struggle session chat logs.

That was interesting. Thanks for sharing. I did hear from someone who's sticking with Freenode so far that tomaw was a central character to things, but that was after my initial research and I hadn't yet gone back to see why. That letter from Lee, if true, enlightens things a little.

A tl;dr for those that don't want to read it;

• christel quits as head of staff (maybe to take another job?)
• The staff select tomaw to replace her. Lee doesn't object
• tomaw asks Lee and his brother for control over the Freenode domain names. They refuse but try to come to a compromise
• tomaw suddenly announces a partnership with OFTC (a smaller IRC network with a similar audience) on the web site, to Lee's surprise (AFAIK this partnership didn't happen…?)
• Lee lawyers up
• The mass resignations and exodus happens
• tomaw's lawyer tells Lee not to talk about the situation (I think Lee might be BSing about this because I don't see how this is possible, but even if it were, what changed so he can talk about it now?), thus allowing the story from the former Freenode staffers become the dominant one
• Lee finds meeting agendas showing that the coup was underway before tomaw asked for the domain names

Personally I'm seeing a couple of the channels I lurk at doing the "This channel has moved to libera.chat" thing in their topics and MOTDs, but they don't really seem any more inactive than before. The rabble continues to chat amongst themselves and when the mods bother to pipe up about how the channel seemingly doesn't exist anymore they get the text chat equivalent of eye rolls. I suppose it's a matter of time before some of them go +m, but it hasn't happened yet to any of them.

 

[ditto]

Personally I'm seeing a couple of the channels I lurk at doing the "This channel has moved to libera.chat" thing in their topics and MOTDs, but they don't really seem any more inactive than before.

Twitter has been complaining loudly about inviting 'nazis' onto the platform, referring to Lee removing this passage from the Freenode policies:

Unlawful activities and related support activities are considered off-topic, as are
inappropriate advertising, heavy media file trading, proprietary game software modding,
warez, porn and various forms of antisocial behaviour, including (but not limited to)
political, racial, ethnic, religious or gender-related invective.

Replacing it with this:

Off topic channels are required to act in good faith in accordance to the freenode
community as a whole. Unlawful activities and related support activities are considered
off-topic, as are inappropriate advertising such as unused channels for the purpose of
polluting the channel list results, transmission of illicit content such as warez or
illegal content, spam, or squatting a namespace preventing others from utilizing it.

policy update by realrasengan · Pull Request #513 · freenode/web-7.0

github.com

IMHO an improvement. Not feeling or understanding the downside of this yet.

 

[HTTP Error 404]

So I'm still getting caught up on the FreeNode drama, but leave it to a nice bit of chaos and drama for the Woke leftists to demand their political enemies be removed at the same time as any other mass change. I mean, if they can browbeat a "anti hate speech" rule in the new libra network, then that's 80% of the infiltration work done right there.

https://twitter.com/plainoldchair/status/1396541081580343297

And of course it's a fucking tranny. It's ALWAYS a fucking tranny.

They are nothing if not consistent in their long march towards trying to get power over the rest of us.