Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?

[Miles Fidelman]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>    > So what we could ask, is that Savannah, Github or Sourceforge, and
>    > Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu, stop to distribute free software in Russia.
>
> We could make Savannah deny access from Russian domain address, but
> why do that?
>
> It would not impede anything the Russian government wants to to with
> our softwsre.  It would not stop Russians from downloading our
> software, as they could use mirror sites.  It _would_ stop people in
> Russia from committing changes in our repositories, unless they use
> Tor or a VPN.  That isn't hard to do, unless Putin has blocked it.
>
> The main thing that would do is tell Russians, "You are Russian, so
> you are scum."
>
> Is it useful to treat Russians that way?  Would it help save Ukraine
> or defeat Putin?  I don't think so.  That message is not a valid or
> useful message to give to Russians.
Good points all.

Then again, we might want to spend a bit more time SCRUTINIZING 
SUBMISSIONS to the repositories.  I expect that the Russians (among 
others) are spending a bit more time, of late, inserting malware into 
things - to better distribute disinformation, the better to collect 
names of folks to arrest, the better to prepare for large scale 
cyberattacks.

Let's be sure that our efforts are helping the revolution, not the man.

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown