Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1079385/3d7a57da58b41aa9/

by 6581 • 23 days ago

132 115 23 days ago

Svoka7• 23 days ago

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

jszymborski2• 23 days ago

Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.

4bpp2• 23 days ago

It's still selective degradation of functionality, as presumably people who download a snowglobe animation program don't do it to see any sort of statement apart from normative depictions of wintery things. The problem would be the same if it showed Russian flags only to users with Ukrainian locale, or ads for Mountain Dew only when the user's locale is set to French, or even just something as impossible to interpret as offensive on its own as adding lots of little cactus men whenever the locale is Dutch.

galdauts• 23 days ago

Very much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.

4bpp2• 23 days ago

The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.

Svoka7• 23 days ago

Not sure you know what discrimination is.

epistasis3• 23 days ago

Given the number of colonized people that speak Russian, including residents of Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. etc. I think this sort of Easter Egg based on language rather than geographical location is quite appropriate.

My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...

bradrn• 23 days ago

This point in the comments made me think twice:

People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Svoka7• 23 days ago

Oh no! Imagine the horror of losing your job. It compares nothing to literal genocide their army perpetrating.

And yes, it is their, not their government, not some mysterious leaders. Russians reelected same government for 35 years with it invading neighbours pretty much every 5 years.

7bit• 23 days ago

How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.

nosioptar• 23 days ago

It's not even an anti-Russian statement!

I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.

neilv2• 23 days ago

I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:

Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:
> I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.

belorn2• 23 days ago

The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.

smw• 23 days ago

The maintainer and upstream are the same person

neilv2• 23 days ago

That might be responding too narrowly to this objection.

Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten).

The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.

JdeBP3• 23 days ago

It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.

asveikau• 23 days ago

I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream?

I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:

    https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332

  if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
     tt = MAXTREETYPE;

hexagonwin• 23 days ago

it is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.

jzb• 23 days ago

Sorry if it sounded like it was only in Debian; that was not my intent. I tried to make clear that the Debian package maintainer and upstream maintainer were one and the same, and that the change was upstream first. That was the reason cited by the person who complained, that he didn't file a bug because the maintainer was the one who instituted the changes upstream.

kjs3• 23 days ago

Most do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...

cloudie782• 23 days ago

So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what?

Shit like this erodes trust.

JdeBP3• 23 days ago

I wonder how many people immediately thought about whether similar things had been snuck into xfishtank and xpenguins.

cloudie782• 21 days ago

How about something like this? https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2022-23812

adamrezich2• 23 days ago

I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?

ferongr• 23 days ago

It seems like the "we support the current thing" crowd disagrees with you.

adamrezich2• 23 days ago

I just wish impotent slacktivism was rightfully looked down upon rather than enshrined as something noble and worthwhile, man.

Is that really so much to ask for?

krunck• 23 days ago

One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing:

" People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."

epistasis3• 23 days ago

And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

giancarlostoro3• 23 days ago

if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

Sheesh, how different are the languages? Would it be an honest mistake to say a word in Ukrainian and not realize?

sombragris• 23 days ago

Slackware-current upgraded xsnow to the latest version in June 20th but applied a patch from ALT Linux that removed the protestware bits just because of this reason. I support this.

hulitu• 22 days ago

I use xsnow 1.42 . The new release is crap and according to this post, even more so.

dgellow3• 23 days ago

They don’t have to use the software. It’s such a non issue. Xsnow is closer to art than critical software, you can easily ditch it

JdeBP3• 23 days ago

The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.

WD-42• 23 days ago

How is this an issue? Xsnow is a novelty. You have to make two decisions: the first to still be using Xorg at all, the second to install the application itself which is essentially a gag screensaver.

The idea that some govt employee would get fired for this is extremely far fetched.

simion3142• 23 days ago

Yeah, but is open source so if some of the extra rare "good Russians" do not like this super small chance of getting hurt then they diserve their regime, they will finally protest when the regime will affect their own lives but stay silent while other people get genocided.

I do not own any popular software to put anti Zed/Putin shit in it so sorry I can inconvinience those super rare good Russians.

LtWorf13• 22 days ago

Are you currently located in DC protesting about the war in Iran? If not, rules for thee but not for me?

netsharc• 23 days ago

When the war started, Europeans were forcing famous Russians living in Europe to denounce their government's evils. For example an opera house demanded a Russian opera singer to say something against the regime or be "blacklisted".

As if it's so fucking easy to denounce a dictator who has murderous tendencies and who rules your homeland, as if it's so easy to insult him, and then what, not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?

I found those demands so unthinkingly heartless, it's responding to tyranny with your own tyranny...

fer• 23 days ago

I mean, it's easy to be apolitical and stay in russia. They can always do that and not break the russian social contract.

Молчание - знак согласия

giancarlostoro3• 23 days ago

not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?

Assuming they're still alive.

Svoka7• 22 days ago

Oh, russians re-elected same govenment for past 35 years cheering invading neighbors every couple years since inception of russain federation.

Problem is not in dictator. Problem is imperialistic russia and every russian citizen who does nothing about it. They should be denied every service from civilized world until they stop their fascism.

And before you ask, yes, I did protest and depose dictator.

JoshTriplett• 23 days ago

Note that xsnow already displayed such flags randomly, and this just changes the probability.

So, if you're in a location where displaying the Ukraine flag will get you shot, 1) it was already not safe to run xsnow, and 2) much more importantly, I genuinely hope you can successfully escape your situation.

mopsi• 23 days ago

That's also a good argument for completely removing rainbow flags from everything, in more countries than one. Will we see that happening?

michaelmrose4• 23 days ago

This sounds like a you problem. Suppose you have software that shows famous faces and quotes as a screensaver would you make it by default not show anyone of color so it would be acceptable in rural Oklahoma or make it show no women so it would be acceptable in Iran?

trollbridge2• 23 days ago

In rural Oklahoma, it is entirely acceptable to have “anyone of colour” portrayed in something like a screensaver.

I don’t know much about Iran, but depictions of women seem common in advertising there.

pluc• 23 days ago

Wouldn't that be.. acceptable, if not entirely the point? Raising awareness? Some rando getting arrested for a screensaver they didn't know contained a flag is pretty efficient propaganda and would likely turn at least the involved people and their inner circles? It might not be the point but I doubt they'd be disappointed

pooploop64• 22 days ago

I really really really hope the point of stuff of like this is NOT to make martyrs of randomly selected people in a foreign country. That would be an absolutely demented thing to try for. Not to mention the arrogance of thinking you need to show foreign people what their country is like. They know that better than you.

pibaker• 22 days ago

I'd understand it if the flag is added by someone from Ukraine or another country invaded by Russia. But it looks like it was added by someone with a Dutch name.

Westerner putting random people's lives at risk just so he can give himself a justice boner doing some cheap virtue signaling. Classic.

_0xdd• 23 days ago

One of the comments that struck me on the lwn.net site is the (albeit small) possibility that someone in Russia could be running the software and unintentionally land themselves in hot water if someone discovers these images on their computer. I'm sure that's not the intended consequence, but I could be problematic.

weare1382• 23 days ago

The issue with that claim is xsnow already displayed the Ukrainian flag regardless. And it's in no way a critical app most people would even have installed to begin with. I had no idea it was even still being maintained.

Chu4eeno• 22 days ago

No it didn't, the ukrainian flag was a recent addition by the guy who took over xsnow to add this protestware.

Just go look at the repo history on sf.

weare1382• 23 days ago

Has anyone confirmed who this 'Alexander Ivanov' person is or even if this is a real person and not some AI bot? I searched for the email address used and it only appears recently in these handful of posts about xsnow.

LtWorf13• 22 days ago

Debian doesn't require to create an account and submit your national ID to allow you to open bug reports or write to mailing lists.

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

I could not be less sympathetic on this. If you don't want people protesting your actions, don't, like, invade their country.

"But what if it was the US doing the invading?" Yes, even then. If some Iraqi author made an Xsnow that waved little Iraq flags, that's their right. Even if I disagree, it doesn't harm me, and it might inspire me to consider our actions.

"But what if it makes someone's boss get mad at them?" If my boss saw an Iraq flag on my screensaver, I'd say "huh, look at that! I guess that was added in the new version. I'll change it to another screensaver." And if you live in a country there the likely reaction is that your boss might execute you, your government are the baddies.

sssilver2• 23 days ago

Isn't there discrepancy between that and The Debian Linux team removing “offensive” quotes for the “fortune” application[1]?

[1] https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1952340426892984580

striking• 23 days ago

I think there is in fact a discrepancy between displaying flags and advocating directly for gendered violence:

Debian contributor "NoisyCoil" said that they had wanted to argue in favor of keeping the packages, but after looking at the content they had decided against it:
> I went peeking at the package and, unless I'm completely missing something, the second offensive Italian fortune says that women's "no"s should be interpreted as "yes", while the third one explicitly calls for violence on women [1]. Like, it literally says women should be beaten on a regular basis. I'm afraid I can't help you here, sorry.

from https://lwn.net/Articles/1031750/, linked in the fine article

croes3• 23 days ago

What is offensive on the Ukrainian flag?

GaryBluto• 23 days ago

Is there no project safe from these kinds of obnoxious neo-busybodies?

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

You'd have to ask the respective, different sets of people involved in each situation.

tryauuum• 23 days ago

don't, like, invade their country

I did not invade any country

At least this app just displays the flags and not prints such accusations

alwa• 23 days ago

That may be, but if I do in fact live in a place where my "government are the baddies," why does it follow that open software should punish me—for nothing more than happening to be alive within that jurisdiction—by provoking my "baddie" government to visit its badness upon me personally? For speech I wasn't even trying to make—for speech that you kind of put in my mouth without asking me?

It would be fine if you gave me a beautiful and whimsical way to choose to express my feelings, and I took it. But when you're disguising the flag in code as an "EXTRATREE," that signals to me that you're trying to slip through a surprise without my noticing:

    #ifdef USE_EXTRATREE
          if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
          if (drand48() < 0.02)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
    #endif

I think it's great that you live somewhere—and enjoy a relationship to your working environment—where you don't have to worry about that kind of thing! I wish more people got to enjoy those kinds of freedoms. I don't think the way to make that happen is to rub individual people's faces in the crappiness of their predicament.

I'm reminded of a situation I encountered some years ago where a person opened a web browser in front of a classroom—no porn in their history, nothing untoward, just going to a high-profile mainstream news site or something in service of a classroom discussion—and all the targeted ads were for things like HIV medicines and mainstream campaigns choosing ad variants that depicted gay couples.

Not the time or the place, that person didn't ask for it, and it led to deep consequences for them—from "outing" on one side, to accusations of "grooming that classroom full of students" and "probably being riddled with AIDS" on the other—that this good, responsible, kind, wise person did nothing to invite.

The targeters probably thought they were doing something righteous or even "accepting" by "making sexual minorities feel seen" or something—but by putting words in the person's mouth without their consent or agency, they caused great unnecessary harm to somebody who didn't deserve it.

croes3• 23 days ago

What exactly is the punishment in seeing a Ukrainian flag?

thesuitonym• 23 days ago

In that same file it also says

    # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    # GNU General Public License for more details.

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

To be explicitly clear, I have nothing to do with Xsnow. I don't even use it.

That out of the way, I can't and won't sanitize my words so that they're perfectly inoffensive all the world around. I've made comments over the years critical of a great many governments. If the fragile leadership of those countries saw my words on a screen there, perhaps they'd get angry at the person reading my writings. I do feel bad for that person and certainly didn't try to get them in trouble. But neither am I going to not criticize a government that's behaving poorly — even my own — for the sake of a hypothetical situation that may never even exist.

LtWorf13• 23 days ago

Looking at your comment history, it's odd how you feel this way about certain countries but not certain others.

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

Which countries have I not criticized for invading others? No, seriously, please let me know if I've missed some and I'll fix that immediately. I've certainly criticized my own country's misguided attacks on others who I don't think were a direct risk to us or our allies.

antonvs• 23 days ago

Don’t you mean Iran, not Iraq? Or are you hoping Dick Cheney’s ghost will see the flag?

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

Argh, yes. Sorry, for most of my life we've been mad at Iraq and pals with Iran, or vice versa, and today I got that backward.

bjourne• 23 days ago

Not everyone who speaks Russian is a Russian or lives in Russia. It's like show a Palestine flag specifically to users with a Jewish calendar.

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

I didn't write that and I'm not arguing with you. I don't have skin in this game. That said, I think the likelihood of someone having their locale set to RU also being in Russia is substantially improved.

NooneAtAll33• 23 days ago

the problem isn't protesting someone's actions - it's supporting the other side

do you really want to support country that kidnaps its citizens off the streets and honorary reburied Nazi criminals?

kstrauser8• 23 days ago

It's well documented that Russia is kidnapping its citizens off the streets to send them on an invasion of a sovereign country, but I hadn't heard that they're honoring nazis now. I'm not sure I believe that.

Insimwytim• 23 days ago

So, if someone were to modify a Debian package to show Palestinian flag for Hebrew speakers or Iranian flag for ...Enligsh speakers, the change won't be instantly reverted and the user won't be restricted, right?

pwdisswordfishq• 23 days ago

Or LGBT flag for Arabic and Persian speakers.

estebank• 23 days ago

A lot of people talking about how displaying the flag at all could get somebody in Russia in trouble. You could see the increasing of the likelihood as helpful then, because the flag could always appear. By making it come up more often it communicates to the user that it can appear it gives a chance to the user to notice it in a "safe" situation and not use xsnow if they are in a situation where it could cause trouble for them. The existence of the flag is not quite mentioned at https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/, and the site is loading too slow to see if it is shown in https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/visuals/index.html.

saltamimi2• 23 days ago

Protestware as a whole has never worked to solve anything. Awareness of a particular issue is the only positive thing "protest" software has successfully tried, with the second order effect being better supply chain management.

I don't use Linux or Xsnow but it baffles me how distributions would allow something like this. Sure, it's just flags now, but if you look at faker and colors.js, you'll see the other side of the coin of what happens when you allow software like this.

LtWorf13• 22 days ago

Distributions didn't "allow" anything. The author just uploaded it. That's all there is to it.

The asset file isn't called "ukraine flag" so unless you open all the images or run this as a russian you will probably be completely unaware of this behaviour.

saltamimi2• 22 days ago

Sorry, the article didn't really say if it was upstream or only in Debian. I assumed it was only Debian.

I still stand on the point that stuff like this should be frowned upon regardless of stance on issue.

bill_mcgonigle• 23 days ago

I haven't heard of this package personally and it's not on my desktops so it must not be pulled in by any of the task- desktop environment metapackages I use. So you probably have to go looking for it.

I really don't care about this package or protest but what might be more interesting to consider is what if this were in a default package and what if the affected locales were different?

If I make a list of all the countries who have recently been at war or are currently engaged in hostilities or have ethnic animus towards each other and just choose to taunt them all, that would really be a dick move and it's probably OK for Debian to drop the package. FWIW I'd rather see them adopt a kindhearted fork than override an author/ maintainer when possible.

If there's no special pleading for the ru/ua conflict then it's not too concerning.

LtWorf13• 23 days ago

The debian maintainer and the original author are the same person. If they added this feature in the original version, I doubt they will drop the package or fork it and place the fork in debian.

periodjet• 23 days ago

This change to xsnow is obviously an unalloyed negative, and the simplest test to confirm this to yourself is to imagine the political statement being something you disagree with, e.g. if the locale were set to an EU country, only the US flag would show.

Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

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