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.
Every protest every has been met with "but this protest is being done the wrong way, don't inconvenience me", but that's the point: protest has to disrupt things to make people take notice and make changes.
Would I do this? No. I don't think it's effective or right (it really isn't going to harm Putin, even indirectly, in any meaningful way), but I think it's silly to pretend people don't know what they are doing. The intent is to disrupt.
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.
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.
“Every protest ever has had people saying that the disruption to them is over the line”
So which crimes would not be acceptable in a protest? And if people will always complain about the line being crossed, does this mean there can be no line at all?
I don't think there is a clear-cut line, no. Context matters, and people will disagree about what is proportional or justified.
Clearly that doesn't mean all protest methods are always justified, and I even said I think that this is over the line given this particular set of circumstances, but I reject the premise that it would always be over the line.
Why not pick, say, the Boston Tea Party (And the war that followed) as a better example of an effective protest?
Highly illegal and immoral, destructive and violent, killed some five-digit number of press-ganged soldiers and civilians, met all of its political goals...
Oh absolutely. The reason the Boston Tea Party is celebrated is because their side won the war. Had the British won, it would have been one of the many wicked/evil "rebellions" against the King that got crushed.
But I'm not really seeing the connection here or why it invalidates the Unabomber example.
Unabomber is a worse example because while the ideas of his manifesto have taken root, he can't solely be credited for them, and his acolytes (both people pushing back on tech, and pundits screeching about woke politics ruining society) tend to condemn him (Again, because he wasn't the only person raising these ideas.)
The long and short of it is - just about any destructive, devious, and murderous form of protest is considered acceptable, as long as you can convince a large enough segment of society that it's end justifies the means.
It's circular logic, of course, but that's all there is to it. There are no involatile, unbreakable taboos when it comes to seeking political ends - you just have a harder time convincing some people that your cause is worthwhile, when you are using more extreme ones. And even if you win, you might still be condemned by history for your methods.
On the scale of extremes of methods, this thread's subject is notable, novel, interesting, but is more on the 'misdemeanour hooliganism' side of that spectrum.
Given how influential Ted Kaczynski's manifesto has been within the tech community, and how many people agree with his views (particularly regarding leftism,) if not his methods, I think that's objectively true.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. Users are responsible for the open source software they use. If they want to blindly execute software from the internet without auditing it first, that's their problem.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, as I said, I think that's a core factor in this instance, and culpability increases the justification.
I don't think that means that targeting random people in protest is wrong universally. A common example might be blocking roads, which can harm random people disrupted from being able to go to work, for example. I think there are cases that can be justified.
I mean, right now the sanctions put in place to try and cripple Russia's ability to wage war are hurting random Russian people. That's essentially state-level protest. It sucks for the Russian people who don't support their government, but I think it's the lesser of two evils rather than funding and enabling a regime that is invading Ukraine.
It's a combination of factors, I think trying to draw hard lines universally is just the wrong way to think about it: protest should be proportional and justified, and each case has to be judged on its own merits as to whether it is, something people won't ever agree on universally.
How many Russian cyberattacks on Americans go unpunished by Russia? I don't see any reason for America to bother prosecuting American attacks on Russia as long as Russia isn't prosecuting Russian attacks on Americans.
Whether or not they're excused is orthogonal to whether or not America should prosecute. If Russia doesn't prosecute cyberattacks on Americans, then the logical leverage to get them to do so is to not prosecute American cyberattacks on Russians.
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Every protest every has been met with "but this protest is being done the wrong way, don't inconvenience me", but that's the point: protest has to disrupt things to make people take notice and make changes.
Would I do this? No. I don't think it's effective or right (it really isn't going to harm Putin, even indirectly, in any meaningful way), but I think it's silly to pretend people don't know what they are doing. The intent is to disrupt.