Technology

One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

It was the right move, but this needs to be expanded. Assume there are state actors from all of the major countries installing backdoors.

The digital war front will be getting hit from all sides. We need extreme paranoia to protect all of the innocent bystanders. Don’t assume even your own country is trustworthy in this.

They weren't kicked out, iirc. Their contributions just aren't automatically merged anymore

There is a theory that sanctions against a country with a tyrannical ruler hurt the common people more than the oligarchs / dictator. But eventually they do make life more difficult for that ruler

Oh noes, I bet lemmy.ml users all switch.

Where are the tankie posts now?

Anything involving a ministry in Russia is not a serious plan. They'll receive funding, hire a couple of bash script writers, well, maybe a couple of people who'll write drivers for Elbrus, Baikal or something that's sort of developed and produced in Russia, but nobody really uses it even in governmental structures.