Far-right supporters move to open source to evade censorship | Hacker News Reader

Far-right supporters move to open source to evade censorship

theguardian.com

another unsubstantiated and woefully opinionated personal attack from the guardian :/

> In 2019, Smith said in a video he wanted to live in a “Unabomber cabin” to escape the surveillance and censorship which he believes is especially aimed at the far right. In a post on his blog in the same year – since deleted – he described the modern world as one “where your every action is watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social media services”.

wow what an evil terrorist this luke smith guy must be! He is AGAINST PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE and then DELETED his post?

Are they not aware of the irony here?

"Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has published research on both the far right and open source software communities. She says that “the dominant open source culture historically has been one of extreme misogyny, unfounded meritocracy, toxicity and abuse of everyone,” and that Smith is one of those resisting efforts to change that culture."

That happens to be a quote from the article.

I didn't know that Richard Stallman or Eric S. Raymond are abusive, toxic and misogynic meritocrats.

All those people who contribute their free time into development of Linux kernel, Gnome, Tex, Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, Libre Office to name just a few out of uncountable number of other free software, all the Debian packages maintainers, etc., etc. are such a disgusting people. Shame on them! So good we have Megan who enlightened us.

"Unfounded meritocracy". Seriously? Who makes such people "professors"? How someone who is able to put so many nonsense claims into a single sentence can even be let inside academia?

Stallman is, unfortunately.

> I didn't know that Richard Stallman or Eric S. Raymond are abusive, toxic and misogynic meritocrats.

Sounds like you haven't read Eric Raymond's blog. Or the accounts if how Stallman treated women, or his own political talking points about how he thought pedophilia was okay.

As for Linux, we have documented instances of abuse by that project's leader going back decades. In 2018 he was called out and forced to accept accountability for it. The alternative may have been loss of stewardship of the project.

> "Unfounded meritocracy". Seriously? Who makes such people "professors"?

"Meritocracy" is like "culture fit": a fiction often used to mask discrimination based on race, gender, gender identity, or ethnic background.

> “Every marginalized community knows what it’s like to be systematically deplatformed”, says Bevensee, who uses non-binary pronouns, pointing to the way in which groups such as sex workers have adopted platforms like Mastodon after finding themselves unable to advertise their services.

> But as Bevensee’s report shows, peer-to-peer platforms are a double-edged sword. “The reason I want it as a trans anti-fascist is the same reason that a Nazi wants it; we just have opposite ends,” they explain.

> “You know who really doesn’t understand it? The FBI,” Bevensee adds: “we’re talking about a technology that can’t be subpoenaed. It can’t be surveiled” and, in order to carry out remote surveillance of private chats, “you would have to back door every single device in the world”.

I really don't understand this person's view. On one hand, they claim platforms like this are helpful to marginalized communities who have been deplatformed on mainstream services. But then they point out that the FBI doesn't have unlimited access to decentralized platforms, as if it's a bad thing?

That looks like bad writing to me. Bevensee probably gets it, but the journalist who wrote the article does not and his personal view shows through selection of the quoted sentences.

I read that as illustrating that the FBI doesn't understand the value of the protection afforded by this technology because they are an organization that is by definition part of the power structure so they can't fathom not being able to solve their problems with bullets and jackboots and then have the courts take their side whereas the groups on the receiving end of the jackboots and bullets do understand the value.

I agree that the journalist isn't really "getting it" but I didn't see any issue with the selection of quotes.

They're saying it's a double-edged sword. The same features that protect marginalized communities also protect people planning to commit crimes. That's a long-understood dichotomy, one that US courts and law enforcement agencies have been grappling with for a long time.

That's not news. They've just found a person to say it on the record, so that it's a quote rather than a reporter stating "common knowledge". They found somebody who is in the former group but is very aware of the latter, so they're a good go-to to say the thing that we already knew.

What's news is that it's actually happening for certain groups in the US, in particular associated with major platforms removing groups associated with the last US President after a uniquely precarious and violent transition. We on HN knew that already, of course, but we live our lives steeped in this stuff.

What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.

> What is "far right"?

Someone with ideological beliefs that are either far away from or diametrically opposed to those on the left.

> just a BS title

So is "the left" and "Republican," but we need terms to help us communicate ideas to other people. What would you call what I described above?

"Far-right" as opposed to just "right" or "conservative" makes it sound like they're more than a standard deviation more right-leaning than the typical conservative. It makes the action of moving to open source sound like it's being done by extremists as opposed to conservatives in general

In this post-BLM world, we have to treat people who don't take affirmative stances on protecting the marginalized as if they were far-right. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." --Desmond Tutu

Is this a post-BLM world? The phrase would suggest they are no longer around, but they very much are.

> Is this a post-BLM world?

Pretty much can be confirmed by google trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Fair to say it will be back in 2024?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com