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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

Why is "compromised by political activists" in the title?

"political activists" is 1) plural (wasn't it only 1 committer?) and 2) an opinionated label for someone we don't know much about. Sure, the commit may be an act of political activism, but to label the individual based on this one action seems inappropriate.

And "compromised" makes it sound like it's against the will of the maintainers. Do we know that? The commit was 23 days ago. There's an ongoing open discussion here where there are folks defending both sides: https://github.com/Yaffle/EventSource/issues/202

Anyway, a better title might be "event-source-polyfill displays popup about Ukraine in Russian timezones" or if its malware, then "event-source-polyfill affected by malware in Russian timezones"

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I think the title can be shortened to NPM package event-source-polyfill sabotaged.

Sabotage is a better word since it is not loaded politically. It does not infer a reason nor motive. Just that something happened which was deliberately done by someone.

Sabotage, to me, explicitly means that the act was committed with the intent of derailing the project’s original purpose. This act seems orthogonal to the original intent of the project, so it’s underhanded but it’s not really sabotage.

Sabotage is quite a fascinating concept. IWW are big promoters of using sabotage as direct action. An industrial saboteur might have the goal of disrupting the supply chain causing damage to their boss’s profits, either as a revenge for poor labor condition, or as negotiating tactic during a strike. Here the saboteur is disrupting at the end of the supply chain when the product is consumed with the goal of delivering a political message.

Like I said sabotage isn’t loaded and does not depend on the motive. Only that something was disrupted on purpose.

Sabotage seemed a bit weird of a choice to me, but the dictionary disagrees, so fair call on that one

> destructive or obstructive action carried on by a civilian or enemy agent to hinder a nation's war effort

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sabotage

I think it's a bit much to call this sabotage. It's not as if this opensource node-library is fulfilling a crucial role in Russia's war efforts.

Using this reasoning you could argue that any negative comments about the war towards a russian could be construed as sabotage, because it goes against Russian war-propaganda.

Negative comments usually don’t have anything disrupted. This however disrupted the consumption of websites that use this library. So these websites were indeed sabotaged for the end user through this library.

In comparison this act is probably more disruptive then anti-war sticker bombing in grocery stores (https://t.me/nowarmetro/465) and most people would call that sabotage.

But like I said, sabotage is not loaded. It can cause anything from a minor or trivial disruption, to a major destruction. It can have a positive or negative message, or even no message at all.

If to some people this source code change provides helpful information, is it sabotage? If seen through their eyes?

Eg about using Tor to get access to forbidden news.

(Maybe the way it was done, won't work in practice, but if you pretend it worked, as a thought experiment?)

I would think so, for two reasons: First the web pages using this library are still disrupted (hence sabotaged), and second—a bit far fetched—the propaganda campaign and information gatekeeping efforts by the Russian government have been sabotaged with leaked information.

The popup message is information that there's a war going on, and a suggestion to download the Tor browser (to get past Putin's censorship).

To some, that's malware, whilst to some people in Russia, it could be valuable information, something helpful.

But maybe most software people know about Tor and VPNs already. And I suppose that the popup in most cases got stopped during Q/A.

I don't really see the message reaching its intended audience

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