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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Distrowatch was blocked for linking to an AV-flagged privoxy 4.0.0 tarball. The same kind of anti-malware blocking you'd expect for a mass-market, non-technical audience. Nothing to do with "speech" or Linux in general.

Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/

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Well, that doesn't explain why someone else in this discussion had their post removed, as there was no mention of distrowatch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42840143

Probably entirely unrelated to the distrowatch thing.

Who knows? The article says "I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter." -- presumably we could ask Distrowatch to share the exact wording of the response they got back, but the fact FB apparently responded in such a way suggests it wasn't a filter specific to Distrowatch.

I think the Distrowatch author is just missummarizing the interaction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848244

Maybe! We're all just speculating about the degree of accuracy here. I messaged them on Mastodon to see if they will clarify the text. Will post back if I hear from them.

This is Facebook, where people regularly post something in group A and think they posted it in group B, and then complain that their post was "deleted" or "censored".

I guess filtering is level of: "My 11-year-old son keeps talking about this Linux thing with his computer. What is Linux? Is it a hacking tool? Should I be worried?"

On another note, Sourceforge just removes the malware flag, but did they actually check anything or just went with the provided explanation without any concrete details? If I hijacked some software and got caught, I'd act nonchalantly like this as well and hope it'll blow over without anyone noticing.

As far as I know, they didn't check anything. (And neither have I -- no comment on whether this is an AV true positive or false positive.)

Here's VirusTotal on the tarball (note Chrome blocks its download, for the same reason): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...

Nimda was a Windows malware from 2001. It seems unlikely that would be a meaningful attack vector for a compromised privoxy in 2025. But again, I have not investigated it.

I had my post removed a couple of weeks ago for linking to aeon desktop (immutable opensuse).

Thank you for providing this, it seemed a little clickbaity. Even far less technical companies run some things in Linux so seems weird they’d ban Linux talk in general.

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