Damn there are a surprising number of maintainers that are comrades and not taking this lying down from the western supremacist cohort.
Linus opened up a massive can of worms and turned this into a geopolitical conflict by acting like a baby.
This comment by Hantong Chen is great:
Hi James,
Here’s what Linus has said, and it’s more than just “sanction.”
Moreover, we have to remove any maintainers who come from the following countries or regions, as they are listed in Countries of Particular Concern and are subject to impending sanctions:
- Burma, People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
- Algeria, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic, Comoros, and Vietnam.
For People’s Republic of China, there are about 500 entities that are on the U.S. OFAC SDN / non-SDN lists, especially HUAWEI, which is one of the most active employers from versions 5.16 through 6.1, according to statistics. This is unacceptable, and we must take immediate action to address it, with the same reason.
Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?
If yes, I see why they finally want to restrict maintainers to countries they can trust
Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?
as far as i know, that has not happened.
what makes you think it did?
Articles back in the days.
I found a random one now. Maybe I got just clickbaited with titles back then. I dunno
https://securityboulevard.com/2020/12/was-this-huaweis-failed-attempt-at-a-linux-backdoor/
Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:
5/22/2020 Update: This kind of update should not have been necessary, but due to irresponsible journalists and the nature of social media, it is important to make some things perfectly clear:
Nowhere did we claim this was anything more than a trivially exploitable vulnerability. It is not a backdoor or an attempted backdoor, the term does not appear elsewhere in this blog at all; any suggestion of the sort was fabricated by irresponsible journalists who did not contact us and do not speak for us.
There is no chance this code would have passed review and be merged. No one can push or force code upstream.
This code is not characteristic of the quality of other code contributed upstream by Huawei. Contrary to baseless assertions from some journalists, this is not Huawei’s first attempt at contributing to the kernel, in fact they’ve been a frequent contributor for some time.
Holy shit that got spicy. I was not expecting a Ukrainian and a Serb to start bickering back and forth while stacking racks over the level of support a country gave to the Nazis in WW2 on a kernel mailing list like they were in the comments here on Lemmy.
I get that tensions are high, and for many people the geopolitical reality is their homes being used as cover on an active front line, but like bro your actual fucking name is attached to these messages. At least I keep my most unhinged shit on a semi-anonymous platform. They need to lock it the fuck up.
Edit - jfc, a few messages later somebody comes in with something along the lines of “Taiwan isn’t a country, it’s part of China. When reunification comes sanctions won’t be appropriate against Chinese entities.” Is Lemmy just a front end for this mailing list and I had no idea this entire time?
Taiwan isn’t a country, it’s part of China
This is not a hot take, it’s the official position of the United States of America and 90% of the population of the world. Those who say Taiwan is its own country are radical fringe separatists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China#United_States_policy
Not even Taiwan claims to be a country though. They claim to be the sole legitimate government of China, hence their actual name, The Republic Of China, and not “republic of taiwan” or some other thing.
It is not good for the kernel and it’s team to suddenly have to kowtow to Usamerican politics.
The reality is that the Linux Foundation is in the United States, and Linus is a naturalized US citizen who lives in Oregon (at least on Wikipedia). So they both will have to pay attention to avoid transacting business with individuals and companies on the SDN list. That is the law in the United States.
What an extremely dangerous place to domicile such an important project.
Maybe it’s time to fork the Linux Foundation and fix those two problems.
