this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
416 points (98.6% liked)
Programming.dev Meta
2470 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
Links
Credits
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Which is expected. When it comes to security the fact it happened at all is the problem.
I don't expect the software to be fool proof. All software has bugs and problems, but this software is specifically developed by bad actors who will eventually use the platform to fuck you over.
The developers aren't trustworthy on the account of their extremist ideology, not on account of this bug happening. This bug is evidence that despite the fact that this project is open source you should not just brush off that extremist ideal as "no big deal".
And immense social value.
We can argue non stop about politics, but that isn't the point. Whether or not we agree with their politics is irrelevant to their ability to build a social platform. Until we start to see their beliefs affecting their software decision making in a negative way, we cannot complain about it. As they may or may not have popular opinions, that is a very good reason for them to have a great platform. So they can share them without fear of retaliation.
However, they have so far done nothing to show they can't be trusted to not make unbiased or malicious software. It is incredibly rude to assume they will.
If you have evidence showing they cannot be trusted, please come forth with it. We need to know it.
You'll be about a billion days too late and the entire network will have been compromised for ages. You don't operate on a "oh let's just trust the authoritarian communists until they do something bad" policy.
Alright, so what do they plan to do? Compromise Lemmy, sure. Then what? What do they gain? Propaganda?
Basically pull data on various accounts (IP address, activity history, etc), people, and trends. They could promote given posts or suppress posts or hide things from moderators. They could distribute whatever malware they might like, target specific accounts that way....
The possibilities are many.
Even so, it just seems like a lot of work and risk for something that would not be necessary to achieve those or similar goals. Besides, if word gets out that the software is compromised, then people will just stop using it. The much better/easier solution would be run scams, vote manipulation, etc as it doesn't kill your platform that you would then be using to push a goal or agenda.
The name of the game is to not be noticed. You have a bad user or instance, they get banned and make a new one. Compromising the whole thing though? That's one and done, especially where the Lemmy croud is a lot more tech oriented than most other platforms.
My point being that why compromise Lemmy for a short while then have it die vs playing the long game and have an ever increasing user base to scam, steal from or manipulate? It just doesn't make sense when you think about it.
What do you mean by that? Are they hell bent on using Rust Nightly and making overly-judicious use of
.unwrap()?edit: I see that you mean they are Marxist-adjacent.