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Kernel Developer Dmitry Monakhov Arrested For Protesting Ukraine Invasion
sfcrazy (1542989) writes, based on a report from Ted T'so, that Kernel developer Dmitry Monakhov was detained for 15 days for disobeying a police officer. The debacle came about when Monakhov decided to protest the recent invasion into Ukraine by Russian armed forces.
Monakhov is using Twitter to keep people informed about his experience with the Russian judicial system; a human translator can probably do a better job than Google in this case.
Russia is back to totalitarianism, the only thing that still missing for a full return to Soviet era are bread lines and mandatory people's rallies. With sanctions brought by Putin's military aggression theses are not too far away.
>>>no evidence.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Satellite images of Russian armored columns entering Ukraine, captured active duty Russian troops, secret burials of killed Russian soldiers, rebel chain of command composed entirely out of Russian citizens with ties to KGB are all disagree with you. You can account for maybe one of these by claiming accidental what-have-you, but combined they establish clear pattern.
1. Technology does not exist in a vacuum. Slashdot readers sometimes pretend this is the Online Journal of Bits and Bytes, but it ain't so. What happens in the outside world directly affects what practically every company, university, and engineer works on from day to day; not to mention our quality of life apart from work.
Yesterday we had a story of a major iCloud hack. This would've been somewhat interesting if the victims had been, let's say some sorority sisters attending college in the southern part of the USA. The fact that the victims were Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst and Kate Upton made it a story of front page importance, not just on Slashdot but on general newspapers and news sites worldwide; and a much more difficult problem for Tim Cook and Apple.
The NFL thought that the issue of domestic violence was completely unrelated or orthogonal to its mission of organizing professional football games. They just found out otherwise, big time. When a major social or political issue shows up on your doorstep, it's generally a bad idea to stick your head in the sand or some other dark place.
2. This *is* a technology story, and not just because Monakhov works on the Linux kernel. Monakhov has chosen social media as the vehicle for his dissent. While the internal infrastructure of Twitter may not be super interesting, the disruptive effects of social media on nearly all major industries, and on governments, is profoundly interesting, worthy of ongoing discussion here on Slashdot.
3. The effectiveness of civil disobedience depends on support from lots of people outside the region in which the incidents are taking place. Monakhov has identified himself as a kernel developer and is specifically asking for support from the FOSS community. Others may be appealing to their respective external communities as well. If they're ignored, the Russian authorities will feel no risk in shutting them down, or worse.
You should treat both sides as untrustworthy. Fabricated evidence, or just total lack thereof, is used by both sides.
It's an amazing trait of modern wars. We often say that cyberwarfare is the threat of the future, but right now information wars, shaping public opinion that's malleable and not always critical enough of the fact presented, is maybe a bigger thing than actual firefights on the ground. Modern technology makes information easy to manipulate, easy to inject into public view, and far, far easier to spread.
Unless a war goes on in your homeland right next to you, you can't really tell if you're being told the truth.
The more people who know about the developer, the safer he is, at least while he is being harassed by relatively minor officials. We should be happy to accept a post or two about a nerd who is under threat by a government seeking to hide the truth about a military invasion.
Science is done best when it is done with the free exchange of truthful information and ideas. A nation which hides the truth is operating in a way fundamentally contrary both to the ideals of the open source community and to the spirit of intellectual exploration.
Nerds who don't care about that aren't nerds at all. There are a lot of diatribes about the authenticity of geekdom or nerdery. Most are just people trying to identify with one group or another and somehow believing the label affects their status in a way that people around them care about. But at the core of all Slashdot-related identities lie knowledge, intellectual expression, and the taking of joy in the exchange of information.
Yes, but the tanks and artillery the "separatists" keep popping up with are coming from somewhere. At this late stage in the game, they certainly aren't Ukrainian remnants that the separatists have captured in those Ukrainian territories - those were used and destroyed many months ago.
So one of two things are happening. Either Putin and friends are blatantly lying and calling for peace talks and negotiations while they are pouring heavy military equipment into Ukraine, or Putin has no control over his military and anybody can just hop in one of his tanks and leave Russia in it. Either way, he looks like a fool with such obvious blatant lies, or due to his weakness as a military leader. I think we know which of those two is more likely.
Oh, and everyone seems to have quickly forgotten all the civilians that died on a passenger jet because of Russia's antiaircraft missiles. It blows my mind in this day and age that a country that is supposedly a big part of the world community can get by with shooting down a plane and the rest of the world does absolutely nothing about it.
Better known as 318230.