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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.
Russia had plausible deniability by only supplying things like T-64s to the rebels, but as the rebels were losing it seems Putin couldn't accept that and now there are numerous photos of T-72BMs in the Ukraine and the Russian military is the only military in the world to have access to and operate these:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
Similarly, Russian mothers are beginning to ask why their sons are coming back in coffins due to unexplained deaths from a "training exercise" on the Ukrainian border, and where reporters attending their funerals are attacked by mobs that have nothing to do with the funerals in question but magically turn up at them to keep journalists away all the same. Then of course there's the actual Russian soldiers who were outright captured in Ukraine:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Of course, we have history, just this year too, where Crimea was filled with "rebels" who Putin eventually admitted were Russian soldiers, so it's obviously well within Putin's realm of willingness to pass of serving soldiers as civilians until their mission is complete, which, by the way, is a war crime for what it's worth - yes, that's right, admitting this tactic makes Putin a self-admitted war criminal.
When MH-17 was shot down, and it was just T-64s and modern machine guns the rebels had it seemed a bit of a stretch, yet still plausible that this was just a rag tag bunch of individuals fighting on behalf of Russia. Now, with more recent evidence you'd have to be exceptionally retarded to not recognise that Russia is very clearly in the Ukraine with full serving units (hell, the 10 captured soldiers prove that as an outright fact by itself whether you really believe they were lost or not, you don't just allow your soldiers to stumble into a war zone accidentally unless you want them to end up in a potential fight). This is why the tide of battle has changed too from being strongly in the Ukrainian military's favour to now being in the Russia's favour - the Ukrainians are no longer fighting relatively lightly armed insurgents, they're fighting full blown armoured battalions backed up by professionally precision launched artillery strikes all of a sudden - that doesn't just get organised out of nowhere by rebels in a couple of cut off towns with little remaining access to the outside world and dwindling numbers, that requires state level planning, implementation, and financing over an extended period of time to implement - i.e. it requires a professional army.
At this point the only hope is that enough Russian soldiers are killed such that Russians themselves start asking what the fuck they're doing in someone else's country that has done absolutely nothing wrong to Russia (other than hurting Putin's ego) when there's a simple solution of leaving that country the fuck alone and letting it get on with becoming a modern nation even if it does mean Putin's little big man syndrome takes a knock. Thankfully that already seems to be happening to some degree with the Russian soldier's rights institute that's compiled a list of the 400 dead Russian soldiers it believes have been killed in this war already - putting that into context that's very nearly as many lives as the British have lost in 13 years in Afghanistan so thankfully there is a high cost to Russia for this stupidity, and thankfully it is beginning to be noticed by ordinary Russians themselves.