Kernel Developer Dmitry Monakhov Arrested For Protesting Ukraine Invasion 205
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.
Re:News for nerds ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, no, this story has the following buzzwords:
Kernel
Ukraine
Russian
Invasion
Guaranteed to bring page views. And you, you... inconsiderate clod, you think it's not a relevant story? Bah! Many buzzwords disagree with you!
Russia is back to totalitarism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:4, Insightful)
The invasion of Europe by Russia is pretty big news, and will have an impact on everything from the economy to space exploration. NATO has direct evidence of the invasion, and Russia is hardly trying to hide it any more apart from the loopy puppet Sergei Lavrov (the new Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf). Ukraine has already introduced conscription, so that's already a pool of potentially talented young programmers off to get slaughtered by Russian tanks. The Russian murder of those Dutch people in the airliner also has affected air traffic.
As Europe gets sucked unwillingly into war with Russia, this is going to get quite brutal as the Putin doesn't care how many people die on either side even his own. He's got a fair amount of cyber-warfare talent to call on too. Maybe this will be the wake-up call to start putting in place proper encryption EVERYWHERE. War with Russia is a little more important than the NSA passing on tips on drug dealers.
Phillip.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Response on why we should care (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Relates to safety and knowledge. News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:2, Insightful)
It became also a huge story once the whole thing was debunked. I look at media coverage as follows:
1. There has been numerous clear fabrications by the Russian media and the state. For example actors have been posing as different people (you can find these on youtube). In addition, pictures have been from different places than claimed. These have been used as evidence for their version of the story.
2. The only sort of pictures that I've seen fabricated by Western media was the one video on the MH17 falling down, which turned out to be some clip from Syria. The main difference was that the clip was never shown to prove anything, only to generate "clicks" by having people visit the site for some exclusive footage. The motive was money, not to mislead.
As an example of verifiability the presence of a BUK in rebel territory was easy to verify from a video released by the Ukrainians. It didn't take long before people used Google Maps to pinpoint the precise location and anyone can verify by going to Google Maps that this is the correct location. The location was firmly within rebel held territory. Similarly, most other interesting pictures have been located on Google Maps, so anyone can verify the location.
Re:News for nerds ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Russia is back to totalitarism (Score:4, Insightful)
Bread lines will return because combination of sanctions and Putin's effort to Keep Up With the US Military Jonses will put Russia back into impossible economical position of high military spending out of shrinking budget.
Re:Russia is back to totalitarism (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the biggest impact of sanctions has been European farmers.
They tried to bypass sanction by selling to Austria, who would then sell on to Russia. The Russians spotting the scam denied entry (Austria is not known for producing oranges).
The farmers were compensated by the EU. But rather than give the food to some needy Greeks, the food was destroyed.
Quick geography lesson. Austria is in Europe (smack in the middle of it) and is part of the European Union. So your statement that somebody tried to go around the Russian food import ban by going through Austria is highly suspect. The way it is actually done is to go through Belarus. Russia is now importing beef from Belarus, which coincidentally is importing cattle from EU (technically the beef is produced in Belarus, as this is the place the cattle gets chopped up). Somewhat more absurd is the sudden appearance in Russian stores of shrimps originating from Belarus [joyreactor.cc] (Belarus is a land locked country). So yeah, if there is a ban there will always be somebody to make money by going around them. The thing is that the Russians will be the ones paying the bill.
Re:Russia is back to totalitarism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:2, Insightful)
You will be waiting yet, as Putin's denial and conspiracy is the way he invents this war. There are massive amounts of messages about weapons both moving into Ukraine, shooting from Russia side, troopers from Kostroma captured on territory of Ukraine or those from Pskov buried after killed in this war. It is obvious how almost settled war has turned over end of August after Russia activated its involvement. There's even Malaysia airliner, shot down from BUK-M system, that was supplied to terrorists by nobody else, but helpful Russia - you still don't believe all those dead dutch? It all goes on, has no stop, but you are still "waiting for evidence". I hope you at least have registered unidentified "green people" of Crimea now, that this land has "suddenly decided to proceed with Russia" after them visiting and helping with things. This is dirty war, and major supply of its dirtiness comes from particular source, which makes problem somewhat better solvable.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting point of view. There seems to be a pretty major propaganda war going on over Russia and Ukraine, and I wonder which parts are truth...
Claims from the West should be treated with healthy skepticism.
Claims from Russia should be treated with howls of laughter.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:2, Insightful)
"massive amounts of messages" - mostly from the Ukrainian state media and ministries, copy-pasted to western outlets and some alleged satellite imagery, which doesn't really show or proof anything.
"shooting from Russia side" - no proof whatsoever, except for the same "reports" from Ukraine and some imagery without crucial information and wrongly placed shadows. Ukraine, however, was shooting the border posts, while the OSCE was there.
"troopers from Kostroma captured on territory of Ukraine" - those 10 guys? That's a massive invasion. First it was 10 km, then it was 20, next day it was 50 km from the border. What about the 400-something Ukrainian troops that were on Russian territory?
"There's even Malaysia airliner, shot down from BUK-M system" [citation needed], "that was supplied to terrorists by nobody else, but helpful Russia" [citation needed]. Btw, did you know that BUK missiles are from the soviet era and are (also) produced by a Ukrainian company [en.uos.ua]?
Even many clues don't create a single piece of evidence, which is still missing. I'd like to see it, so I can form an educated opinion about what's happening, but until I do (and I doubt that will happen), I'll just form my opinion on the basis that I know: media outlets are manipulating public opinion everywhere, not just Russia.