Debian Developer Imprisoned In Russia Over Alleged Role In Riots (itwire.com) 93
An anonymous reader writes:
"Dmitry Bogatov, Debian developer and Tor node admin, is still being held in a Moscow jail," tweeted the EFF Saturday. IT Wire reports that the 25-year-old math teacher was arrested earlier this month "on suspicion of organizing riots," and is expected to be held in custody until June 8. "The panel investigating the protests claims Bogatov posted several incitory messages on the sysadmin.ru forum; for example, one claim said he was asking people to bring 'bottles, fabric, gasoline, turpentine, foam plastic' to Red Square, according to a post at Hacker News. The messages were sent in the name of one Airat Bashirov and happened to be transmitted through the Tor node that Bogatov was running. The Hacker News post said Bogatov's lawyer had produced surveillance video footage to show that he was elsewhere at the time when the messages were posted.
"After Dmitry's arrest," reports the Free Bogatov site, "Airat Bashirov continue to post messages. News outlets 'Open Russia' and 'Mediazona' even got a chance to speak with him."
Earlier this month the Debian GNU/Linux project also posted a message of support, noting Dmitry maintains several packages for command line and system tools, and saying their group "honours his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software... we hope he is back as soon as possible to his endeavours... In the meantime, the Debian Project has taken measures to secure its systems by removing Dmitry's keys in the case that they are compromised."
"After Dmitry's arrest," reports the Free Bogatov site, "Airat Bashirov continue to post messages. News outlets 'Open Russia' and 'Mediazona' even got a chance to speak with him."
Earlier this month the Debian GNU/Linux project also posted a message of support, noting Dmitry maintains several packages for command line and system tools, and saying their group "honours his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software... we hope he is back as soon as possible to his endeavours... In the meantime, the Debian Project has taken measures to secure its systems by removing Dmitry's keys in the case that they are compromised."
Re: Good since he supports systemd... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a difference between things that are better and things that are advertised as "better" using massive propaganda. I just had to remove the systemd-fail from a laptop to get a serial adapter working again. This thing has no advantages in most situations but compromises stability, usability, simplicity and security. Really a shining example of how not to do it.
What astonishes me though is that two morons with known bad personalities and a bad track-record with their software can compromise most of the Linux community. I would have expected it to be more resilient, but apparently not.
Re: Good since he supports systemd... (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't actually "drop" them, it just doesn't send them to the syslogs by default. You're supposed to use journalctl to read them! The logging behavior of systemd is a configuration option
All systemd logging can be forwarded to syslog in plain text format, standard feature enabled by a single edit in: /etc/systemd/journald.conf
It can also be enabled on a per boot basis with a simple addition to the kernel boot parameters
ForwardToSyslog=, ForwardToKMsg=, ForwardToConsole=, ForwardToWall=
Control whether log messages received by the journal daemon shall
be forwarded to a traditional syslog daemon, to the kernel log
buffer (kmsg), to the system console, or sent as wall messages to
all logged-in users. These options take boolean arguments. If
forwarding to syslog is enabled but nothing reads messages from the
socket, forwarding to syslog has no effect. By default, only
forwarding to wall is enabled. These settings may be overridden at
boot time with the kernel command line options
"systemd.journald.forward_to_syslog=",
"systemd.journald.forward_to_kmsg=",
"systemd.journald.forward_to_console=", and
"systemd.journald.forward_to_wall=". When forwarding to the
console, the TTY to log to can be changed with TTYPath=, described
below.
Re: (Score:1)
> It doesn't actually "drop" them, it just doesn't send them to the syslogs by default.
Until the log is damaged. You can change the behavior to have it work properly (kind of). But, by default, it's broken.
Re:Good since he supports systemd... (Score:5, Informative)
Are you using Fedora or something? Debian configured systemd to leave /var/log/messages working just the way it always has.
Re: (Score:3)
You can still get rid of systemd in Debian, but it seems to be getting harder to do so and you lose more and more core functionality. Now it seems you lose Python3 apt integration.
It seems to me that "choice" has left Debian a while ago, and the authoritarians in control are hard at work to remove what is left of it.
Re: (Score:1)
> You can still get rid of systemd in Debian
No problems with that here, definitely
> Now it seems you lose Python3 apt integration.
Care to expound on that? Perhaps it's fixable.
And since when was Python3 "core functionality"? (yah, pretty transparent attempt at derailing an already-derailed discussion. Folks, that was intended to be *funny*, OK?).
This was about Dmitry, not about systemd. I guess the systemd slant was injected by the Russian propaganda machine (yah, those exist).
Re: (Score:2)
Apt is "core functionality". In the end, I do not care too much but this shows a trend.
As to Dmitry, he obviously gets misused to threaten people. Even the Russian authorities know than a Tor exit-node operator has no control over what is done over it.
Re: (Score:2)
"Even the Russian authorities know than a Tor exit-node operator has no control over what is done over it."
On the contrary, everything I've learned about Russia seems to point at them being even more clueless than the rest. Mostly because all they need to know is who the lucky one is to get the government's attention, and they all know that they won't be punished for oppressing people too much, but they will get punished for oppressing them not enough when their superiors need an excuse to thumb them in.
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But why are you talking to yourself?
Re: (Score:1)
Well, logs are important to a sysadmin, and IT, and even most end-users. However, if you're operating a service or website and want it to be squeaky clean, immune to government searching, logs can provide enough information to screw you. Of course, anyone competent would be encrypting the hard disk and likely has a great backup strategy, (also encrypted), coupled with some way to destroy evidence well enough to create plausible deniability... but then we're getting into secops and not just logging..
I agree
Re: Good since he supports systemd... (Score:1)
This. Real professionals need syslog so we can't use systemd.
Re: (Score:2)
Which shitty distro are you using? On RHEL, systemd sends messages to syslog by default. You have to go out of your way to stop it fro doing so. There are plenty of issues with systemd, but the troubles most of the rants criticising systemd are either imaginary issues or problems with shitty distros with stupid defaults. This makes it easy for them to say, "Haha none of these idiots have even used system," because you're busy drowning out the people trying to get real issues with systemd addressed (like
Re: (Score:2)
At least the fanboys are finally admitting the latter. There have been real implementation annoyances at times.
Re: (Score:2)
Which shitty distro are you using? On RHEL, systemd sends messages to syslog by default.
That's assuming that functionality is up and running. It makes troubleshooting the early boot process more difficult.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the reasons why my employer has absolutely banned systemd. The risk it brings is just far to high, with no perceptible gain to compensate.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow such lack of love for humanity. Here we have a guy imprisdoned for trying to make the world better and speaking out on what he thought was an injustice. Who probably very scared and currently powerless.
As you from your comfortable location applauding this because he happened to make a technical decision to use a different software set with different features tradeoffs which you have the option to not use at all or just spend a little time to learn better and perhaps change the default configuration.
Wha
Re: (Score:1)
YHBT. HTH. HAND,ADFT.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: it's the Linux legal problem (Score:1)
What good would removing his cock do if he can will produce semen in his balls? You need to jump in a vat of acid since you fail to understand basic reproductive systems and modern advances in artificial insemination!
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Re: (Score:3)
The solution is better information and education. However, FOSS has a long way to go here. Even within the co
Re: (Score:1)
Polonium Putin (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile the man they're protesting about, Putin, rigs elections, poisons people with polonium, shoots opposition leaders, throws journalists off buildings....
This is about control (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not about him or what he may or may not have done. This is about scaring others so that they think twice before hosting a tor node or any other kind of communication outside government control.
Re: (Score:1)
Police do stupid shit all the time. I was arrested the other week for crossing the street and then was charged with a law that restricts crossing the street in between two intersections with traffic lights. Well, guess what, the adjacent street is a stop sign. I didn't break the law for which I was arrested. The reality is they didn't like the fact I was filming an unconstitutional checkpoint. The police weren't authorized to block sidewalks and had other mandates such as being polite and courteous, keeping
From an *exit* node? (Score:2, Interesting)
"but when HE posts messages"???
Why would he post messages from the exit node he runs, that's dumb it makes no sense. It's to use TOR is a way that bypasses TOR. (!)
Likewise the authorities know its not him, its the TOR exit node. So the arrest is clearly timed.
There's anti Putin protests in St Petersburg, lots of people are being arrested, they want Putin to step down and stop rigging elections. Opponents are being killed, poisoned, the press is suppressed. This is clearly related to the insecurity Putin fe
Re: (Score:2)
If you wanted to make the statement that you are coming after anybody who operates a TOR node, this would pretty much cover that.
When making bold statements about your power and willingness to use it, I don't think the guilt or innocence of your chosen target is all that relevant, is it?
Re: (Score:2)
Two mutually orthoganal comments (Score:3)
1) Yay for pervasive CCTV!
2) A computer nerd that can't figure out how to automate a web post isn't a true computer nerd.
Re: (Score:1)
Even more suspicious is that he used Tor, but specifically altered the config to go through his own exit node.
Wrong Person (Score:1, Insightful)
In his real name - but on a TOR network. No one is that stupid crazy in that environment. Clearly a setup by someone else. Was Trump also posting messages?
Re: (Score:2)
"Airat Bashirov" sounds a bit different from "Dmitry Bogatov" to me. I also suspect the former might be not quite the real name of the poster.
Incredible (Score:4, Funny)
I knew the war over Debian switching to Systemd was intense but I had no idea it had gone this far! ;)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah. My heart goes out to those poor violent criminals.
Bloods vs Crips animosity is nothing compared to init vs systemd.