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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Now, of course, the fork is embattled by another "opinionated lead developer" -- who I understand was relatively inactive for a long period of time -- who has seized control of the project and removed the CoC.

My understanding is that Lenny owned the PolyMC organization on GitHub and was thus able to oust all other maintainers that way. And he owned it because he started the fork. People have been passing around the commit graph chart on the PolyMC "Insights" page and saying "look, he didn't even do jack shit for the project!" but that's misleading because (a) every contributor's graph will look like that because PolyMC only forked from MultiMC in December of last year, and (b) GitHub is weird about crediting people on the graph if a commit was authored by person A but committed by person B, plus there are several merge commits that were made by multiple people who may or may not get credit for it on the graph, etc.

I originally learned of the change due to an update message when I recently upgraded the flatpaks on my personal system:

This package is currently read-only until situation around OVE-20221017-0001 clarifies.

So for those not in the know, this "OVE" is basically trying to mimic what is called a CVE report, and fake it enough such that maintainers get scared and take action to deplatform the package, despite it not even being a real CVE report. I'd go as far to say that calling it merely a "fake CVE" is being too charitable. That's how much this abuses a process that is (nominally) politically neutral and objective.

The package managers aren't the only thing PolyMC has been kicked out of. The user agent string it uses to fetch mod updates is now banned by CurseForge, so users have to change the string around. The API key they use so people can sign in to their Minecraft accounts has been mysteriously and silently deleted (allegedly, because a previous ousted maintainer owned it). Every single Minecraft-related Discord server has sent announcements fearmongering about the project, as well as respected figures in the community like KingBDogz, a Mojang developer, repeating the message that people should stop using it immediately "because he is promoting bigotry". Basically, everyone has done everything they can to screw over the project, all over allegations that it was "hijacked" by a "right-winger" for "malicious purposes". I get the sinking feeling that if the situation was reversed and it was instead a left-winger taking over to own all those Nazi chuds, people would instead be cheering them on (and any objections that the takeover now means they could install malicious files onto people's computers would just be dismissed as right-wing talking points). Just goes to show you who's truly in power.

So for those not in the know, this "OVE" is basically trying to mimic what is called a CVE report, and fake it enough such that maintainers get scared and take action to deplatform the package, despite it not even being a real CVE report. I'd go as far to say that calling it merely a "fake CVE" is being too charitable. That's how much this abuses a process that is (nominally) politically neutral and objective.

It gets even better. Just parsing the naming convention, you get "OVE", October 17th 2022, report 0001. CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. I'd presume the O is related to Open as in Open Source but replacing the word Common with it doesn't make much semantic sense to me. In CVE terms that'd be the first report for the entire year but even then, the formatting is wrong since CVEs don't embed full dates just the year. Let's just take a look at the website that maintains the list of OVEs. It is literally some randos blog with nothing else related to vulnerabilities political or otherwise. Quite the social engineering effort.

Apparently OVEs aren't just something that the blogger cooked up out of thin air; some security group called "Openwall" maintains a service that generates these unique OVE IDs (you can generate your own here and verify that the site won't reuse IDs, even after a refresh). Of course, that doesn't change things too much; these OVEs are poorly-known enough that some of the blogger's friends only found out via this incident, and one wonders if the blogger would have used an OVE if the ID format and name didn't bear such a resemblance to the better-known, scary CVEs. But it's not quite as bad as the blogger making stuff up from whole cloth.

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