cyberwarfareispeace VS peacenotwar

What the hell are NPM and GitHub doing, are they letting this malware exist since it's for the "right" cause? I understand where this guy's heart is at but this is wrong on so many levels. I reported this to both of them this morning, and they are still up, I can't be the only one. If they don't take it down then that is a serious trust issue there, and represents a new reality where people will willingly host malware if it's for the correct political cause.

I forked the repo to make the README.md more accurate and satirical, but sadly I can't make a PR since he's locked down the repository to only contributors.

https://github.com/4oo4/cyberwarfareispeace

But seriously GitHub and NPM, get your shit together.

Today, with an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, some open source maintainers have taken it upon themselves to protest the war via changes to their code that express anti-war rhetoric via messages that display when the software is run. However, one maintainer in particular took it to the next level. Brandon Nozaki Miller, published a library on GitHub named peacenotwar that simply printed an anti-war message to the computer it was run on. This package is harmless on its own, but things got interesting when he included this package as a dependency in the node-ipc module he maintains. Users who downloaded the latest version of node-ipc to a machine in Russia would be subject to complete data destruction. Miller defended the act by claiming that this is all documented publicly and that users who don’t want this installed on their machine should lock their dependencies to older versions.

apparently an NGO working in belarus got affected

From that reddit thread, here is the github issue the paste originated from.

https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/peacenotwar/issues/45

the repo where this issue was posted simply created a .txt file on the user's machine, doesn't wipe anything: https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/peacenotwar/issues/45

This headline is fucking yikes, the node package that they're talking about is fully open source and does nothing but make a text file in 3 locations. It does nothing remotely close to "wiping" computers, lmfao.

His actions destroyed over 30,000 messages & files detailing war crimes committed by Russian in Ukraine belonging an American NGO that monitors human rights infringements in eastern Europe. Cool protest, bro.

Première victime collatérale

Links to drama: https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/peacenotwar/issues, https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues

The package uses https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/peacenotwar to deliver the message.

But I don't understand why/how it would wipe the PC. Unless I missed something, the code from the package does not delete anything.

> This code serves as a non-destructive example of why controlling your node modules is important. It also serves as a non-violent protest against Russia's aggression that threatens the world right now.

Nah, the author knew it's would be controversial. The first sentence is there as an excuse.