gitian-builder VS peacenotwar

A number of pull requests are still awaiting gitian checks. Unfortunately, my attempt to review and help pulling #2579 (that would make it much easier to do gitian checks) over the finish line, is not ready because the gitian-builder software that we need for this has a bug. I have opened a pull request with them to fix the issue but because Bitcoin Core is moving away from this software, it takes a little longer to get things merged there. If I see no progress on this until Friday the 20th, I will propose to temporarily fix it locally in our own scripts.

So I also faced errors even after finding these bad boys. I kept getting a system error but I solved that using help from stack overflow and some Linux forums. Bitcoin.org too was also my close friend. The error was that I haven't started apt-cacher-ng yet. so after solving that I got a new error. With this error it took about three days to find a solution because it was a problem with the code or not with the code but the Ubuntu server location. Ubuntu has moved some archive files from Archive.ubuntu to old-releases.ubuntu. But the gitian builder was still fetching from that place. So as a normal bug solver. I edited the code on GitHub and sent a pull request for DevRandom to review. Guess what MY PULL WAS CORRECT SO HE MERGED ITT!!!! I was soo excited that day that I showed it to all my friends whether they understood or not. I was happy that I had contributed to the software which is literally the backbone of all Altcoins who build through Gitian. I was also happy that I had contributed to the same repository as the names like Gavin Andresen, Luke Dashjr , Hebasto and other prominent developers in the Bitcoin Development community. The link of my two pull request can be found here

The release process we inherited from bitcoin can be quite painful. It uses gitian to build repeatable and deterministic binaries from the source code. This means that multiple people can all build the code on different machines (and even different operating systems) and still get the same exact release binaries. We can then all compare the results and then sign the release, certifying that we all agree that the published release is safe & accurate.

For those interested in reproducible builds, the gitian [1] project is a fairly simple VM which sets the up the necessary environment for doing this sort of thing.

The tooling and community around reproducible builds is growing all the time, and imo we should be insisting on it for things such as government apps.

[1] https://github.com/devrandom/gitian-builder

git clone https://github.com/devrandom/gitian-builder git clone https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin git clone https://github.com/dogecoin/gitian.sigs pushd dogecoin git checkout v1.14.3 popd

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.