peacenotwar VS tiny-http

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.

kcgi describes itself as being "minimal" whereas actix-web calls itself "powerful", "extremely fast" and as having "a lot of features out of box"... seems about as fair as comparing the 320MB Apache HTTP Server repo against the 52KB tiny_http library

I'm developing the backend of https://www.cozydate.com/ in Rust. Async Rust is not productive yet, so I tried rouille http server which lets me write non-async request handlers. Unfortunately, it uses an unbounded thread pool and falls down under load https://github.com/tiny-http/tiny-http/issues/221 . Then I tried Tide and a threadpool to call my non-async API handlers. This worked, but was really ugly, and I had issues with uploads after deploying to Heroku https://github.com/http-rs/tide/issues/878 .

tiny-http is small. You'll probably be able to make something with less than 1 Mb.

That's not a simple http server, something like tiny_http would be with only... 17 total dependencies by default. Actix is a full framework with an abundance of features, and correspondingly-large dependency tree.