In one perspective, if you are willing to be reductionistic, a lot of my hobbies are escapism from the real, physical world isolated from “things that actually matter” like politics and social activism. Obviously, I think there needs to be people who are interested in those things, who are good at what they do, and are going to push movements and laws and bills in the direction that will benefit all of humanity. This of course is what anyone who has NOT been active in politics like myself would say. This is a child’s dream! The real world here on Earth, as we all learn, is a shitty place that we unfortunately cannot just leave behind for the “metaverse” or to Mars. We’re here for a good long while. I’m not here to rant about how all of our lives are dangled like puppets by other people who have more power in your structured society. I’m here to just share information.

I think there are some nerds like me who are not at all political and are fundamentally ignorant of a lot of big picture humanity things who are being recently reminded that geopolitics always finds a way to find you! A couple of weeks ago there was a news cycle about how the UK government signed a treaty to release their sovereignty of some islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, and how this technically means that the .io domains should no longer exist by the ICANN’s rules. However, there are so many websites online that use that ccTLD. Obviously the organization knows it can’t just force all those people off, so they’ll likely just make another exception or change it from being a country code TLD to a generic one. Now recently there’s discussions about how the Linux Kernel project revoked a couple of Russian maintainers access with the reason of following various compliance requirements. Obviously a lot of countries including the US have sanctions against Russia for the war in Ukraine, and this is downstream of these world events. Do we suspect all programmers from governments that do bad things to be nation state paid actors now? Are all chinese contributors to OSS suspected to be another Jia Tan? Am I supposed to hold the belief that there is some statistically significant probability that one or more of the Russian maintainers removed from the MAINTAINERS file in this patch to be a paid, malicious actor who will eventually sneak in backdoors? This is quite sad. These open source projects should stay neutral, and isn’t that what the Linux foundation is supposed to do:

I thought the year’s events in Open Source Software couldn’t get any worse after the Wordpress drama but man.