Chinese users attack Notepad++ app after 'Free Uyghur' release

[zanderthunder]

Notepad++'s GitHub issue tracker flooded with pro-Chinese and anti-western messages. Anti-Chinese activists are fighting back with their own spam and attacks on the Beijing regime.

 

 

 

Chinese propagandists are spamming the GitHub repository of the Notepad++ app with pro-Chinese and anti-Western messages after Notepad++ devs released a version codenamed "Free Uyghur" on Tuesday.

 

Angry Chinese users posted messages in support of their government, accusing westerners of interfering in matters "they don't understand" and that "China's territorial integrity is inviolable."

 

Messages were posted in Chinese, English, or both -- so the messages "hit home with foreigners."

 

Initial messages invoked China's right over the Xinjiang region, home of the Uyghur minority.

 

Over the past year, multiple reports have surfaced about China's appalling treatment of the Uyghur population, with the deployment of facial tracking technology, travel bans, and "re-education" camps from where people often never come back.

 

But the flooding of the Notepad++ project's GitHub repository with pro-Chinese propaganda messages quickly drew in all the anti-Chinese activists.

 

Today, discussions on the Notepad++ issues tracker had shifted to all Chinese topics, such as Taiwan's sovereignty, the Hong Kong protests, and the failure of the "western democracy" model -- and especially the "brainwashed western people living under evil capitalism regime [sic]."

 

With most of the discussions taking a "China vs. the world" theme, other users have also stepped in, and are calling out the hypocrisy of some pro-Chinese commenters who are mocking western democracies while living under a "social credit" system.

 

Notepad++ developers have been trying to keep pace with all the spam and closing discussions, but new GitHub issues with propaganda messages are being opened every few minutes.

 

Furthermore, the Notepad++ website also came under a prolonged DDoS attack today. The site recovered after hours of downtime only after being moved behind Cloudflare proxies.

 

The Notepad++ 7.8.1 release, the one codenamed "Free Uyghur," has not been pulled, and is still available for download.

You can read the hundreds of pro- and anti-Chinese messages in the Notepad++ GitHub issue tracker's closed section.

 

Developing story. Updates will follow.

 

Source: Chinese users attack Notepad++ app after 'Free Uyghur' release (via ZDNet)

 

p/s: While the main site is running well at this time of writing, but the domain download.notepad-plus-plus.org that serves the installer download is still down.

[zanderthunder]

Text editor releases ‘Free Uyghur’ edition, gets swamped with Chinese spam

Developer was promoting human rights awareness

 

 

This week, the developer of the popular text- and code-editing software Notepad++ released a new version update. Nothing seemed particularly strange about it, except maybe the name: Notepad++ v7.8.1 is the “Free Uyghur” edition.

 

 

In a blog post announcing the updated version, developer Don Ho writes about the plight of the Uyghur people, an ethnic minority in China that’s faced persecution from the country’s authoritarian government. China operates internment camps that are used to detain Uyghur people throughout the country’s Xinjiang region.

 

“The fact you have just learned such information is already an action in and of itself,” Ho writes in the announcement. “But you can involve more people to focus on this issue and hopefully apply additional pressure on the Chinese government to stop their oppressive actions and crimes concerning the Uyghur people.”

 

While the protest may have been innocuous enough, it hasn’t played out that way online. Since the announcement, the software’s GitHub “issues” page has been bombarded with spam, much of it in the Chinese language.

 

“Stop sending meaningless political-related issues, it just makes you look like an idiot,” reads one comment. Another one simply reads, “Bye ! Uninstall.” There’s a litany of curses, and one asks, “What do you know about China?” Others have moved in to criticize the Chinese government in response.

 

Ho told The Verge that the software’s dedicated site was also under a distributed-denial-of-service attack, but that it has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by the site’s host.

 

For software like Notepad++, the GitHub page is an important resource, and having it unavailable could be a headache for some users. Previous versions of the software have, in the past, been named in political protest, and one even referenced the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Ho writes in the announcement that he anticipated potential pushback, saying “talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid,” but decided to take the step anyway.

 

“The problem is,” Ho writes in the announcement of the Free Uyghur edition, “if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us.”

 

Update, 7:35PM ET: Includes statement from Ho about denial-of-service attack.

 

Source: Text editor releases ‘Free Uyghur’ edition, gets swamped with Chinese spam (via The Verge)

 

p/s: While both of these news are actually suggested to be posted under General News in the first place, but I posted it on Security and Privacy News instead since the main point of the news also discusses about DDOS attempt and outage of the Notepad++ website, alongside the spamming attack on GitHub repo for Notepad++.

[Arachnoid]

Im not Politically minded to either viewpoint so have no comment on that but I would have thought Git Hub itself would have had small print for users of the service restricting them from bringing sexual,religious or Political issues into their products as it could severely affect the quality of service they provide for all users.

[zanderthunder]

25 minutes ago, Arachnoid said:

Im not Politically minded to either viewpoint so have no comment on that but I would have thought Git Hub itself would have had small print for users of the service restricting them from bringing sexual,religious or Political issues into their products as it could severely affect the quality of service they provide for all users.

Though the issue tracker on that GitHib repo for Notepad++ was cleared of spams, but still one question remains: Why GitHub does not filter what is regarded by legit issues and what is regarded by spams when reporting on the tracker?

 

Also, this is not the first time Notepad++ caught in controversy, last time they also caught in 2008 (for Boycott Beijing 2008 banner at their SourceForge website) and in 2015 (hacked due to objection to "easter egg" endorsing "Je suis Charlie").