Russia and China are definitely interfering in the US (to spread discord, ex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_interference_in_the_20...), so should the US formally declare war against them?

What I do think is that nations should 1) interfere back, and 2) make their citizens more resilient to foreign propaganda. And I specifically don't mean building a firewall. In fact do the opposite: if a firewalled nation is leaking out propaganda, ensure firewall-breaking tools leak in.

> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves.

It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…)

If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free.

Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.

“Open core” is when part of the product is open-source and part is private.

Was a significant part of the product private before this announcement?

If not, someone can fork the repo and immediately launch a competitor (FOSS or paid). (Technically even if so, except it wouldn’t be immediate, and if they’d have to re-implement too much, it would be easier to start from scratch.)

Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804). And now paraphrased on various ad-space (and in this case affiliate link) sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here.

Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.

As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked?

Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former).

You should actually consider the downsides and failure modes of implemented mass surveillance, not "it prevents malicious foreign influence better than my other proposals", because it may be worse than said influence (which does not necessarily translate into control; keep in mind that Georgescu only won the primary and would've lost the runoff had it not been annulled). The world under free information is the devil you know.

I always hold that the problem with mass censorship and state overreach is, they are too powerful and people are too selfish and stupid. There's no good solution, but my prediction is that any drastic attempt to prevent foreign interference will backfire and fail at that (liberal leaders can't use authoritarian tools as effectively as authoritarians). Even Democracy, "the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried", is a better countermeasure; all you need, to prevent anti-democratic foreign capture and ultimate failure, is to preserve it.