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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

As best I can tell from perusing the thread:

- The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google.

- HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work.

- Asahi Linux team is mad that HN is playing shenanigans on the outbound-link level, even though Asahi Linux team is playing shenanigans on the inbound-link level.

I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

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Lesson learned for them is that you can never rely on the http referrer because it can be removed/updated/spoofed etc. A team that runs Linux should at least be aware of that and not block a website based on this value.

I suspect they were aware of it. They didn't rely on it to block bad actors like bots or spammers or ddos-ers, they relied on it to block actors who were at some level implied to follow the social contract of how the internet works (e.g. a website focused at developers).

The actual lesson learned here I think is that certain communities don't have respect for the social contract when it benefits them. Though I suppose you are right, a team of linux users should never have expected a site ran by a venture capitalist firm to respect the social contract.

Also lots of accusations about how our entire site is somehow abusive even though 1) I and many others here have contributed our resources to Asahi and 2) they have not put forth sufficient (any??) evidence. I can imagine how stressful it must be to run a major project like Asahi, but it seems like a bit misguided to cast Hacker News as a net negative source of interest.

Until today, I had a positive perspective on Asahi, and HN is the only place in my life I ever heard about Asahi. Maybe they shouldn't paint with such broad brushes about the visitors to HN?

I don't get it either. I discovered Asahi via HN and my characterization of comments here is 1) enthusiastic (I can't wait to run linux on my m1!) 2) appreciative (impressive job, asahi team, in a short time!) and 3) impatient for new features (oh man I just need support for x and then Asahi will be my daily driver!). I think we can accept #3 as a form of #1.

Pretty sure marcan is not talking about "enthusiastic, appreciative, impatient for new features" people. I've read plenty of comments regarding Asahi along the lines of "why do we need this", "why is this not already in <favourite distro>", "this is already supported in the kernel, who are these people (the authors lol)".

Not much to get I'd say.

Since you are doing basically a "Not all HNers!" it would be very interesting to know what you have actually contributed to Asahi. I've been here way longer than you, since the early days, and I don't feel the need to comment on what Marcan is saying. Why do you?

> zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

is a hilariously unclear accusation.

FWIW HN sets the Referrer-Policy header [1] to origin [2] and it seems most browsers maybe support it. [3] Perhaps some addons override or spoof it and/or maybe some bots ignore it.

[1] - https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-referrer-poli...

[2] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...

[3] - https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy

This is enough to make me never touch Asahi Linux. What a childish game for a Linux distro?

How dare someone link to their website without their approval...because that is totally how the internet works?? ffs.

Do you hate jwz, too? Because I assure you, if you follow a link from HN to jwz.org (without removing the referer header), you will get much worse than a Google redirect.

> Do you hate jwz, too?

I mean, he definitely needs to look in the mirror.

What beef does jwz.org have with hackernews?

let's try: https://jwz.org http://jwz.org https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/06/and-its-a-great-looking-sku...

edit: strange, it works perfectly for me.

Your link anchor tags have `rel="nofollow noreferrer"`

It's at least clear where the balls come from. A tab redirected to Google would just leave me confused and concerned about malware.

....like what?

Agreed. I like to try out different Linux distributions every so often. After seeing this immature tantrum, I wouldn't go near Asahi Linux.

If you have a mac you will keep touching it, their code is forever in the mainline kernel.

But again, I guess you really didn't understand that he was just lamenting the lax moderation for the threads about Asahi.

What about robots.txt ? lots of sites have preferences on how you access them

Paywalled articles are posted here everyday

Why not respect the site owners wishes ?

Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too? It is the exact same principle. I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

Yes!

Edit (quoted context):

> Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

Yes! - I can’t vouch for anyone here, but me

> What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too?

Yes!

> I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

I don’t care, don’t take it personally. I’d be concerned about Asahi’s actions if I was a member of that community

I’m concerned HN being a part of chicken-shit tech games

> Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

That's not how it works. If you want to copy the URL into a new tab, you can still access the site. They just don't want to make it easy for people to click on the link from HN to their site.

It's a super trivial thing to avoid and this whole thing could be avoided entirely by allowing sites to submit their domains to HN if they don't want to show up on the front page.

Asahi Linux paywalling their blog is a very valid option for them if they want to control who sees it and who doesn't.

HN types traditionally have a hard time with the distinction between things they SHOULD do and things they have a RIGHT to do.

"Why not respect the site owners wishes ? "

The answer, overwhelmingly with the HN demographic, is "because we don't HAVE to."

> I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

There's a surprising number of tankies ("State violence is okay if it's against people I don't like") on HN.

I wouldn't use the word "tankie" since that's specifically about communists. There are exceeding few communists on HN. That isn't to say there's a disturbingly large number of authoritarians here, but they're of the opposite persuasion.

Source?

I mean they might ban twitter as well then, but they don't.

#freejulianassange

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