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'Protestware' is on the rise, with programmers self-sabotaging their own code. Should we be worried?

  • Written by: Christoph Treude, Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne
'Protestware' is on the rise, with programmers self-sabotaging their own code. Should we be worried?Alexander Sinn/Unsplash

In March 2022, the author of node-ipc, a software library with over a million weekly downloads, deliberately broke their code. If the code discovers it is running within Russia or Belarus, it attempts to replace the contents of every file on the user’s computer with a heart emoji.

A software library is a collection of...

Read more: 'Protestware' is on the rise, with programmers self-sabotaging their own code. Should we be worried?

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