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by ziddoap 1414 days ago
>Similarly if you distribute OSS viruses don't act shocked if people want to harass you over it - distributing viruses is illegal in some places

Plenty of legitimate software can be used for nefarious things (and sometimes the legitimate code is indistinguishable from malicious code, e.g. remote viewers).

We should probably focus on the people and the actions those people take, rather than code itself, or we might end up in a bit of a pickle. Ban encryption because it's used in ransomware. Ban tech-support software like TeamViewer or QuickAssist because it is used in scams.
2 comments
kevingadd 1414 days ago
Tornado Cash exists for money laundering. That's the thing it does. You can believe money laundering should be legal, or that there are legitimate uses for the software, but the fact is that the software appears to be against US law, so nobody should be surprised that the authors got sanctioned.

The vast majority of OSS software does not have this hazard and it does everyone a disservice to pretend that the situation is identical. There are a bunch of other things OSS maintainers should be worrying about before US sanctions.

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capableweb 1414 days ago
> Tornado Cash exists for money laundering

Maybe you don't know exactly what "money laundering" is. That you want to hide whatever you are doing doesn't mean that what you're doing is illegal, which is a prerequisite for something to be "money laundering". Just like E2E doesn't exists solely for hiding criminals doing criminal things.

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ziddoap 1414 days ago
>You can believe money laundering should be legal, or that there are legitimate uses for the software, but the fact is that the software appears to be against US law, so nobody should be surprised that the authors got sanctioned.

I'm not sure if you understood my comment. I don't care about the authors and whether or not they were sanctioned. My point was about the code itself. If we started to force GH and the like to remove any code that has been used in an illegal activity, there's going to be very little code left on GH.

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froh_away 1414 days ago
Right, and also note that plenty of "nefarious" software can be used for legitimate things.

Just think of malware analysis or feeding malware to the machine-learning monster.

In the end, it's just information and can be interpreted in a myriad of ways and for all kinds of purposes, including the good ol' simple satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. But many people in this thread seem to have a zero bit mind. By that I mean that they have a single bit dichotomy good(allow)/bad(ban) world that invariably has the value "bad(ban)".

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