Statement on We Make Fedora

News & Announcements Community Blog
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Originally published at: Statement on We Make Fedora – Fedora Community Blog

As part of our Code of Conduct, the Fedora Project has pledged to collaborate in a respectful and constructive manner, to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, to avoid personal attacks on others, and to avoid inflammatory language and speech that perpetuates discrimination. 

Recently, the website We Make Fedora (WMF) has come to our attention. WMF scrapes and aggregates (via RSS/Atom) the blog feeds from Fedora and Fedora contributor sites. These scraped posts are intermingled on WMF with other posts.

The Fedora Project does not endorse We Make Fedora. The site maintainer is not a member of the Fedora Project community and is unaffiliated with Fedora. Further, WMF has not committed to follow our Code of Conduct and has not made the same pledges contained therein. 

If you have a blog on Fedora Planet which is appearing on WMF, you may want to include the following statement as a blog header:

Suggested Blog Header

We Make Fedora is not affiliated with the Fedora Community or the contributors to the Fedora Linux operating system. If you read this post on We Make Fedora, it might be there without permission. We encourage you to read this content at its source.

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Is there any contact info to have one’s name de-listed? My content is openly licensed but my name is not and I don’t want my name listed as a contributor in the footer of WMF.

Also just a suggestion for anybody else as creeped out by this as I am -

Blocking WMF from access to your RSS feed in order to scrape your posts

I use Wordpress with apache. So in the /blog directory for my wordpress install I have a .htaccess file. I set up a mod_rewrite rule that redirects anyone trying to access my RSS feed from the IP address of We Make Feed to a page that points to this WMF statement.

Here is .htaccess config I use in case it helps someone:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 82\.221\.136\.1
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /feed
    RewriteRule .* /harasser [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

The REQUEST_URI line points to where your Fedora .planet file points to for your blog’s RSS. You can replace the “/harasser” to go wherever you want the redirect to go on your site.

Redirecting any referrals from WMF to the Fedora statement on WMF

If anyone clicks on any link to my blog (front page, post, etc.) they will get automatically redirected to the Fedora community blog statement on WMF.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ⁽.*)\.wemakefedora\.(.*) [NC]
    RewriteRule ⁽.*)$ https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/statement-on-we-make-fedora/ [L,R]
</IfModule>

Other Methods
I found this page to have useful information that others may find helpful, including how to just block outright without a redirect:

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Good post!

I’d like to mention that there is also fedora.email. There should be a statement that this is not the Fedora Project’s service.

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I’ll forward this to legal. Thanks.

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Thank you for that statement!

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Ugh, as someone whose blog is on GitLab Pages, I wonder what’s the best way to block them. There’s no equivalent of htaccess, and I take it they won’t be nice enough to honor a robots.txt telling them kindly to please go away?

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If you own your own domain, one solution could be a proxy. I kinda dislike recommending Cloudflare, but that’s a feature the service provide.

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Also, blocking the aggregation is the nicest solution.

Feed aggregators like this are not made to support a adversarial blog, as the assumption is that you only aggregate folks you trust.

But there is dozen of way to sabotage a website like this if you are syndicated.

For example, redirecting/proxying just your feed URL to the wemakefedora feed URL would surely have a interesting results on the website feed.

Redirecting it to a big file is going to also be annoying for the operator. It would be a shame if the redirection was pointing on a 21 G compressed XML file that would be uncompressed in ram to see if it is a proper atom feed, and the build process start to go OoM every time (not to mention clogging the network pipe and exploding the bandwidth cost if paid by usage like on AWS).

But feed content can also be a vector. A specific feed full of empty posts using zero width space all made in the last 5 minutes would monopolize the aggregator (who show the last X posts). A feed full of incorrect HTML will break the layout. Correct but expensive HTML would make the website unusable. Have you ever seen how a browser react with 200 nested tables and images without having the size of each file ?

And for real nasty stuff, I am sure a feed full of link that will attract copyright lawyers can result in a quick and swift action from the hosting company if the person responsible do not react.

Really, aggregating people against their will is asking for trouble.

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The site does have, at the verrrrry bottom of the page, " This is an independent, censorship-resistant site run by volunteers. This site and the blogs of individual volunteers are not officially affiliated with or endorsed by the Fedora Project."

Doesn’t change the fact this site is mirroring other people’s content without permission…

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If it is truly without permission, meaning the original content was published without a license or with a license that does not permit republication/distribution, then if the aggregator site is in the US a DMCA request could be used to shut it down.

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The website is not in the US, but hosted in Iceland by a “free speech” provider. It is also on a server hosted in Switzerland, on a professional optical fiber line (with a dedicated IP range ). The person behind the website is also based there, so I guess that’s just built in some basement or something.

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Reading the creative protest ideas shared here makes me grin. Given the nonconsensual aggregation of our content on a website that seems only to exist to cause emotional and reputational harm against others in our community and other neighboring Linux communities, these ideas seem like effective inconveniencing.

P.S. – If anyone knows a clever way to do something like the .htaccess method but with NGINX instead, I’m all ears.

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@jflory7 referral redirect can be done with:

 location / {
   if ($http_referer ~ '.*wemakefedora.org') {
     return 302 https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/statement-on-we-make-fedora/ ;
   }
 }
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Let’s please not engage in “counter-trolling”, even if that seems fun. Best to keep things simple, factual, and above-board. Thanks.

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And for blocking the aggregation directly, that’s even more simple:

deny 82.221.136.1;

It can be placed in server, location or http block.

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I’ve recently found out a website that scrapes and aggregates articles from Fedora Magazine: https://poplinux.tech/. An article I’ve written a while ago is listed there, without crediting or mentioning Fedora Magazine. I’ve also found other Fedora Magazine articles in there.

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It doesn’t credit “Fedora Magazine”. But it appears that “Fedora” is credited fairly thoroughly (at the top of each page, again at the bottom of each page, and everything is under the “Fedora” category in the left-hand sidebar. I don’t see a problem with this site personally. We have even encouraged such forks of the Fedora Magazine site in the past for purposes of translation into other languages. This one looks harmless to me. But maybe I’m overlooking something?

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Saying “Fedora” is different than providing credit, in particular because author names are removed and the author retains copyright, they don’t assign it to the project. The site also does not appear to attach a license to the content, which means it doesn’t preserve the rights ensured by the ShareAlike clauses. It’s a pretty straightforward violation of CC BY-SA 4.0 on two fronts.

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OK. I’m no lawyer and I don’t even pretend to be one. :slightly_smiling_face: Thanks for pointing out the problems. So I guess these issues entitle us to take some sort of action in response? What sort of actions can/should be pursued? Should we just ask them to comply with the CC BY-SA 4.0 requirements? Should we ask them to “cease and desist” sharing the Fedora Magazine content? Should we attempt to ban/block their site from reading the Fedora Magazine content?

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Usually, this is the best place to start.