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Going Viral: Case Studies on the Impact of Protestware

Published: 23 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Maintainers are now self-sabotaging their work in order to take political or economic stances, a practice referred to as "protestware". In this poster, we present our approach to understand how the discourse about such an attack went viral, how it is received by the community, and whether developers respond to the attack in a timely manner. We study two notable protestware cases, i.e., Colors.js and es5-ext, comparing with discussions of a typical security vulnerability as a baseline, i.e., Ua-parser, and perform a thematic analysis of more than two thousand protest-related posts to extract the different narratives when discussing protestware.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-Companion '24: Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
April 2024
531 pages
ISBN:9798400705021
DOI:10.1145/3639478
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 23 May 2024

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  1. protestware
  2. software ecosystems
  3. case studies

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ICSE-Companion '24
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