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Ok, what's the true story?

It is obviously allowed to discuss Linux. There is plenty of discussion about Linux on Facebook, including some about the recent "ban".

My guess is that some automated scanner found something wrong about the linked page. Maybe there is some link to a "hacking"-oriented distro, maybe some torrents, some dubious comment, etc... Probably a false positive, it happens.



Probably some jobsworth decided that free software = piracy.

I knew a company that leapt to the same conclusion regarding GitHub.


Meta is one of the biggest contributors to free software in the world. They certainly don’t believe that it’s equivalent to piracy. If your guess is indeed what happened, it will be corrected by higher-ups soon.


It is perfectly possible that someone at a lower level, especially a non-technical person, would believe that. Moderators are not going to be highly paid and skilled people.

It has to get to the attention of higher ups.

The one time I have reported a comment to FB, it was horrible racism (said "do not interbreed with [group x] because they are [evil - not sure of exact wording]" and got a reply saying that it did not violate community standards.


I thought Facebook fired all the human moderators ?


But at this point, in 2025, it's perfectly reasonable for GAFAMs (and other Russian/Chinese/USian infocoms) to be blocked (ideally at the state level).

And particularly in the context of work primarily about communication or computing : having an official Xitter account for a journalist or a GitHub account for a software developer is like promoting a brand of cigarettes or opiates by a doctor - a violation of professional deontology.


The pic accompanying mentions openKylin. Kylin is China's Unix, formerly based on FreeBSD, now Linux/Ubuntu.

I presume that it is used for launching hacks, but even so discussion should not be banned.

Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole story.


“ Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole story.”

Nobody outside of Facebook can possibly know the whole story. Hell, most people within Facebook can’t know, either.

Are you suspecting that distrowatch knows more about the context than they are letting on?


They know more than us, by definition. They could do more analysis and not be so dramatic. I'm not alleging anything nefarious.


But how else are you going to get the clicks?


Kali is one example. That said Kali is not a bad thing.


We are obligated to have an external auditor run PCI DSS penetration testing and network segmentation testing every year.

Their second request (after a network diagram) is always to create an EC2 instance running Kali.

Which, honestly, confuses me a bit -- all of the packages are available in AL or Ubuntu, so why do they care? I don't know, and I guess I don't care enough to ask. Just give me the attestation document please. :)


My assumption is it's for reducing the number of things they need to configure, and therefore troubleshoot.

It's easy to say "The newest Kali release is the distro the org will use" instead of "Use whatever Linux flavor you want and here's an install script that may or may not work or break depending on your distro and/or distro's version".

Them spending time troubleshooting a setup that's out-of-spec is still time billed, so it's better for their customers for everything to roll smoothly too. They also just want to execute their job well, not spend time debugging script / build issues.


From my experience, it is obviously not all the packages in Kali Repo will be in Ubuntu (or other regular distro) Repl. Lots of specific pentesting tool can be installed with just `apt install ...` in Kali, which make it a lot more convenient when you need to do pentesting.


Out of the box experience and some extra scripts :-)


Think about all the time saved not having to do sudo or su.


Kali has actually used a non-root user as default for a while now.

Anyways, if you don't run `sudo -s` as your first command in a shell - are you really hacking?


They don't know how to use Linux they just know Kali


More like compiling a bunch of github projects written by hackers is a pain in the ass, so “make me an ec2 with Kali” is more cost effective


Fair point


pic mentions openKylin, I suppose Kylin is a bit like Kali?

Likewise, discussion should be allowed.

The actual title of this story is literally not believable if you take the most generic meaning of discussion and Linux.

I'd go even further: I don't believe that anyone could believe that the title is believable.


It is believable if you've experienced anything to do with moderation on Facebook. It's a dystopian experience that defies any ordinary expectation of normalcy.




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