Perjury: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian lying and scapegoating
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
In the next snippets of Debian vendetta-by-lawyer, we are going to pick out the examples of perjury.
On 6 November 2023, I signed the order canceling the Debian trademark registration in Switzerland. If we were dealing with reasonable people, that would be the end of the matter.
In the bundle of papers submitted to the Swiss judge, Axel Beckert of ETH Zurich writes the nasty accusation that if people don't join Debian then it is all because of the questions I ask. If these Germans get their wish to put subversive people who ask ethical questions back into the gas chambers today, does anybody really believe there will be a rush of new contributors waiting to join the day after?
In the first week of December 2023, I published the blog confirming the trademark registration was canceled.
Another few weeks passed and then on 27 December, Rafael Laboissière started an email discussion about Community renewal and project obsolescence. Clicking his link gives a chart showing that Debian has been slowly declining over more than twenty years. The chart proves this has nothing to do with me. It is a general trend. Stubborn men like Beckert refuse to adapt.
The email and report by Rafael Laboissière and Sébastien Villemot proves beyond any doubt that Beckert lied to the lawyers and a judge. Perjury.
Subject: Community renewal and project obsolescence
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2023 21:12:17 +0100
From: Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org>
Organization: Debian GNU/Linux
To: Debian Project <debian-project@lists.debian.org>
CC: Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org>
Dear Debian fellows,
This is a very simple-minded analysis about the Debian community (lack of) renewal and project obsolescence:
https://salsa.debian.org/rafael/debian-contrib-years
containing interesting comments made by Sébastien Villemot.
Best,
Rafael Laboissière, DD
In other words, they revealed this evidence just a few weeks after the conclusion of the legal procedure.
Looking at the years on the X-axis, we can see decline begins with the creation of Ubuntu, it continues through the suicide of Frans Pop (Debian Day 2010) and the decline is helped by the regular lynch mobs. What will be the final deathblow to this project? The scapegoating, the censorship or the arrogance? There is a steep drop in 2018, coinciding with the leadership of Chris Lamb and the Debian Christmas Lynchings. That is when we saw the high arrogance of Chris Lamb attacking volunteers at Christmas. Many potential volunteers don't know who is right or wrong, they simply avoid groups who behave like this.
Beckert's paragraph of rampant dishonesty suggests that I am responsible for the defamation culture in Debian. But that is also clearly a lie: in one of my previous blogs, I published a series of emails from debian-private showing how rabid dogs got together to tear down Jacob Appelbaum. One of the most glaring examples of defamation culture in Debian is the email from character assassin Enrico Zini to the ITWire journalist Sam Varghese.
Here is another email from the falsified rape accusations. Russell Coker lives all the way over the other side of the world in Australia, how can he possibly make such strong assertions that a smear from people in Berlin is credible? This is an example of the extraordinary defamation that Debianists are creating all by themselves, they didn't have any help from me in making this up.
Subject: Re: Expulsion of Jacob Appelbaum <error> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 03:19:15 +1000 From: Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> To: Erinn Clark <erinn@debian.org>, debian-private@lists.debian.org
I agree that the message sent to potential future predators and to victims is more important than harm to Jacob's future life. Jacob could have refrained from sexually abusing other people to prevent harm to his future life, but he chose not to.
It's his choice. If I had a choice I'd have chosen to have all his victims have happy lives free of sexual abuse. Jacob chose otherwise.
When I posted to the Linux Australia list I mentioned all the organisations that no longer count Jacob as a member to encourage people to make a decision that will protect people in my local Linux community.
Beckert's testimony claims that the fear of defamation turns people away. But I am not the source of it. It has been there all along. In my writing, I simply try to hold a mirror up to these people and this is the ugly reflection that appears. See the chronological history of harassment, abuse, deaths and suicides around Debian
The ultimate proof that Beckert's testimony is fraudulent comes from the first resignation of Frans Pop, the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide victim. In 2007, Frans Pop told us:
Subject: [Very long] Post-partem rant and retrospective Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:56:11 +0200 From: Frans Pop To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
I've decided to write this in a separate mail because I'm afraid this may get long. Quite a bit of this has been written before, but I hope some of you will bear with me.
[snip]
So, what has made me decide to leave the project. It's a combination of just plain emotional stress over the whole Sven Luther issue, frustration with the inability of the project to deal with that and with some other issues, and frustration with the fact that a fair number of members of the project seem to feel that as long as you don't upload packages with trojans, pretty much anything is OK.
Axel Beckert is one of many stubborn people in the Debian cabal who refuse to listen to Frans Pop and everybody else who resigned or suicided. He is employed as a system administrator in a large Swiss university, the ETH Zurich. Having full administrative control of their servers gets to his big head. He thinks he can make judgments over the lives of volunteers and our families, blaming everybody except himself for the decline of Debian.
In a previous blog, I showed how these liars gave CHF 18,500 to a judge to denounce me after the death of my father. In a country where denouncing foreigners and handling corrupt money frequently makes Switzerland the subject of international ridicule, Debianists like Beckert have brought these two themes together to beat me over the head.
Below is an email Beckert sent to the debian-private gossip network, which has been widely leaked now, boasting about all his powers at ETH Zurich.
Working in network security today requires the highest level of integrity. The manner in which Beckert helped to create and propagate lies after the death of my father not only casts doubt on his own integrity but also that of the institution employing him.
Subject: Job change, some RFAs ahead Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2016 21:30:53 +0200 From: Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org> Organization: The Debian Project To: debian-private@lists.debian.org CC: elmar@heebs.ch
Hi,
TL;DR: I'm still at ETH Zürich, but no more at D-PHYS. Still have root on ftp.ch.debian.org. Will probably RFA some packages.
FYI: I've changed jobs with the beginning of this month as some of you already know. It's an internal change and I still work at ETH Zürich, but I switched from the IT Services/Support Group (short: ISG) of the Department of Physics (short: D-PHYS) to ETH's central IT services ("Informatikdienste", short: ID), joining their Network Security Group (short: NSG):
https://www.ethz.ch/de/die-eth-zuerich/organisation/abteilungen/informatikdienste/personen/ict-networks-a-z/id-ictnet-06024.html
The NSG also (but not only) operates as ETH's CERT and is recipient of mails to abuse@ethz.ch.
My work e-mail also changed, it's now the nice and short axel@ethz.ch :-) instead of beckert@phys.ethz.ch. And I'm now working on a different campus (City center instead of Hönggerberg).
With that move I'm following Elmar Heeb (DM, some of you might know him, e.g. from DebConf13 and DebConf15) who changed from ISG D-PHYS to NSG about 1.5 years ago already.
The group I have been part of the past 10 years runs and continues to run debian.ethz.ch aka ftp.ch.debian.org (despite they mostly use Ubuntu nowadays *sigh*). I though was granted to keep root access to the mirror, so I can still fix things there in short term. We also created a dedicated e-mail address mirror@phys.ethz.ch which reaches both, them and me. (Already recorded in Mirrors.masterlist: https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/mirror/Mirrors.masterlist?r1=1.2567&r2=1.2568)
Since I maintain some of my packages just because they're used at D-PHYS, there will be some changes, but luckily the impact for Debian is rather small:
Packages which could need a new maintainer or some help:
* dphys-config: Neither Elmar nor me use it anymore. It's though still in heavy use at D-PHYS. Will probably RFA it and continue to maintain it for now unless somebody else steps in.
* ldap-git-backup: Difficult. Elmar and me are both, package maintainer as well as upstream and we no more use it ourself, but still like the idea. We consider it being in "maintenance mode", despite there are some interesting feature ideas in BTS. Also seems to have performance issues with older Git releases (e.g. 1.7.x as in Wheezy). Long-term future still unclear. RFA sounds like a fitting idea, but it will probably include upstream.
* pconsole: Already RFA'ed, see #696888. I use it only very seldomly (I prefer mssh nowadays), but I will continue to maintain it for now.
* xen-tools: Took it over (upstream as well as in Debian) in 2010 from Steve Kemp (when he switched to using KVM only) because it's used a lot at D-PHYS. I also use it for the Linux User Group Switzerland's servers, but there I need it far less often. So I expect less activity from my side on this package and project. A co-maintainer would be appreciated. Will probably write an RFH for xen-tools and also post a note on the upstream mailing lists.
Packages which you do not need to worry about:
* gnudatalanguage: Ole luckily agreed quite a while ago to become co-maintainer and we moved the package under the umbrella of Debian Astro Team. He even managed to find a fix and do an NMU for plplot which I didn't managed for the most recent issue. So gnudatalanguage is in good hands already. Nevertheless I promised Ole to stay a co-maintainer for now. (It was the only package I never used myself, but maintained it because my users used it.)
* xymon: Still use it at home and Elmar Heeb and me also plan to establish Xymon inside the NSG, so I'll continue to maintain Xymon together with Christoph Berg.
* dphys-swapfile: Still use it at home and is part of Raspbian's default installation. So for now, I'll continue to maintain it.
* aptitude-robot: Both, Elmar and me still use it and we will continue to maintain it.
* dh-dist-zilla: Both, Elmar and me still use it and we will continue to maintain it.
* mb2md: You usually need that package only once in your life. While D-PHYS no more needs it, I still have to do the migration from mbox to Maildir on my private mail server. But it's team-maintained anyways. :-)
* unburden-home-dir: Has been developed for D-PHYS, but never forcefully used for all users there because in the meanwhile, $XDG_* variables are recognized by most applications which tend to DoS D-PHYS's NFS servers, so D-PHYS went for that. I nevertheless still use and continue to develop it, upstream as well as in Debian.
All of my other packages were not or only vaguely related to my previous job and are hence not affected by my job change.
P.S.: Never to be disclosed without an explicit grant from me.
Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE