Comment by ignoramous

5 months ago

TFA goes: A window for response (commonly 14 days) is offered, unless unfeasible due to seriousness and time restraints of the request itself. If the developer disputes the claim and provides supporting information (e.g. license, public domain status, fair use justification), the claim is reviewed.

As someone who has had multiple FOSS projects take down by companies / app stores (happens when we go viral in some country), DDoS'd by rouge actors (thanks for saving our bacon, Cloudflare!), visits from law enforcement etc; F-Droid's post on "appeals process" comes as a surprise. Here's the email I received from them:

  Dear The Rethink DNS Authors,

  The F-Droid platform has received an official order from Roskomnadzor (RKN), Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, IT, and Mass Media, regarding Rethink (Registry Entry #3133609-РИ) https://f-droid.org/ru/packages/com.celzero.bravedns/
  ...

  F-Droid took technical measures to block your website app page for the Russian site visitors to avoid the risk of limited access to F-Droid as a whole. For further queries or concerns, contact legal@f-droid.org.

  Thank you for your cooperation.

Nothing in there informs me that I had the opportunity to appeal.

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ignoramous

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3np  5 months ago

How recently was this experience?

TFA frames this all as recent and ongoing learnings and changes at F-Droid. Given the notability of your project (kudos and thanks), perhaps they'd appreciate your input.

  • ignoramous  5 months ago

    > How recently was this experience

    The email I shared here? 27th Aug 2025.

    > perhaps they'd appreciate your input

    The folks who run F-Droid are very welcoming, no doubt. But the email asked us to direct queries to legal at f-droid.org, and for us, legal is something we have no time/energy/capability to pursue (unless there's explicit offer of help, viz. "window for response", that I am hearing only for the first-time and from this blog post).

    > notability of your project (kudos and thanks)

    Rethink DNS + Firewall? Barely at 10% of installs as the most popular project in the domain (NetGuard), but thanks! (:

    • 3np  5 months ago

      Cheers! 10% is nothing to scoff at!

      ...While I have your ear: IME ReThink DNS often runs into bootstrapping problems since 1) preconfigured DNS servers are referenced by hostname, not IP 2) I can't find a way to separately configure server address and TLS name (making it impossible to configure DoH/DoT servers via IP).

      So users often run into "catch 22" where they need existing DNS to resolve their DNS server... When roaming it may work fine for a bit until the local cache drops it, and so on.

      Allowing to separately configure TLS hostname for TLS-enabled protocols, and having a preseeded list of IPs for bundled provider endpoints, would mean ReThink DNS could work reliably even in absense of existing DNS.

      cf tls_auth_name for stubby. https://dnsprivacy.org/dns_privacy_daemon_-_stubby/configuri...

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