Linux Developer Swatted and Handcuffed During Live Video Stream

Last October Slashdot reported on René Rebe's discovery of a random illegal instruction speculation bug on AMD Ryzen 7000-series and Epyc Zen 4 CPUs — which Rebe discussed on his YouTube channel.

But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware...

Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...

[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.

Rebe has been contributing to Linux 'since as early as 1998,' according to the article, 'and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well.' (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)

The article points out that Linux and other communities 'are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.