Re: What? - Pipedot

What? (Score: 1, Interesting)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 07:12 (#2T3S)

Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.

What?

OK, there is someone named Jake. There was a github repo. There were documents? There is something called "Operation Disrespectful Nod"?

"Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago." is not a sentence. Or at least is a horrible one. But specifically:

documents for a letter writing campaign (what does that mean?)
to advertisers (so - letters to advertisers?)
for the publishers of game media articles (so... uh... game mags and/or review websites?)
declaring gamers dead (nope - you lost me. are all gamers dead? I'm not dead, so I don't think that's what you mean.)
just over a month ago. (uh... something happened just over a month ago. No link. Did gamers die? Or was the repo deleted? Or was that when the repo was created? Huh?)

After clicking a few links, none of this is much clearer - except there is lots of drama. Most of it sounds mostly imagined.

GitHub was hosting a public repo that they didn't want to host, so they nuked it. So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?

Re: What? (Score: 3, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 12:57 (#2T3X)

This is very important news for anyone and everyone in the software industry. That includes a lot of the readers here at Pipedot.

Maybe you've never done software development. If you haven't, you may not realize just how important source code, asset, and documentation management is. Well, it's very important.

GitHub claims to provide a solution to these sorts of problems. But one of the most critical features of any such solution is the safety of the data involved. It can't just disappear overnight, whether by accident, by incident, or by manual deletion by an employee of the company tasked with storing the data.

We need to know which solutions we can trust with our data, and which we cannot.

If a public repo can be removed in such a manner, apparently without any sort of due process, then it could very well happen to a private one.

Organizations just can't take that kind of a risk with critical data, or with systems that are important to their everyday software development practices.

We need to know when our critical data may be lost without warning. This incident is thus something we need to know about.

Re: What? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 14:39 (#2T3Y)

Then for goodness sake pay for it! Why in all the world would even the tiniest, poorest organization rely on the good graces of ANY "free" service to do ANYTHING important?

And YES that includes Gmail!

If you want some assurance your project will actually be there tomorrow, pay under $5 per month for hosting and back it up, or distribute it among your members as Git had intended.

I appreciate the reactions here, but come on. There are a LOT of more important and serious topics on Pipedot that aren't getting this kind of attention. And yeah I too had trouble parsing the summary.

Re: What? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 18:17 (#2T45)

I apologize for the summary, It was tough for me to balance. I'm pro-Gamer Gate, but I didn't want this to be "about" Gamer Gate. It's tough to separate "Github developer deletes repository of alleged harassment campaign" without going on a huge rant bringing my personal Gamer Gate views into it. I tried to just give the relevant information and evidence that essentially a developer received a tweet and deleted a repo and tried to demonstrate he did this based on his personal agenda rather than based on any real facts that the repo supported a harassment campaign.

The fact that Git developers have and abuse that power is the issue here. I work on a MAJOR government project that's distributed all across the country, open for public use and development, with hundreds of of people working on it. I believe someone pays for it, I'm a just code monkey on the project so I don't know for sure. What's not to say that someone in the private sector doesn't like the competition from a free alternative and wants their for profit project to be the only one or have an edge. They tweet a dev at Github and say my project is a harassment campaign related to Gamer Gate and, without even looking at the contents of the project, Git just deletes it?

It's something we need to be conscious of and prepared for through methods like what you've mentioned and/or by using another central server, maybe setting up our own. It's important in the professional software development space.

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