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Github staff Jake Boxer disables #GamerGate operation disrespectful nod repository

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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 Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 21:12 (#2T48)

What's to say they wouldn't remove a repo even if it was being paid for?

See, that's the whole problem that companies that use GitHub are facing now. Due to this incident, there's uncertainty about how safe their code and other assets stored in GitHub truly are.

And if a company does go and set up their own git servers somewhere, what's the point in continuing to use and pay GitHub? The whole point of using GitHub is that they're supposed to provide and maintain the infrastructure. But if there's this risk of deletion forever looming over GitHub users, and these backup git servers are already in place, a company might as well just get rid of GitHub and use their own servers.

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Time Reason Points Voter
2014-10-06 10:45 Troll -1 vanderhoth@pipedot.org

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