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: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 18:05 (#2T43)

I am a developer. I use github. So I know that if they were to pull my public repos without warning that I could petition them to get the data back and they would be totally reasonable about it. I know that because I have actually come very close to having that discussion with them for a private repo that was unexpectedly nuked (my fault).

What's more, I know that my local git repo had everything that got nuked, so it was a non issue.

I think that covers it.

Re: What? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 18:27 (#2T46)

Getting the data back isn't the point and even less the problem. GitHub comes from 'git', which is a a distributed revision control and source code management system. So if you are a developer and use git, chances are high, that you have the complete source tree on your local machine anyways. But for a single developer using GitHub is almost a bit overkill. Its real value comes as central repository for developer teams. Especially in self organized open source teams. Being forced to move somewhere else can cost money, e.g. if a website has to be adjusted to point to the new repository. I might break 3rd party links, which makes documents harder to find. The larger the team, the higher the logistic efforts till normal work can continue as usual.

Definitely not a non issue.

Re: What? (Score: 0)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 03:24 (#2T4H)

Help me out, then.

In what way, exactly, is this particular case an issue?

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