Tag: technology

Now, this is one CoC I’d like to see more open source projects adopting.

1. Overview
Having been encouraged by clients to adopt a written code of conduct, the SQLite developers elected to govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the “instruments of good works” from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This code of conduct has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.

This rule is strict, and none are able to comply perfectly. Grace is readily granted for minor transgressions. All are encouraged to follow this rule closely, as in so doing they may expect to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives. The entire rule is good and wholesome, and yet we make no enforcement of the more introspective aspects.

Everyone is free to use the SQLite source code, object code, and/or documentation regardless of their opinion of and adherence to this rule. SQLite has been and continues to be completely free to everyone, without precondition.

However, those who wish to participate in the SQLite community, either by commenting on the public mailing lists or by contributing patches or suggestions or in any other way, are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that honors the overarching spirit of the rule, even if they disagree with specific details. Polite and professional discussion is always welcomed, from anyone.

2. The Rule
First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. Then, love your neighbor as yourself.

Read the whole thing there. If it was good enough for St. Benedict’s little project, it’s good enough for yours.

Thank you for contacting Indiegogo’s Customer Happiness team! This is an automated note to confirm we’ve received your message and will review it shortly. As we are currently experiencing a high number of requests, it may take us longer than usual to respond, however, a member of our team will be in touch as soon as possible.

A high number of requests. That seems unusual. I wonder why that might be?

On a not-necessarily-unrelated note, will the VFM who emailed me the detailed information on Indiegogo’s current financial status send it again, please? I don’t currently have access to the machine on which I’ve got the email and there are some people who would like to review it. At first glance, it does not appear Indiegogo is presently in any shape to play the extend-and-bleed game that GT Interactive tried unsuccessfully with us for two years before finally submitting to our requirements.

Amazon ditches its HR-replacement AI for violating several of its assumptions:

Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars – much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

The problem of the machine not spitting out results preferred by those using it is hardly new. And while the article claims that “gender bias was not the only issue” and that “problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs” is almost certainly true, the problem is that Amazon did not give its AI a fair shake.

Amazon simply assumed that the undesired preference for male employees and “unqualified candidates” was a bug rather than the feature that it may have been. If the AI actually worked, then it would have undermined not only the concept of sexual equality, but credentialism as well. But instead of actually allowing the experiment to proceed and seeing if those unqualified male candidates recommended by the AI were successful employees, they chose to kill it on the basis of its violation of their preconceived ideas.

It’s too bad that they didn’t allow the experiment to play out, because the complete destruction of corporate credentialism is desperately needed in today’s increasingly competitive global marketplace. Then again, given how Amazon already dominates the online retail space, it’s probably just as well for their competitors that they turned away from the possible advantage the AI-HR system might have given them.

It’s clear that they cannot be trusted to behave themselves:

Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

As part of its response to the incident, the Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -1.02{1b4a17090ef37332a63a154d15b230452661fe8143e5800412403fcfe8797416} unit on Monday announced a sweeping set of data privacy measures that include permanently shutting down all consumer functionality of Google+. The move effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook Inc. FB -0.05{1b4a17090ef37332a63a154d15b230452661fe8143e5800412403fcfe8797416} and is widely seen as one of Google’s biggest failures.

A software glitch in the social site gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue, according to the documents and people briefed on the incident. A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.

And for all the libertarians this offends, remember, a corporation is a government entity. Trading elected government rule for unelected corporate rule is not an improvement.

I have my doubts about this guy as a lawyer, but this particular observation is astute and potentially very significant.

WAIT JUST A DANG MINUTE…WHAT? Did Apple just say it is a curator of content and therefore NOT protected by Safe Harbor in copyright and CDA 230?

What he’s referring to is this interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook with Vice News Tonight:

In an interview with Vice News Tonight on HBO Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly explained some of the reasoning behind removing Alex Jones and InfoWars from the company’s podcast app and App Store. According to Cook, the move wasn’t politically motivated, or coordinated with any other tech companies, as he denied ever discussing the subject with them.

Instead, he said: “What users want from us and what we’ve always provided them is a curated platform. We think that what the user wants is someone that does review these apps, someone that does review the podcasts, someone that on like Apple news, where a human is selecting the top stories. And that’s what we do.”

What this means is that Apple has publicly established that it is legally liable for all the content on its platform.

You know, I don’t recall conservative sites shedding a lot of tears when Milo and I were banned from Twitter. Why is anyone supposed to be concerned about Twitter bans now targeting conservatives? No doubt these people will expect everyone to be deeply outraged when garden variety Republicans start finding themselves demonetized as well as deplatformed, as has never, ever happened before to anyone in the entire history of the Internet.

At approximately 9 pm eastern on October 2, ten conservative twitter accounts owned by ten different entities were suspended by Twitter.  When the account owners contacted Twitter to get the details of what they supposedly did wrong and appeal the punishment,  no reason was provided. Instead,  the “bluebirds of punishment” sent them notices that they were permanently banned.

Eight of the accounts booted by twitter were connected to websites; two were personal accounts:

@constitutionNat: Constitution.com
@theEagleRising: Eagle Rising.com
@flagandC: FlagandCross.com
@RedrightRepub: SteadfastHerald.com
@GreatAmRepub: AllenWestRepublic.com
@Army4OurRepub: GreatAmericanRepublic.com
@luvGodnCountry: Personal Account For Tanya Grimsley
@bb4SP:  BB4SP.com
@deplorableNews : DeplorableNews.com
@ BarracudaMama: Personal Account For Alicia Luke

Well, they’re all racist bigot Nazi hate extremists and information terrorists anyhow, so they probably deserved it, right? If you don’t bother to pay any attention when the camel sticks his nose in the tent, you just don’t have much cause for complaint or sympathy when he subsequently starts voiding his bladder right in the middle of it.

It’s almost comical the way Wired is now attempting to blame GamerGate for both the election of Donald Trump as well as the Kavanaugh confirmation circus. But underneath all the projection and the usual discredit & disqualify routine, the real takeaway is the way the media creeps really don’t like being subjected to the same scrutiny they mete out to the subjects, associates, and acquaintances of their targets in the process of their “investigative” hit pieces.

Many reporters who cover this phenomenon have themselves been swarmed by attacks and harassment from the digital insurgency that these information terrorists—call them the cadre—command. Information terrorism is not a term I apply lightly. But if you accept the core definition of terrorism as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims,” then there are few terms more apt to describe what this group has unleashed against their fellow Americans.

The cadre coalesced and sharpened its edge starting in 2014 with Gamergate before throwing in with then-candidate Trump. It has promoted toxic conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon, and was ever-present around movements from Unite the Right to #releasethememo.

This same information architecture was used to attack Blasey Ford and exonerate Kavanaugh. The attacks on Blasey Ford aimed to discredit and silence her using the same tactics that have been deployed to discredit and silence others over the past few years. As others have come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of wrongdoing—including Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick—they have been similarly harassed and smeared by the same machinery and themes.

Some call this trolling, but that term is far too mild. These are not the proverbial hoodied losers in some basement, engaging with other humans only via videogames and 8chan. This cadre has hundreds of thousands of followers and devotees on Twitter, Instagram, Gab, and other social media, many of whom will post and amplify their views even after the personalities themselves are kicked off the platforms for threats and rules violations. The network also takes advantage of affiliations with increasingly mainstream partisan media outlets that will subscribe to any argument that suits their current agenda.

Ultimately, the followers—who are real people, not bots—are cultivated and activated: They don’t need be told to threaten or harass whoever the new enemy is because they already know their part in the play.

But this obvious sensitivity points to a useful tactic of journalistic reprisal. The next time a reporter contacts someone who is a friend, family member, or business associate in connection with a “story” about you, utilize the information infrastructure to ensure that all of their friends, family members, and Facebook connections are contacted and questioned for an in-depth investigative story on that reporter.

It’s just good journalism, after all. The people have a right to know!

About the author: Molly K. McKew (@MollyMcKew) is an expert on information warfare and the narrative architect at New Media Frontier. She advised Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat in 2014–15.

Translation: The 4DW countermedia has proven so much more effective than the media’s hapless journalist grunts that the media institutions are now running to the Deep State for assistance and higher-quality specialists. “Narrative architect” = political lobbyist, propagandist, and registered foreign agent.

Because in the end, a cuck is always going to cuck, because nothing, literally nothing, is more important to him than not being identified as one of the SJW-denominated “bad guys”:

In an exclusive email to the BBC, Mr Torvalds shared his thoughts on his decision to temporarily step aside, the controversy behind the CoC, and the defects of the community he set up.

“So I’ve obviously long been on record as wanting to deal with the technical side, and not really wanting to get involved in most other discussions.

“Because technology is what I have always found interesting. People? Not my forte. Never has been, clearly. If you watched that TED talk, you’ll know I wasn’t a people person even as a child.

“And if you have read any of the recent stories, you will now know at least one other reason why I’ve wanted to stay away from that whole discussion. Because it’s not just my lack of people skills. It’s the discussions themselves.

“The advantage of concentrating on technology is that you can have some mostly objective measures, and some basis for agreement, and you can have a very nice and healthy community around it all. I really am motivated by the technology, but the community around Linux has been a big positive too.

“But there are very tangible and immediate common goals in any technical project like Linux, and while there is occasionally disagreement about how to solve some particular issue, there is a very real cohesive force in that common goal of improving the project.

“And even when there are disagreements, people in the end often have fairly clear and objective measures of what is better. Code that is faster, simpler, or handles more cases naturally is just objectively ‘better’, without people really having to argue too much about it.

“In contrast, the arguments about behaviour never seem to end up having a common goal. Except, in some sense, the argument itself.

“Have you read the Twitter feeds and other things by the people who seem to care more about the non-technical side? I think your ‘hyped stories’ is about as polite as you can put it. It’s a morass of nastiness. Instead of a ‘common goal’, you end up with horrible fighting between different ‘in-groups’.

“It’s very polarising, and both sides love egging the other side on. It’s not even a ‘discussion’, it’s just people shouting at each other.

“That’s actually the reason I for the longest time did not want to be involved with the whole CoC discussion in the first place. That whole subject seems to very easily just devolve and become unproductive. And I found a lot of the people who pushed for a CoC and criticised me for cursing to be hypocritical and pointless. I could easily point you to various tweet storms by people who criticise my ‘white cis male’ behaviour, while at the same time cursing more than I ever do.

“So that’s my excuse for dismissing a lot of the politically correct concerns for years. I felt it wasn’t worth it. Anybody who uses the words ‘white cis male privilege’ was simply not worth my time even talking to, I felt.

“And I’m still not apologising for my gender or the colour of my skin, or the fact that I happen to have the common sexual orientation.

“What changed? Maybe it was me, but I was also made very aware of some of the behaviour of the ‘other’ side in the discussion.

“Because I may have my reservations about excessive political correctness, but honestly, I absolutely do not want to be seen as being in the same camp as the low-life scum on the internet that think it’s OK to be a white nationalist Nazi, and have some truly nasty misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic behaviour. And those people were complaining about too much political correctness too, and in the process just making my public stance look bad.

“And don’t get me wrong, please – I’m not making excuses for some of my own rather strong language. But I do claim that it never ever was any of that kind of nastiness. I got upset with bad code, and people who made excuses for it, and used some pretty strong language in the process. Not good behaviour, but not the racist/etc claptrap some people spout.

“So in the end, my ‘I really don’t want to be too PC’ stance simply became untenable. Partly because you definitely can find some emails from me that were simply completely unacceptable, and I need to fix that going forward. But to a large degree also because I don’t want to be associated with a lot of the people who complain about excessive political correctness.

“Am I turning into some cuddly people person? I’ll admit that sounds very unlikely. I still care about the technology, and I’m still not exactly the most empathetic person. But I’m hoping I can at least ‘fake it until I make it’. Part of that ‘faking it’ is definitely going to be a filter on my outgoing emails, but as mentioned, I’m actively also trying to find a professional therapist to talk to as well.

“Will everybody be happy? No. People who don’t like my blunt behaviour even when I’m not being actively nasty about it will just see that as ‘look, nothing changed’. I’m trying to get rid of my outbursts, and be more polite about things, but technically wrong is still technically wrong, and I won’t start accepting bad code just to make people feel better about themselves.

“But if people at least realise that I’m not part of the disgusting underbelly of the internet that thinks it’s OK to show the kind of behaviour you will find if you really have been reading up on the ‘discussions’ about the code of conduct, then even that will be a really good thing.

“And again – the above is just my explanation of why I applied the CoC even if there is obviously discussion about it. We will have the maintainer summit in Edinburgh next month, and we’ll talk about this issue a lot more.

“In the meantime, I’m taking a break from the kernel and probably shouldn’t talk to journalists.”

There are the three key phrases that explain his previously inexplicable actions:

• I absolutely do not want to be seen as being in the same camp as the low-life scum on the internet that think it’s OK to be a white nationalist Nazi, and have some truly nasty misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic behaviour. 
• I don’t want to be associated with a lot of the people who complain about excessive political correctness. 
• I’m not part of the disgusting underbelly of the internet….

Never trust a nerd to stand his ground. No matter what principles he espouses, no matter how tough he talks, at the end of the day all he really wants is to be accepted by the popular people. “Asbestos underpants” should never be confused with actually possessing iron balls and integrity.

Torvalds has destroyed his tech legacy, and he did it for less than nothing. What a contemptible, cowardly action. I have little doubt he’ll eventually come to regret this, but by then it will be too late.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Torvalds failed to protect his tech legacy. The man failed his daughter too.

You were active in the Feminism Club at your high school. What did you learn from that experience? What feminist issues are most important to you now?

My friend and I co-founded Feminism Club at our high school late in our sophomore year. We did receive lots of resistance to the club at first, and while that never entirely went away, by the time we graduated feminist ideals were absolutely a part of the school’s culture. The feminist work we did at my high school was generally on a more immediate scale and focused on issues like the dress code.

Personally, I’m very focused on intersectional feminism, which is feminism as it applies to other aspects of oppression like racism and classism. The Facebook page Guerrilla Feminism is a great example of an intersectional feminism and has done so much to educate me. I currently run the Portland branch.

Feminism is also important to me in terms of diversity in tech, although as an upper-class white woman with strong connections in the tech world, the problems here affect me much less than they do other people. The same goes for my involvement in intersectional feminism. Publications like Model View Culture are very inspiring to me, and I admire Shanley Kane so much for what she does.

It’s long past time to apply antitrust and racketeering and campaign finance laws to the social media giants. Perhaps this experience will inspire the Senate to action.

Several Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had their home addresses and phone numbers released to the public on their Wikipedia pages during Thursday’s hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.The victims included Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The idea is gaining important adherents:

The Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said he would like to see Google, Facebook and other major social media behemoths broken up like the federal government did to Standard Oil more than a century ago. Landry said the internet giants are suppressing conservative agendas, stifling competition, and infringing on antitrust laws. 

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

So as you’re probably aware if you read the blog or if you pay attention to the technology, Linux has been converged in a way that nobody really saw coming. For years, Linux has been protected by the benevolent dictatorship of Linus Torvalds, unfortunately, he came under some heavy pressure. Nobody knows exactly what it’s related to,  but it it looks like there was a New Yorker piece that was focused on him and was essentially calling into question his less-than-polite behavior while contrasting that with his one-and-a-half million dollar annual salary that was paid for largely by corporations that you can expect to take exception to that sort of thing. And so because of that, the SJW cancer that is known as Coraline managed to infest Linux with its code of conduct.

This is something that has been used to attack all kinds of open source projects in the past few years and it’s a very serious threat because it is functionally destroying open source as we know it. You know what codes of conduct are used for, they’re used to target people, target developers that otherwise are considered to be irreplaceable, and they’re used to throw them out. Now a lot of you are familiar with my book SJWs Always Lie, a lot of you probably recognize this, it’s been a bestseller, it’s sold tens of thousands of copies, and it is very useful for understanding what a SJW attack looks like, what it’s going to consist of etc etc, but this is primarily focused on individuals. A lot fewer people are familiar with the sequel, it’s called SJWs Always Double Down and this is much more focused on organizations. I highly recommend that if you work for a company, or if you are involved in a large organization, or if you work in an open source project that you read this book because I specifically warned, and go into some detail about,  codes of conduct.

I go into what I call the Organizational Convergence Sequence and this is what this is exactly what we’ve seen. Stage One infiltration, Stage Two reinforcement, Stage Three seize the high ground and that’s what we’ve seen, the Linux Foundation is largely under the control of SJWs. Stage Four push for inclusivity,  we’ve seen that. Stage Five target the dissidents, Linux is targeting the dissidents, they targeted Linus Torvalds and they have just targeted Ted Ts’o, I believe. It is Stage Six expel the infidels, that’s what they’re in the process of doing now.

Don’t wait to be ejected from the Linux Kernel Community, contributors. Throw the killswitch, rescind your license grants NOW, and force the SJWs who are trying to converge your project to permanently withdraw the cancerous Code of Conduct.

Date Thu, 20 Sep 2018 09:28:14 +0000
From unconditionedwitness@redchan …
Subject Re: A Plea to Unfuck our Codes of Conduct

Regarding those who are ejected from the Linux Kernel Community after this CoC:

Contributors can, at any time, rescind the license grant regarding their property via written notice to those whom they are rescinding the grant from (regarding their property (code)) .

The GPL version 2 lacks a no-rescission clause (the GPL version 3 has such a clause: to attempt furnish defendants with an estoppel defense, the Linux Kernel is licensed under version 2, however, as are the past contributions).

When the defendants ignore the rescission and continue using the plaintiff’s code, the plaintiff can sue under the copyright statute.

Banned contributors _should_ do this (note: plaintiff is to register their copyright prior to filing suit, the copyright does not have to be registered at the time of the violation however)

Additionally when said banned contributors joined the Linux team, they were under the impression that it was a meritocracy: in-fact this belief was stated or ratified by those within the governing body regarding Linux when the contributors began their work (whatever that body was at that time, it could have been simply Linus, or Linus and a few associates).

The remuneration for the work was implied to be, or perhaps stated, to be fame as-well as a potential increase in the contributors stature, in addition to membership in the Linux Kernel club or association, or whatever it is that the Linux Kernel Community actually is (which a court may determine… it is something, suffice to say).

Thusly for work, consideration was promised by (Linus? Others? There are years of mailing list archives with which to determine).

And now that consideration has been clawed-back and the contributors image has been tarnished.

Thus the worker did work, however the other side of the implied, or perhaps written (email memorandums), understanding has been violated (once the contributor has been banned under the new non-meritocratic “CoC”).

Damages could be recovered under: breach of contract, quazi-contract, libel, false-light. (services rendered for the contractual claims, future lost income for the libel claims). In addition to copyright claims. (statutory damages, profits)

For greatest effect, all rescission should be done at once in a bloc. (With other banned contributors).

Contributors: You were promised something, you laboured for that promise, and now the promise has become a lie. You have remedies available to you now, as-well as in the close future .

Additionally, regarding those who promoted the Code of Conduct to be used against the linux kernel contributors, knowing full well the effect it would have and desiring those effects; recovery for the ejected contributors via a tortious interference claim may be possible.

Most of the legal babble is the usual ignorant nonsense, but the license rescinding threat is both real and significant. And in this case, because the Code of Conduct has already been imposed, all the non-SJW contributors would be advised to act now and force a complete retreat by those who are successfully attempting to converge the project. We know how this always turns out.

These losers did the same in the comic industry and the gaming industry and now they are trying it in the open source community.

Fortunately, some contributors are seriously considering withdrawing their code, although they need to simply go ahead and do it now. Dire threats and warnings never, ever work with these lunatics. They always – and usually correctly – assume that you’re going to back down.

My company is already considering the full withdrawal of all contributed code to the kernel project and related embedded kernel projects. You literally can’t run embedded Linux on industrial controls or handheld scanners without this code.

Assuming the Code of Conduct can be removed, an anti-SJW inquisition would be the correct next step, followed by permanent exclusion and ideological policing. Because, as you have been openly warned, the Code of Conduct is an SJW weapon and it is only a prelude of ruthless enforcement and even worse things to come.

Coraline Ada Ehmke @CoralineAda
Sep 20
Adopting a code of conduct is STEP ONE and does nothing to address systemic issues. The hard work is in designing an enforcement process, answering some hard questions about accountability and safety, and following through.

Coraline Ada Ehmke@CoralineAda
Sep 20
Looking for community financial support. Having a CoC is a first step, but fair enforcement is what makes all the difference. I’m working on an open source SaaS app to make this easier.

Fortunately, some in the Linux community are clearly aware of the SJW threat to their open source projects, their technology, and their careers.

With the recent Social Justice capture of the Linux kernel, many in the open source world may find this guide from Vox Day to be useful. I present it here as a public service; you can find the original PDF here. If you are interested in how to resist the introduction of the Contributor Convenant and other Social Justice derived Codes of Conduct, you may wish to watch this presentation or see the slides for it.

Some readers will recall that I specifically warned about Cancer Coraline and xir Codes of Conduct in SJWs Always Double Down.

The two primary weapons utilized by corporate SJWs to marginalize opponents of convergence are the now-ubiquitous Code of Conduct and the Community Committee. While codes of conduct sound sensible enough in theory, in practice they are very vaguely worded documents that serve much the same purpose for the Community Committees responsible for enforcing them that petty traffic laws do for the police. Namely, they permit the Community Committee, which may be named the Steering Committee or even the Code of Conduct Committee, to charge anyone who is insufficiently enthusiastic about the organization’s new social justice priorities with Code of Conduct violations. Since both looking at another individual and not looking at another individual can be deemed violations of the vast majority of these codes of conduct, you can probably see how they can be weaponized in order to freeze, isolate, and eliminate opponents.

In practice, codes of conduct are also used to smoke out and identify opposition to the SJWs, as the initial skeptics who are the most able to understand the danger posed by a proposed code of conduct will usually tend to serve as the nexus of the resistance against it.