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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#161

Post by dheera »

macintux wrote: post #92
faustomorales wrote: post #82

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in)…

Ouch. I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop, I’ve seen too many glitches (although usually not quite that embarrassing). Slack has been my one exception (although only on my phone). Thanks for the valuable reminder.

That and also in case there is any legal reason to sneeze the company laptop for discovery or anything you don't want any personal stuff on there.

Keep personal stuff on personal devices, and never use personal devices for work either.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#162

Post by rcfox »

pigbearpig wrote: post #157
thrownawayalre wrote: post #124

Innocent mistake. The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming. Now his real name is going to stay at the center of the internet for a while thanks to being 1st on HN. I would definitely not have coped well with that much internet attention at his age. Some Github replies are more immature than the initial action and I hope he does not…

I disagree, the PR is some pointless wordsmithing and then to comment "Verify the pull request and merge asap" is a bit ridiculous. Also, no one is going to care in a day.

> Also, no one is going to care in a day.

You should ask Sumit Bhatia about that. ;)

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#163

Post by Geezus-42 »

heyitsguay wrote: post #113
cmckn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thundering herd e-mail at Amazon about 10 years ago that I’ve heard stories about. It went on for days. There’s a funny internal talk with lots of data about it, maybe it’s on YouTube by now…

When i worked at the NIH, a couple times an entire institute was accidentally cc'd instead of bcc'd on an email, and for weeks after the chain would continue, consisting only of people writing "please stop responding to this chain". I don't know what you do for that...

Where I work we create a policy that drops the messages.

To: soandso@domain.tld Subject: blah Action: block

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#164

Post by faustomorales »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #138
faustomorales wrote: post #82

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in)…

Did the slack warning not tell you the number of people it was going to ping? At least nowadays it says something like "You're going to ping X people in Y timezones".

Right you are, yes, it was that same message. I suppose what I meant to convey is, "despite the thoughtful safeguards built into Slack, I still managed to screw this up." :) I really appreciate Slack and it is my preferred workplace communication platform, so I hope no one reads my anecdote as criticism of the product. I can't think of any way Slack itself could have done more to prevent my mistake.

As more context, I do remember thinking, "that X number seems higher than I would expect, but maybe we had a lot of folks who signed up for the event that didn't show." I worked at a small company so the size of the company was on the same order of magnitude as the number of invitees to the event (~100). I explained away the Y time zones because I knew some people traveled internationally. I was also operating on very little sleep, so that probably didn't help.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#166

Post by peterkelly »

The problem here is that GitHub allows this - anyone could have taken advantage of it. I don't know if the guy did it deliberately or accidentally, but that's beside the point.

GitHub are in effect operating a spam relay by permitting anyone to email 400k people. I don't know what the solution is - whether it's limiting team sizes, or adding restrictions that only org admins can trigger such notifications when there are so many members. But if the underlying problem is not fixed, this will happen again.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#167

Post by ffhhj »

thrownawayalre wrote: post #124

Innocent mistake. The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming. Now his real name is going to stay at the center of the internet for a while thanks to being 1st on HN. I would definitely not have coped well with that much internet attention at his age. Some Github replies are more immature than the initial action and I hope he does not…

Seems like he is trying to increase his reputation with minimal effort, see all the badges collected in his profile. It's the usual social network effect, and the same reason HN doesn't have notifications or actually relevant karma. Microsoft wanted a new social network, there they have their community of naive gamblers.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#169

Post by cmeacham98 »

db48x wrote: post #149
Ansil849 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. And yet why is that sort of annoying forced registration not considered 'antisocial', but this accidental tagging is resulting in calls for the poster to be banned?

They sell it (access to the source for the engine) under a commercial license. They were going to have _some_ sort of registration system, so that they can make sure everyone who downloads it paid for it. They reused GitHub for both distribution and registration.

Access to the UE4 source code is free. They probably sell licenses that let you do more than the free license, but the Github thing is not used to gate purchases. I don't know why they do it like this to be honest, they could just put the free license in the repo, that's pretty common practice.
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