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GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

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Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#421

Post by ratww »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #199

The only notable thing here IMO is the lack of limits imposed by GitHub on notifications. Apparently a random tag of `@microsoft` in the comments was enough to notify 4000 people [1] as well. I have no idea why the user is even being mentioned in this headline. I haven't used GitHub in a while, and am unfamiliar with orgs and subgroups, but tagging a developer subgroup on a PR seems...a reasonable thing for a new con…

> How is it their fault that the developer subgroup has been hijacked by this organization to mean "Anyone who has ever signed the Terms of Service To View Our Code"?

Oh, but hijacking developer subgroups for almost anything is totally kosher in Github. They do it themselves. That's how you get into some of their private betas.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#422

Post by remram »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #278
quadrifoliate wrote: post #199

The only notable thing here IMO is the lack of limits imposed by GitHub on notifications. Apparently a random tag of `@microsoft` in the comments was enough to notify 4000 people [1] as well. I have no idea why the user is even being mentioned in this headline. I haven't used GitHub in a while, and am unfamiliar with orgs and subgroups, but tagging a developer subgroup on a PR seems...a reasonable thing for a new con…

People who blame that kid are ridiculous. People who are asking to punish him somehow are pathetic. There should be no way to send any non-premoderated information to 400k people (from the system that has some trust and is unlikely to be filtered) - “spam” is the most innocent thing that might happen. It's just a fly you should ignore. Political, religious, and radical extremist groups could use it for a much more da…

If anything I'm surprised no one spammed ads this way. At least now it's sure to happen so GitHub is going to have to fix it.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#423

Post by flurdy »

sverhagen wrote: post #179
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…

Looking around, everyone has a story like this, so I don't want to just pile on with my similar experience at Verizon. But what stood out at me there was the low quality responses from low-level managers in far parts of the world, demanding, by the power vested in them, to be taken off the email chain... you know... IMMEDIATELY!

Yeah that is one thing that I remember from one or two that I was copied into in roughly 2000s with more than 200,000 CCed. Mini-kings and also people with enough technical skills to know better keeping the threads alive and flooding the Exchange servers woldwide for days.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#424

Post by fnordpiglet »

blensor wrote: post #217
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)…

The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying

I’ve seen this happen in some context at least once every five years throughout the 30 years of my career. The absolute best ones cause large scale incidents due to the volume of the messages. I always looked at it as a random celebration that brings all the trolls and introduces them to the idiots.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#425

Post by fnordpiglet »

School-Cotton wrote: post #327
sph wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't go that far. It's annoying to get useless email, but 95% of the non-spam email I receive everyday is useless crap: T&C changes, some company newsletter that somehow I never unsubscribed to, other notifications deemed so important I cannot unsubscribe to, a GitHub thread I subscribed to years ago and now has a very active discussion. It's not like every single person received 400k emails in one go, it's 400…

The attitude annoys me more than the actual effect. I’d also fire someone who “trolled” the company by spraying graffiti on the side of the building. Trivial to remove or even ignore, yes, but the unprofessional and juvenile mindset, taking pleasure in annoying everyone else, is enraging all by itself even if no practical harm was done.

You’ve obviously never removed graffiti.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#426

Post by wgjordan »

perlgeek wrote: post #372
usr1106 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source has no formal definition. There are tons of different licenses. They can be OSI-approved or not. Edit: I doubt the license for this code is an OSI-approved one with this registration business. But I have not checked and I won't check.

There is a trademark for "Open Source", and if you want to use it without written approval from OSI, you have to use it for something under an OSI-approved license: https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines#Usage_That_Does_... I think this is the closest you can come to a "formal definition", short of a law defining the term.

If you read the page you linked more carefully, you will see that OSI does not own a valid trademark for "Open Source", only for "Open Source Initiative".

OSI in fact tried to file for a trademark on 'Open Source' in 1999 [1], but failed because the term is 'too descriptive'.

[1] https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#427

Post by kube-system »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #345
Pako wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kinda looks like an attempt to get a commit into a bigger open source repository. It'd look nice on a resume to say you "contributed to Unreal Engine on GitHub".

But that's so weird because even if that's on the resume, any interviewer would be interested in know what the contribution was. Maybe revealing that you only "fixed typos" would do more harm than good?

That’s exactly the point. They want the interviewer to be interested so that they get an interview.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#428

Post by UncleEntity »

School-Cotton wrote: post #316
blensor wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying

The worst is that it becomes clear eventually that people are responding just to troll. The casual vandalism of hundreds of thousands of people’s time and attention is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I saw similar things at large (50k+ employees) companies when some reply-all chain got started — people who clearly knew better, replying just for the lulz. If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobod…

> If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.

I’d just fire everyone with a sense of humor, that’ll show them.

I’ve heard some people spend whole minutes setting up a joke for the punchline. How many billions of dollars does that cost the economy each year one has to wonder.

Outright theft of wages if you ask me!

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#429

Post by edwcross »

vesinisa wrote: post #354
edwcross wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patch itself is indeed worse than useless, it's the kind of rephrasing just to say "I did something", but which actually makes it worse (adds useless words and English mistakes). If the "kid" is ready to send this kind of useless "contribution" (which takes some deliberate effort), they surely are ready for being reprimanded (or, more likely, they will be actually proud of it).

Either way, it's pointless to "reprimand" the perpetrator. This could have just as well been a deliberate spam attack eg. someone using the @-mention to promote their scam-coin or penis enlargement product (and some people in the thread seem to have already used the opportunity to promote their band etc.) Telling a spammer they are doing an evil thing is obviously useless as they are well aware of it. This should be…

On the one hand, I agree that paying attention to the spammer is bad; on the other, I do believe there might be some use in publicly stating that such PRs will never be merged and are frowned upon; hopefully other people reading (many of them likely beginner programmers) will get the message. But there's likely a better way to do the "teaching" without drawing any attention to the perpetrator.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#430

Post by bobobob420 »

TeamMCS wrote: post #253

Man it's still ongoing, and now the trolls have discovered it. The original thread somehow managed to crash my iphone due to the sheer number of replies. Amazing GH even made this possible. Not sure if there's also a data leak, I notice my email was CCed, not BCCed. Now they've managed to email nearly half a million people, this could go on for ages as idiots keep responding to the original chains. Wonder if EpicGame…

I can scroll the entire thread on my iphone pretty easily. Those 50 replies crashed your iphone? Or am i missing something
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