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Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

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Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#61
post #55

Hi there. I’m around to answer any questions!

Do you think that there is a point in having boarders between countries? If so how should they be enforced? If a 17 year "child" crosses the boarder should they be detained (ie. kept in prison until deportation) or should they be allowed to walk free in the US. If a child and parent both crossed the border should only the parents be detained leaving the child to fend for itself in America? Should they be detained in…

What do you think ICE is doing with over $700 per person per night that they would do better with even more money?

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#62
post #55

Hi there. I’m around to answer any questions!

Do you think that there is a point in having boarders between countries? If so how should they be enforced? If a 17 year "child" crosses the boarder should they be detained (ie. kept in prison until deportation) or should they be allowed to walk free in the US. If a child and parent both crossed the border should only the parents be detained leaving the child to fend for itself in America? Should they be detained in…

Using children as a way to take advantage of existing policy is a well known strategy employed by the cartels to get across the border, which is what initially precipitated the separation policy under the Obama Administration. While, sure, ICE having more funding would be good it's still just treating a symptom of a much larger problem (growing strength of Cartel activity and human trafficking).

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#64
post #29

Hi there. I’m around to answer any questions!

If I was you, I would not answer any questions, and I would consult a lawyer. edit: Looks like they were public gems, but in general it's always good advice to consult a lawyer before disrupting commercial or public systems.

That would be an insane precedent to send if breaking or removing a FOSS project becomes a crime simply because your project happens to be used in some mission-critical system.

Good way of making sure no one ever contributes to FOSS again.

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#65
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting approach. Makes me wonder if you authored a component and extended a license to say that “use of this code must abide by [inert relevant code of ethics]”, could you enforce that?

Such licenses exist, and yes. But it wouldn’t apply retroactively.

Also such licenses are not Free Software. And from a practical point of view (existing in the ecosystem) that matters a lot.

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a political statement that will do nothing but echo in people's respective echo chambers. It'll get positive coverage like this in places like the Daily Dot and MSNBC, and Tucker Carlson will use it as "just another example of far left Silicon Valley attempting to circumvent our laws". The net impact is zero.

Tucker Carlson talking about this is a good outcome. This will only highlight the power that open source and open source contributors have. Lol, a political kerfuffle over an devops FOSS project. Make working with ICE a toxic asset. Make people not proud of working for ICE contractors.

You actually think that Carlson is going to inform his viewers of the virtues, let alone technical details, of a FOSS project?

>Make working with ICE a toxic asset. Make people not proud of working for ICE contractors.

This kind of activism in tech leads no where good. It will lead to witch hunts, more "cancel culture" purity spirals, and generally shit software used for critical functions of our government.

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#68
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was not to disrupt ICE, Chef, or any organization thereof. The goal was to remove my code from an ecosystem that was using it for purposes I perceive as evil. I had no goals of disrupting ICE operations or Chef operations. I suspected a small percentage of people with a hard, runtime dependency would be impacted, but I did not know Chef (the software) had a hard runtime dependency and was pulling that depend…

Besides the political statement, do you have any technical opinion about an organization such as Chef shipping things that have runtime deps to third parties?

It wasn’t a political statement. I have a few thoughts in general. These aren’t specific to this situation.

First, always minimize runtime dependencies. I personally prefer compiled things for this very reason.

Second, if you’re going to include a third party dependency, how are you auditing it? There’s an unexplored area around security here too. The Node.js ecosystem has had a series of incidents where popular packages have had cryptocurrency miners injected into otherwise helpful packages. If you’re depending on third party runtime dependencies: how are you auditing changes and contributions, how are you scanning for vulnerabilities, how are you patching those vulnerabilities if you don’t have an internal fork upon which you build?

Third, RubyGems is a volunteer-run organization. I believe other software ecosystems are similar. From my understanding of the situation, a RubyGems outage would have had similar effect.

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#69

Not completely related, but the tone of the two tweets linked in the article doesn’t make sense to me. The first is a reasonable request for a comment about an issue that Shanley cares about, but it’s immediately followed by a comment a minute later screaming at Chef to take a certain action while hurling epithets at them in all-caps. How can you possibly assume good faith from the first comment after reading the sec…

Expecting good faith from shanley given her track record is like yet another frog offering a ride across the river to the scorpion, despite the frog corpses nearly damming the flow downstream. This is just not a person who deserves to be taken seriously.

Re: Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ICE are literally Nazi's and immigration deletion centers are literally concentration camps, then why not? After all that would mean that they are effectively the embodiment of evil. You would be a hero. If you actually genuinely believe that then I can't see why you wouldn't. Unless deep down you're self aware that you're using such rhetoric not because it is valid but because you think it supports your political…

> literally concentration camps They're not death camps but they are literally concentration camps.

Perhaps under an alternative definition of the term "concentration camp" which would also include prisons and jails. Whether or not you believe the law is just the people being detained have committed the crime of illegal entry, and they are being detained because of this crime.

The mainstream definition of concentration camp is one where people are interned on the basis of a national, ethnic, or religious identity [1]. The term came to prominence during the Boer War [2] where Afrikaners were imprisoned on the basis of their ethnicity, not for any particular crime. Detaining people illegally crossing a border is not a concentration camp under the commonly accepted definition.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps

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