4 ms·

To fight ‘evil’ ICE, an engineer pulled his code off GitHub

41 points by donohoe 7y ago

Justsignedup 7y ago
Can someone expain please? Wouldn't the devs just have a local copy? Or I guess their prod builds all crashed trying to install the dependency?
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  It appears that he deleted a listing from RubyGems, a (the?) package distribution platform for Ruby. Yes they probably have several copies, but now Bundler won't work until they re-host & re-register the gem. Deleting from RubyGems was probably more impactful than removing it from Github. I'm unfamiliar with how Chef works, but I wouldn't be surprised if a `bundle install` was part of the workflow. Maybe someone else with more experience here can fill in some gaps.
- salawat 7y ago
  Generally speaking, yes. Most government projects locally mirror dependencies (and source) if available, as having to do a few tweaks now and again isn't unheard of. So taking your code down really isn't quite doing much more than virtue signaling. Even less so in fact, as they'd just have someone grab it through whatever alternative distribution method you'd utilize for everyone else and bring it in. You'd have to explicitly revoke license for everyone to do with your library as they please. I.e. become non-open source to effectively restrict access in any meaningful way.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  I know Seth, and he’s a really good guy. He also used to work at Chef. I signed the Chef Contributors License and their Chef Code of Conduct. I fully support his decision to pull his code. What he has really highlighted here is a major OpSec fail on the part of the company. They should have internal repos containing trusted and verified copies of all code they are dependent on for their build and deployment process. His code is released under an Apache license, so it is totally legit for the company to fork the repo and produce their own private version. But they really stepped in it when they changed the license after forking, removed his name, etc....
flyinglizard 7y ago
Is the outcry against ICE happening due to its operating methods or is it contesting the legitimacy of ICE altogether?
- viraptor 7y ago
  It can realistically be only against the methods. Even before ICE existed, other people had similar roles, just distributed in different departments. If ICE was scrapped, police/DHS would have to take over at least some of their current responsibilities.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Which is why I don’t understand efforts to disband ICE. People in the US illegally will still be deported, it’s just a change in who will do the deporting. DHS could absorb ICE, rebadge those folks, and now DHS is handling deportations.
    - bdhess 7y ago
      The argument is that ICE doesn’t treat its detainees humanely, because the institutional culture within ICE is pervasively rotten beyond repair. The hope is that by disbanding ICE and handing its responsibilities over to new management with a better track record, we might get a better outcome. I don’t think the proponents of this plan would support simply rebadging current ICE employees without some kind of filtering process. (I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, just restating the arguments as I understand them.)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  The latter. When you go past all the rhetoric and the individual human-interest cases it boils down to the following policy issues/grievances (whose merits you may or may not agree with; I won't be litigating them today) in rough reverse chronological order: - The current administration is super-racist - The last administration wasn't much better because it used immigration enforcement to appease the right in hopes of obtaining political concessions - After 9-11 DHS was set up, which was a Bad Idea, and what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service was split up into separate administrative (USCIS) and enforcement (ICE) wings; this was bad and correlated with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment - Most of the current immigration law dates back to 1996, when an imperfectly working system was swapped out for one that was far more draconian and arguably designed not to work but instead to maximize the number of people deemed 'illegal', which it definitely did - since the late 60s/early 1970s the primary drivers behind stricter immigration policy have been white supremacists, most notably a guy called John Tanton who set up tons of front groups like FAIR, CIS, US English and so on to promote his extremist views - but when you get down it US immigration policy has been characterized by waves of racist reaction towards Mexicans, Chinese, Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. - not to mention the whole slavery/civil war thing, which I mention because today's Abolitionists explicitly model themselves on John Brown and also have fundamental philosophical disagreements with the role and scope of police in society, and finally - indigenous and non-White (=/= non-caucasian) people are really sick of colonial bullshit. To sum up, while you might or might not agree with these political stance, and the movement doesn't do the best job of communicating it, Abolitionists are fundamentally opposed to the existing order of society, are solidly grounded in the liberatory traditions of the Enlightenment, and mean business.
ultrarunner 7y ago
"I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business." This strikes me as a tone-deaf and transparently greedy response. I'm a little shocked that rather than taking a skeptical stance on the actual evil of ICE's actions, this CEO seems to accept it and argue that morality has no place in business. Yes it is appropriate to make decisions about with whom you do business. Yes it is practical to examine the direct outcomes of your company's contributions. If it's not within your mission to make ethical business decisions maybe you're one of the bad guys.
- Chris2048 7y ago
  "tone-deaf" is the new "cultural fit" - fits any situation without explanation. What is the "evil" of ICE's actions? FUD about "cages" that where fine when it was Obama doing it?
remotecool 7y ago
If I get arrested for drunk driving and I am in jail and separated from my kids, I wouldn't really blame the police for separating a family. I really wish there was more personal responsibility in this world.
- nathanaldensr 7y ago
  The people pushing the message of "evil ICE" know that it's actually about personal responsibility. That's not the point, though; the point is advancing the progressive no-borders agenda. You know how I keep my kids protected? By not crossing multiple countries' borders with my children, ignoring international asylum law (must seek asylum in the first country you come to), and obeying the law in my jurisdiction.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Even so, ICE should strive to enforce the border more humanely.
  - cloverich 7y ago
    > You know how I keep my kids protected? I'm guessing if you could move them out of a violent, dangerous country, and into a much safer (and more economically stable) country, you would risk quite a bit to get them there. Sorry, I get the personal responsibility angle, but your comment comes off as deeply disingenuous.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      It is also disingenuous to pretend all of Latin America is a dangerous cesspool of crime and murder, unfit to live in, and the US is the sole shining beacon of safety and prosperity. People are so quick to point out how very wrong Trump was to call them 'shithole countries', but immediately adopt that position when it's time to justify increased immigration.
      - ultrarunner 7y ago
ssivark 7y ago
Maybe a good time to discuss the importance of software licenses, particularly copyleft? It's funny somehow folks running businesses always talk about applying proprietary licensing for their outputs assuming they have perfect control over their inputs.
chkaloon 7y ago
Fork?

41 points by donohoe 7y ago

Can someone expain please? Wouldn't the devs just have a local copy? Or I guess their prod builds all crashed trying to install the dependency?

ultrarunner 7y ago
It appears that he deleted a listing from RubyGems, a (the?) package distribution platform for Ruby. Yes they probably have several copies, but now Bundler won't work until they re-host & re-register the gem. Deleting from RubyGems was probably more impactful than removing it from Github. I'm unfamiliar with how Chef works, but I wouldn't be surprised if a `bundle install` was part of the workflow. Maybe someone else with more experience here can fill in some gaps.
salawat 7y ago
Generally speaking, yes. Most government projects locally mirror dependencies (and source) if available, as having to do a few tweaks now and again isn't unheard of. So taking your code down really isn't quite doing much more than virtue signaling. Even less so in fact, as they'd just have someone grab it through whatever alternative distribution method you'd utilize for everyone else and bring it in. You'd have to explicitly revoke license for everyone to do with your library as they please. I.e. become non-open source to effectively restrict access in any meaningful way.
bradknowles 7y ago
I know Seth, and he’s a really good guy. He also used to work at Chef. I signed the Chef Contributors License and their Chef Code of Conduct. I fully support his decision to pull his code. What he has really highlighted here is a major OpSec fail on the part of the company. They should have internal repos containing trusted and verified copies of all code they are dependent on for their build and deployment process. His code is released under an Apache license, so it is totally legit for the company to fork the repo and produce their own private version. But they really stepped in it when they changed the license after forking, removed his name, etc....

flyinglizard 7y ago

Is the outcry against ICE happening due to its operating methods or is it contesting the legitimacy of ICE altogether?

viraptor 7y ago
It can realistically be only against the methods. Even before ICE existed, other people had similar roles, just distributed in different departments. If ICE was scrapped, police/DHS would have to take over at least some of their current responsibilities.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Which is why I don’t understand efforts to disband ICE. People in the US illegally will still be deported, it’s just a change in who will do the deporting. DHS could absorb ICE, rebadge those folks, and now DHS is handling deportations.
  - bdhess 7y ago
    The argument is that ICE doesn’t treat its detainees humanely, because the institutional culture within ICE is pervasively rotten beyond repair. The hope is that by disbanding ICE and handing its responsibilities over to new management with a better track record, we might get a better outcome. I don’t think the proponents of this plan would support simply rebadging current ICE employees without some kind of filtering process. (I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, just restating the arguments as I understand them.)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
anigbrowl 7y ago
The latter. When you go past all the rhetoric and the individual human-interest cases it boils down to the following policy issues/grievances (whose merits you may or may not agree with; I won't be litigating them today) in rough reverse chronological order: - The current administration is super-racist - The last administration wasn't much better because it used immigration enforcement to appease the right in hopes of obtaining political concessions - After 9-11 DHS was set up, which was a Bad Idea, and what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service was split up into separate administrative (USCIS) and enforcement (ICE) wings; this was bad and correlated with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment - Most of the current immigration law dates back to 1996, when an imperfectly working system was swapped out for one that was far more draconian and arguably designed not to work but instead to maximize the number of people deemed 'illegal', which it definitely did - since the late 60s/early 1970s the primary drivers behind stricter immigration policy have been white supremacists, most notably a guy called John Tanton who set up tons of front groups like FAIR, CIS, US English and so on to promote his extremist views - but when you get down it US immigration policy has been characterized by waves of racist reaction towards Mexicans, Chinese, Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. - not to mention the whole slavery/civil war thing, which I mention because today's Abolitionists explicitly model themselves on John Brown and also have fundamental philosophical disagreements with the role and scope of police in society, and finally - indigenous and non-White (=/= non-caucasian) people are really sick of colonial bullshit. To sum up, while you might or might not agree with these political stance, and the movement doesn't do the best job of communicating it, Abolitionists are fundamentally opposed to the existing order of society, are solidly grounded in the liberatory traditions of the Enlightenment, and mean business.

ultrarunner 7y ago

"I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business." This strikes me as a tone-deaf and transparently greedy response. I'm a little shocked that rather than taking a skeptical stance on the actual evil of ICE's actions, this CEO seems to accept it and argue that morality has no place in business. Yes it is appropriate to make decisions about with whom you do business. Yes it is practical to examine the direct outcomes of your company's contributions. If it's not within your mission to make ethical business decisions maybe you're one of the bad guys.

Chris2048 7y ago
"tone-deaf" is the new "cultural fit" - fits any situation without explanation. What is the "evil" of ICE's actions? FUD about "cages" that where fine when it was Obama doing it?

remotecool 7y ago

If I get arrested for drunk driving and I am in jail and separated from my kids, I wouldn't really blame the police for separating a family. I really wish there was more personal responsibility in this world.

nathanaldensr 7y ago
The people pushing the message of "evil ICE" know that it's actually about personal responsibility. That's not the point, though; the point is advancing the progressive no-borders agenda. You know how I keep my kids protected? By not crossing multiple countries' borders with my children, ignoring international asylum law (must seek asylum in the first country you come to), and obeying the law in my jurisdiction.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Even so, ICE should strive to enforce the border more humanely.
- cloverich 7y ago
  > You know how I keep my kids protected? I'm guessing if you could move them out of a violent, dangerous country, and into a much safer (and more economically stable) country, you would risk quite a bit to get them there. Sorry, I get the personal responsibility angle, but your comment comes off as deeply disingenuous.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    It is also disingenuous to pretend all of Latin America is a dangerous cesspool of crime and murder, unfit to live in, and the US is the sole shining beacon of safety and prosperity. People are so quick to point out how very wrong Trump was to call them 'shithole countries', but immediately adopt that position when it's time to justify increased immigration.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago

ssivark 7y ago

Maybe a good time to discuss the importance of software licenses, particularly copyleft? It's funny somehow folks running businesses always talk about applying proprietary licensing for their outputs assuming they have perfect control over their inputs.

chkaloon 7y ago

Fork?