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> In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identifi
by lapcat 2y ago
> In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.
> “We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”
- rstupek 2y agoRedirecting the emails is crazy. I would assume, as an employee of any company, that they can monitor emails to corporate email accounts but outright redirecting emails is something I've never heard of
- markx2 2y agoSysadmins doing what they are told I imagine.
- xerox13ster 2y agoThey're not Sysadmins as far as I'm concerned because they ought to be blackballed for implementing such a heinous process.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Alupis 2y agoRedirecting, forwarding, copying and other email rules being set by system administrators is normal. "Heinous" is grossly disingenuous.
- luma 2y agoThis sort of thing happens for a bunch of reasons, most typically as a result of legal action. I myself have all of my email being held for discovery in an ongoing case that I personally have nothing to do with, it says nothing about wrongdoing of anyone involved. If CEO came to me and said "we need to archive all email to or from this recipient", the only unusual part of that ask would be the person requesting it.
- browningstreet 2y agoBlackballed how and by whom and what downstream process, the cabal of principled sysadmins? I’m sympathetic to your philosophical bent but that world, outside self employment, got stomped hard some time ago. We have The Work Number but no way to reasonably implement your suggestion. We’re cogs, just toast.
- orev 2y ago> never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails I get that it’s creepy that this is being done, but I highly doubt that nobody at Blind has “never seen” this. Blind sends spam using multiple different domain names trying to get people to sign up. The domains are rotated so they can get around blocking on the email server, and the fact they do it means they already know that companies try to block them.
- qgin 2y agoBlocking, sure. But literally sending the emails to the CEO might very well be a new one.
- rwmj 2y agoThere are loads of terrible companies around, so I'd be surprised if none of them had ever tried to intercept Blind sign-up messages before now, and if you're a tyrant CEO at one of said terrible companies, getting the emails forwarded to you is merely the next logical step. The next paragraph in the text is a lot more interesting: Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss. What are the consequences (in the US) of a company blocking that?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoZero. Protected speech is protected from government intervention. You can run your own forum that bans people from discussing <thing you hate> without repercussions.
- ceejayoz 2y agoEh, discussing salary is a right, guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act.
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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ano-ther 2y ago> Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. That’s a pretty bad design decision. It’s also not a good idea to access such forum from you work computer, even when not using the company email.
- romanhn 2y ago> That’s a pretty bad design decision How would you design it?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dboreham 2y agoNot parent but here's a couple of not fully thought out ideas: 1. Have the signer upper send a provided email from their own Gmail account to their own company account. Then show the message's DKIM headers to blind. Now Matt has to find emails from employees personal mailboxes to their corporate mailboxes but he can't tell what the content is about. 2. Employ a graph of email forwarders (humans) selected from existing blind users. Use them to forward challenge email payload to the signer upper. Now Matt has to find emails from anyone to anyone and still doesn't know what the content is about.
- delfinom 2y ago>Then show the message's DKIM headers to blind. You realize that Blind isn't exclusively for software engineers right? Lol