You can read the facts of this case through a simple search. Surprise, surprise: They may not be as clear and straightforward as you might think, from this copy. You can see what the prosecution wanted versus what he got. You can make whatever judgement you like about him, his victim, and the legal system.
I don’t particularly care about any of that. At least, not any more.
It’s been six years since this happened. Yet every other month, this guy’s face gets reposted to 9gag, Imgur, and Facebook, et. al, and dragged through the mud again. You may think he deserves this treatment. You may think it’s a picture-perfect case of white privilege, or rich privilege, or rich, white privilege. You may think he never deserves to be forgotten. You might be right, but don’t forget that the legal ramifications of being on the sexual offender registry will follow him the rest of his days, and they are no joke.
According to one site’s statistics, there are presently 463,634 cases of sexual assault per year in the US. In the six years since this case, that’s roughly 2.5 million cases. So my question is: why this guy? Why is this case reposted every few months on every social media site I visit? If you were to trawl through the 2.5M sexual assault cases since this happened, I absolutely, 100%, money-back guarantee that you will find at least one other case that demonstrates presumed privilege better than this.
This particular post was lifted from 9gag. Several of the comments demonstrate the same frustration I have. I once saw it reposted by a friend on Facebook, and asked: why? He came back with, “If it happened to your daughter, wouldn’t you do the same?” And I said, “Maybe, but this wasn’t your daughter either. Why do you feel the need to repost it?” He didn’t have a good answer.
So what’s going on here? It’s weird. Is this being done by the victim? Friends and family of the victim? Is someone getting paid to do it? In this particular case, the account that posted this to 9gag tags all of his posts with “decolonize.” Is it a sockpuppet for foreign agitators? I honestly don’t know, but I’m starting to think there’s a story here. Normal, rational people would have let this go by now.
A few years back, as part of a long, slogging series of unfortunate events, I had been tasked with developing a new web application, which circumstances dictated should be written in Java. Books could be written about this one-year period of my career. (And not, like, inspirational ones.) Anyway, part of the process included trying to get people to realize that no one, these days, wrote web apps in Java without using one of the many, popular Javascript libraries for the front end (like React or Angular), and get my management and corporate IT to understand that I needed to install NodeJS on my machine to facilitate this. Up until this point — and despite the fact that it was obviously used by other development teams in the company — it was not on the “approved” list of software to be installed on local machines. Through several strained meetings and rounds of email, someone, somewhere, deep in the bowels of IT, corrected the obvious oversight, and put it on the list.
The production version of NodeJS was 8, at the time of approval.
This kerfuffle was but one small facet in the gem that was this job posting. In the middle development process, I jumped at another job opportunity, and left my Fortune-250 for a different Fortune 250. The IT environment was eerily similar, and led to this post about making Windows tolerable. It was this experience that got me to see the real root of what I’m complaining about here.
And then, through a short series of more unfortunate events — and one amazing event — I came back to the original Fortune 250, in a different department.
Some months later, just after getting settled back in, I got an email asking me if I would approve a new version of NodeJS to be officially blessed and uploaded to the internal repository.
A Symptom, not the Disease
Strangely, I was being asked to approve NodeJS version 9. If you’re not familiar, NodeJS uses a version numbering system like the Linux kernel used to, where even-numbered releases are for production use, and odd-numbered releases are development versions, intended only for development of the software itself. In no way should 9.x be considered for use in projects inside a blue-chip Fortune 250.
I explained this situation to a laundry-list of TO: and CC: recipients in a long email thread that had already been making rounds inside the company before someone finally saw my name attached to the original request, and added me to the chain. Of course, my explanation was ignored, but I only discovered this 6 months later, when I was being asked, again, to approve version 9. Apparently, I was preventing some developer in India from doing his work on a “high priority project” by not having approved it already, and I needed to get on the stick.
I become more blunt, at that point. First, I didn’t do whatever was done to get it certified the first time, so I didn’t know why I was being called on to do it again. Second, I tried to make a case for exempting development libraries, like NodeJS, from the slow process of getting them approved for internal use, and uploaded to our internal software delivery site. This led to another important person added to the chain, who, surprisingly, supported my argument, but, again, nothing changed.
A month later — seven months into this “discussion,” and presumably still holding up a “high priority” project with a “requirement” for 9.x — I got another email, which included a screenshot of an error from Angular, saying that it no longer supported NodeJS 8.x, and that it needed at least version 10.x or 12.x. Again, I pled with the list of people involved in the email chain that we needed to treat development libraries and applications differently than we treated, say, Office applications. I pointed out that, in the time that we had been fussing over version 9, version 14 was now shipping.
Six months after this exchange, I got an email from a desktop support technician. He was asking for clarification about details when installing… wait for it… version 8 on a developer’s computer. That’s right: After over a year of this exercise, we were still fighting to get a version that’s now a year and a half out of support installed on a developer’s machine.
And then, the situation actually got even worse. The developer’s “computer” was really a shared environment (like Citrix, et. al.), and the shared NodeJS install was being constantly re-configured between multiple developers using the same computer between projects. The support person was actually savvy enough to have suspected this, and was asking me about how it worked. I confirmed that this would, indeed, be a problem, and we figured out the flags to install it into each person’s personal directory, and keep the node_modules directory separate, per user. So, at least we figured out how to successfully install a version of Node that was dangerously out of date to a shared computer.
Actually trying to use NodeJS for the job it was created for, and downloading a stack of Javascript libraries to support Angular or React, led to another discussion of how to get it to play nicely with our corporate, Active Directory-authenticated firewall, which — naturally — blocks all access to the internet from anything that doesn’t run through the Windows TCP/IP stack. Say, like npm or yarn trying to access the NPM repository. I had figured out a workaround for that in the first few months of working at the company, and just pointed them at Corkscrew, which transparently handles the NTLM authentication for command-line utilities like npm (or Ruby’s Bundler).
The Root of the Problem: Microsoft, and Windows
If the shared computer had been Linux or Mac, none of these problems would have existed. Each account on Linux and Mac has a proper personal directory, and things like Node and Ruby assume this, and take advantage of it. Each user could install whatever he wanted to in his home directory, and not need administrative permissions on their machine, or have to rely on some internal application-distribution site. Also, if developers could use anything other than Windows, corporate IT would probably not assume that everything which gets forced through the corporate firewall can do NTLM authentication, and force people running tools like NodeJS to rely on a squirrely tool like Corkscrew. Windows has gotten a lot better over the past several years about installing things into a user’s AppData directory, and Microsoft has spent a lot effort in recent years to develop and astroturf WSL(2), Visual Studio Code, and the new Terminal, but Windows is still a second-class citizen for modern web programming.
I try to temper my frustration with this situation with the knowledge that IT departments of large companies have been forced into many, cascadingly-obtuse compromises by their use of Windows. So many frustrations in a company’s user community can be traced back to the relatively quirky, and single-user-oriented way Windows has always worked, and the monoculture that using Windows requires, thanks to Microsoft’s legacy of embrace-and-extend, especially in directory services. The size of the company exacerbates the problem. At my current company, I know of at least 5 different IT org trees. After 6 years of working with various people in these groups, I still have very little understanding who actually owns what. To be fair, most of this is felt by only a small portion of the “power user” community at a company, but that’s most of the people I deal with.
The Distortion of Scale
The biggest problem here is the scale of the operation. When you have 50,ooo nails, you make sure they’re all the same size and finish, and you use the exact same kind of hammer and technique on all of them. You’d think it would be possible to use a bit of manpower in these various IT departments to treat some of these nails differently, but the vast ecosystem required to take care of Windows just eats up all available resources. Anti-virus. VPN. Standard desktops. Scripts to prevent people from doing things they shouldn’t. Scripts to report all activity on the things they should. Office 365. One Drive. Teams. Zoom. Forced password rotations. Worldwide hardware and software upgrades. Locking out how long the screensaver takes to kick in. Preventing changing of custom login screen backgrounds. It’s a lot. I get it. Using Windows as a corporate desktop environment automatically assumes so much work, it leaves little room for treating a computer like a tool that needs to be customized for the job it needs to do, and the work it needs to support, even when those goals are, ostensibly, incidentally, also primary goals of the larger IT organization. It’s a counter-intuitive situation.
I started this post by pointing out that this stack of regrettably-predictable compromises, which result in suboptimal policies and outcomes, is primarily a problem with traditionally non-“tech” companies, but the real, underlying problem is much deeper.
The truth is that all companies are now “tech” companies, whether they realize it or not. And those that can’t change their approach to IT to adapt to this new reality — or change it fast enough to matter — will wither on the vine, and their remaining assets, eventually, will be picked up in a corporate yard sale to companies that have “tech” embedded in their DNA from birth.
I worry that a company which, 30 years later, still breaks up it’s most-important digital asset into 8 pieces because that’s what would fit on a floppy disk will not make the turn in time.
The reason I started writing all of this down was because — after all of this time and discussion — I was asked to approve NodeJS version 10 for the internal software repository. At the time I was asked, version 10 didn’t even show up on the NodeJS release page any more. They were shipping version 16. I guess 10 is better than 8, but let’s be honest: The only reason they gave up on version 8 or 9 is because the version of Angular that they’re using is refusing to work with anything pre-v10. That happened back in Angular version 8, which is now also out of support.
As part of the great email chain, I pleaded with the various people involved with the internal software approval process that keeping up with the shifting versions of your tools and supporting libraries is just part of the job of being a web app developer, yet no one even batted an eye. You would have thought that this concept would have fallen directly under the multi-headed hydra of “security,” and the company’s philosophy seemed to be you can never have too many software layers or policies about it. You would have thought they would have pounced on the concept in order to at least seem serious. I even invoked the specter of the recent, infamous log4j bug, as an example of the risks of letting things get out of date. This issue caused an audit of every Java-based application in the company, so it should have been a touchstone issue which everyone in the chain could relate to. But if anyone could understand what I was trying to say, they apparently didn’t care.
IT Best Practice vs IT Policy
I didn’t much care for The Big Bang Theory, but one scene has stuck with me for a long time. In S1E16, Sheldon is shopping in a store like Best Buy, and some woman comes up to him and asks, “Do you know anything about ‘this stuff?'” He replies, “I know… everything about ‘this stuff.'” And that’s the heck of this situation. It’s almost like every single person concerned with this process has absolutely no idea how any of “this stuff” actually works, and won’t listen to someone who does. And I realize how conceited that may sound, but, in this case, I don’t know how else to put it.
The only other explanation is simply apathy in the face of bureaucracy, and I wish senior IT management would take it on themselves to root out this sort of intransigence, and fix it. It would seem to be their job, and would go a long way to justifying a C-level salary. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve found myself trying to explain a direct contradiction of IT best practice versus IT corporate policy to the very people who are supposed to be in charge of both, and I’d like to think I’ve learned how to convey my thoughts in a less confrontational way, but I obviously still haven’t figured out how to motivate people to rise above the internal politics and align the two, and that makes me sad.
I’m finally posting this because I just got another request to approve version 8, now three and a half years on, and I needed to vent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Update 1
A couple weeks after posting this, I got CC’d on a long desktop support email chain from a developer in India who can’t get angular-cli version 7.x working with npm. <sigh> And there are four references to how urgent and how high a priority this is. A simple search shows a pretty detailed SO post about the particular error message, and the general answer seems to be to either play games with the particular versions of the dependencies, or just upgrade to a 8 or 9… three years ago. In any case, this isn’t a desktop support question. IMNSHO, this is squarely a developer’s issue. Sorry, but that’s the job, brother. Do I try, feebly, to make another point, or just let this go?
Update 2, eight months later
Because everyone got new laptops, I was looking around the internal company web page for software installation. And what do you think I happened to see? That’s right! Got it in one try! To be fair, there’s a newer version, but this version should simply not exist, anywhere, for any reason, at this point.
Has any company ever actually retired all of their mainframes?
I’ve worked for a company which spent millions to “retire” the mainframe in favor of a OneWorld ERP system, and, of course, we wound up with an ERP system designed by consultants, and, years later, still couldn’t get rid of the mainframe.
That company was “bought” by another company who was implementing Oracle financials to bypass their mainframe for one particular product line. I was the sysadmin for the $20M of Sun/EMC hardware that ran it. At last count, they had spent $110M in the effort, and then my company was raided and sold, and I lost track of what happened.
In my current place, we have numerous little groups all over the company because the mainframe 1) exists, and 2) is a mainframe. One group of people I work with have to spend hours working through mainframe screens to fill out a specifically-formatted Excel spreadsheet to send to another group to actually do the data entry into the mainframe. This type of “solution” to technical debt exists all over the company.
Our technical debt is such that for forty years, we still break our most-important internal software in 8 pieces BECAUSE THAT’S HOW MANY PIECES IT TOOK TO FIT IT ON FLOPPIES to send to the plants to upload it into the product’s computer. EVERY piece of software in the company has to deal with the fact that there are 8 individually-tracked, part-numbered sub-pieces, which are often shared between builds, in a feeble attempt to be slightly more efficient with 1.5 MB files. I worked with another group of people who spend literally DAYS on every release, going through a process of making sure all the pieces disassemble and reassemble correctly.
Does anyone in the world think that we could modernize our internal systems to stop doing this? Could anyone possibly imagine getting rid of the mainframe, which is the central source of authority of this complexity, and the single reason that things can never change? I hate it, but I don’t think there’s any way the company could muster the resources to change this… at least for EXISTING products…
Several national antiabortion groups and their allies in Republican-led state legislatures are advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere, according to people involved in the discussions.
As I’ve said before, this issue seems perfectly and legally suited to invoking the Commerce Clause to regulate it nation-wide. Congress just needs to sack up and do it, despite the re-election impact, whatever it may be. Take a chance, guys. Lead. Legislate. Make policy. Give it a go. Try it on for size. Just see how it feels.
Sidebar news headline: “People more interested in Depp/Heard trial than abortion.” Well… Duh! Everyone in America already knows what they think about abortion, and how it should be treated, legally. With basically one look or comment, they know what everyone else thinks about it too. There’s no conversation happening between the polar ends of the spectrum that is changing anyone’s mind on the issue, so what’s the point of writing more opinion pieces about it?
I maintain that abortion is the central issue in American politics that determines if you’re “right” or “left.” There is no other issue that can so immediately and accurately place you on the political spectrum. (Interestingly, despite the American notion that Europe is a godless, barren land of communism, I’ve read that most European countries’ laws are more stringent on the issue than Roe, or most of our state laws.)
Those of us on the correct side of the issue are reaaaaally tired of people holding signs like this telling us that we are the barbarians. The current talking point for these people is that they want zero restrictions on killing a baby, right up to the second before it comes out of its mother’s body. This position is viewed unfavorably by 80% of Americans.
Here’s this article again. It get rewritten every year or so. The dystopian take is that we’re headed for the “pod living” in some Asian countries, but the US has so much land, people will move to other places before living like this in aggregate. We’re just not bound by lack of available land like Japan or Hong Kong. If nothing else, the financials will basically make it happen.
I didn’t much care when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, because no one actually likes LinkedIn. What little usefulness it has exists only because there’s nothing else in the space. A Facebook for work. Really? That’s boring squared. Who cares? But when Microsoft bought GitHub, I was really disappointed. I felt it was “unwarranted.”
Linus Torvalds wrote Linux, and changed the world. Despite never being able to make a dent in desktop usage, it destroyed what little progress Windows was making on the server side compared to Unix and minis, and now runs basically everything that isn’t a desktop (or an Apple device).
Then Linus changed the world again, and wrote git. Except for the absolute biggest repositories (e.g., Microsoft Windows, or, say, Oracle), it quickly ate all other source code management software, paid or free. And then Microsoft patched git to handle their codebase, and uses it now as well.
GitHub was one of the first big Ruby on Rails apps to prove the framework’s viability at scale; a huge platform success that didn’t involve either Microsoft or Oracle.
So, from my perspective, GitHub — hosting git repos using Rails running on Linux and MySQL — represented everything in the software world that was NOT MICROSOFT.
And then Microsoft threw a couple billion at the founders, the government shrugged their shoulders at such a “small” acquisition, and GitHub, like so many before, became another head on the software world’s biggest hydra. I actually felt a little betrayed by the founders, if I’m being honest. I hate the M&A activity that’s destroying our economy, capturing our government, and producing a new feudal-like aristocracy, but I suppose, of all the companies that had the resources to give the founders their exit, a DOJ-chastened Microsoft wasn’t the worst possibility. Certainly better than Oracle or Salesforce.
Now I see this tomfoolery in the updated version of Outlook, which my corporate laptop just self-installed. Uh, no thanks? In fact, I can’t imagine something I want less than this, but Microsoft is always surpassing themselves, so I’ll just give it time. I would complain about jamming more “stuff” into an already over-stuffed application, but Outlook may be the software world’s poster child for bloat at this point, so what’s another useless “social” add-on?
I’m saying all of that to say this: I fully expect GitHub to get some sort of LinkedIn integration like this in the near future as well. “Link your professional software portfolio with a click of the button!” it will say, as if you can’t stick a link in there already. And then it will build a graph of user data behind the scenes for only-God-knows-what further marketing purposes.
I also expect that there will be some linkage between GitHub and Azure Devops. I had been thinking that Microsoft would simply phase out Devops for GitHub. Devops has never been particularly interesting as a product. However, a thoughtful person on Twitter — “There are dozens of us!” — disabused me of that notion. I’m sure he’s right: Microsoft certainly has too many paying customers for Devops to do anything drastic with it now, and it has become another lame-duck victim of Microsoft’s own success, destined to limp on forever because of backward compatibility. But I’m certain that they’re not just going to leave these two, so-closely-related silos sitting right beside each other with no connection, and I’m also certain I won’t like it when they finally do something.
“How do you define ‘unwarranted?'”
UPDATE: A comment on HN pointed out that Microsoft already has “boss ware” in the form of “Workplace Analytics,” and it’s bundled in Office365. Ticking this box, then, will allow them to associate a real person with a user in your company’s “analytics.” Will they rank people for recruiters based on this data? Will they provide a report for companies who are considering you for a job? Sounds like a perfectly valid, dystopian business opportunity to me. Right up their alley. I wouldn’t put it past them.
To that end, Democrats in Congress are calling on their colleagues to “codify Roe” in federal law. The Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) introduced by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) in June 2021 would do just that. Here’s what you need to know.
By framing the right to abortion as a matter of access to abortion services, the WHPA is taking a page from another major civil rights bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When Congress sought to enforce anti-discrimination requirements in public accommodations such as hotels, public transit and restaurants, it grounded its authority to do so in the Commerce Clause.
I’ve been barking at the moon on Twitter about the leaked decision on Roe v. Wade, trying to point out that it is the job of Congress to pass policy law on the issue of abortion. If delivered as leaked, this decision doesn’t require an Amendment to restore the status quo, nor does the issue have to be relegated to 50 different State legislatures, which all have wildly-varying interpretations on what the policies should be.
Elizabeth Warren made some news by being candid, passionate, and coherent — an unfortunately all-too-rare combination for a sitting Senator — and basically said what I’ve been trying to say: “Congress can keep Roe v. Wade the law of the land; they just need to do it.” And then everyone ignored that, and we got Kamala Harris jumping up in front of a microphone, and delivering a charted symphony of dog whistles.
The article I’ve linked makes the point I’ve been thinking: Congress has gotten a lot of milage from the “interstate commerce” clause of the Constitution. Especially given the varied nature of State statutes governing abortion, it would seem to me that Congress is perfectly positioned to invoked the clause again in order to regulate abortion across the country. In fact, I would argue that the leak should be seen as a blessing, giving time to Congress to lead and be prepared to pass just such a law if and when the time comes.
There’s an open floor for actual leadership in this country. But, no. No one is stepping up. No one is being an adult here. So, instead, we’re letting all the crybabies have the mic. It’s disgraceful. This whole thing is just disgraceful. And I really just can’t wrap my head around how it seems our entire government of elected lawyers can’t figure this one out. I realize everyone wants to capitalize on the political persuasion that’s up for grabs here, given the coming midterms, but the party that takes control of the narrative, makes the case for Congress doing their job, and drafts a bill reflecting a compromise would score huge points in the next election.
I just felt this was a great post, serving to highlight the capriciousness, hypocrisy, and exploitation of kids just trying to get through public eduction. The people who are architecting these policies and curriculums know they have a captive audience. Further, they also know that their only resistance are parents who are too caught up in the adult versions of these same pressures to effectively combat the school boards who are applying them to their kids. Nobody likes being coerced. No one likes being compelled to do things they don’t want to do. Why is so much of society now bent on telling everyone what to do and say and think!?
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