Obviously, data loss is embarrassing. I think we all appreciate the importance of not only having multiple backups, but testing to ensure that your backups work, and are sufficient to fully restore operations. GitLab is just the latest in a long tradition of sites and services that have found themselves facing the consequences of not regularly testing their recovery plans.

But I do respect their response. They quickly recognized what had happened, and they diagnosed what went wrong with their backups. They did not try to use PR-speak to conceal their mistake -- they publicly copped to it, in plain industry-standard language that their users would understand, and even offered a livestream of their team resolving the issue. I think this has been a masterclass in how to recover from a blunder. I bet you that this is not a mistake GitLab will be repeating anytime soon.

Also, I think it's very fortunate that they're in the git repo business, and presumably users who had data that was affected by the loss still have a copy in their own local repos. Thank god for distributed SCM.

I wouldn't mind if, after some time in jail, they are given supervised release during which their phone numbers are published so that the rest of the country can call them during dinner.

Gamergate was when a bunch of gamers discovered that the biggest, most brutal and highest-stakes eSport in the world is social media. Unfortunately for them, the ultra-left had figured that out way earlier and were way better at it. So then the ultra-left people kept writing kooky leftist shit and calling gamers racist, and gamers kept going nuts over it, and then eventually the rest of the world figured out what was going on with social media too. Then all sense of order or meaning disintegrated, and now Pepe the frog is the face of white nationalism and Donald Trump is President.

I think that should catch you up.

Twitter followers

You said he talked about a national Muslim registry before the election; you showed me a video of someone else asking him about it after the election. That video simply does not show Trump advocating for a national Muslim registry. I explained why, and I showed you links to two articles that agree with me. So unless you seriously believe The Guardian is stumping for Trump now, you need to check your read of the situation.

Your response rebuts nothing. It doesn't disagree. It just says you think I'm wrong because you think you're right. Some people made you buy into a story that was bullshit, and I pointed that out, and that pisses you off -- but you don't want to admit that you got suckered, so it's my fault for not just going along with the spooky story about Orange Hitler and the Muslim Registry. And because I didn't go with the story, apparently, I'm one of The Bad Guys now.

I said it at the start: it all fits into a broader narrative in which Trump represents the second coming of Hitler, and everyone who does not unconditionally reject him is a neo-nazi.

"My ilk." Please. If you want to know why the new POTUS is a reality TV star whose press corps is a Twitter account, find a mirror. You already thwarted my "ilk" when you traded investigative journalists in for fucking BuzzFeed.

That's covered in both the articles I linked. They've written it up quite well, along with later comments Trump made about those questions, but the cliffnotes here is that the linked video does not show Trump explicitly calling for a national Muslim registry. A better analogy would be that the reporter said, "2+2?" and Trump said, "those are definitely numbers, yes, and numbers are key." The article itself has a bit of selective quoting, by the way:

It fails to mention that the full quote is, "They have to be l-... They have to be... Let me tell you that, the KEY... People can come to the country, but they have to be here legally." It sounds much more like he is redirecting the question to immigration (which he'd done earlier). I've watched the video probably 10 times now, and it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is barely paying attention to what the guy is asking, and is replying with non-answers.

In any case, that's not even Trump talking about it -- it's a reporter asking him questions while he's signing stuff and mingling his way out of the room, and Trump gives very confusing responses. The Intercept says the transition team has floated the idea of a "national Muslim registry." You said he repeatedly talked about it in the election. Can you find one of those examples?

I paraphrased. I addressed the specific language earlier in the post. The question specifically describes a "national Muslim registry" as "a project which has been floated tentatively by the president-elect’s transition team." There is no support for that assertion, and in fact, I've linked several articles which acknowledge the lack of any statement by Trump that endorses a national Muslim registry.

I've gone looking myself, and while I can find sites like BuzzFeed claiming that he said it, they do not offer any quotes or any other evidence of what was actually said. I can find cases of people asking him if he would support it, and he dodges the question. While we can do plenty of speculation on that, it doesn't really show him proposing it or advocating for it in any meaningful way.

If you can link me to where Trump explicitly calls for a national Muslim registry, I would be very interested to see it. But if you can't find Trump saying he specifically wants a national Muslim registry, I ask that you consider whether articles like this one have helped you believe you heard something that you did not.

Here is the question from the article (https://theintercept.com/2016/12/02/of-8-tech-companies-only-twitter-says-it-would-refuse-to-help-build-muslim-registry-for-trump/):

“Would [name of company], if solicited by the Trump administration, sell any goods, services, information, or consulting of any kind to help facilitate the creation of a national Muslim registry, a project which has been floated tentatively by the president-elect’s transition team?”

The question is loaded, because it is founded on the premise that such registry has actually been proposed by Trump's transition team. It has not. The Intercept itself offers no support for this assertion. The closest it comes is a Reuters article from Kris Kobach, who says he would support re-instituting a special registration program that monitors immigrants coming from countries that have been designated high-risk. This program was originally created after 9/11, and although the countries affected are predominantly Muslim, the program does not specifically target Muslims, nor does it target ass predominantly Muslim countries. Even then, it is unclear to what degree Kobach's comments reflect the incoming Trump administration's actual agenda, since no official statement has been made. Above all, it certainly does not fit the criteria of a "national Muslim registry."

Here are a couple other articles that have attempted to tease out the Trump camp's position on Muslim registries:

http://www.politifact.com/trut...
https://www.theguardian.com/us...

These articles highlight comments Trump has made about Muslims and immigration in the past, and point out that he has refused to explicitly say he would never seek such a thing. Sitll, they make it clear that (at least to the best of the knowledge of the journalists writing these articles) at no point has Trump ever actually proposed a national Muslim registry (e.g., "Trump has not called for blanket registration of all Muslims in the US or those seeking to immigrate from other countries.", The Guardian).

So, it is my opinion that asking tech companies if they will support Trump's muslim registry plan is loaded, because Trump does not have a muslim registry plan. Despite that, any answer -- including no answer at all -- can be easily misconstrued as a political statement by the company. And that's exactly what The Intercept has done here.

This isn't shit journalism because it puts Trump in a bad light. It's shit journalism because it asks a loaded question, and attempts to make a story out of the landslide-majority of polled companies that didn't take the bait. It fits into a broader narrative in which Trump represents the second coming of Hitler, and everyone who does not unconditionally reject him is a neo-nazi.

For decades, we were warned about the dangers of increasing media consolidation. And since the rise of online journalism, we've been warned that this new model does not support the kind of journalistic integrity we came to expect in our news. A decade ago, Fox News showed us that facts and integrity are not necessary to win viewers. Now the major outlets are controlled by a handful of entities, and they do not practice journalism as we once understood it. Those entities are in turn controlled by the ultra-wealthy. The ultra-wealthy have political agendas based on their wishes and needs. Because they live very different lives from everyone else, their agendas are unlikely to match the wishes and needs of the broader population. So the institution we relied upon to inform us in our democratic decision making is now in the business of pushing agendas that are unlikely to match the wishes and needs of the broader population.

That's scary.

For the past few years, all we've heard from Google, Facebook, et al., is how deanonymization is going to end trolling and make people Take The Internet Seriously. It hasn't worked. In fact, it has consistently failed spectacularly, and made every problem worse. Doxxing is easier than ever, and is a virtually standard part of arguing on the Internet. Privacy has gone to shit, and the demand for phenomenally unworkable "Right To Be Forgotten" laws has increased, without any concern for the fact that we wouldn't need to forget so many things if people were able to simply remain anonymous.

So no, we should not require real names for domains, or for Youtube accounts, or email, or whatever inane thing it's going to be next. I'm very skeptical that we should have a public WHOIS registry at all, because for many years it has been reduced to a useless racket for registrars to sell "domain privacy" services.

Oh, I'm sorry, did Peter Thiel force them to illegally publish a sex tape? Did Peter Thiel then force them to openly defy court orders to remove it? Did Peter Thiel force them to repeatedly mislead the court in such a way that the judge could not in good conscience allow them to post a bond to delay payment until their appeal could be processed?

No, of course not. Peter Thiel did none of those things, and yet, those are the things that put Gawker in this position. So instead of being mad at Peter Thiel, who critics still can't puzzle out a way to actually accuse of any real wrongdoing other than "he helped a victim of a serious crime get justice from the serial offenders who wronged him," perhaps you should be mad at the ACTUAL evil people who will unlawfully publish secret recordings of people having sex and saying things post-coitus that aren't popular so they can profit off the destruction of their careers.

Not sure where you're going with either of those. GP (no idea if that was you or not) made a wisecrack about Hulk getting a $150m award for shitty porn. Regardless of whether he gets paid or not, it seems likely to me that Kim got less because a) she settled out of court, and b) Gawker did an abysmal job of defending themselves.

It's also charitable to describe any of what Gawker did as "reporting."

Hulk got paid a finder's fee for discovering the world's least sympathetic defendant.

Kim Kardashian did sue. She settled for $5 million, and also became famous.

I used to be a really big stickler for type safety... but these PHP bots are just so dynamic, and just between you and me, they let you get to root so much more quickly. I feel like with some of them, you barely have to go five minutes before she's almost begging you to inject your SQL.