Gregory's ServerSomeone at Twitter is trying to delete data from from a git repository
Please pass the popcorn
 88 comments
 @axoplasm @ygalanter @thomasfuchs i'm tired and my eyes are kind of burning / itching / unfocused and at first i read this as "this page is talking too loud" and got *very* confused, but ngl that'd be a funny error message too  @ygalanter @skobkin @thomasfuchs It’s like a bunch of people just discovered GitHub and decided to treat it like Reddit.      @lispi314   @makdaam @thomasfuchs My point is even if they delete the repo there’s no taking it back :)  I can force-push from my local hard drive too, you know... 🤫  @thomasfuchs: I've got a diff. There appears to be little interesting there; curiously, somebody has been systematically removing usernames of people whom Melon presumedly fired. But there are some functional changes, such as stripping out the @chancerydaily @riley @thomasfuchs enabling fraud, falsification, and destruction of evidence was part of the reason the svn folks argued strongly against supporting mutable repo past change histories... @tychosoft @chancerydaily @riley @thomasfuchs even with CVS and SVN I had to alter history from time to time. Sometimes people use the systems in a very wrong way and commit the absolutely wrong stuff. Sometimes legal reasons require removal. Being able to rewrite however allows me to work with small iterative commits, but present something reviewable. But there are still systems, like Fossil, which do not like rewrites and are quite interesting. @johannes @chancerydaily @riley @thomasfuchs If confidential information was revealed, its probably better to presume its already compromised rather than pretend it didn't happen and hope nobody noticed. Gross errors can always be resolved with a revert commit. At least that could be an argument I would make for having immutable change control; that the abuses mutable histories invite may be worse than the problems it may solve. @tychosoft @chancerydaily @riley @thomasfuchs it's not only confidential information, but also information I may not distribute (Copyright etc.) also GDPR requires handling personal information. "Somebody may have cloned" is not an argument. But yes, rewrites in published repositories shouldn't be done lightly. @riley @thomasfuchs Mmmmm, PII, eh? I do so hope none of the people concerned were in the EU.... @thomasfuchs Seems reasonable to expect that Musk will start shopping for half-ass version control systems to buy. @grumble209 @thomasfuchs Pretty much my entire life my default setting has been “half ass”. Elon Musk makes me look like an S tier type a personality. That man can half ass anything. I bet he half asses taking a crap. @mos_8502 @thomasfuchs It's remarkable to watch (from afar) Elon's string of unforced errors since his hasty offer to buy Twitter. I can't imagine he's having fun at this point, and don't understand why he won't turn management over to competent professionals (ala SpaceX). @grumble209 He has to keep running the show, because he's done everything very publicly and can't admit now that he's not a know it all genius... erm, I mean... genius who knows everything. He's manœvered himself into a corner and his ego is keeping him there. On a human level, quite sad, actually. @grumble209 @mos_8502 @thomasfuchs who would want the job? He's turned T into such a trash fire. It won't be able to support itself without more money funneled in to reverse Musk's actions.  @grumble209 @thomasfuchs Like what? Perforce? He couldn't afford it. The PE fund backing it would probably appreciate a buyout, though. @kboyd @thomasfuchs SourceSafe? StarTeam? Rebrand one of those as MuskTeam and I bet there would be VC willing to invest ;)   @thomasfuchs I'm curious how the republican vs democrat weight is different. That could be a whole different can of worms. It was actually "just" for stats, but I guess we can then open up a discussion on false balancing right there. Never mind the US-centered myopic outlook on what is important to balance.  @thomasfuchs Given that both groups are rich in not-terribly-clueful tech bros, I honestly wonder what the exact degree of overlap is between these two groups: "Blockchain, which is the best thing on the planet, and which you can't delete stuff from, is just like git, and everyone thinks git is fine, so stop it with the FUD" "OMG they can see what was in the git repo, delete it! ...what do you *mean* people can still see it?" @thomasfuchs And of course, twitter has successfully managed to become the most self destructive social media platform in existence. Well done Elon 🙄  You could do that on AOL. Maybe Elon will buy up AOL next, in order to gain access to their tech. [/deadpan] @thomasfuchs the embarrassing commits are still up lol, this is why you check for reputational risk *before* you open source @lampsofgold @thomasfuchs Maybe they are renaming the constant to `author_is_narcissistic_psychopath`? @TheCodeLorax @lampsofgold @thomasfuchs It’s like when Carl Sagan learned that Apple was using the codename “Sagan” for the first PowerPC Macs in the 1990s and threatened litigation, so they changed it to BHA, which he eventually learned stood for Butt-Head Astronomer. @kctipton git is a source code versioning system which literally first and foremost keeps any code changes every made to a codebase intact and in a history. It’s not possible to delete anything from git, yet they're trying because they didn't read their embarrassing code before releasing it to the public. @thomasfuchs @kctipton Well, it is. It just requires rewriting the history & garbage collecting all the orphaned refs before you go ahead & release it to the world. It's far too late now and they fucked up.  @thomasfuchs they removed some code referencing Pres Obama, Katy Perry, Stephen Curry and Jack, the prior CEO and cofounder. one of the few remaining engineers; github probably isn't the best option for us at this time Musk; the f*^k did you say to me?!?! @thomasfuchs Elon about to learn about git networks and history lolololol @thomasfuchs What’s the ‘so what’ in non tech language for those of us who don’t know what that means but who have half a feeling it might be significant? @thomasfuchs are these the mastermind genius rockstar SpaceX software developers Elon brought in? The question becomes how sync'd this is with the actual production system or if it's something they're putting out there just to sate people. @simon_bitdiddle @thomasfuchs Oh, there’s no way they’re syncing this with prod. At least I’d be extremely surprised if they did. I wonder if people who are forking it are making enhancements or fixing bugs and Twitter are using those efforts to fix their bugs in prod. I also wonder if Twitter is trying to hire people who do that sort of thing. God, came up with a novel supply chain attack: We copied code from someone who patched a bug in the code we published but it turned out to be poorly crafted/intentionally buggy. We can't demand that they fix it because we didn't get permission to use it. I think the amusing thing would be to see them actively develop day-to-day on this and then suddenly /stop/ right around the same time an announced round of firing occurred.  @thomasfuchs “please note that when our boss said ‘I don’t care, just open source it’, he didn’t think of any implications such as trade secrets or potentially embarrassing lines of code. Note that further meaningless walking back may be required in the future.”  @thomasfuchs I'm sure there're at least a 100 forks and thousands of clones of the prior version. At least I hope so.  @thomasfuchs When I first saw people linking to the commit with the “userIsElon” stuff I was convinced it was a hoax using the “commit from a fork” trick. But no! They just force pushed it? Man @thomasfuchs so, it was not an april fool's joke? Reality is way more idiotic than fiction? @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io git has a warning about -f not because that screws up repos, but because the Force Police will hunt you down and cause merge conflicts until the end of time  |
@thomasfuchs oh my FUCKING god