Author: Shawn K. Quinn

Dwyane Wade, more important than “O Canada”?

Bleacher Report broke this story on Dwyane Wade’s apparent disrespect for the Canadian national anthem before the Miami Heat’s Game 3 loss to the Toronto Raptors on Saturday. Mr. Wade was continuing to shoot buckets during most of the opening verse of “O Canada.” Quoting the article:

Wade explained on Sunday how he didn’t mean it as a slight to Canada, saying, per the Associated Press’ Tim Reynolds, “If anyone thinks I was being disrespectful, they don’t know who Dwyane Wade is.”

The 34-year-old veteran added, per the Palm Beach Post’s Jason Lieser, “I understand whatever’s said about it, but I’m not a disrespectful person.”

[…]

Reynolds went on to explain how part of Wade’s pregame ritual includes making his last shot before lining up for the national anthem. He kept failing to convert that aspect of his routine, which explained the ongoing quest for a bucket before “O Canada.”

I don’t care what level of basketball you are playing or how much you are getting paid. If the event is of enough importance that a national anthem–whether your country’s or that of your opponents–is being performed before the game, the proper thing to do is be respectful and stop whatever you are doing. Respect is the most important part of any pregame ritual.

Mr. Wade’s comments only aggravate the situation. His words speak the exact opposite of his actions. And honestly, his words ring rather hollow. The video of Mr. Wade shooting baskets during the opening verse of “O Canada” will certainly make its way around much faster than any lame excuses he can offer up for his disrespectful and egomaniacal actions.

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Wade is getting paid $20 million this year. Perhaps a large fine will get his attention that shooting extra hoops during a national anthem is something you Just Don’t Do. Shame on you, Mr. Wade.

The tale of the missing “bloody sock” game

A recent story in the Washington Post highlights an editing decision made by a major sports network which, in light of recent events, is rather suspicious.

Recently, ESPN parted ways with former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling who had been hired on by the network as a baseball analyst. ESPN found Mr. Schilling’s recent social media posts to be out of line, and I will admit that I find a lot of the stuff Mr. Schilling posted to be rather distasteful and tacky. (I’m not going to get into what’s been said about others at ESPN having similar viewpoints that haven’t been posted to social media; that’s a bit tangential to the main focus of this post, though it is noteworthy. I don’t have the specifics handy at the moment, but I may explore that issue deeper in a later post.)

However, what ESPN did next isn’t much better. ESPN needed to edit down a documentary (for time) about the 2004 ALCS series and the amazing comeback staged by the Boston Red Sox to come back and win the series in seven games after losing the first three in a row. Mr. Schilling’s performance in Game 6, known to many baseball fans (Red Sox and otherwise) as the “bloody sock game”, was central to the team’s comeback effort. Surprisingly, somebody at ESPN decided to cut the entirety of the portion about that Game 6, basically cutting Mr. Schilling out of that airing completely. From the story:

“When a live event runs long, it’s standard procedure to shorten a taped program that follows,” an ESPN spokesman told The Post. “In this case, we needed to edit out one of the film’s four segments to account for the extra length of the softball game.”

What an amazing coincidence! This looks incredibly bad on ESPN; I don’t care what Mr. Schilling said or why ESPN felt it was necessary to fire him. The editing gaffe that ESPN made here is paramount to revisionism and basically says that Mr. Schilling’s Game 6 performance is less important than what happened in Games 4, 5, and 7, or put another way, that the Red Sox could have won that ALCS without him. Looked at another way, the edit by ESPN says they would rather pretend Game 6 didn’t even happen, because of who pitched most of it (Mr. Schilling). Any way you slice it, this is pretty distasteful and I don’t buy that it’s a mere coincidence in the least.

The best parallel I can draw here is in chess, with the late Bobby Fischer’s somewhat well-known “fuck the US” rant shortly after the terrorist attacks on 2001-09-11. I believe it is possible to condemn the increasingly radical political viewpoints held by Mr. Fischer during his later years, and still positively reflect on his contributions to the chess community during the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, the two situations are not identical in the least. (Mr. Fischer didn’t return to the US after a rematch with Boris Spassky in 1992, due to the fact the match violated a UN trade embargo and an executive order from then-President George H. W. Bush, and there was a warrant for his arrest issued at the conclusion of the match. Mr. Fischer lived as a fugitive for years never returning to the US for the final 16 years or so of his life.)

Even today within the chess world, Mr. Fischer’s anti-American and anti-Semitic rants in his later life are the source of quite a bit of debate. And maybe I am the odd one out for having different opinions of Mr. Fischer as a chess player up to the 1970s versus Mr. Fischer post-1992, or having different opinions of Mr. Schilling’s performance as a baseball player versus Mr. Schilling as a baseball analyst and social media user.

Regardless of whatever animosity ESPN may have towards Mr. Schilling, “coincidentally” editing out a segment which covers perhaps his best known accomplishment for time presents entirely the wrong impression. Hopefully they won’t get this one wrong again.

Blockheaded blocking, GitHub style

From WPTavern.com comes this surprising development about the block functionality on GitHub. From the article:

Users who are blocked will no longer be able to open or comment on issues or pull requests, nor will they will not be able to add or edit any of the project’s wiki pages.

…both of these sound reasonable so far, but then there’s this:

Blocked users are also prevented from forking any of the organization’s repositories.

It is this last one, however, that I have a huge issue with. While rare, forking is generally considered the best way to resolve differences of opinion on a project. There are also other valid reasons for forking such as wanting to recode substantial parts of a project for different hardware (anything from a completely different architecture to a newer or older generation of CPU), to satisfy different jurisdictions’ legal requirements (example: a GPLed arcade game software needs recoding for Texas’s somewhat oddball redemption game limits), or even rewriting the original code in a new language or new variant of that language (Inkscape in C++ versus Sodipodi in C).

This problem is compounded by Github’s terms of service A.7 which disallows one person or legal entity from having multiple free accounts. Otherwise, the easiest workaround would be to make a one-off account just for forking a project one has been blocked from, and transfer it to the “real” account. Someone who wished to fork a project after being blocked would either need to form a new legal entity such as an LLC (!) or have someone fork the project on their behalf. I’m not even sure if that would provide full functionality.

I am, however, pretty sure that the vast majority of ghost accounts on online services, GitHub or otherwise, go undetected for years. Outside of legal action, there’s no real way to stop them. (Example: I could get a cheap voice/text only “burner” phone plus $10 worth of airtime, pay for it in cash, go down to an Internet-connected cafe such as a Starbucks like the one I am in now, and set up a new Gmail account within minutes. If there are more than 5 people in that Starbucks at the time the account was created, and/or there’s no reason to suspect monkey business until after the video surveillance system at Starbucks erases/overwrites the video from that time, it’s going to be damn hard to figure out who really made that account. Personally, I’ve never done this, but I’m sure some people have. Bonus points for using Tails/Tor Browser on top of all this.)

Too many people who use platforms like Facebook and Twitter have no idea what blocking actually does. Too many use it as an “easy way out” with regard to avoiding differences resolvable with minimal effort. (As an aside, in the case of Twitter specifically, it has changed over the years. At one time one could still easily read public tweets of a user that blocked them. Now, there’s just a screen that says “You have been blocked from following @skquinn and reading @skquinn’s Tweets. Learn more”. One huge problem I have with this setup is that it is taking the user’s authentication information and using it against them; it’s possible to see the same timeline as a not-logged-in user. Twitter does not even restrict me from making a second account just for the purpose of evading certain aspects of blocking, though things like a prohibition against harassment and stalking are still in play.)

Also, blocking is an all-or-nothing proposition in most cases. There’s no way to line-item block certain posts from certain people that are no longer friends. The closest one can come is, on Facebook, to make a custom filter that amounts to “all friends except Joe Dummy” or similar. Indeed, GitHub’s block function appears to allow no easy way to allow just forking, and was made with the assumption someone would want to prohibit a diverse and far-reaching set of actions with one button most of the time.

So again we have a service which has made the block function far more powerful than it really should be. As unfortunate as it is, there is still time for GitHub to fix this unfortunate mistake, and I am hoping that they do.

Mislabeling of Microsoft’s latest Windows addition

Recently Microsoft made the announcement regarding the ability to run some GNU/Linux programs under Windows. Unfortunately, it was a lightning rod attracting the most high-profile abuse of the name of the kernel, Linux.

In Mike Gerwitz’s blog post entitled “GNU/kWindows”, he sets the record straight on exactly what is going on. The main points:

  1. What most people have been referring to as “Linux” is actually GNU.
  2. “Most users would not even recognize what GNU is” thanks to the mislabeling that has been ongoing for the past two decades.
  3. The GNU Project is about freedom. Not just passing around the source code, but freedom. Specifically, these four freedoms:
    • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
    • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
    • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
    • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Note that source code access is only a precondition for two of these four freedoms. It’s very possible to distribute source code that cannot legally be run for specific purposes, or that cannot be legally redistributed.

It is also worth noting again (Mike does not touch on these points, but maybe he should have), the “open source” movement which seems to get all the publicity splintered from the original free software movement founded by Richard Stallman back in 1984. Without the free software movement there would have been nothing for this “open source” splinter faction to splinter from. In fact, “open source” started off as a “marketing campaign” for free software. It was an attempt to get people talking less about freedom–and unfortunately, it worked.

There is a GNU kernel, the Hurd. A lot of people choose to ignore its existence, as it is not “release quality” yet; the goals and philosophy behind it differ radically from those of the kernel, Linux. (There is technically a recent release, but it’s numbered 0.7. Usually versions numbered 1.0 denote development versions.) It is still there, and I have faith the GNU Project developers will complete it. I do check in on their progress with Hurd every so often (about once every 2 to 3 years). I do plan to switch to a system which boots Hurd when the time is right.

Microsoft has done the free software community more of a disservice by naming this the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) when a more appropriate name would be the Windows Subsystem for GNU (WSG). As I read it, they are using GNU bash, GNU libc, etc.

Mark Shuttleworth ought to be especially ashamed of himself, per this quote:

In our journey to bring free software to the widest possible audience, this is not a moment we could have predicted. Nevertheless, we are delighted to stand behind Ubuntu for Windows, committed to addressing the needs of Windows developers exploring Linux in this amazing new way, and are excited at the possibilities heralded by this unexpected turn of events.

He had a great opportunity to say “exploring GNU” instead, and set the record straight. Remember, Linus Torvalds himself has said the kernel, Linux, is nothing without an operating system (OS) to boot into:

Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools aren’t in the distribution – ask me (or GNU) for more info.

Unfortunately this paragraph has been omitted in every version of the kernel, Linux, released since (at least the surviving RELNOTES-0.12 doesn’t have it, it may have been in versions released between, but who knows how many copies of those survive and where). Of course, personally, I make it a point to either refer to “GNU/Linux” or “a GNU variant” (when the kernel really matters less than the operating system and software) when referring to what operating system I run. I could only wish everyone else did the same.

This is before even getting into the broader implications of making it more convenient to use Microsoft Windows. The spying on users that Microsoft has been doing has only gotten worse with Windows 10. Microsoft has combined that with a rather aggressive attempt to get users to upgrade to Windows 10, either by discontinuing support for earlier versions of Windows, or by just pestering them with unwanted offers to upgrade “for free” to Windows 10. It’s obvious to see what direction this is going.

The best choice to develop software for a given OS, is to actually run that OS. Unless of course it is an OS intended to run on a different device (embedded systems) in which case cross-compiling is unavoidable. Choosing to run an OS like Windows, to develop for an OS like GNU/Linux or another GNU variant, is a highly questionable and self-contradictory choice. I don’t know what the point was behind Microsoft’s port of the Bash shell and a GNU variant environment to Windows, but they would have served the community better making their own GNU/Linux or GNU variant distribution. Actually, the best case scenario is pledging to release Windows 11 under the GPL. (A man can dream…)

The Untied.com story: United Airlines tries a SLAPP

I don’t travel by air that often. In fact, the last time I flew a commercial airline was before 2001-09-11, and I don’t plan to travel by air (at least via mass-market commercial airlines) anytime soon for a variety of reasons. However, I do keep up with travel-related news as one day I may be traveling by air again.

So it did and still does concern me greatly that United Airlines filed a SLAPP suit against a “consumer opinion” site called Untied.com (note spelling). (SLAPP stands for “strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”; basically, United is (ab)using the legal system in a lame attempt to silence one of the more prominent websites critical of their mistakes.)

I will admit I was a bit disappointed to hear that Continental Airlines was merging with United back in 2010. I had been at least nominally familiar with the Untied.com opinion site before that year. I had hoped that the corporate culture of Continental would prevail over whatever was causing so many unhappy passengers at United. Instead, some four years after the merger is complete, it turns out that now United is the only real choice for air travel on some routes. And, not surprisingly, Untied.com still has plenty to write about in the way of United’s poor customer service. So much for that hope I was holding out.

Unfortunately for a variety of reasons, I was not able to post this before the trial began this past Friday (2016-04-15). However, I believe publicity will still help, as a lot of the traveling public has not heard of Untied.com. So spread the word and make everyone aware first that Untied.com is out there, and that the airline they are criticizing is attempting to silence them with a SLAPP suit. It’s absolutely outrageous that in a Canadian province (Quebec) that supposedly has an anti-SLAPP law, United is still being allowed to press forward with a fairly obvious SLAPP suit.