Tag: harassment

The last straw: harassment and endangerment of the campaign bus

I know I’ve been relatively quiet lately. I’ve had a lot going on in my personal life so I haven’t been able to comment on events as they’ve been happening. I still have a post from the start of the pandemic I have been working on that I will try to get up shortly.

I didn’t watch either of the debates, but I think it speaks volumes that CNN’s Dana Bash called the first debate a “shit show” on live cable TV, quickly clarifying “we’re on cable, we can say that.” I don’t blame Dana for not mincing words. I’ve never heard of a presidential candidate rudely interrupting his opponent so many times and making the moderator’s job so difficult. How hard is it to understand how a debate works? The moderator asks the question or provides the talking point. One person talks while the other shuts up and listens. The other responds while the first person shuts up and listens. Then the moderator asks the next question, etc.

Are people really voting to re-elect someone to lead our country who cannot even grasp basic elementary-school-taught manners?

For that matter, in many ways, ***’s conduct and attitude during the debate is a microcosm of his presidency so far. This whole presidency to date has been a shit show, as much as I would prefer not to use that kind of language to describe it.

Perhaps the most damning strike against *** is the one I allude to in the headline. A few “supporters” decided to harass and intimidate the Biden-Harris campaign bus on its trip between Austin and San Antonio. What does *** do right afterwards? He gets on Twitter and tweets “I LOVE TEXAS!!!” with a video of this dangerous criminal act committed in the name of his presidency and campaign. Any president worth anything would have immediately condemned this. These so-called “patriots” are the reason I’m a bit ashamed to be a Texan right now. Honestly, for me, this is the last straw.

And then, of course, there is the most egregious broken campaign promise I have ever seen. “When I’m elected I won’t have time to play golf, I’ll be too busy working.” Yet *** has spent more time out there on the golf course playing “ah shit” golf you’d think he was trying to become the next Arnold Palmer–at taxpayer expense, at that! At least Barack Obama took into account that the taxpayers pay for the Secret Service (and he didn’t own the golf course and surrounding resort either– I really have to wonder if that has something to do with it as well).

I get that a lot of people think Hillary was (and probably still is) unelectable as president. Joe Biden certainly has at least a decent chance; certainly his campaign team understands what’s at stake. Joe isn’t the perfect candidate, but if we tried to find the perfect candidate every election we’d never elect anyone.

Four years of this was four years too many. We can’t stand to have another four years of it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go vote.

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.

HPD officer harasses photographer

I just happened to see this photo and its horrifying narrative in the description when browsing my Flickr feed. Three additional photos follow this one, but all have the same description.

Of particular note are these two quotes from the photographer’s narrative:

…if I was in any way impeding his work, I would be glad to comply with his orders, but otherwise I would continue about my business. He insisted that I was disrupting his work by taking photos as he “doesn’t want his picture taken.”

Upon noting my refusal, Officer Hudson reached for my camera, as if to take it out of my hands. I pulled back and again reiterated my point that I was in my rights to take the photos. He stated that I could either delete my photos or he would arrest me for obstruction of justice.

One of the pictures shows an HPD cruiser with unit number 37622 and Texas exempt plates 104-0046. Unfortunately this is the only identifiable vehicle from the pictures. This along with the date and approximate time (March 3 at around 6pm), and location (Hidalgo near Post Oak Boulevard) should be enough to identify exactly who Officer Hudson is, including badge number.

This is a clear-cut case of abuse of police power, as well as a violation of the standards by which decent people live.