I remember listening to Charity Majors[1] talk about this on a podcast -- in the case of Honeycomb they have a "dogfood" cluster than monitors production, and a "kibble" cluster that monitors the dogfood.
Cute, but it gets the point across: watchmen for the watchmen, with each layer slightly less mission-critical than the last.
Way I see it is it's more than OK to not know things -- it's a necessary optimization. Engineering is all about tradeoffs, and skills development is no exception. Follow one path, forego another; dive deep, sacrifice breadth (and vice versa).
So consider that maybe, just maybe, for a developer working full-time on a SPA framework, not knowing Docker or Bash scripting might not be a real impediment to working effectively or delivering quality product. If it were, perhaps React & Redux wouldn't be as great as they are. And since they are great, maybe we should consider that fact not as a celebrity get-out-of-jail-free card, but as counterevidence to your implication that these topics all constitute a universal educational imperative, and that someone lacking in any of these areas is by definition not a professional in the software field.
Surely there must already exist some legal protections? I seem to recall certain professional (football? basketball?) players successfully suing EA Games over unauthorized use of their likeness.
>Surely there must already exist some legal protections?
Almost certainly, I think there are companies whose entire business is to handle the image of dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, but should there be?
An actor or athlete's performance is a creative act, and could reasonably be considered intellectual property, but their appearance is an act of nature. Why should that have any special legal protection?
The distinction is it was NCAA as a whole, acting as a single legal entity. The individual athletes were/are powerless against the wealth EA can throw at their legal team.
I would also hope for and expect this to be communicated ASAP from the NPM org to its users.
@seldo, I understand that you don't want to disseminate misleading info, but an abundance of caution seems warranted in this case as my understanding of the incident lines up with what @yashap has said. If we're wrong, straighten us out --- if we're not, please sound an advisory, because this is major.
Yeah, these were some core, widely used packages that were deleted. If they were temporarily hijacked, lots of dev machines (including mine) may have been compromised. There’s a major security risk here, if there was any hijacking now is not the timing for information hiding and PR.
Haha, this has been a well-trod rant of mine for years. Don't forget scorpions, vampire bats, great white sharks, and the world's top 4 deadliest jellyfish!
So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine.
One doesn't have to be "dumb" to be in some danger from the fangjectors.
A friend of mine was driving around his property and found the track blocked by a fallen tree. He started pulling branches off the road and trod on a tiger snake in the grass. He was bitten and survived after administration of anti-venom. He wasn't doing anything particularly dumb and probably 99.9% of the time wouldn't have trodden on a snake.
I used to work on a farm. One day after moving the irrigation sprays I went to the well to turn the pump on. Around the well was about a 3 foot high concrete wall, maybe 3 inches wide. I sat on the edge of the wall to wait until the pressure came up and sprays started working. As I turned to leave I happened to notice on the wall, about 30cm from my hand, was a red-bellied black snake sunning itself. Close call.
I remember as a child, my mother chasing brown snakes out of our front garden so they wouldn't be a danger to us children.
If you're outside of a major urban environment in Australia, snakes are around. One just needs to be a bit careful.
Your diagram got me a bit confused as the empty space was right over the fold and I was wondering why the comments wouldn't load and what a weird error [place where bad things are] is.
On the flip side of this incessantly boring argument, once you've actually dealt with a swarm of all of these things successfully, i.e. lived to make lunch out of it, then .. pretty much .. everyone elses' zeitgeist seems pretty fucking boring.
The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...
Are you speaking purely with regard to the swatting, and not to the scores of bomb threats?
Regardless of the issues around policing, surely we can agree that this individual has caused tremendous societal cost, not just due to the disruption of valuable services or the resources wasted investigating his claims but also due to the fear he's created and the doubt he's cast over such claims in the future, which could lead to slower and less effective responses to true threats.
He's also been to jail for this before, and appears to have gone right back to work when he got out. He's a serial offender, without much apparent motive besides pure misanthropy.
Again, regardless of what you think about policing in America, can we please agree that this is the kind of person who belongs in prison? Perhaps you do, in which case apologies for the long response -- just thought it was worth clarifying given the thread's focus on the police reaction.
Cute, but it gets the point across: watchmen for the watchmen, with each layer slightly less mission-critical than the last.
[1] https://changelog.com/shipit/11#transcript-98