I'm amazed they use Slack at all. Let alone as a fallback.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-matter...
> Like many companies in the last year we've switched to using Slack to improve internal communication. [...] Since Slack doesn't offer an on-premises version, we searched for other options. We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative and suggested a collaboration to the Mattermost team.
I'm not really sure why it's 'GitLab Mattermost' and not (at your link) 'GitLab Nginx' et al. though.
(We use GitLab and Mattermost (integration) where I work. I've been 'remote / WFH' for the past 7 years.)
They use a ton of services.
Likely you don't want your backup to be one of your systems and another part of the company probably uses Zoom already so it is probably easy to fail over to that.
This includes many proprietary ones, we generally choose the product that will work best for us, considering the benefits of open source, but not excluding proprietary software.
Mattermost is not part of the single application that GitLab is. There is a good integration between with GitLab and our Omnibus installer allows you to easily install it. But it is a separate application from a separate company.
That is one reason we did not go with Mattermost.
This isn't a slam at devops, it's about the need for institutional information hiding; not everyone needs to know about and weigh in on every decision being made.
https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/slack-updates-privac...
This is the reason these "closed" ecosystem apps like Slack/Zoom are multi billion dollar companies and have massive uptake. Simple and easy to user.
--
Though, I do agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment that the Slack team needs all the positive vibes they can get right now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...
I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market.
Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there.
Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.
What other business in this space has given China unfettered access to US users and data? I'm not aware of it occurring with Webex, Teams or go2meeting. The "one rogue employee" thing falls flat pretty quickly when they're the only ones that had this issue.
This feels like their encryption thing all over again, there's an "oversight" that is equivalent to a backdoor that only gets fixed when they get caught.
The fact is all of the US businesses operating in China give surveillance ability to the Chinese government for the Chinese users and are operating in an ethically questionable space being primarily based outside of China, at least in my opinion.
It's really not too different than the businesses sharing US citizen data to the US government, much of which Snowden and others before him exposed. I suspect there's a lot more surveillance going on everywhere than the general public know about and the businesses best positioned to do the surveillance are probably doing it.
The fear on this forum is imagined political thriller more than realistic.
Every technologist is grifting off the military industrial complex.
No one imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is a US Citizen and neither is Assange.
The US prison system is super fucked up but it is not the same as ethnic cleansing.
You are comparing apples to concentration camps.
I think you should I know I -- and probably others, are reading this as "b-b-but, they're not US Citizens, so they don't deserve [the same] rights"
I hope that's not what you mean, because if it is, that's really fucked up.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-were-mass-...
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2020/09/18/more-migrant-women-say-...
And 70% of those people in those camps are released within 30 days, often times within one week back to their country of origin (or given asylum).
Are the "brown people" in camps along the border a single, ethnic minority? Are all "brown people" in the country subject to arrest and under surveillance just for being "brown"?
That's a glib retort.
A takeaway from your position is that it's ok so long as you do it to citizens of other countries.
> it is not the same as ethnic cleansing.
See the above.
That's always been the difference between the US and China and why so many countries have hatred for us and yet little to none for China. They don't fuck with other countries on the level that we do.
America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.
Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high.
As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.
This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal"
But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned.
I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls.
For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
> and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete.
Zoom at least suspects he did not act alone.
I'm posting this because I found a lot of people don't know that Zoom includes a complete chat client that includes channels.
And #HugOps to the engineers at Slack working on this. I appreciate that they posted a periodic update even when there was no news to report: "There are no changes to report as of yet. We're still all hands on deck and continuing to dig in on our side. We'll continue to share updates every 30 minutes until the incident has been downgraded."