> It's always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.

This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 million people in the streets. Just think of the logistics of food, water, and waste ... cellular data bandwidth ... Twitter, Facebook and Instagram load ...)

That's how change happens; we try to persuade each other. People who are more involved, motivated, skilled, available, etc. do more of the work. If there was an environmental problem in SF Bay, the people who have the knowledge and expertise about the issue, and the communication skills, would inform and try to persuade everyone else. I'm not going to investigate it myself.

A business isn’t a social club. More often than not, agitators have an agenda to agitate no matter what, or to provide air cover for other issues.

When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.

People never have legitimate concerns about pay, working conditions, etc.?

> A business isn’t a social club.

A lot of them are more social than anything else. Likeability supplants pure efficiency, and people hire friends, or people they want to spend time with.

Apple isn't like any business you've worked at before. While this movement might have signs of social activism, Apple's culture of secrecy is sui generis. It's been a long time coming for any sort of pushback against it, and it makes sense that it took a pandemic and enforced WFH for the systems of control to begin to break down.

As to whether or not their grievances are warranted, try asking any of your colleagues who used to work at Apple, and decide for yourself.

An unofficial, definitely don't tell management slack would have 1000s of users before the email prohibiting it managed to finish sending to all employees. Draconian policies seem viable and like they'd work, but they require a certain amount of compliance to be effective.

These shadow IT attempts surface all the time through a vaguely competent SecOps’ team daily work, especially insider threat. Gets bragged about or picked up via MDM or DNS queries. So ya in this case the rule comes with easy enforcement.

In 2013 maybe. These days (and especially so at Apple) it doesn't take much skill to setup a group chat on signal - and we can assume they have personal phones. Your IT group are not going to find anything.

Small group in Signal, yes that would be hard to catch. A group large enough where this matters to think about, OPSEC would fail via non-technical hires.

Notwithstanding the write-itself scandal of a "privacy-champion spying on employees and cracking down on their communications" angle, you won't be able to enforce anything on personal devices congregating on off-company platforms and being spread by word of mouth (or company email, if they are feeling saucy)

You arguably can if it’s work business on personal devices. Violates an AUP and other various company regs ties to data loss and IP.

Your comment raised some questions for me:

* Just curious, how do you enforce against, for example, a Facebook group? Would you have to totally block Facebook?

* With word of mouth an activist Slack workspace can take off on personal devices over cellular data, if the conditions are right. Is the idea of internal enforcement just to make it less convenient to participate?

* Why don’t activists use Blind to organize? Is Blind hostile to activists? How active is Blind at moderating content on behalf of companies (eg. taking down or burying activist content)?

To preface, “insider threat” is a bit of a harsh way to name the program this behavior falls under- it also covers “good” employees behaving in non-malicious but mistaken ways that will harm a company. Also, all work-related actions taking place off work devices gets covered under an AUP. So heading into this, Apple has both the program and policy to enforce a few different legal/HR actions against employees who’d go this route.

With insider threat, the idea isn’t to force the behavior into concealed channels, but instead into “cleartext” channels where the data exfil, or I guess in this case subversive employee behavior, can be watched/snapshotted. Once that’s done, it goes over to HR/legal. So it’s not so much make it inconvenient to participate, but to make it easy to catch that participation is occurring, with some safeguards around what that participation is - chatter is ok, but have safeguard for Apple intellectual property landing in that activist slack.

So with FB and Blind, a company has two ways to ID that’s occurring, take evidence,nand then over to HR /Legal it goes.

If it occurs on work computers, one is device management tools like Forcepoint that allow an insider threat team to see your real time action. They see the employee going to this Slack/Blind, insider threat team starts taking artifacts, and that’s evidence. Other device mgmt tools aren’t as invasive, but achieve similar ends. All in all, regardless of the forum, the behavior can get caught, and it’s shipped to HR.

If all of the activism occurs off work computers, I’d bet the behavior gets caught by two ways. One, 3rd party vendors who scan social media/GitHub for company branding existing outside of company channels (so on FB “Apple Activist Group” would fire). Two, and more likely, is the activists suck at OPSEC because Bob or Susan from marketing who join the group but computers are Google-machines to them talk about it on work devices or the water cooler/Slack.

Gotta remember a place like Apple has insider threat programs dealing with industrial/corporate espionage. A bunch of pissed off activist employees trying to sneak around aren’t the same challenge. If Apple did have an employee activist group with ironclad OPSEC, Apple prob has big problems and those employees need to balance how important the cause is and why can’t they just talk about it to mgmt vs how that would look from the outside to a company/law enforcement.

Do these device management tools extend to personal cell phones that have corporate software installed on them? For example, using a token that’s generated on the phone to log in to the corporate VPN while working remotely from home, would this give a company the same device management access?

It depends on what that corporate software is. Only a few of them skew towards real-time viewing of behavior. If what you’re referring to just generates a token that you then use to log onto a Vpn on a work device, that token generation is likely really limited in its access. The less like Google Auth, and the more like a custom solution the tool is, the more you have to think about device access you’re giving. I operate under the assumption any work business I do on any device is potentially logged extensively. The tools you want to be aware of installing on personal devices are “MDM” or similar, at a high level. Those get potentially large access.

Thanks for the response. I am not familiar with either Google Auth of MDM. The token is installed with a suite of Microsoft apps such as Outlook and Teams.

I definitely assume work provided devices are logged and I've been told work provided cell phones are logged, but I don't know if that extends to personal devices. Of course best case would be to try and find out if there is a way to use an external token generator to keep work off a personal device.

If you name the app, can prob give a guesstimate

It's called SecureAuth Authenticate. Thanks for your time!

Since it can do push notifications, prob some telemetry phones home to corporate around user agent/ip, minimal fingerprinting like that.

This part is interesting, future feature, wonder how they detect that on a personal device: “ Jailbreak detection If a user installs SecureAuth Authenticate on a jailbroken or rooted phone, SecureAuth will detect the occurrence and will not allow the user to set up a SecureAuth account. (Coming Soon)”

Ultimately, read your AUP and BYOD policy and see what you did/did not sign away wrt monitoring on personal devices. Quite likely you can raise an HR stink if this app had more than just basic telemetry and they mandate it to be on a personal device.

That's the right direction, but the wrong policy. Basecamp's "no talking politics on work channels" is more likely to be effective, in part because spending work hours on other things - e.g. a political non-company slack - then becomes an issue of wasting time.

Is it similar to Twitter where the <0.1% drive dialogue?

You could say that about most communities though. For every person that submits an article to HN, how many readers are there?

Same with Reddit. Hell, same with IRL, in person communities.

Honestly, that realization is part of why I started commenting on message boards rather than lurking. The vast majority of people read but don't even bother to up/down vote. You have a lot of outsized influence if you choose to comment, even if it doesn't seem like your comments get much attention.

Somewhere between 5 and 10 million uniques a day IIRC

Tim Cook reaps what he sows. He started all this when he fired Antonio García Martínez in response to an employee petition. (Hint to Tim Cook: You should have fired each and every one of the employees who signed that petition.)

He made the wrong, worst people at the company feel "empowered" and now there's no stopping them.

For those who don't remember, this fired leader wrote "Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self- regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel" and many other things similar to it.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...

Yeah, the complaining about this is ludicrous. It feels like there are increasingly two camps, one of which believes anyone fired for social justice reasons is being wronged due to some kind of cancel culture, and the other of which believes that the former never happens in any case.

The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.

The fact is, that was a minor point in a well-received, critically-reviewd book he wrote a number of years before he was offered the job at Apple, and Apple hired him knowing about the book.

And now you, who never read the book but copy-pasta a few quoted sentences, want to destroy this man.

To go back after the fact and fire someone because of this was wrong. (That's why Apple settled for a lot of money, and Mr. Garcia can no longer talk about it.)

I don't want to destroy him. That was a weird thing for you to say.

I didn't hear about Apple settling for a lot of money. How much was it?

Full context:

> Anyway: Chaos Monkeys contains scenes from Antonio’s private relationships. Characteristically, they’re painted as comedies, where his personal life is depicted as an unpredictable third party over which he has little control — only occasionally, it seems, does it even listen to his suggestions. He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”

He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She did such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.

At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:

British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.

Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who... ----------

I don't see how that context changes anything. It's not a quote from a character or, apparently, an intentionally unreliable narrator, and there's nothing to indicate that it's not a sincerely held belief by the author.

Exactly. Thanks for trying to explain it to the hordes on Hacker News.

The NY Times mentioned this episode in this article, which is why I mentioned my belief that it's what started these internal troubles for Tim Cook and Apple.

> The complaints seem to be making an impact. When Apple this year hired Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, more than 2,000 employees signed a protest letter to management because of what they called “overtly racist and sexist remarks” in a book he had written, based in part on his time at Facebook. Within days, Apple fired him. Mr. García Martínez declined to comment on the specifics of his case.

Just a note, before Slack a lot of the company was just using iMessage - nobody wants that, 30+ people group chats with messages at all hours of the day was the worst digital communication experience I've ever seen at a company.

Nothing wrong with eating your own dogfood. If iMessage group chats are a bad experience, fix them in the software itself.

iMessage is not a scalable work communication tool.

Shouldn’t Apple just limit Slack channels to 12 people?

I think when "suppressing employee communication" is part of your playbook, it's time to consider that the unrest might be warranted.

That would push internal communications into a far more externally facing/visible forum, I would guess.

This would not help Apple’s case with the current Department of Labor probes, as well as the investigations complaints lodged with California’s Dept of Industrial Relations Labor Commissioner's Office. Organizing efforts are protected by federal law, as is discussing and sharing your compensation information with others (regarding pay equity).

https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investig...