Yesterday was the third anniversary of Raspberry Pi announcing that they'd hired an ex-cop (specifically a Technical Surveillance Officer) as their "Maker-in-residence", and then pissing off a huge segment of their target market by acting completely oblivious as to why that might be a problem.
I missed my calendar reminder about it, so instead you can celebrate the third anniversary of Buzzfeed writing an article about it:
@ansuz This part kills me. -“If she has made an error and blocked somebody who should not have been blocked, people should give her the benefit of the doubt given what had just happened to her,” Upton said.
Like, everybody critical of the situation has to be aware of this one mod's mental state, but the company never has to consider what it's audience has been through. They told us that their devices were used to spy, ON US! AND THEY WILL HIRE THE GUYS DOING THAT AND BRAG ABOUT IT! Then act like this is some organized dogpile rather than people having a very normal reaction to being told a trusted company was acting against our interests. The mental state and circumstances of the one person they know outweighs the mental state and circumstances of hundreds. People have their lives destroyed by people like Toby Roberts, possibly even died due to his intel, but none of that gets to count I guess. She was able to just dismiss this as a smear campaign totally unrelated to their actions.
@ansuz - I've met quite a few people involved with infosec from the maker scene that are also involved in law enforcement.
