Just as I started to dive into Rust and start using it on a new project, I hear the entire moderation team (of three people) resigned recently.

From a pull request to the “team” Rust repo:

The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately. This resignation is done in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to. To leave under these circumstances deeply pains us, and we apologize to all of those that we have let down. In recognition that we are out of options from the perspective of Rust Governance, we feel as though we have no course remaining to us but to step down and make this statement.

The team declined to actually say what happened though:

In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability. We’ve chosen to maintain discretion and confidentiality. We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.

As someone evaluating languages/frameworks for use on new project, it’s a little weird to hear that the core team of one of the options has done something bad enough to cause an entire group of moderators to resign, but there’s no information other than that team shouldn’t be trusted.

I respect not wanting to cause unnecessary drama, but keeping everyone in the dark like this doesn’t really seem like the best way to handle it either.

One of the members of the moderation team (burntsushi) writing on a reddit thread:

TIL about the term “vaguebooking.” Yes, we were vague. But on the flip side, we weren’t as vague as we could have been. Anyone who has read any amount of my writing knows that I’m all about balance. To say too much would be terrible folly. But to say too little would not make effective use of the last tool we had in our disposal: resignation. We resigned because we think some kind of change would be a good idea, and we suggested some ideas to the rest of the Rust Team Members.

It’s obvious why saying something is useful. But why not just let it all out? No. That’s irresponsible. Deeply deeply irresponsible. People who think we should just be completely and 100% transparent about literally everything that comes to us have not given any kind of serious thought to what it means to be a moderator. I’ve talked about moderation in the past, and how people tend to assume things are easier than they are.

There’s further discussion on Hacker News, but not much information on what actually happened. Anyone have any insight?

Alex Heath:

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

This actually makes a lot of sense for them. If you’re gonna be a conglomerate (by buying up or cloning the features of any company that is in any way related to or a threat to you) then at least be clear about it. I’m guessing Mark Zuckerberg hopes this might also:

• Allow him to more effectively continue hiding from the consequences of his actions
• Make him a harder target for government investigation/action
• Put some distance between him and the tarnished Facebook name
• Position him as the CEO and leader of the entire “metaverse” he’s trying to build

Vlad Savov from Bloomberg:

The report that Facebook Inc. plans to change its corporate name prompted a flurry of online speculation as industry followers rushed to register their guesses.

[…]

“Meta” is another contender put forward by, among others, Samidh Chakrabarti, the company’s former civic integrity chief. The web address meta.com currently redirects to meta.org, the home of a biomedical research discovery tool developed under the stewardship of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-founded by the Facebook CEO. That suggests Zuckerberg has a head start on any other contender looking to secure the ultimate name for a metaverse firm.

I’m seeing a lot of people speculate that Meta is the new name. I’ve also seen either Horizon, which is the name of one of their VR projects, or just FB. Either way, I’m hoping this changes nothing and the company ends up being split into parts and the executives made responsible for the damage they’ve caused.

Emily Glazer at The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc. has slowed the rollout of new products in recent days, people familiar with the matter said, amid media reports and congressional hearings related to a trove of internal documents showing harms from its platforms.

Executives at the social-media company have also put a hold on some work on existing products while more than a dozen people are involved in conducting “reputational reviews” to examine how Facebook may be criticized and to ensure products don’t adversely impact children, the people said.

It seems a little late for that, doesn’t it?

Facebook has been tightening the reins on what information is shared internally over the past few weeks, the people said. A team within the company is examining all in-house research that could potentially damage Facebook’s image if made public, some of the people said.

This sounds like the “shredding evidence” phase of their corporate response.

Someone on 4chan posted a 125 GB leak of Twitch’s source code, creator payout information, account info (including encrypted passwords), and code from from Amazon’s unreleased Steam competitor called Vapor. From the post:

We bring to you today an extremely poggers leak:

Twitch is an American video live streaming service that focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.

Their community is also a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories, including:

> Entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings
> Mobile, desktop and video game console Twitch clients
> Various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch
> Every other property that Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge
> An unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios
> Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools (lol)

AND: Creator payout reports from 2019 until now. Find out how much your favorite streamer is really making!

The Twitter user @KnowS0mething posted some screenshots of the list of highest paid streamers earlier today.

Note that the torrent name is “twitch-leaks-part-one” so I’m assuming there’s more to come soon.

More articles about the leak:

Kotaku: Report: Twitch Is Hacked And Its Source Code Is In The Wild
VGC: The entirety of Twitch has reportedly been leaked
The Verge: Twitch source code and creator payouts part of massive leak
TechCrunch: Twitch source code and creator payout data leaks online
IGN: Twitch Reportedly Hit By Huge Leak Including Source Code, Payouts and More

I just came across this blog post about the perils of a .xyz domain. I’ve been using this (dwayne.xyz) domain for a while now and I definitely had some concerns about how often my links will be spam-filtered. Luckily I’m not trying to sell an actual product (besides my web development services) so I figured I would stick with it and see how it works out.

This part of the article stuck out though because I recently had something similar happen to me:

One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers.

[…]

The text including the .xyz link is notably absent. Until I realized what was happening, I would sometimes have some very strange text exchanges with people whenever I would mention my company or my email address. Once we switched to spotvirtual.com, this issue went away.

I sent a SMS with one of my .xyz email address to someone recently, and just like in the article, it silently failed to send. Very frustrating and concerning for me considering I use this domain to communicate with my clients.

I have other non-xyz domains as aliases to this server, and every time I read about this kind of thing I’m tempted to make one of them the primary instead of this one…