@Kyle_Rankin’s blog articles written for Purism has been decredited and replaced with the Purism placeholder author:
I want this change reverted.
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Does seem a bit CCP.
Purism would have to speak to
a) whether this was an accidental change or an intentional change?
b) if the latter, what the reason was?
@JCS ?
(As a “hypothetical” example of how this could happen “accidentally” … let’s say you use a Content Management System, and a staff member leaves, so you immediately disable the account as per correct security practice, and X years later your security auditors are giving you grief about too many old and obsolete accounts that are disabled but not deleted, so you finally delete the account, and then for Referential Integrity reasons the association between document and account has to change.)
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I don’t know; I haven’t seen (or noticed) the context around this but can ask internally.
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A recursive blanket edit change? Maybe they intended to edit one file and ended up editing them all?
“To really screw things up requies a computer.”
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I mean, cloudflare was a mistake too, so things happen…
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Like Stalin era “disappeared people” on official photos?
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Or strings of stunning victories getting ever closer to the capital? (Used by both sides.)
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Who @purism was responsible for the change? Has anyone taken responsibility?
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I don’t think it matters, and depending on why it was done it may not be feasible for them to talk about.
No one has publicly claimed responsibility for the change.
Has anyone asked Kyle? He may have asked for this to happen for instance, and if so it may not be for Purism to disclose and speak to that.
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No.
Yes, I notified them last week about this via email. Their responses did not explicitly state nor suggest that they have authorized this change.
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Did it indicate they were unhappy or otherwise cared about the change?
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Thank you. Sounds like a logical and likely scenario and based on Kyle’s lack of enthusiasm for Purism to do something about it I suspect the most prudent thing for Purism to do is, nothing.
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From the responses I received internally, it seemed that leadership did some IT housecleaning and Wordpress dissociated the deactivated account to the default/generic user. So it sounds like Kyle was entirely accurate about that. I don’t manage Wordpress accounts but suggest that Kyle’s articles still reference him, even if it’s tied to some restricted-access dummy account only containing his name and avatar.
I’m working on higher-priority issues right now but can loop back to this eventually for follow-up.
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Seems like a housekeeping problem more than a deliberate action, then.
I really liked reading his articles, they were always to the point and with style too.
If you enjoy reading him, he has written many interesting articles on LinuxJournal[dot]com.
N.B. The more paranoid would want to avoid landing on the site and be flagged, though (you know, xkeyscore rules100 and all that…)
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Another option might be to edit the actual article text just to contain a one-line acknowledgement that the article was originally written by Kyle.
From a security perspective, having “dummy accounts” is a bit sub par.
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You can still follow Kyle Rankin on Mastodon.
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Just to dispel any speculation about why Kyle left, he has admitted he was laid off: https://mastodon.kylerank.in/@kyle/113042257435912047
[…] The bad news for librem.one users, is that domain relies on puri.sm name servers so it’s down too (among the reasons I migrated to my own instance when I was laid off). The good news is that someone could possibly fix that faster than puri.sm with NS changes.
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I thought sub-par was good, or is is that only in golf?
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Kyle appears happy to stay at his new role at Aurora. However, he appears to still keep tabs on what’s going on with Purism so I can only guess he still has some fondness for them and may return at some point in the future (just my speculation) if Purism can pull through.
https://mastodon.kylerank.in/@kyle/112934862472009215
While I’ve managed teams (and even a company) before, there is something about my current job that has made me really embrace and enjoy everything involved with managing. I actively enjoy all the opportunities to take care of my team and help them succeed at a deeper level than I felt in past jobs.
It’s probably some combination of the great team I’m leading, and my own maturity in my career. In any case, it’s something Kyle from 15 years ago wouldn’t have understood at all.
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