since botting is so easy, probably they used a lot of accounts to access data that, in theory, is somewhat public. I mean, in an ideal world in which engineers have infinite time sure, they would have noticed, but I do investigations on platform apps for work and trust me, they miss a lot of more fundamental stuff.

spotify has a whole economy of bots signing up, uploading fake songs listened by other bots and earning lot of money in the process. I know several people living out of this. A little army of scraper bots is definitely not what they should be the most concerned about.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.

Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.

There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.

I would add exploitation of precarious workers both in the USA, Europe and third-world countries. That said, were you involved in Alphabet Workers Union? If not, why?

He’s a brown guy immigrated to NA and writing on a Marxist magazine. I don’t believe in reducing the personal to the biographical like Americans do, but also I think you can guess the answer to a few of your questions.

Hello. Thanks for the input. We know most of these and TWC is globally under a process of moving towards a self-hosted infrastructure. We have a self-hosted url shortener, but we still have to structure a process to guarantee that the social media teams use them.

For the calls, Zoom is pretty entrenched in our infrastructure, but we plan to eventually replace it. For obvious reasons of hardware performance, we are keeping it as one of the last steps, because we often organize webinars with 100+ people, and our current infrastructure probably wouldn’t handle it with like a jitsi instance or similar.

The security party is also intended as a way to attract people who could bring more expertise on these topics into the infrastructure team and accelerate this transition.

yes. The event is on an American time zone so I kept the American format. We might repeat it on an European time zone if there’s interest.

which expands the group of people that can do this from mobile cybersec people to anybody with some foundations of IT management skills

CET, it’s in the title

I guess here the topic is more of insurrections, like what’s happening in Iran right now or how it went on in HK

I have no clue what you believe this event is actually about and why people go there.

Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.

God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.

The issue with this line of reasoning, which is correct and the only reasonable way to approach protests, is that protests are sold to participants as if they are actions that do something in the world, because at some point in history, they did. The people attracted by protests are people who want to protest. Even if you attract them into your org, they will still carry that mindset that politics is about words, expression and dissent, rather than power, leverage, change, and impact.

Probably most potential good organizers avoid protests actively because they do understand intuitivelyy they don’t work and why they don’t work.

I think the point is more general about profiting from “renting” their music rather than from their labor. The fact that Spotify gives them peanuts make their position even more miserable.