
Uber blocks employees at work from chatting on Blind App - mayoralito
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-blocks-anonymous-chat-app-developer-says-2017-2
======
mooted1
I work at Uber. I was on the wifi yesterday. I was successfully using blind.
If business insider would like video evidence, I'm happy to work with their
reporters 1:1.

There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for
many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.

~~~
rabbidruster
Hmm I downloaded it just to try yesterday and I was not able to access it from
uGuest. Not sure if it's Uber or blind blocking it though.

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urahara
This is very much like a sign that Uber again takes an old path of silencing
people and problems instead of fixing toxic culture. Makes me think that they
also prepare to blackmail Fowler.

~~~
cbanek
Seems like they have probably already started:

[https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833](https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble
and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.

I'm curious though, what tipped her off? While I've worked at tech start-ups
before and can believe all the behavior she outlined (because I've seen
similar things myself, it's _very_ believable) it still bothers me to continue
to take someone's word at face value. I mean I do, I would trust what she says
over Uber any day, but I wish more of this type of information was verifiable.

~~~
uberthrowaway1
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

>This seems to be Uber's modus operandi every single time they're in trouble
and it almost always seems to backfire on them, PR wise.

From attending all hands meetings I get the sense TK has a victim mentality
and sees himself doing no wrong or Uber doing no wrong.

Since we're _clearly_ not wrong, it has to be the critic, right? /S

To be fair, we do get some BS scandals related to surge (they turned off surge
for natural disasters! They're profiting off us! They left it on, they're
profiting off our misery!) but almost all of our scandals are self inflicted.

>I'm curious though, what tipped her off?

I'd wager an employee.

Employees are very angry now at leadership, and in our last few all hands /
CTO speaking to everyone (something they put together just for this week I
think) people questioned publicly what's been questioned in the shadows for a
while.

For instance, Uber has a list of stupid "cultural values" that include values
like "always be hustling" (yes, it's a direct quote) and I've been in private
conversations with people who find these values obnoxious and poorly written.
Never raised to management though.

But this all hands people threw these bullshit values at TK and Thuan and
pointed out how bad they are, including this specific "always be hustling"
value. The questioner even referenced Zootopia ("It's called a hustle,
sweetheart") to skewer it.

Also it was pointed out how our perf review process doesn't reward
collaboration between teams at all (hence the politicking).

Felt almost like a press conference with ace reporters fighting against an
unprepared, incompetent politician. Our CTO even cried, which was a little
dramatic for me.

Happy to see I'm not the only angry employee.

~~~
alphonsegaston
Thanks for the insights. Question about the inside view - do people really buy
Kalanick's fake apologies/victim act at this point? We've gone through this
ruse so many times, from the outside it just seems like a laughable caricature
of malignant narcissism. From your comments about the CTO, I'm guessing he
surrounds himself with "empathizable cover" after the classic abusive pattern
(if you come after me, think about the damage it will do to the nice people
around me).

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k_sh
> "Our activity at Uber has gone up 3x since they blocked us on their WiFi,"
> Shin says.

Streisand Effect in 3... 2... 1...

It's 2017. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?

~~~
hardlianotion
It's really not more surprising than the thought there are still new, well-
funded and high profile companies that have seriously misguided ways of
dealing with sexual harassment complaints.

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retube
Sounds like there's a pretty simple work around, just use mobile Internet not
wifi.

(You shouldn't use corporate wifi for a personal phone anyway)

~~~
toyg
Yeah, this move is just stupid. It's 2017 California, there are umpteen
connectivity options.

It's literally an admission that what is written on Blind is actually true and
leadership is in panic mode. The right response was to dismiss it all as
gossip and act nonchalant; moving from the "laugh at you" step to the "fight
you" step means they're on their way to defeat.

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Flammy
First time hearing of Blind, can anyone share their experiences?

(working at a startup so can't just sign up and see it myself...)

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
I'm on the Microsoft Blind forum as a former FTE as they don't (yet)
revalidate accounts.

MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as
a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises,
bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies
all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone.

The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age
and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s
kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock).

Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who
comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to
get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and
SharePoint are so terrible.

~~~
paganel
> and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so
> terrible.

I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has
become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment
I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never
caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Pretty much everyone at the IC-level at Microsoft is well-aware of the
systemic issues plaguing many products - lower management too - but these
issues don't get fixed because of whatever decisions being made at the
Director level (mostly of the "evil" kind, like how improving UI
responsiveness won't raise profitability but adding video ads will, or how no-
one will switch to OneDrive-for-Business simply because the desktop client
actually works - it'll be because the sales team drove a hard bargain with an
enterprise customer and now their poor users are stuck with it).

I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck
into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't
worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the
wrong color scheme, etc.

~~~
callmeal
Can you please also fix the "escape key closes chat without any warning"
feature too?

------
KKKKkkkk1
The only source of the story seems to be Blind's founder.

------
omar3550
Can I somehow register to be an Uber employee on the app without actually
being one? Would love to read all the crap employees are going through as
lessons learned when I start my own company (one day). Any ideas? The blind
app requires an uber.com email address. Any employees want to help out a
fellow HN'er?

~~~
chinathrow
WTF how stupid is that? You use a company address to sign up, leaving trails
within an internal mail service...

~~~
dajohnson89
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Verification by company email reduces
spam/noise, so I understand why it's done. Probably useful to have non-
employees filtered out. But there's no way I'd trust the service enough to use
it. Not to mention my latent fear of a data breach/leak ruining my career.

~~~
omar3550
Aren't there any company mailing list addresses someone can provide? Someone
inside uber needs to have some connections with IT - could be done easily I
think. No email will be sent I am assuming? Or is there a verification step
where one has to click on a link? Someone who has the app should verify.

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thewhitetulip
Even in 2017, we are still not understanding that if you block something it
becomes more exciting just for the fact that it was banned, ignore it and
it'll die.

~~~
asdfologist
China's a counterexample. Their censorship efforts are pretty damn effective.

~~~
throwanem
China's government has a degree of ubiquitous control that no Western company
can hope to match.

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diebir
What's "Blind"? Never heard of it. So far I have never encountered anything
blocked internally at Uber. Nor is anyone is talking over anything secret at
Uber. People normally talk in person, but there isn't even much of that going
on.

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victor9000
This is really saavy marketing by Blind App

~~~
revelation
Well, until people awake from their righteous fervor and ask why the anonymous
Blind app knows there are 2000 Uber employees using it

And god beware they start asking what Blinds business model is going to be!

~~~
uxp100
Because you are required to sign up with a company email. It's anonymous for
the users, not for blind.

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sfifs
So employees are trying to chat "anonymously" on a tech company's wifi
network? Seems remarkably dumb for tech employees.

It should be assumed as a given that any company or hotel wifi network is
monitored and HTTPS is quite possibly is MITMed.

~~~
Symbiote
An employee's personal phone wouldn't accept the certificate if HTTPS was
MITMed.

~~~
foepys
You don't really have to MITM, you could just check the logs of the DNS server
that the network DHCPs to the WiFi clients for queries to Blind's IP
addresses.

This doesn't tell you the content but if an employee uses the app. Make of
this what you want but given Uber's previous actions I don't think they would
just ignore this.

~~~
lojack
I don't use the app, but messages appear to be timestamped, that's probably
enough to deanonymize many conversations.

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rhizome
This will definitely help fix things.

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ilurkedhere
What makes Uber uniquely asshole-like?

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passivepinetree
This is hopefully a prelude to a Streisand effect type situation here, but my
biggest reaction to this came in the ad below the piece: an "article"
describing the reason behind the F and J bumps on any keyboard. Does there
really need to be an article about that? It seems like common sense, or
something you might learn in any typing exercise ever.

~~~
taneq
There are probably enough younger people around who've rare even used a
physical keyboard, let alone have formal touch-typing training. I imagine
mentioning the 'home row' would usually just get you a blank stare.

~~~
seanp2k2
Do they no longer teach typing as a mandatory class in ~6th grade? It seems
even more relevant now than 16 years ago.

~~~
oh_sigh
Would you teach typing on a physical keyboard, or on a virtual phone keyboard?
A lot of young people don't use laptops/desktops.

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logicallee
>Many do on an anonymous chat app called Blind.

...

>And over 2,000 Uber employees in total use Blind, says Blind's head of
operations Alex Shin.

Jebediah O. Springfield! As the "head of operations" at an "anonymous chat
app" you have ONE JOB, Alex Shin! And you just blew it.

(To be explicit, I am saying Alex is way out of line for disclosing this
information. An anonymous app should not have such information revealed even
in the aggregrate - you can see what just happened as a result. Instead his
public, and private, statements should have been "We do not disclose - confirm
or deny - any users who may or may not use Blind, their affiliations or
locations.")

In point of fact I do agree with sharing this news, however it should be
presented disclosing as little information about employees as possible. Plus
the app isn't doing a very good job if its traffic is easily distinguishable
from other apps' traffic (technically making it possible for Uber to take the
actions we've just read about, or directly monitor based on telephone MAC
addresses, the exact employees using the app and the timing of their doing
so).

But there's not so much that can be done about that. However, revealing the
number of users at a company is not information that should be given out, in
my opinion.

~~~
mavelikara
What if Alex was bluffing? An average Uber employee reading this would think
that some massive congregation of his/her peers is happening on Blind and
would rush to install it.

~~~
logicallee
Very interesting, though as an officer I'm not sure if he's allowed to make
specific numerical misstatements like that. :)

