I think that’s a good idea. :) I’ve considered doing the same thing, although I currently don’t even have a blog under my REAL name. It’s very easy to self-censor, especially if you’re not famous or powerful enough not to have to care.
The worst part is that it’s typically navel-gazing about national politics. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with my coworkers’ views a lot, but good god, does anyone know what the state legislature is doing? How about the governor? Which of our coworkers could name their state rep? Probably very few. Meanwhile, we have a primary coming up in six months and our district has two lackluster candidates, but nobody’s concerned about that (we’re losing our awesome incumbent who’s running for state senate).
The "thing" referred to here was enforcing "your personal desires." In a functioning democracy, it's never one individual's personal desires that are enforced. The question of whether various democracies are functioning is an interesting one but not my intention to discuss here.
Jesus, can people just not talk about politics/religion/sex at work? This isn’t a problem for other work environments. Maybe it’s an age thing? Or maybe it happens when people become too friendly with their coworkers. Either way, I’ve been in that situation recently and it’s not fun. E.g., there are people at work who shitlist you if you support the ACLU, because the ACLU recognizes that our existing first amendment jurisprudence comes from Supreme Court cases involving the KKK’s right to free speech. But there’s a contingent of the left that has a knee-jerk reaction to that, and I work with some of those people.
I also know for a fact there are conservatives at work who are uncomfortable too because they don’t have the majority view, and that’s not okay. You should never feel uncomfortable at work just because you’re in some kind of minority. One real easy way to avoid that is just not talk about politics at work or outside work with your coworkers.
Being able not talk about politics is privilege. When being a trans person who is treated with respect is somehow a political thing or when being an Iranian whose freedom of movement is somehow a political thing then it becomes impossible to leave politics at home. "Hey can I use the women's restroom" is a question that is filled with politics.
I’m actually gay, but thank you for assuming I don’t struggle with LGBTQ issues. :) Anyway, there is a difference between getting into an argument about socialism (happens at my work) and using the restroom that matches your identity. The former you don’t need, and the latter, at least where I’m at now, nobody would care at all.
And that’s not to say companies can’t make political decisions. Company policy for letting trans people use the restroom that matches their gender identity is fine because it’s not people arguing about Trump during lunch, it’s an official company policy. I just want my coworkers to stop getting into arguments about things that then make it really awkward to work with them.
See, that’s the thing: nobody gives a crap who uses which bathroom at work. Really. Nobody argues about that. But arguing about policy or socialism or who is a real communist or not is not work-appropriate.
I would imagine that, for the vast majority of people working at Google, politics do not affect their day to day work life, so there is no reason to talk about it. Even with the issue of trans people and bathrooms, as long as there is a company wide policy about how to deal with it, no one needs to worry about it.
How do you avoid talking about politics when the contentious item is a decision that must be made by the company? And this same item is up for debate in tons of industries. Just look at the Oscars.
Email is always a nightmare. My ex runs a BSD mail server that seems to work alright (and he has a cloud service that will handle mail in the event of a server failure). Me? I pay Fastmail like $50/year to do that for me, and they’re wonderful. I tried to sign up for a trial with my own domain, and when I got a strange error that didn’t let me log in, I put in a ticket (as a non-customer) and the issue was rectified quickly.
I swear, I don’t work for Fastmail, but I’d much rather use them (or any email provider that is halfway decent) than fiddle with my own mail server.
No, because it’s not against the law to scan servers on the internet. If you don’t want people to scan listening services, don’t let those services listen publicly on the internet. If you were to log into the server, though, that would violate the CFAA.
I know that current caselaw holds that it's not a violation of the CFAA to portscan in the general case[1]. I'm not asking in the general case; I'm asking specifically in the case where the scans are regular and ongoing, and the scanning party has been explicitly given notice that they are unauthorized.
The courts recently ruled on a similar case[1] and came to the conclusion that it was not a CFAA violation. That said, there's a difference between a public website such as LinkedIn and a host that just happens to be reachable over the internet, so I'm not sure it would be fully applicable.
