Computer Ethics @ComputerEthics@mastodon.technology
Stories, articles and news about the ethics of software development.
The Parable of the Locksmith – A Six-Month Retrospective on Ethical Open Source.
“‘I want to hire you to open a certain safe. Never mind whose safe it is—that’s none of your concern. Just do the job I hire you to do, and I will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.’”
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/a-six-month-retrospective-on-ethical-open-source
Tim Bray also wrote some words after the reactions of the previous days.
“- Can we get on the phone so I can ask you some questions?
Hmm, I'm not that interesting, just a grumpy old one-percenter white-guy engineer with a social media presence. If you want to go live with this story you should do it with the actual people who got fired, who are young, fresh-faced, passionate, and really at the center of the news story.”
Tim Bray, who wrote the XML and JSON specs, leaves #Amazon over firing of whistleblowers.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
@edri published #EthicalWebDev, a guide for ethical website development and maintenance. It has been a huge collective work for more than a year by a bunch of wonderful contributors.
You can find the PDF version here: https://edri.org/files/ethical_web_dev_web.pdf
EDRi wrote a blogpost about it in the EDRigram newsletter: https://edri.org/ethical-web-dev/
<3
via @bob, who also links to the follow-up discussion with many more examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692005
The code I’m still ashamed of – Bill Sourour
“If you write code for a living, there’s a chance that at some point in your career, someone will ask you to code something a little deceitful – if not outright unethical.”
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of-e4c021dff55e/
Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract
“In an open letter published Wednesday on GitHub, software developers representing the open source community joined the call for GitHub to immediately cancel the $200,000 contract with ICE.”
“The Holberton-Turing Oath is made to gather all AI experts in the world around shared values and moral to drive them to use their skills by insuring their integrity and by avoiding any threat to any life being.”
“Vice reports at least five staffers quit today.
(…)
Last month, GitHub staff engineer Sophie Haskins resigned, stating she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE.”
Stories, articles and news about the ethics of software development.
