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Google Engineers Refused To Build Security Tool To Win Military Contracts (bloomberg.com)
Mark Bergen reports via Bloomberg: Earlier this year, a group of influential software engineers in Google's cloud division surprised their superiors by refusing to work on a cutting-edge security feature. Known as "air gap," the technology would have helped Google win sensitive military contracts. The coders weren't persuaded their employer should be using its technological might to help the government wage war, according to four current and former employees. After hearing the engineers' objections, Urs Holzle, Google's top technical executive, said the air gap feature would be postponed, one of the people said. Another person familiar with the situation said the group was able to reduce the scope of the feature.
The act of rebellion ricocheted around the company, fueling a growing resistance among employees with a dim view of Google's yen for multi-million-dollar government contracts. The engineers became known as the "Group of Nine" and were lionized by like-minded staff. The current and former employees say the engineers' work boycott was a catalyst for larger protests that convulsed the company's Mountain View, California, campus and ultimately forced executives to let a lucrative Pentagon contract called Project Maven expire without renewal.
The act of rebellion ricocheted around the company, fueling a growing resistance among employees with a dim view of Google's yen for multi-million-dollar government contracts. The engineers became known as the "Group of Nine" and were lionized by like-minded staff. The current and former employees say the engineers' work boycott was a catalyst for larger protests that convulsed the company's Mountain View, California, campus and ultimately forced executives to let a lucrative Pentagon contract called Project Maven expire without renewal.
They're better off anyway removing everyone's privacy to slice and dice audience segments for Madison Ave.
Oh look, tin foil is 20% at Home Depot Online with coupon code ACNUTTER2018.
Is it morals? More likely the employees are just foreign. And let's not kid ourselves, the employees from China are sending all the good info back home to their military.
> Even a cake baker should have that right isn't that right Google? I guess the Supreme's agreed on that one.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court didn't rule on that issue.
In Masterpiece Bakery, the case was decided based on the Colorado commission's stated hatred of religion as being the basis for their ruling.
The baker told the couple he would gladly sell them cookies, brownies, etc - anything that's not custom made with messages or decorations celebrating gay marriage. He would not, he said, use his artistic talents to create a message celebrating something that was illegal at time, and he believed was anti-Biblical.
The Colorado Commission had consistently sided with Baker's and others who refused to create messages, on cakes and elsewhere, that were critical of illegal gay marriage. Bakers and others can refuse to make things with a message they find objectionable, the commission said, based on their free speech rights. Commissioners stated, on the record, in the hearing, that they were ruling against this Baker because moral standards based on *religion* are "despicable". In a later hearing, the commissioner, again on record, compared the refusal to celebrate gay marriage to the Holocaust, and suggested that the Holocaust was caused by religion. That unfairness, that blatant, stated discrimination against religious-based morals by the state, is what the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional.
So a one-sentence summary of the Masterpiece decision is:
When the government is violating the first amendment freedom of religion, they shouldn't say out loud "I'm doing this because I hate religious people".
Says the Apple user who isn't even aware that the text he's writing doesn't show up right for most computers. Your job is to code? You don't know what you are doing.