Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 8, 2021 23:09 UTC (Thu) by willy (subscriber, #9762)
Parent article: Another misstep for Audacity

I think this needed a bit more highlighting.

> (though some of them appear to have found their way to the Tenacity fork instead)

That's a pretty mild way to describe harassment of the Tenacity maintainer to the point where they felt their safety was at risk and resigned!

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 9, 2021 9:14 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (2 responses)

> That's a pretty mild way to describe harassment of the Tenacity maintainer to the point where they felt their safety was at risk and resigned!

"felt their safety was risk" also seems pretty mild, when the Tenacity maintainer says (in the linked GitHub issue) "I was slit in the arm" and "It was attempted murder with an illegal butterfly knife" as the result of a 4chan harassment campaign.

(Pseudonymous GitHub comments aren't necessarily proof of anything, but the maintainer does have a long history there and on other social media and doesn't hide his real identity and sounds like a reasonable person, and provides links to 4chan threads full of wildly offensive abuse against him (which seemingly started when he rejected 4chan users' vote for a stupid meme name for the fork), so his claims seem plausible. Even without the assault, the online harassment is totally unacceptable.)

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 9, 2021 11:32 UTC (Fri) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link] (1 responses)

> Even without the assault, the online harassment is totally unacceptable.

The dummy sneedacity repository advertised on 4chan features James Crook, an Audacity author, as a main contributor. If that's where the harassment originated, perhaps it's safe to drop Audacity irrespective of any telemetry features.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 9, 2021 12:45 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> The dummy sneedacity repository advertised on 4chan features James Crook, an Audacity author, as a main contributor

I think you're misinterpreting GitHub's contributor list - it's just showing the authors of all commits in the master branch since the beginning of time. The last of James Crook's commits in that repository are from April 13, i.e. they are from the main Audacity repository before it got forked, so he has zero involvement with the fork or the harassment.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 9, 2021 9:21 UTC (Fri) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (1 responses)

Holy shit, that whole issue text sounds scary as hell. He wasn't just harassed (though that is bad enough, surely), he was physically attacked with a knife. On his own property. How batshit crazy are some people!?

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 10, 2021 22:47 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> How batshit crazy are some people!?

Unfortunately, very. These are the exact same demographic that whipped up a years-long conspiracy theory that *started* with a grown man showing up at a pizza shop with an assault rifle convinced that it was hiding a satanic torture basement behind a fake wall, and culminated in the January 6th sedition attempt. They probably think they're on a mission from on high to "rescue" Audacity from foreigners at all costs.