Woop-woop! That's the sound of da… Raspberry?

December 8, 2022 9:11 AM

Raspberry (the people with the tiny computers) had the great idea of hiring a former surveillance cop to be a "maker in residence." The lack of enthusiasm for this decision has been answered on Twitter and Mastodon with snark and blocking, so all is going just fine.
posted by dominik (90 comments total)

wtf?
posted by slater at 9:17 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I suppose asking raspberries to read the dang room is too much.

They're being incredibly dismissive and condescending on Mastodon. Pretty sure I've bought my last RPi.
posted by humbug at 9:22 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Every "Chronically Online" Conversation Is The Same
posted by gwint at 9:22 AM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Regardless of who you feel about hiring a surveillance cop, the incredible PR failure (at least on Mastodon) is really something else. Twitter-style snark (and Twitter-style brand marketing) doesn't really work on Mastodon, but even if it did this is just a remarkably bad way to handle the situation.
posted by asnider at 9:38 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Oh, lordy, those Tweets are baaaaad.

I mean, it's no problem boycotting them because there basically haven't been any Pi's in the retail channel for a couple of years: the foundation said they prioritized commercial/industrial customers (who presumably had built real products around the devices) over individual buyers.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:43 AM on December 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

Every "Chronically Online" Conversation Is The Same

The problem is when people respond to every positive thing people share with a lazy cliché about why the other person's happiness is invalid.

In this case, I think it's fair to say that it's a very legitimate opinion to be reasonably ambivalent about surveillance operations by police in Great Britain, and Raspberry are a large enough company that they really should be able to deal with it and allow for that.
posted by ambrosen at 9:56 AM on December 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

I'm not generally one for the police, but this feels like a bit of an attempted internet rage machine. The twee comments are probably not the best way to diffuse the situation, but the space between the police officer who makes microphone donuts and Google opening the doors to the NSA is... large.
posted by pan at 10:20 AM on December 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

So not only was he a surveillance cop, but it looks like Rasp Pi is playing up that history on every article/post. Why?
posted by ryanrs at 10:23 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

"they prioritized commercial/industrial customers" = they prioritized ticket scalpers, from what I hear.
Maybe the cop knows someone who can look into that.
posted by bashos_frog at 10:29 AM on December 8, 2022

So not only was he a surveillance cop, but it looks like Rasp Pi is playing up that history on every article/post. Why?

Probably because historically, his primary use of RPi's was in his work as a surveillance cop and not just a fun hobby he did in his off time. Literally the reason he is a fan of the products is because they allowed him to build surveillance devices so they're almost forced to talk about it, even though he is now primarily a hobbyist (or so we're told).
posted by asnider at 10:33 AM on December 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

I don't get it. Why does it matter that the person was a surveillance cop in a former job? Genuinely asking.
posted by Wild_Eep at 11:22 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Computers should be bigger anyway.
posted by bondcliff at 11:22 AM on December 8, 2022 [15 favorites]

I took another read of their own announcement copy and I'm with asnider. And even if that's the past, the ex-cop guy himself says he used to build drones for the police (note tense) and is still designing and building them (note tense). Prior to that bit he talks about how he really enjoyed thinking up ways, in his old job, to disguise surveillance tech in every day things, and this includes him using 3D printers. And in that post itself, one of the things he made they're highlighting in the photos is a fake chocolate bar that he can slip a board in.

Altogether, it's indeed A Choice.
posted by cendawanita at 11:28 AM on December 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

It matters to many people because the kind of hardware hackers who made the Raspberry Pi what it is tend to be the kind of people who are not too fond of government surveillance. This combined with the fact that they're bragging that he used to use Raspberry Pis is not designed to make that community particularly happy.

Which probably would have blown over in a few hours if their social media person hadn't gone full edgelord,
posted by dominik at 11:29 AM on December 8, 2022 [30 favorites]

Ones standing on Mastodon is going to be absolutely and totally irrelevant to the value of your brand, to a degree that it’s hilarious to even consider it… except in this one case. Whoops.
posted by Artw at 11:30 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Well I suppose showcasing a surveillance cop as an artist in residence is better than hiring that guy who made an IoT tracker to stalk his ex.
posted by ryanrs at 11:33 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Don't give 'em any ideas...
posted by humbug at 11:38 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

It matters to many people because the kind of hardware hackers who made the Raspberry Pi what it is tend to be the kind of people who are not too fond of government surveillance. This combined with the fact that they're bragging that he used to use Raspberry Pis is not designed to make that community particularly happy.

Hackers: I am making this cool and useful tool, and it will be cheap for everyone
the state: great I am gonna use it to help further the state’s ends
Hackers: no not like that

(I’m bein’ glib!)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:39 AM on December 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

And it's not as if people are doxxing a random Rasp Pi employee. A 'Maker in Residence' position is supposed to focus on the person, and what they make.
posted by ryanrs at 11:42 AM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

And in that post itself, one of the things he made they're highlighting in the photos is a fake chocolate bar that he can slip a board in.

(Per the post, “Toby created silicon moulds so he could make Pico W-shaped chocolates”, not, uh, fake chocolates for hiding a Pico-W, though those silicon molds could perhaps serve as fake chocolates hiding a pico-w.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:42 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oh yes, I'm making the implication explicit.
posted by cendawanita at 11:45 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

That "educational computer for kids" thing. How's that going?
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:51 AM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Yeah they need to walk that back real fast from the C suite or it's going to stink for months. It may already be too late for any presumption of good will to linger to the brand itself. (If it ever had any after the Shortages.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:56 AM on December 8, 2022

Oh yes, I'm making the implication explicit.

Respectfully, I think this is actually “drawing an inference”? The article is full of weird little projects to show how he likes making weird things, and he specifically owns that his police work was making and flying drones. It seems like a very specific read to assume that the reference to making chocolates shaped like computers was intended as a winking reference to his slipping computers into molds. Fine to read that he could have done that! But it seems unlikely that the article author is trying to wink at the reader here.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:59 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

ne of the things he made they're highlighting in the photos is a fake chocolate bar that he can slip a board in.

Five seconds with an unattended fake chocolate bar and its secret will be revealed.
posted by aniola at 12:11 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Chronically online people: OMG he was in the police, triggered.

Literally everyone else: Oh, he made a lightsaber. A policeman was nice to me when I was in a car accident that time. My friends husband is a policeman I think.

The controversy appears to have generated 1 comment on the article on their site and 300 comments from there 500k followers.
posted by Damienmce at 12:11 PM on December 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

I suppose asking raspberries to read the dang room is too much.


Read the room? I think most people think police are, on balance, a good thing and that countering terrorism is good actually.
posted by Damienmce at 12:14 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I better go to sleep because i keep trying to write something with the appropriate and safe level of allusions but it's no point until i find someone else i can cite without using personal stuff, but that chocolate bar is apparently something to be filed under, "if you know, you know."
posted by cendawanita at 12:17 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Read the room? I think most people think police are, on balance, a good thing and that countering terrorism is good actually

The police being a good thing on balance and whether police “counter terrorism” is actually being applied to terrorists and not random people the police don’t like are both actually reasonably controversial subjects. On the later theses some considerable UK history that’s pretty contentious.
posted by Artw at 12:29 PM on December 8, 2022 [38 favorites]

it looks like Rasp Pi is playing up that history on every article/post. Why?

My take is "we hired a cop, he talks cop-speak, cops come and talk to us about the Pi!" ("cop" being a euphemism for an organization that does surveillance or security stuff)
posted by credulous at 12:35 PM on December 8, 2022

Yes, please do read the room.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I have a few of their devices. I could have chosen something like teensy instead, which would have been a better fit. But I went with raspberry pi because of the vibe, and wanted to support it. The org has a great foundation and community, but has exhausted every ones good will, primarily by not making enough actual devices and generally ignoring the community.

They hired a copper, which is dumb, but now they are acting petulant about the response. And my response is like most - just ‘this sucks’. Which it does. I expected them to be professionals, I want to be able to rely on them as a source to educate and provide leadership.

Another guy with authoritarian tendencies building light sabers? Cheap and readily available. Add being a cop who builds hidden spy devices? Creepy. Not art. Not interested.
posted by zenon at 12:45 PM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I've hopped on the ESP32 train. I'm using an old pi as a home assistant base station (odroid works fine tho) and it's changing my life. $10 wifi enabled low power draw, and I can manage them over-the-air.
posted by constraint at 12:51 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

primarily by not making enough actual devices

Dude, nobody has parts right now. I'm rewriting a whole project because NXP screwed me over and they have way better customer relations than freaking Broadcom.

There are plenty of better documented parts with viable ecosystems that have some or better stock out there, one just needs to do the homework and not be a complete cheapskate.

You want a cheap linux system to run your house and DNS blocker? Buy a used Dell Xeon workstation for $40 on eBay.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:58 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Honestly I don't really care much about the former cop as maker-in-residence unless there's something specifically concerning in his past or present. But they should probably suspend and retrain their social media manager. I didn't look at Twitter but the Mastodon thread was embarrassing for them.
posted by biogeo at 12:59 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Read the room? I think most people think police are, on balance, a good thing and that countering terrorism is good actually.

Is your target audience "people who are fine with police hiding surveillance in furniture or household items", or is your target audience the famously soft-a anarchistic maker movement? Like, it doesn't always live up to that, but community goodwill is pretty much the main thing keeping their audience from shifting to any of their competitors and they spent a lot of time early on trying to build up the pro-social aspect of what they were doing.

(also, why would you trust "we say we're counter-terrorism, so that means we counter terrorism" on its face?)
posted by CrystalDave at 1:03 PM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

teensy

I recently dumped them for this Nordic nRF52840 based board. It is legitimately low-power and can run for weeks off a battery, right out of the box. Stuff like Teensies and ESP32 can't do that, at least not without a ton of work.

I really love the peripheral system. Any peripheral function on any physical pin. And the task/event system seems very powerful.

Teensy all the way for USB devices, but for low power, I'll never look back.
posted by ryanrs at 1:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Read the room? I think most people think police are, on balance, a good thing and that countering terrorism is good actually.

This depends on whether the room is at Defcon or the Security Industry Association. "Most people" haven't the slightest clue what a RaspberryPi is if it's not a typo.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:05 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Read the room? I think most people think police are, on balance, a good thing and that countering terrorism is good actually.

To say this implies you’ve been reading in a room with a very select group of people and no windows for the last 20 years.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:12 PM on December 8, 2022 [35 favorites]

I'm getting really tired of "read the room" on Metafilter. It's starting to sound like it really means "you're not helping our echo chamber."

I really don't think Raspberry's doing anything wrong here.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:20 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

For serious though, is Raspberry trying do business with state surveillance apparatuses? Because networking with government contractors seems like a good reason to have a such a guy on payroll.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:24 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really don’t want to defend cops, but… this really seems like an American response to an English policing question. I haven’t looked at his CV, but to be a beat bobby, you have to have a degree level education and other qualifications including volunteering as a PCSO (there are special ‘being a cop’ degrees). Then you would have to do qualifications and ranking inside the force to gain enough seniority to do this job, because otherwise you’re looking at a lifetime of policing soccer matches and pub closing time shifts. Finally, his work as a gadget guy would only be acceptable under some anti-terrorism and serious crime investigations because the UK feels pretty differently about surveillance, especially when presented as legal evidence.

Although this is what is called ‘context’, and it looks like neither Rasberry nor the chronically online are into that. I’m sure his CV stood out a lot compared to the hundreds of cosplaying types that must apply for the maker in residence.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:31 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Regardless of your opinion of the police and surveillance - I'll admit to falling on the "this is harm" side of the fence, and having grown up in the UK and lived in the US I don't think the two countries are as different as the British would like to believe - the way the account has responded to criticisms is spectacularly not okay. This is just bad comms all the way around. Meet your audience where they're at, take concerns seriously and address them with empathy, and help them feel comfortable with your brand. That's the job.
posted by bwerdmuller at 2:43 PM on December 8, 2022 [24 favorites]

really don’t want to defend cops, but… this really seems like an American response to an English policing question. I haven’t looked at his CV, but to be a beat bobby, you have to have a degree level education and other qualifications including volunteering as a PCSO (there are special ‘being a cop’ degrees). Then you would have to do qualifications and ranking inside the force to gain enough seniority to do this job, because otherwise you’re looking at a lifetime of policing soccer matches and pub closing time shifts. Finally, his work as a gadget guy would only be acceptable under some anti-terrorism and serious crime investigations because the UK feels pretty differently about surveillance, especially when presented as legal evidence.

(Definitely saw a tweet from a British person on masto about how cozying up to cops was a very British response, we’re all secretely wanting a boot to stomp on our face, etc. Total anecdata, obviously, but it seems like feelings about cops are complicated everywhere.)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:22 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I saw a fun lil documentary about one on of the earliest 'clashes' (ie raids) by law enforcement on hacking communities here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2v56rmHH00

to say there's a history between LEOs and hackers is an understatement as is assuming that state surveillance in the UK isn't an issue that people care about

orgs that hire people publicly like this (with repeated blog posts/PR on it) are explicitly making a statement. hires like this are scrutinized by leadership and indicate the values of that leadership and the organization as a whole. do they value privacy? they're hiring a hobbyist surveillance tech maker who was former law enforcement so probably not. probably they're thinking that this is potentially a way for them to collaborate with the nation state in the future with little cop training courses on how to build surveillance tech, contracts to sell Pis to the state en masse, etc

that people don't see this as an issue in 2022 when we're like half a century into the study of semiotics either means they don't care about state surveillance or control, or they're just bad at understanding how institutions function
posted by paimapi at 3:26 PM on December 8, 2022 [22 favorites]

for those interested in a thorough documentation of the state of surveillance in the UK, Copwatch EU has a nice 50 page report on it
posted by paimapi at 3:29 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

→ the foundation said they prioritized commercial/industrial customers

No, that would be Raspberry Pi Ltd. The foundation has a tiny part to play in the whole project now. All the boards (except perhaps the rarer-than-hen's-teeth Zero W) are designed by the commercial arm. And yes, commercial customers have been prioritized.

→ they prioritized ticket scalpers, from what I hear

I'm still bound by NDAs, but I'm no longer an approved reseller. The above is untrue. Approved Resellers (ARs) used to get access to lower wholesale prices, but had to agree to sell at a fixed price. Because of doctrine of first sale, no-one can control the price after the AR has sold it. So we had to come up with all sorts of creative ways to limit sales, or any shipment would be snapped up by one buyer and resold on Amazon at a very fat profit. ARs aren't getting so many these days, is all I know.

→ I recently dumped them for this Nordic nRF52840 based board

Oof, that's a good board, but those can go unobtainium real quick. I had a customer standardize on them, only for the chips to fall off the market for 9 months. Paul Stoffregen at PJRC has been very smart with sourcing and has always had stock, if at a much reduced level. The nRF52840 is for a completely different customer than the monstrous Teensy 4: energy-sipping 64 MHz vs holy-shit-fast 600 MHz dual-core madness with fast memory, wide data buses and hardware double-precision + DSP mathematics
posted by scruss at 3:43 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Hi, I'm Troy McClure, you may remember me in such hits as Mission Impossible: Origin or T.J. from the animated S.W.A.T. I'm glad, I'm proud, to be part of the Raspberry® family, we'll see you around."
posted by clavdivs at 3:49 PM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's likely this cop only ran electronic surveillance upon unions and protestors, for the purpose of worsening labor conditions and making protests ineffective, but..

At least some of his fellow officers infiltrated social and environmental justice groups using fake long-term romantic relationships. And 'some of these undercover police relationships had resulted in children whose fathers later "vanished" when their role was completed.'
posted by jeffburdges at 4:02 PM on December 8, 2022 [26 favorites]

The nRF52840 is for a completely different customer than the monstrous Teensy 4

I'm mostly comparing it to the stripped down Teensy LC and older Teensy 3.2, both of which are now out of stock.

Maybe I should ebay my stockpile of older Teensies and buy more Nordics, ha ha.
posted by ryanrs at 4:08 PM on December 8, 2022

I was looking through their account, and the media manager is really bad at their job, way before this.
posted by signal at 5:03 PM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

(i feel like I'm representing the British Commonwealth in my reaction at the comments implying UK policing traditions are... Harmless? Not as bad as the American one? Maybe he's not Special Branch but British policing is... I'm not sure if I'm understanding this, but British police doesn't do invasive and extensive state surveillance? We've inherited that and in the meantime neither of our paths have gone towards being better at respecting rights in this regard imo.)
posted by cendawanita at 6:12 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Bonus points for the KRS-One reference in the title. It was via that song I learned the connection between the words "overseer" and "officer". This thread has completed that circle of definitions in my head now.
posted by not_on_display at 6:23 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

A solid analysis of why the posting behavior was a boneheaded move. tl;dr: if you run your own brand instance as RaspPi is, there's only so much enfant terrible behavior you can get away with before you're not only blocked by individuals, but #fediblocked by entire instances.
posted by humbug at 7:05 PM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I mean, it's no problem boycotting them because there basically haven't been any Pi's in the retail channel for a couple of years: the foundation said they prioritized commercial/industrial customers (who presumably had built real products around the devices) over individual buyers.

Oh is that what happened? I've been waiting for well over a year to get ~17 chips for a research project first designed in 2020. Couldn't be had.

Mind you, the project involves getting synchronous recording from a bunch of mouse behavior chambers, so the less good back end workaround will almost certainly involve purchasing a DVR and cameras from a company that actually specializes in surveillance with everything that entails, so 🤷. It's not like I'm exactly being peak altruist either.
posted by sciatrix at 7:18 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

makes ya wonder what is actually on that lil blob that runs the the whole thing, and is not, open source.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:35 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’m confused by the claims that UK police don’t do as much surveillance. Isn’t the UK the country with the highest density of CCTV cameras per capita? Or is that now an out of date stat that I read years ago? My impression was that the cameras were publicly owned/police run or at least accessible without a warrant, not just a random un-networked collection of individual business and home cameras. Like, people regularly make films or performance art using footage from these cameras, because there are so many of them that that’s a feasible thing to do in the UK. And didn’t there at least used to be some significant police intelligence divison(s) focused on domestically surveilling for IRA activity in the more clandestine sense of surveillance? Is the claim that unlike police most other places, the UK police actually de-funded and decreased staffing levels in that area once the IRA threat was over, rather than just switching to other threats?

Or am I misreading, and the claim is that while all that may be true, there is just broader societal support for high levels of police surveillance in the UK?
posted by eviemath at 7:53 PM on December 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

It's probably worth noting that there was a lot of discussion... last week, I think? Maybe this week?* over whether or not an infosec-oriented instance should be ACAB'd out of federation over a federal agency setting up an Official Account there. So there's a chunk of people already heated up over this sort of thing.

Most of my infosec friends were all "dude 'Spot The Fed' is already a regular game around Defcon, what's the big deal" so I'm not defederating from there and I'm letting this one evolve until at least like next week before I make any decisions.

* god time has been a mess for me lately, and mostly not in a good way
posted by egypturnash at 8:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I scanned the thread a couple of times and I don't see anyone actually claiming that the UK police do less surveillance than the US, but maybe I missed it or maybe we're just reading things differently. The closest thing I see is The River Ivel's statement Finally, his work as a gadget guy would only be acceptable under some anti-terrorism and serious crime investigations because the UK feels pretty differently about surveillance, especially when presented as legal evidence. This seems to suggest that the legal standard for using surveillance is higher in the UK than the US, which I don't know about. It does seem at odds with the UK's reputation for having high densities of CCTV cameras, but CCTV cameras in public places aren't exactly the same thing as covert surveillance devices, which is what it sounds like this guy used. As far as I know, getting a warrant that permits covert surveillance is not trivial in the US either; both countries use them for organized crime, human trafficking investigations, etc., and both countries have had some high-profile scandals involving abuse of police and court powers where law enforcement agencies have inappropriately surveilled activist groups based solely on political concerns.

I think the US vs. UK issue is probably a red herring.
posted by biogeo at 8:49 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's also quite an interesting case study on how the "teen edgelord persona" that many brands have adopted for their Twitter presence work out in the fediverse.
posted by dominik at 12:14 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Those suggesting there's some universal love for the Police in the UK might ask themselves why as British a word as Bastards appears in that phrase.
posted by grahamparks at 1:02 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Now look here, Bond. An ordinary Keep Left sign; inside, a wireless packet sniffer.
posted by bartleby at 1:43 AM on December 9, 2022

Raspberry Pi has a charitable foundation "Raspberry Pi Foundation" but is also a private company "Raspberry Pi Trading". It's not publically traded but El Reg reckons it's valued at about $500m (around £366m). That's not a huge company, but piling on its PR strategy isn't the same as piling on a random individual.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:53 AM on December 9, 2022

There tends to be very different feelings about the police, and police surveillance in the UK, depending upon background. So depending upon who you talk to, they can be valued public servants keeping us safe, or complete racist bastards out to crush any signs of dissent. And to be fair, there's truth in both.

The UK has had a number of successful terrorist attacks. Last year, for example, an MP was stabbed to death, and just over the last five years we've have multiple car and knife attacks in London, and of course the deadly Manchester Arena bombing. These days it's largely ISIS fans or right wing nutjobs rather than the IRA, but it's a real threat that exists and has for many years. The police get blamed by politicians and public for not catching them ahead of time. So there is indeed substantial police surveillance, and a lot of people think that's a good thing. Locking up 'Just Stop Oil' people for blocking traffic is rather popular, too.

There is *also* the fact that multiple police groups have a terrible longstanding culture of racism, sexism and homophobia, public surveillance has often been turned on environmental and organised labour groups, including embedding spies for years who end up having children!, despite them being entirely non-violent. And the policing of non-violent public protests has often been pretty extreme. And you have examples like the police murder of Charles de Menezes because they mistook him for a surveillance target, the list is extremely lengthy of police misconduct.

So it can rather depend upon your own experiences, biases, and indeed class and racial background as to whether you see the police as largely 'on your side'; or part of a brutal state apparatus to crush dissent, particularly by minorities and/or those with politics that don't align with the tories.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:13 AM on December 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

That said, the childish responses by the rPi brand manager were frelling stupid to valid criticism of course.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:24 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is hilarious, though. Brands are finding out that in a more truly public square like Mastodon where they can't buy access to people's eyeballs, they have to not only be civil, but bring their A-game nice, if they don't want to be shunned.

Like down at at Yonge/Dundas square, or at TIFF, or whathaveyou, there's always some company trying to push something, and they aren't doing it by by being shitheads; they are bending over backwards to be friendly & give stuff away.

This is a really lovely writeup of how not to do PR on Mastodon by Aurynn Shaw.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:35 AM on December 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Posting that "Every "Chronically Online" Conversation Is The Same" link here kind of confirms to me that that piece is more ammunition for the "cancel culture has gone too far" crowd than concern for people being harassed online. It's a way to downplay criticisms from progressives without having to address the criticism.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:58 AM on December 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

I think a healthy mistrust about police surveillance is warranted. In the UK, Police spies infiltrated UK leftwing groups for decades.

The list so far compiled, however, suggests police spies overwhelmingly monitored leftwing and progressive groups that challenged the status quo, with only three far-right groups infiltrated – the British National party, Combat 18 and the United British Alliance.

Undercover officers spied on 22 leftwing groups, 10 environmental groups, nine anti-racist campaigns and nine anarchist groups, according to the database.

They also spied on campaigns against apartheid, the arms trade, nuclear weapons and the monarchy, as well as trade unions. Among those spied on were 16 campaigns run by families or their supporters seeking justice over alleged police misconduct.

According to the database, police spied on 12 animal rights groups and eight organisations related to the Irish conflict.

posted by taz at 8:01 AM on December 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

The hardest dunking I'm seeing right now is from UK folks, so I'm not buying a UK/US culture split.

Amongst my friends who are developing consumer electronics, supply chain trust is a concern. I mean, a decade or more ago practice was to have DRM keys programmed into components in the US before they got shipped to China for assembly, because they felt like they could control that part of the supply chain better.

Those days they just worried about someone sneaking nefarious code on to their chips, they trusted the chip manufacturer to do the right thing about trying to harden the chips against things like disassembly and scanning with electron microscopes. Nowadays they're worried about whether they can trust the chips to perform as the manufacturer suggests with respect to keeping things secret, or whether there are hard-coded back doors. Or, as the software stack gets deeper and deeper, soft-coded ones.

And, yes, even when it's just DRM (and it's not just DRM these days), state actors are part of the threat model.

At any rate, pretty sure that a bunch of those folks who had been prototyping with Pis are now gonna spend a little more time building their own designs. And I can't imagine that the doubling-down from Liz Upton today is gonna help them feel any more confident in outsourcing that portion of their design process.
posted by straw at 10:04 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

they trusted the chip manufacturer to do the right thing

And nobody trusts Broadcom to have their customers' interests in mind, ha ha. They're like Oracle, but with a worse attitude.

(Broadcom makes the SoC that powers the Raspberry Pi. They are the ones who decide what parts of the firmware can be open sourced, and what is hidden behind an opaque binary blob.)
posted by ryanrs at 10:12 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

And I can't imagine that the doubling-down from Liz Upton today it's is gonna help them feel any more confident in outsourcing that portion of their design process

I was just reading the Buzzfeed piece that's from:

Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi’s cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. “We didn’t put a content warning on it, because we don’t put a content warning on meat,” Upton said. “There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that.”

Right.
posted by cendawanita at 10:14 AM on December 9, 2022

The pigs in a blanket tweet.

Sharp-eyed readers will note the tweet has not been deleted, despite "quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that".
posted by ryanrs at 10:18 AM on December 9, 2022

screenshot in case the evil vegans have the tweet censored
cw: meat, cholesterol
posted by ryanrs at 10:21 AM on December 9, 2022

(a) Those are bacon-wrapped sausages, not pigs in a blanket. (b) Does Upton know that pigs is an alternate name for cops? And if so, what exactly is that tweet trying to signal? That they are wrapping cops up in their warm corporate blanket? That they are offering the cops up to be devoured by the online masses? It’s just a semiotic mess, all ‘round.
posted by eviemath at 10:31 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, they would have legit saved themselves some hassle if they had fired their social media manager for that sausage tweet, lmao.
posted by ryanrs at 10:35 AM on December 9, 2022

eviemath - pigs in blankets is the common name for bacon-wrapped sausages in the UK, where Raspberry Pi are based. And that tweet was before all this stuff kicked off, so the pigs/cops thing is spurious and coincidental.
posted by parm at 12:11 PM on December 9, 2022

Sharp-eyed readers will note the tweet has not been deleted, despite "quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that".

She was referring to the (identical) Mastodon post, not the tweet, however to claim people are dogpiling because a single person asked them to CW the photo is disingenuous at best. I cannot believe this woman is a PR/Communications professional and that is her key message: it's not really about the cop, it's about the pigs-in-a-blanket post that one person was very mildly upset about.
posted by asnider at 12:32 PM on December 9, 2022

For what it's worth, CW food pics, particularly meat, is a weird cultural norm across much of the fediverse due to the fact that, at least initially, it leaned HEAVILY leftist and anarchist in particular (amongst whom veganism is more common than amongst the general population).

I think it's a bit silly, personally, but it is a norm. But it's still just a single, self-described fan making a fairly innocuous "complaint." To describe that as dogpiling is, again, disingenuous at best.
posted by asnider at 12:35 PM on December 9, 2022

I just want to point out how danged useful public relations professionals are these days. Now that we know all corporate communications strategies are handled by PR people, the companies don't even have to point the finger at anyone anymore when they screw up. A company does something egregious on the internet? "Wow, that media manager is so getting fired."

Instead of, for instance, "wow, that company has some terrible values and practices and that's reflected in their web presence and in the people they hire."
posted by MrVisible at 12:54 PM on December 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

"wow, that company has some terrible values and practices and that's reflected in their web presence and in the people they hire."

As some who works in PR (albeit for the public sector), please absolutely do hold companies to account and do not brush off a shitty response as: "Wow, that media manager is so getting fired."

I mean, sometimes, yeah, the social media manager does fucking suck and the blame lays squarely with one individual. But, as we in this case, sometimes the company defends the shitty social media manager and stands by those shitty responses (even going so far as to invent a conspiracy!), so obviously there is more than just a single bad employee involved here.

First, good PR people would not typically respond the way Liz Upton is doing in that BuzzFeed article.

Second, PR people ultimately take direction from management. We can give them best, most noble and ethical advice in the world, but if they don't take that advice, that's on them; don't let them scapegoat their PR/media relations people who, ultimately, are just doing what their boss tells them to do (though they should resign if they're being told to do something particularly egregious).
posted by asnider at 1:06 PM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

There’s no distance between management and PR here. Liz Upton is married to the CEO and main founder, and has been since before the company existed. A lot of places credit her as a co-founder - although Wikipedia disagrees for probably Wikipedia-ish reasons.

I’m not sure if this helps explain what the fuck is going on, but one might assume she can’t simply be fired.
posted by grahamparks at 2:09 PM on December 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

It'll be funny observing this and other #fediblock events but..  Any thoughts on where this winds up going?

At what scale do government decide they control federation policies? Raspberry Pi is a nobody, but how would Walmart respond to fediblock? etc. Jon Postel lost fast vs the DoD.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:12 PM on December 9, 2022

From the Buzzfeed piece:

“I think what we’re looking at is a dogpile that’s being organized somewhere,” [Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi’s cofounder and chief marketing officer] said. “There’s obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere.” She did not provide evidence to support that claim.

Oh, it can't possibly be that lots of people are simply against this hiring choice? There must obviously be a Discord server somewhere where this master conspiracy is being carried out?

Is it run by Hunter Biden? Has cancel culture gone too far?
posted by AlSweigart at 2:12 PM on December 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Oh hey nice of you both to share the piece I wrote here!

Obviously I do think that this was a failure of understanding the Fediverse culture and the way that it's so fundamentally different to the incentive system that works on Twitter, and the Buzzfeed article just hammers that home. This isn't how brands can act if they want to be on the Fediverse ... and that's a good thing, imo.
posted by aurynn at 2:49 PM on December 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

@grahamparks: I was speaking more generally, but I did not know that about Raspberry Pi. I'm familiar with their products but never paid much attention to the CEO or other staff before this whole episode.

Married to the CEO or not, though, Upton's messaging it just bizarre. There is no dogpile (at least not in relation to the pigs-in-a-blanket post; I still don't understand why she tried to bring that into the conversation) and claiming some secret conspiracy at work is just wild.
posted by asnider at 3:23 PM on December 9, 2022

→ down at at Yonge/Dundas square, … they are bending over backwards to be friendly

Except for the street preachers, who seem to dare anyone to call them out for their shitbird ways.
posted by scruss at 3:56 PM on December 9, 2022

This was a quick response - the CEO just announced that they are redirecting product for the public to buy:

As a thank-you to our army of very patient enthusiast customers in the run-up to the holiday season this year, we’ve been able to set aside a little over a hundred thousand units, split across Zero W, 3A+ and the 2GB and 4GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4, for single-unit sales.

And a 5$ price increase. Availability can be checked on rpilocator.com.
posted by zenon at 7:43 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't think the response was related, zenon. As a commercial integrator of Raspberry Pis, we heard a couple of days before the announcement (so the day before the stooshie) that production had freed up a little, and a consignment was on its way to us.

The set-aside has erased 90% of the noise over this happening.
posted by scruss at 5:06 PM on December 12, 2022

Oh - I didn't mean to imply the decision of redirecting their supply chain, it was just in reference to the timing of the public announcement. But I am assuming a level of PR that is otherwise in short supply, and if partners knew then it seems pretty unlikely that it particularly intentional.
posted by zenon at 1:04 PM on December 15, 2022

As for my question above, I'll predict some UFoI-like scheme succeeds brilliantly in preventing mass defederation actions like this against corporations. In fact, the current UFoI maybe too American, too legalistic, etc. but something "universalist" here, ala wikipedia's rules.

We'll still have many interesting non-UFoI instances, who'll still defederate whoever they find distasteful, but as they won't articulate "universalist" rules they'll gradually become sidelined in some form. In particular, there would always be UFoI instances who abide by both the UFoI in their federation rules, and also by some stricter moderation rules required by interesting non-UFoI instances with whom they federate, so average users would choose these for their wider access.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:07 PM on December 18, 2022