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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see this statement out of Github. The general tone and specifically the mention of the founder's wife in this post gives a huge amount of credence to Julie's claims. I hope Github follows through on this with as much sincerity and determination as this post implies.

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Agreed. Keep this handy for when you have an event such as this. If no attorneys were involved in drafting this, I would be surprised.

It admits no guilt, declares that individuals are the possible cause and that action is being taken to prevent their continued damage, notifies the community that a new HR head started very recently, and attempts to be as graceful as possible in acknowledging the points made by the victim.

If you get a chance, watch 'Wing Chun', an informative documentary on the same topic, and note the effectiveness of 'cotton belly'.

I agree that the statement is good. I only wish they'd addressed the concerns that were raised regarding them having access to/messing with private repos.

I didn't quite read the statement as saying the founder's wife had access to private repos. I just read it as saying that the founder's wife claimed to have access to private company communication, specifically chat logs only intended for github employees. But a statement clearing the concerns up would be nice.

I personally just read the quote as meaning the wife knew her husband's passwords (and where to find company chat logs). Theoretically, this might give her access to private repositories, but only to the extent the founder in question does. A problem, to be sure, but its not like they were giving away credentials to people.

You're right - the TechCrunch article didn't mention access to private repos - only private employee chatrooms. But the question was raised here on HN, asking if she did have access to private employee chatrooms what else might she or others have access to? If the security is lax in one area, one might assume it's lax in others as well. But it's just speculation - but it has merit non the less

[edit: spelling]

There's no way to know unless someone comes out and says it explicitly, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that the aforementioned "spies" emailed specific chat logs to her. In a toxic environment, that kind of stuff gets passed around willy-nilly. That's the first conclusion I jumped to after reading the TechCrunch article, anyway.

They use campfire so giving anyone access to the chat logs would be as simple as adding them. They could then look at any logged history (almost all of it, unless the room was locked) and search through it however they liked.

I'm under the impression that GitHub has moved away from campfire and uses their own custom chat system

[1]: https://twitter.com/holman/status/444642237456998400

That's probably a custom client for Campfire (right underneath the screenshot[1] they say it's Campfire).

[1]: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/ (first screenshot)

I was confused when I read the tweet after the article, but this seems like the most likely explanation

At the same time: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/

> We still use (and love) Campfire.

I'm curious if the company itself took this up or if board pressure played a part. It is sad that the events transpired as they did with out management stepping up earlier.

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