Reply All - #69 Disappeared

Episode Date: July 7, 2016

This week a man decides to sabotage the entire internet. Plus, PJ discovers the secret code he’s accidentally been speaking, and learns about the people who created it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the afternoon of March 22nd, 2016, and Katie Caldwell, who's a program manager at Microsoft in Seattle, is in a meeting. At approximately 2.30 p.m., her phone starts to blow up. And I remember just receiving a number of Twitter, like, updates, like, all at the same time. I just, like, saw all of the people that I follow, and I follow a lot of tech folk, just explode. So first I was like, who died?

2,000 miles away in Houston, Texas, a developer named Dakota Smith is stuck. He's trying to update a program, something he's done a thousand times before, and it's failing. And he has no idea why. But his boss is not pleased. He's like, well, that's not supposed to happen. I mean, he was kind of incredulous. Like, this was so without precedent. I'm certain that at the time, he thought that I was just misreading the error message.

developers all over the world, France, Korea, Russia, China, they're all getting these error messages, just like Dakota did. And to someone who's surfing the web, everything looks fine. But these developers, who are just trying to do their jobs, can't do anything. The term break the internet is by now this tired cliche that's used to describe something really popular, like a viral video. But on this one afternoon in March, even though most people have no idea that it's happening, the internet is really, and truly busted. And no one can figure out why. Hi, Alex.

Hi, PJ. I have a question. Yes? Why is everything broken? Well, there's just one clue, which is that the error messages that everybody's seeing, they're all coming from a site called NPM.

And to understand how the internet is breaking, you need to understand how NPM works. So let's say that you're working on a website and you want a piece of code that like automatically resizes images or automatically bold certain words, but you don't want to write that code yourself, you can go to NPM and grab a piece of code that someone else has already written.

Developers call these pieces of code packages. People started talking to us and going, hey, so this package, which absolutely has to be there is missing. What's wrong with your servers? This is Lari Voss. He's the chief technology officer and co-founder of NPM. And that was how, you know, as soon as we went into investigating that, we were like, oh, it's not our servers.

The package is actually gone. And that's a problem because people don't typically store packages on their own computers. If they need a package for whatever it is they're working on, they just go to NPM and grab it from there. So what is the package that's missing? Like, what's the thing? So it was this piece of code that was called LeftPad. First of all, what does LeftPad do? Well, it's really sort of hilariously simple.

If you've got a piece of text that you need to be aligned to the right, the way that you align a piece of text to the right is you put a bunch of spaces to the left of that piece of text. And that act is called left padding. And that's all that left pad does. So it's basically a margin. And as someone who's not a coder, that sounds pretty simple. But just to make sure I asked Katie Caldwell for Microsoft. How long would it take you to write a program like LeftPad?

I was just writing it in my head. So I think it could take about, it would probably take me about five minutes, probably less. That's it? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not, it's not that complex. But on March 22nd, LeftPad is the most important program in the world. So back at NPM's office, it's 2.35 p.m. Pacific time, and NPM servers are getting hundreds of requests per minute for LeftPad, and they're all failing.

It's this weird, unprecedented event on the internet. And to illustrate the scale of how broken everything is, Lori compared it to this episode of the West Wing where mad cow disease breaks out at a small ranch in Nebraska, and it has this ripple effect that impacts the entire country's food system. So suddenly they've realized they're going to have to recall all beef. And they start walking through, I think the president starts walking through the impact that this is going to have. So first, all the beef farmers are going to go bankrupt because no one's going to buy beef. but that's just the beginning because all the fast food restaurants are going to go bankrupt

because they depend on beef. And then all the people who worked at fast food restaurants are going to be out of work. So all of the services that they depend on are suddenly going to have a lot less money. All the people who grow lettuce and the people who make ketchup and the people who bake bread for a living, they're suddenly going to be out of work. There's going to be this huge economic impact caused by one farm discovering that their cow is sick. So, Lori and his team start to investigate. They look up the author of LeftPad.

His name is Azar Kachulu. And this was the second clue about what was going on, because Azer had written something like 250 packages and put them on NPM. And when they went to look for what was going on with LeftPad, they were all gone. They realized all his packages were gone. Yes. Huh. So what had happened?

Well, Azar had gotten into a fight with this company called kick. I'm sure you're familiar with the company kick, right? K-I-K. Yeah, they're sort of like Slack or messaging. They're a messaging thing. It's like a chat program, but it has hundreds of millions of users, all of whom are very young, which is

why us olds don't know who they are. No, I use it all the time. You're really cool. I'm going to text with all my relevant friends. So anyway, the fight. Ozard declined to do an interview with us, but he has written about it, and this

basically what happened. So, Azar wrote a package called Kik, and he says at the time he didn't even know that there was a company called Kik, but inevitably, the company reached out to him and said, hey, we want to post a package on NPM called Kik, can you please change yours? And Aser said no. And so Kik wrote back and did a little bit of saber rattling. They basically said, look, we don't want to be Dicks, but since the name Kik is a registered trademark, we're going to have to get lawyers involved and you don't want lawyers beating down your door. Did he actually say we don't want to be a dick? Yes. And Ozzer's response, and this is a direct quote, was, ha ha, you're actually being a dick, so fuck you. Don't email me back. Okay. Kicks sent him a couple more emails,

but didn't get anywhere. So they just kind of went over his head. They went to NPM directly and said, look, you guys run this place. This guy, Ozzer, is using our company name. Please help us. And NPM says, okay. Here's Lori again, the guy from NPM. We made the call. We said, well, you know, Kik, the iOS app has several hundred million users. And it seems logical that the very famous messenger application should probably have this name Kik.

And so we gave the application name to Kik. Azer really, really, really didn't like that we had taken the package name away and given it to these other people. And so in protest, he decided that he was going to delete kick itself, his kick. But he also wanted to delete everything else he'd ever written. Which included LeftPad.

And that doesn't seem like it's such a big deal because LeftPad is not that complicated, but it's built into tons of other packages. So tens of thousands of people, people were using it every day without even realizing that they were using it. So when Azer yanked it, it just broke everything, which is crazy. But what's crazier is that there was nothing to stop Azer from deleting his package because it was so unthinkable that someone would delete their package like that, that NPM

hadn't built any safeguards to protect against it. So once everybody figures out what's going on that Azer Kachulu decided to take everything off of NPM, they're really pissed. I mean, they tweeted things at him like, quote, fuck this Ozark Cahooleu guy. Kik's claim is reasonable. NPM position correct. Cachulu response childish. These are developers.

These are the insults of computer developers. Or maybe someone who only had 140 characters, right? I'm trying to say. But part of the reason that they're so mad is that Azer has just violated this sort of holy agreement of the Internet, which is called open source. I assume you're familiar with open source. Yes. Yes, in a way where if you asked me to explain, I probably couldn't do it well. Basically, open source is this community of people who develop code.

And the idea is that anybody can borrow anybody else's best ideas and work on them. They can build something else on top of it. They can basically take her code and do whatever they want with it. And you're okay with that. Like, they don't have to pay you. Yeah. If you share code and you share it as open source, like you're essentially giving it away. Right.

So the thing that I feel like I did not realize that I am realizing now is that you can share it with everybody. But if you decide later that you don't want to share it anymore, it's not just like new people can't use it. It's like it goes away. Like if it were like the real world, it'd be like you invented a screw that went in a bridge. And then you're like, no, I'm mad. And every bridge that was ever built that has those screws just collapses because the screws disappear. Yes, that's right. That's insane.

That's an insane system to have. So Azar took the screws out. everybody's bridges collapsed and it's a total mess. But luckily, NPM has a backup of left pad on their servers. Oh, so they can just put the screws back in. Right. So at 454 p.m., like two and a half hours after Azer pulled the packages in the first place, NPM restores left pad. Which, of course, Lori knows is against Ozzer's will.

He deleted these things for a reason. But Lori basically says, well, listen, Azer, sorry, but it's not your decision to break the internet by pulling your code. You explicitly said, you gave it an open source license, you explicitly said, it is okay that other people can do anything that they want with this code. In fact, the license that is attached to LeftPad, it's literally called the WTFPL, which means the, you know, paraphrasing slightly, the whatever the hell you want license. That's what it is. The license is incredibly simple. It says, do whatever the hell you want with this code. It doesn't get more explicit than a WTF license.

It just underlines how open sources this community that's built top to bottom on sharing. But for all the people who are mad at Ozzer for deleting his code, there were just as many people who were mad at Lori and NPM for fixing the thing that he broke. And one of them is this guy, Kade Deem. He's a developer from Australia. and Kate says, yes, what Azar did was obnoxious, but he was definitely not out of line. Yes, it's a dick move to kill off all of your packages,

but at the same time, he's within his rights, even if it does break a whole bunch of projects, if NPM were concerned about people unpublishing, they shouldn't have had that feature as part of their repository in the first place. The real thing that bothers Kate about this whole debacle is that as far as he's concerned, NPM colluded with kick, which is this powerful corporation,

and they totally shut out Azar, who is the author of the code. Taked this felt like a power play, totally against the spirit of open source. And the way he describes the open source community is not just a bunch of coders working on their own independent stuff. It's like this big utopian experiment.

Open source is this swirling, amazing, literary and technical anarchy. And so when I say there's an anarchy, and not talking about Molotov Cocker, But instead talking about anarchyure in its purest form, which is self-governance across the internet. And of course, there's some parts of this that are really bad. But for the most part, the whole reason why we have this technology ecosystem is because of that founding philosophy and how open source essentially self-goverens. And to Ozzer, that ecosystem where everyone shares their ideas gets totally disrupted if any time a corporation says boo, everyone just gets out of the way.

He won't stand for it. And he told me in an email, quote, previous generations told us that big fishes eat small fish. I'm a small fish that doesn't accept that. Big fish can't threaten, steal, and get away with it. Big fishes can't dictate small fishes anymore. We're awake. Power to the people.

Wow. Yeah. So the weird thing that I noticed while talking to so many people in the open source community for the story is that even if they disagreed with what Ozard did, Like, even if they thought he was being a brat, they all seem to respect his worldview. Like, they believed what he was standing up for. Even Lori, the guy whose company, Oz, are sabotaged.

Not to get too, you know, high-minded about things, but open source is it's a political act. It's a statement about how you want the world to work. It's a statement of how you want things to be open and free. And part of being open and free is the ability to protest, and Azer had done this as a protest. I knew that I was limiting the impact of his protest in a way that was exactly opposite to what he had wanted. He'd wanted a bunch of people to be broken. He'd wanted a lunch of people to notice that this thing was broken and hear about it. And by fixing it, I was diminishing the number of people who would be broken about it

and also diminishing the impact of his protest. I was limiting his free speech in some way. So the net result of this entire fight is that NPM made it so people can't unpublished stuff in the way that Ozzer did anymore. So it's like there wasn't a guardrail there and now there's a guardrail. Exactly. But that is not to say that this will not happen again. Because something like this will definitely happen again. I mean, maybe not at NPM, maybe not like as severe.

but open source is in everything on the internet. Like, it's in every website, it's in every operating system. Open source just touches everything. It's like the foundation of the internet. That's the internet that we've chosen to build. And the benefit is that it's open and anyone can improve it. But the downside is that it's very vulnerable to, like, hurt feelings and egos in this weird way that I hadn't really realized.

And in a way that, like, bridges aren't. Right. Like nobody gets mad and takes their bridge home. Right. So, I mean, if you look at it that way, this act of sabotage by Azar strangely makes me feel pretty good. Oh. Does that make sense? I mean, every single day, there are countless people who could decide to break things, but they don't.

instead this fragile flawed human system this system that we all rely on it soldiers on for another week coming up after the break we realized that we didn't get to yes yes yes yes last week so regular listeners to the show know that we have this segment called yes yes yes no where we explain confusing things from the internet to our boss Alex Bloomberg and the unspoken premise of course of yes yes yes no is that Alex Goldman and I are, like, extremely with it people who are smart and relevant and know everything there is to know about culture.

Otherwise, why would we be experts? Okay. So, last episode, yes, yes, no. We were looking at a tweet that Bloomberg didn't understand, and he was specifically confused by this word he didn't recognize. YAS. So then, yes. Wow. Yes.

Do you want to take this one? It's just like an emphatic. Yes. Yeah, it's just like, yes. Yes. Uh-huh. Right. And then we moved on.

We just missed this huge story about where the word came from. We were three straight white guys sitting in a room talking about something that it turns out we knew basically nothing about. To everybody who heard this and cringed and wanted to punch their iPhones, I'm sorry. For people who are just as ignorant about where the word yes comes from as I was, good news. The story of how this word got here is so fascinating. All right, so let's work backwards. So probably the biggest reason that mainstream culture knows Yass right now is because on the show Broad City, they say it all the time.

There's actually a scene where Alana Glazer teaches her best friend how to say it. Yass queen. Yass queen. Yass queen. Yass queen. Yass queen. Yass queen. Yass queen.

Yass queen. Again. Yass queen. Yass isn't from Broad City. Alana Glazer said she got it from this viral video of a 22-year-old Lady Gaga fan. Yes, Gaga, you look so good. So Alana gives that guy credit for Yoss, and so do a lot of people. But the website, Mike.com, interviewed him, and he went out of his way to say that it wasn't his.

He said, quote, it's something we just said naturally. I was saying YAS with everyone else. So that we there is really important because that we is gay people. YAS comes from gay culture, which still isn't an answer. Like, when, who, how, where specifically did this thing start? So when I got home from work, my girlfriend was just like, you idiot, I cannot believe you don't know where Yoss is from. She told me to just go watch this documentary filmed in the 80s called Paris is Burning. And I'd see.

So I watched it. And holy crap, I saw. So Yoss is literally right there in the opening scene. This beautiful golden drag queen struts out in front of an adoring crowd, and they're all yelling at. So I went in with basically a trivia question. And instead I found a story about people. people who are in an extremely dire situation and who responded to that situation

by making something very beautiful. And weirdly, the fact that a lot of us don't know this, that's part of the story. It's actually part of the tragedy of the story. So to understand what you're about to hear, you just need to know a little bit about Paris's burning, this documentary. Here's the setup for the movie. It's the 1980s and there are these late night parties happening in Harlem.

The parties are thrown by young, queer, black, and Latinx people. And they're called balls. At the balls, there were prizes given to the most fabulous drag queens, but there were also these other prizes. People competed to see who could dress up and do the best impression of just, like, normal, archetypical people who they'd see on the street. Like, who's the best, like, cute girl who picks up her brother from school? Or the best, like, tough guy outside the party who's going to mug you when you leave.

Or the best, like, Wall Street guys. Get into their suits, I said, the well-dressed man of the age. So the MC does this big announcement and outwalks this man who is just dressed like a lawyer. He's got a three-piece gray suit, he's got a briefcase, he walks to one side of the room, he walks to the other, and there's an audience of people studying him. And the goal for this guy is to be real. And if he's real, it means he passes. He could walk around in straight society and nobody would know that he was queer.

Like, he could get on the subway and nobody would beat him up. But that's not exactly why they do it. In the movie, this drag queen named Doreen Corey explains. Black people have a hard time getting anywhere. And those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom, you can be anything you want. You're not really an executive, but you're looking like an executive. And therefore, you're showing the straight world that I can be an executive.

I actually got to talk to somebody who was there back then. His name's Jose extravaganta. He's 44 now. He came by the studio and he told me about the first time he ever went to a ball. I was 15 years old and I stood there the whole time with my mouth open. The cheering and all this creativeness making something out of nothing. It's like, how did you do that? All the time and energy they put into these things just to go there and get a acknowledge for someone to tell me,

Oh, yes, you are fabulous. That's it. That's all you get. You weren't getting a big prize, you know? You weren't going to be able to use it as a school credit, you know, as a class credit, you know? It was your 15 minutes to feel good. All this work and all this creativity just for the benefit of the people who were there that night. But a lot of this culture is stuck around, particularly the language.

So obviously the balls you hear a lot of people saying yes. But there's also these other words that I'm used to thinking of as Internet language that comes from there, that you hear in the movie. So, for instance, reading. See it on the Internet all the time. If somebody gets read, it means they got criticized. If somebody's reading somebody, they're, like, criticizing them in very fine detail.

That comes from the balls. Now you want to talk about reading. Let's talk about reading. She wears more makeup than my mother. Or shade. Everybody in the Internet is always throwing shade, being shady, getting shaded. I thought I knew what that meant.

I thought it was one more synonym for criticizing somebody. But in the movie, Doreen-Cory and Corey explains that shading's more subtle than that. Shade is, I don't tell you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly. And that's shade. Another thing that straight culture took from the ball scene was vogueing. Jose actually became really famous because Madonna hired him to teach her how to vogue and to go on tour with her and be one of her dancers. Actually, the very first time he competed at a ball,

it was in the Vogue category, because that was his thing. I went, and I went with a group of friends, and I wanted to walk. I didn't tell anybody, though, that I was going to compete. I was so afraid. And when they called the category,

I remember that going out there and just vogueing at the speed of light, and you see that a bit in Paris is burning. There's a clip of it. Yeah. Wait, that's your first one? That's my first ball. Yeah, the little kid that's like moving on the floor.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, and they're asking him, what is your name? What is your name? I didn't even hear that. I didn't even hear nothing. And that was my first ball and I won. And that night they asked me to be part of the house of extravaganza. The house of extravaganza.

So houses were like families but non-biological families. And getting asked to join a house was a big deal. Because a lot of the kids who showed up at these balls were homeless. They'd left or they'd been kicked out of abusive homes. And so they were just sleeping. outside on the piers in New York. But if you went to the ball and you were good, somebody would ask you to join their house. Your last name became your house's name. That's why Jose is Jose extravaganza. And the people in the house would actually take care of you. Like, you had a place to

sleep if you needed it. You had food. Jose actually got an allowance from his house. The house even had people who were like the mother of the house and the father of the house. Jose is now the father of house extravaganza. But back then, the father was this guy named David. Danny. I remember going over to Danny extravaganza, who Mayhira's tea, passed away early on. And I remember I would just go to his house every day. And every time I would come visit, they would be like sleeping bags and like people on the floor and like people waking up and somebody coming out of the bathroom. And I'm like, who are these people? I want to be here. I want a sleeping bag too. You know? Yeah, it was the best feeling that feeling of, like,

like a unit. It was a unit. And, yeah. And then, of course, like, I've lost a lot of them to, you know, AIDS and stuff like that, you know. But they're with me. So. Do you have people, like, do you have people on your floor right now? Like, do you have kids in sleeping bags and stuff like that?

No. Not at the moment. But I had a girl who just had a sex change a little. Yeah. she just went through a very big transition and didn't know how to feel. So she came over my house. Yeah. And just, can you imagine just having this big procedure done?

No parents, parents, you know, because, and no one there to be like to hold your hand? That's horrible. It's so much responsibility. Yeah, it is. But it's responsibility that you feel is a good responsibility. It's like I know that I've made a difference. difference in this young girl's life. She really looks to me like a father.

I see it in her eyes. Yeah. And I've given you nothing because I really don't have anything. It's also, I don't know, like as someone who's outside of it, the fact that you can like just make family is, you know what I mean? It's just like you have a family. Fuck it. Exactly that.

And it feels so good. I'm just an emotional dude. That's all. No. I'm sorry. No, that's fine. Yeah. And when I got asked to be the father, it was in a very hard time, you know?

I'm 18, 19 years old, you know? All my friends are dying. And it's funny because I'd never met anyone else like them. You know how you always be people. Or you remind me of this person. These guys were so ahead of everything. Geniuses. I miss them every day.

It's crazy. So that's where Yas comes from. Those people who are gone, they're the ones who came up with it. So what does it mean then? What does it mean to take something from them and not know it? A lot of the people from Paris is burning are now dead. The places they used to dance are gone. The peers where they used to sleep, there's a golf course there now.

And the really bitter irony is that while they're gone, their language is so present. fashion is so present. And that means that people like me, straight people, we use the things they invented without knowing the story of the people who invented them. Shruti was producing this interview, so she was sitting in the room. I think it also makes so much more sense like hearing this, that you feel that anger or frustration when you see words like shady being thrown around because it's not just words that are being taken. It's like these are the people made these words. It's like the people you're talking about, the people you miss. It's like it's them.

And it was kind of like code. We were speaking code, you know, for no one else to understand us, just us, you know? It was our code against society, so to speak, you know. Have you ever been to a ball? Now, you have to go. July 30th, we have to go. They're giving me an award. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. The latex ball. What's that? The latex ball. The latex ball, where is it? They're having it at stage 48. Okay. Yeah.

How do we dress? However you want. Okay. Unless you want to cover a fabulous bizarre outfit. And we bring you out to the stage. I want to fit in and not stand out. You'll fit in just fine. You'll be fine.

It'll be fun. Yeah. Absolutely. Jose Extravaganza, father of the house of extravaganza. He'll be at the latex ball on July 30th. I'll be there too. And if you can't make it there, There is a whole new generation of people throwing balls.

Should go check one out. You can see Jose in the new documentary Strike a Pose, which is coming to theater soon. And in the upcoming Basel Airman Netflix series, The Get Down. Reply all is a mini PJ Vote and Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Shruthi Pinnameney, Fia Benin, Chloe Prasinos, and Damiano Marquetti. Our executive producer is Tim Howard. He's on vacation this week, so he can't tell me not to tell you to go listen to his band, Soltero. My favorite song is Fight Song for True Love.

Production assistance from Tom Cody. We were edited by Peter Clowney and mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks to Jenny Livingston for letting us use clips from her documentary Paris is burning. You can find out about 25th anniversary screenings of the film at her website, jennie Livingston.com. There's also information about her new film project, Earth Camp One. Also, thank you, Lola Pellegrino for telling me I was dumb and made me watch it. We had so much help with the NPM story. Thanks to Samantha Cignon, Sam Bobra, Ryan Wilson Perkin, Chris De Bona,

and thank you to reporter Julia Alsop, who put us in touch with Jose. There's a great interview sheeted with him for Latino USA. Go listen to it. And finally, thank you so much to every person who emailed or tweeted or just got in touch with us and told us that we screwed up. Please always tell us when we screw up. We really appreciate it. Our theme music is from the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. Matt Lieber is the smoke from fireworks. July 13th is the deadline for the Reply All August internship.

If you're interested, more information at gimletmedia.com. Another website you can visit is Replyall.com, where you can hear more episodes of the show, or you can check us out in iTunes or on Google Play or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.