Last night I was reminiscing about my days at MIT's Project Athena, because I have a T-shirt from there as well. This morning I woke up to news of Dan Geer's departure from @stake. Dan managed (among other things) the systems programming group at Athena, which was mostly students -- some of those students have gone on to bigger and better things -- Ted Tso and John Kohl are amongst the most well know. And they had a cool name, they were called the "watchmakers". I was part of the user consulting group, that was people who were helping people out in the Athena public clusters. We were frequently in meetings that included Dan and parts of his staff, and I remember always being impressed and a little intimidated by Dan. He is definitely one of the good guys.

So I was sad when I read about what happened at @stake. It's a loss for Dan, but he's so good that he won't have a problem finding work. It's a loss for @stake, because no matter what actually happened, people are going to conclude that they censored Dan - and that makes them seem untrustworthy. And it's a loss for Microsoft, for pretty much the same reasons -- no matter what happened, people are going to assume that they leaned on @stake to get rid of Dan. This also looks untrustworthy, and people are looking for excuses to declare Microsoft untrustworthy. All of these losses add up to a loss for you and me, because they'll get in the way of improving security in Microsoft systems, which is a benefit to everyone.