Comment by malfist
10 days ago
I don't know how you could possibly have that take away from reading this. They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident and reaffirmed that it did not follow the journalistic standards they have set for themselves.
They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.
> That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.
It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions.
Sounds optional.
Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.
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> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.
Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk.
Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
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It's embarrassing for them to put out such a boilerplate "apology" but even more embarrassing to take it at its word.
It's such a cliche that they should have apologized in a human enough way that it didn't sound like the apology was AI generated as well. It's one way they could have earned back a small bit of credibility.
> They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident
The only incident we know was isolated was getting caught.