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webshit weekly (2021/08/14)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of August, 2021.

One Bad Apple
August 08, 2021 (comments)
An Internet is mad about Apple (business model: "Uber for spyware") turning your phone into a cop, and posts a lot of irrelevant misunderstandings about it. Hackernews follows this up with dire warnings about the state of child trafficking in the world today, complete with admonishments that there is no hope for improvement, except for venture-backed smartphone apps. None of the outrage focuses on the obvious motivation behind Apple's new spyware: if they can put a U2 album on your phone, they can put some kiddie porn on there too, and so can various national governments, and now you'll get automatically reported. There is no information in Apple's documentation regarding how low your Chinese social credit score has to get before this is automatically deployed to your iCloud account.

Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'
August 09, 2021 (comments)
Some bureaucrats, whose funding is dependent on climate change, declares climate change to be extremely important. Of course, tens of thousands of scientists around the world have been saying this for some time, but now the United Nations has paid some empty suits to read this information and grow concerned about it. Hackernews has solved all these problems in their heads some years back, casually post to this effect in comment threads, and are immediately torn asunder by other Hackernews who have solved this problem in their heads _but different_.

TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
August 10, 2021 (comments)
TikTok (business model: "Uber for Vine") is more popular than Facebook (business model: "Uber for Sino-Soviet Propaganda"), presumably because it bypasses the middleman and delivers the content straight from the source. Hackernews debates whether it's just a matter of time before it turns out to be evil, or whether a social-media application targeted at children and operated by a government full of genocidal monsters is and shall remain "fun." Other Hackernews point out that the app, which is operated by a company in which the murderous, barbaric Chinese government has an ownership stake, is mean to fat people.

GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
August 11, 2021 (comments)
Github (business model: "Uber for README.MD") directs its employees to eat its own dog food. Because of Github's acquisition by Microsoft (business model: "Uber for customer abuse"), it turns out that what Github engineers are eating came out of the dog to begin with. Hackernews tries to figure out whether they, as customers of Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to get anyone to use Azure, have any control over their information, or whether they'd be better off remaining with their existing workstation-as-a-service provider, Apple (business model: "Uber for garden walls").

Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources
August 12, 2021 (comments)
Reuters (business model: "Uber for chatlogs") reports about an Apple chatlog as though it were news. This is a continuation of the ongoing outrage over Apple's new policy of outsourcing its content moderation services to your battery. The stakes are high; three, possibly even four people have declared an intention to use Apple products slightly less over the next five to ten years. Hackernews is running out of shit to post about this, so they just link to their previous comments and go back to refreshing their order status pages.

FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website
August 13, 2021 (comments)
Google continues the war against its own users, renewing the surge at the second front recently opened (against its own developers). Hackernews thinks that any agency of any government gives a single shit about what appears on the app store besides advertising platforms with users numbering the billions. Other Hackernews dislike that Apple and Google have so much control over their own property, and look forward to the day when they can be liberated by human rights advocates Epic Games, which is famed for both caring about individual humans and for being part-owned by the Chinese government, a deadly pack of human jackals who prey on the weak at an industral scale.

Asahi Linux for Apple M1 progress report, August 2021
August 14, 2021 (comments)
Asahi (business model: "Uber for Yellow Dog Linux") goes to an extraordinary amount of effort to remove half of the value of expensive computers, and replace it with a shivering basket case of an operating system. Hackernews desperately wants to appear so technically-inclined as to run a gimmick operating system on overpriced luxury computers, but since the shit doesn't actually work and there's no benefit to getting it working, nobody has much to discuss.

webshit weekly (2021/08/07)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of August, 2021.

The rise of never-ending job interviews
August 01, 2021 (comments)
Bureaucrats continue to fuck everything up for everyone. Hackernews points out that Google is full of this particular brand of bureaucrat, which Hackernews interprets as meaning that everyone on Earth is an incompetent moron, except Hackernews, who has all the answers. Many of those Hackernews work at Google, where they explain that they're much better at interviewing than anyone else at Google. Nobody attempts to determine whether any of these superior interviewers are in fact the same people the rest of Hackernews is bitching about.

Life before smartphones (2020)
August 02, 2021 (comments)
An Internet reminisces about the past, but forgets to mention why. Hackernews also has a past, and it was the same one the author lived in, and so this thread serves as this month's nostalgia dumping grounds.

NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]
August 03, 2021 (comments)
The National Security Agency provides a satirical document in which we are instructed how to spackle over all the cracks in the towering edifice of software we use to serve text files to six strangers per day. Hackernews doesn't even bother to read the document, but sets about reconstructing it from a combination of first principles and the horrifically embarrassing experiences they have of being hacked because they were subscribed to the wrong set of remote systems administration services. Meanwhile, half of the Kubernetes security primitives are deprecated, replaced, and then deprecated again faster than it's possible to render updated versions of the PDF.

Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow
August 04, 2021 (comments)
Your phone is a cop. Hackernews can't decide between being outraged that someone else is digging through their shit or being grateful for the Machines of Loving Grace. None of the outraged Hackernews are sufficiently incensed to actually do anything about the situation.

Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
August 05, 2021 (comments)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation attempts to explain why you should be angry about your phone being a cop. One Hackernews has cleverly avoided this situation by buying a different phone. None of the others have. A debate rages about who deserves to be spied upon, whether you can trust a phone you didn't build and program yourself from a box of transistors, exactly how much worse Apple needs to behave to convince a given Hackernews to buy a different phone, and whether children are people.

An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology
August 06, 2021 (comments)
For day three of the Apple-themed Performative Outrage Theater, some Internet rando pontificates on a single-use domain name and invites other nerds to type their names into Github. Tim Cook was available for comment, but nobody asked.

Sci-Hub is fundraising
August 07, 2021 (comments)
A piracy site stops pretending to take the high road and wants some money instead. Hackernews continues to misunderstand the purpose of peer review, can't figure out how to navigate a journal publisher's website, and thus is happy to pay the pirates for their superior indexing service.

webshit weekly (2021/07/31)

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of July, 2021.

The Framework Laptop is now shipping
July 22, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets decide that the missing piece from whitebox laptop offerings is bespoke usb modules. Hackernews is convinced the ability to exchange a USB port for a slightly different USB port is the quantum leap in personal computing for which the world has been waiting. The rest of the comments are feature requests nobody wants.

AWS's Egregious Egress
July 23, 2021 (comments)
A pack of webshits compose a hitpiece on their competitors. Hackernews sets about to deliberately construct a Stockholm Syndrome analogue which will allow them to rationalize being locked into an abusive business relationship. Other Hackernews think the hit piece is unfair because other hyperscale cloud providers are also abusive. Whether or not this is acceptable for a given provider seems to depend on how long a particular Hackernews worked for that provider.

Introduction to open source private LTE and 5G networks
July 24, 2021 (comments)
Canonical (business model: "Uber for Debian") continues its search for a source of actual revenue. Hackernews is interested in the MacGuffin, but not the actual target of the marketing blog. Better luck next time, Ubuntu!

Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion
July 25, 2021 (comments)
Bicycling enthusiasts try to figure out why someone without even a Serfas sponsorship has managed to win. Hackernews knows it was because the professional collusion tools failed the old guard, creating an opening for someone to win based on actual physical exertion. One Hackernews is mad that women are allowed to ride bicycles, but it's not clear if the anger is about the competitive aspect or that a woman has a bicycle at all.

The Insecurity Industry
July 26, 2021 (comments)
Edward Snowden would like everyone to recognize that nothing has got better since diming out the NSA, either for Edward Snowden in particular or anyone else in general. Hackernews warns us that Snowden's unhinged ideas, such as holding people and companies responsible for the products they sell, would immediately lead to the complete and immediate collapse of the First Amendment. Other Hackernews misinterpret this warning as a directive to get angry about the C programming language.

Element raises $30M to boost Matrix
July 27, 2021 (comments)
Some web programmers go into debt in the pursuit of a more perfect chat app. Hackernews thinks the big difference that will make this chat app win over the six million nearly-identical chat apps is their approach to copyright licensing. Other Hackernews think the lone thing preventing the chat app from global market domination is some CSS.

The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
July 28, 2021 (comments)
Google, the world's largest repository of algorithmic search expertise, gets trick-fucked by blogspammers and doesn't notice because nobody at Google both speaks Norwegian and gives a shit about search results. Hackernews is overrun by Nordic commentors decrying their universal inability to get Google to lift a single finger to help anyone, anywhere.

How Dwarf Fortress is built
July 29, 2021 (comments)
An Internet interviews the developer of the second-largest text-based adventure game (behind Linux). Hackernews recounts every experience they've ever had with the game.

Who Owns My Name?
July 30, 2021 (comments)
A person who was famous is angry that continued fame is at someone else's discretion. Hackernews recognizes the name from the original controversy and now wrestles with the idea that other people are allowed to make art about actual events even if that art doesn't reflect the actual series of events which occurred. No technology is discussed.

Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
July 31, 2021 (comments)
A webshit is mad at a peer-reviewed paper for impugning a favored algorithm. Instead of just writing a letter to the journal pointing out the problems, or even citing the actual goddamn paper, the chosen solution is to whine a lot in a blog post and conclude that science is flawed. Hackernews splits attention evenly between the claims made in the blog post and ranting about how 'academics' aren't as good at programming as, say, Hackernews.