webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of February, 2018.

Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values for 3rd parties
February 01, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla half-asses another fundamental privacy feature. No explanation is given as to why users would want this protection only in specific circumstances, instead of, for instance, at all times everywhere. Hackernews initially wants this feature enabled full-time, but slowly realizes that this would deprive all their employers of delicious customer data. After some debate, they decide that advertising agencies are insurmountable opponents and only the government can save them.

Family fun with deepfakes
February 02, 2018 (comments)
An Internet posts a deep dive into a supremely creepy hobby. Hackernews has a nice chuckle at the people who think creepy hobbies are anything but the natural progression of human society toward the ultimate utopia where nobody can trust any of their senses.

How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works
February 03, 2018 (comments)
A webshit guesses about how a web browser works and complains that the ad agency which makes the browser isn't helpful enough about blocking ads. Hackernews writes, and then bikesheds, science fiction about possible malfeasance on the part of the ad agency. Another Hackernews figures out that the ad agency is only enabling the blocker on sites that don't comply with the "recommendations" of a cartel operated by the ad agency.

Modern CSS Explained
February 04, 2018 (comments)
A webshit posts a brief history of the crayons that webshits use to scribble on your browser. Hackernews, unsatisified with the pedantry of the original article, argues about the etymology of various keywords. The rest of the comments are various Hackernews expressing relief that CSS has evolved past all of this box-model garbage to the platonic ideal of just using tables grids for everything.

U.S. consumer protection official puts Equifax probe on ice
February 05, 2018 (comments)
The United States government continues the war against its own users. Hackernews is utterly outraged at the idea that some corporation somewhere can track and monitor their activity without express consent and then aggregate that data and then market predictive services to third parties based on that data even if that corporation is not based in Silicon Valley.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches
February 06, 2018 (comments)
Tesla finally launches a product as advertised. Hackernews, based on Youtube videos, reverse-engineers a spacecraft down to the metallurgical level and then sagely debates the maintenance characteristics of an aircraft that exited service before any of them learned to read and none of them have seen in operation, mostly derived from blog posts by people they're pretty sure knew a guy.

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
February 07, 2018 (comments)
An Internet posts someone else's paper, reformatted and surrounded by advertisements, "so it’s not lost altogether," instead of just uploading it to archive.org. Hackernews lauds the vision and genius of the user interfaces they are all employed to poorly reimplement in bespoke, incompatible javascript. Hackernews bemoans the hubris and shortsightedness of the user interfaces someone else was employed to poorly implement in bespoke, incompatible GUI toolkits.