webshit weekly

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

Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”
February 08, 2018 (comments)
Google is excited about the progress they've made in their unending quest to ensure that trustworthiness is a quality that can only be ascribed by Google. Hackernews is disturbed at the idea that someone might be running arbitrary code in a web browser without HTTPS, which is the only possible way to determine if code should be run. One Hackernews figures out that browser vendors have effectively become the gatekeepers of all internet access, but everyone decides that there's nobody else qualified to do the job.

VLC 3.0 release
February 09, 2018 (comments)
A ragtag band of internet drifters releases some kind of weird offline YouTube clone that doesn't even have a messaging app built in. Hackernews celebrates the duration of the project development, but is miffed that it doesn't seem to work with Apple TV.

How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?
February 10, 2018 (comments)
An Internet posts an oral history of one of Google's legendary project management successes. Starting from open protocols and widely-understood software, Google slowly and steadily replaced every aspect of the program with unusable garbage. Hackernews spends a while disagreeing about which of Google's eighteen indistinguishable chat programs is best, then proceeds to list every single communications-related piece of software ever deployed. Everyone agrees that anything is better than email, which is why nobody on Hackernews has ever had an email account.

Let’s talk about usernames
February 11, 2018 (comments)
A webshit lectures us about problems with keeping track of user accounts, almost all of which were directly caused by the garbage software the webshit has chosen to embrace. Border skirmishes break out between the Schlaueste Demokratische Republik and Союз Стандартизованных Социалистических Республик. When arguing about e-mail address parsing gets tiresome, Hackernews switches to optimizing InnoDB layout for looking up user IDs. One Hackernews writes a doctoral thesis about the injustice of unique usernames, and then has to defend it against a panel of Hackernews who are incapable of imagining any other approach.

German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal
February 12, 2018 (comments)
Facebook, a webshit founded on the idea that everyone on Earth should upload all of their personal information to Facebook, begins development on a special edition of its software for the German market. Hackernews is fully aroused, since the only thing more alluring than bikeshedding a legal issue is bikeshedding a foreign legal issue. Even more delicious: bikeshedding hypothetical legal issues that might arise after the instantiation of an upcoming new law! When the orgy dies down, Hackernews lights a Marlboro and engages in pillow talk about how foolish the German government must be to clash with an organization with as many lawyers as Facebook has.

AMP for email is a terrible idea
February 13, 2018 (comments)
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Hackernews, striking from a hidden browser, have experienced their first disagreement with the evil Google Empire. During the comment thread, rebel Hackernews managed to object to secret plans for Google's ultimate weapon, AMP, a webshit protocol with enough lock-in to destroy an entire internet. Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, rebel Hackernews race online aboard their Macbooks, custodians of the stubborn objections that can save their protocols and restore freedom to the internet.....

Let's Learn About Waveforms
February 14, 2018 (comments)
A webshit posts a summary of that one week in high school your physics teacher talked about audio. Hackernews is so mesmerized by the moving colors and pretty sounds that they can barely incorrect each other about digital signal processing, so they spend some time trading webshit school lessons instead.