webshit weekly

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

Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
May 01, 2018 (comments)
Some nerds are mad that massive corporations won't let them trickfuck internet connections from fascist regimes. The article is composed of pedantic whining about their technical adherence to the protocol specification, which the authors apparently think will prevent third-world despots from shitcanning the entire internet. Hackernews is of two minds on the topic: on one hand, trickfuckery is the primary capital-raising construct Hackernews employs, while on the other hand, these assholes aren't even serving ads or collecting users' personal data. This dichotomy is unresolved, while a much smaller and more interesting debate unfolds. One side believes that the American military should destroy any government inimical to Amazon's profit margins, while the other holds the opinion that maybe mass slaughter is perhaps an overreaction to an internet traffic disagreement. Your editor looks forward to seeing the NO BLOOD FOR URL picketing outside of Amazon HQ.

AT&T updates firmware to block access to 1.1.1.1
May 02, 2018 (comments)
AT&T continues the war against its own users. Hackernews suspects this action is a simple mistake; after all, anyone at AT&T who understands how a computer works got hired by Google many years ago. Hackernews was briefly concerned about AT&T dropping IPv6 packets as well, before realizing that none of them have IPv6 connections and thus cannot communicate with anything on that protocol at all. The rest of the comment chain is various Hackernews slowly discovering that there are no laws against ISPs fucking with the internet.

Twitter urges users to change passwords after computer 'glitch'
May 03, 2018 (comments)
A software company employing nearly 3500 people to store and display short phrases of plain text managed to fuck up the most basic possible handling of authentication data. Hackernews writes a couple dozen fanfiction accounts of how this idiotic behavior may have arisen, primarily based on their universally-shared experiences of fucking up the most basic possible handling of everything conceivable. Some Hackernews attempt to explain the right approach, but get that wrong too, which leads to some kind of bizarre golf game where they iteratively nudge their understanding of simple security concepts toward approximately the level of a schoolchild who has learned not to write a locker combination directly on the locker in question.

Please Stop Using Adblock (But Not Why You Think)
May 04, 2018 (comments)
An Internet advocates using ad blockers which actually block ads, unlike the ones that call themselves ad blockers and then show ads. Inexplicably, but inevitably, this turns into a series of Hackernews lectures about how "Hacker" "News" is special and precious, because Y Combinator is dumb enough to pay money to fully staff a web forum twenty-four hours a day. After the self-congratulatory pontificating ends, Hackernews returns to its previously scheduled freakout about the entire concept of powering on a computer without any interest in using it to show ads to people who do not want to see them.

“Manager READMEs” from some tech companies
May 05, 2018 (comments)
A webshit collects effluvia from bureaucrats. The middle managers represented are from a chat service, a flea market, a company whose entire domain ships in uBlock Origin's filter list, two spam companies, Netflix for Sundresses, and a character from a webcomic about dicks. Hackernews doesn't like this particular bureaucracy, except for a handful so desperate for their bosses' approval that they're overjoyed to submit to frequent interrogation.

Subscription Hell
May 06, 2018 (comments)
A webshit is mad at having to pay for goods and services. Hackernews is also mad at having to pay for goods and services, but zeroes in on their particular turf: software. Hundreds of comments are posted bitching about having to pay for software at all, having to pay for software on a recurring basis, and the deathless specter of possibly having to pay in the future for something that is currently free of charge.

Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming
May 07, 2018 (comments)
An academic lies on the internet. Many Hackernews have personally received instruction from this academic, which doesn't bode well for the quality of instruction involved. Hackernews ingests the article at hand and uses it to advocate several horrible education philosophies, invent human intuition from first principles, and then accuse each other of being bad parents.