webshit weekly

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

A year later, Equifax has faced little fallout from losing data
September 08, 2018 (comments)
A blogger posts a thousand-word article to describe a complete lack of any development in a topic everyone forgot about eleven months ago. Hackernews enumerates all the reasons that government obviously cannot work, because America is doing it wrong, and the answers can be found in whatever economic rounding error issued the commenter's passport. No technology is discussed.

First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?
September 09, 2018 (comments)
A webshit attempts to use a Firefox feature, with appropriate expectations (random shit will break) and unsurprising results (random shit breaks). Hackernews is enthusiastic about any idea that might counteract the unyielding panopticon they're paid to design, build, and shove into the lives of every breathing mammal on Earth. Nothing anyone does seems to have any effect, but the frequent breakage and alarming error messages produce a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. Hackernews is chock full of ideas about exciting new ways to deliberately break all the shit they make for a living.

How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC
September 10, 2018 (comments)
The article is entirely contained within the title, but that doesn't stop this webshit factory from posting a riveting narrative about how they implemented existing protocols designed to do exactly this task. Hackernews has a shitload of feature requests, except for the "list every competing product" hobbyists. Later in the comments, Hackernews has adventures: discovering load balancing, finding out that virtual machines are not as fast as real computers, and theorizing profit models that don't involve advertising.

Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
September 11, 2018 (comments)
An Internet stops the presses with a world-shaking scoop: a website devoted to selling you shit is in fact out to make money. Hackernews decides that Amazon's failure to altruistically serve as an impartial product adjudicator is unacceptable. Going forward, Hackernews will order toilet paper and batteries from some other online retailer, refraining from doing business with this crass commercial operation except at work, where they will continue sending Amazon millions of dollars a day.

EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
September 12, 2018 (comments)
Europe continues its five-year plan to chase every last datacenter out of the continent. As usual, Hackernews is greatly distressed by the idea that someone other than Facebook is being permitted to make technology decisions. A large part of the problem seems to be that various governments don't seem to have a very clear understanding of how their respective laws work, and if they'd just take the time to read Hackernews' comment threads, they'd have this sorted out in a jiffy. Some Internet Traditionalists suggest using technological tricks to comply with the letter of the law while explicitly and intentionally violating its intent, but otherwise no technology is discussed.

SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy
September 13, 2018 (comments)
The Ham Radio Foreign Relations Bureau heard something. Hackernews upvotes the submission out of habit, because eavesdropping on strangers is the core business model of most of Silicon Valley. Hackernews has lots of opinions about space, the quality of which varies according to the number of mathematics courses taken by the commenter's favorite science fiction author. Technology is discussed, but you wish it hadn't been.

Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back
September 13, 2018 (comments)
A Reddit is concerned because a device running Android, an operating system built to send and receive software and data to and from Google, has received some software from Google. For some unfathomable reason, a Google shows up to break their otherwise-flawless "ignoring all customers in every possible medium" streak, but saves it at the last minute by posting a completely meaningless explanation and then disappearing forever. Hackernews argues over whether all this could have been avoided if everyone would just purchase Apple products, but one Hackernews alludes to the truth: any amount of user tracking, security problems, planned obsolescence, regulatory capture of the education sector, Asian fascism enablement, Internet protocol derailment, or warmongering is acceptable compared to the specter of someone sneaking a U2 record into your life. Stay safe out there.

Apple's best product is now privacy
September 14, 2018 (comments)
The sort of asshole who refers to a blog post as a "piece" has opinions about Apple's business model. Still glowing from the sixty-three-hour WWDC product advertisement orgy, the author repeats some Apple press releases about iPhone security, invents new security features, and breathlessly ascribes them to Apple, just because it's not possible to conceive of this company disappointing anyone in any way. Hackernews is very interested in this story, because it's very important that they have a consistent and comprehensive ethical framework to justify buying the phone that integrates with the laptop they already bought.