webshit weekly

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

Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent
December 08, 2018 (comments)
A webshit mailhost denounces a bad law in another country, apparently under the impression that anyone in Australia cares about the political opinions of some Swiss nerds. Hackernews doesn't really care about the mail service; this post was selected as the Armchair Legal Theorists meeting location for the month of December. The Hackernews interpretations of this set of laws range from "end of world" to "obviously just," and maybe it would matter which one was right, if Australia produced anything worth consuming now that John Clarke is gone. One Hackernews links to a Twitter thread containing a hypothetical implementation of the bad law in which JIRA foils the spies.

JIRA is an antipattern
December 09, 2018 (comments)
Australia fires the first volley in its campaign to discredit JIRA, which was yesterday determined to be the primary counterintelligence force stopping its spies from spying. Hackernews breaks out into factional disputes, depending on which denomination of the Agile religion the poster adheres. An argument breaks out about who is more important to a business: the programmers, or the customers? Several dozen Hackernews perform the ancient rite of webforum discussion: one, trying to explain a concept, outlines a hypothetical scenario; the rest, completely ignoring any point anyone is trying to make, bikeshed the scenario by laser-focusing on one tiny irrelevant aspect (in which they happen to be expert). No technology is discussed.

Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
December 10, 2018 (comments)
A journalist gets the scoop: when a company measures every single element of your personal life, it's because they would like to sell that information for money. Hackernews is less concerned about outmoded flyover-state concepts like "privacy" or "dignity" and is instead super concerned with reverse engineering the location service that Google ships on their phones. A few Hackernews make a desultory attempt to theorize a world in which people weren't immediately preyed upon the moment they touch a computer, but nobody can really muster up much energy for trash-talking Google's business model.

Firefox 64 Released
December 11, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla shoves another featureless release of their web browser out the door. The only user-detectable change in this release was made by someone who does not work for Mozilla and was paid for by Google. Like all stories about browser releases, this one is five hundred comments from people who are angry about some weird-ass extension they started using in 2003, people angrily replying that some other weird-ass extension is better, and people angrily declaring you don't need an extension because that database has been built into the address bar for ten years now. Mozilla still hasn't mastered HTML 4, but now that the bug report is old enough to drink, they're at least starting to invent excuses for not fixing it.

Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo
December 12, 2018 (comments)
Something happened, but it's impossible to care about. I can't even care about it long enough to remember what it is. Hackernews doesn't like a webshit's business name, logo, or anything else about it. Most of the comments are trying to figure out why Google would do such a thing ... whatever it was.

Robinhood launches 3% checking account
December 13, 2018 (comments)
Some dipshits would like to act like a bank without doing any of the things that banks are required to do. The dipshits (motto: "Uber for financial crises") haven't even got the product defined before they start misleading potential customers about it, which is a new record for Silicon Valley efficiency. Hackernews, trying to understand, reinvents banking from first principles, even going so far as to identify places where a given society may be required to implement restrictions on financial markets. After that, it's just a matter of every single Hackernews naming every single banking product available in the iOS app store.

CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
December 14, 2018 (comments)
A webshit refuses to leave an abusive relationship. Hackernews has lots of stories about similar abuses, but chooses to focus on how this obviously shitty behavior wasn't the fault of the innocent corporation, because it was the big mean state government that forced their hand.