webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of October, 2019.

Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
October 08, 2019 (comments)
A computer game company takes a brave stand against freedom. Hackernews doesn't think it's fair to hold poor little multinational corporations responsible for defending the civil rights that enabled them to become multinational corporations; this is work best left to individual internet commenters. The right way to fix all this, says Hackernews, is copyright law reform. Other Hackernews debate whether software users should be banned from corporate services immediately upon expressing any opinions, or whether it's better to wait a bit so we can be sure we only blacklist people who actually mean the things they say. The broad consensus is that people should be allowed to say whatever they want in any venue they happen to find, unless it might cost a massive corporation any profit at all, in which case everyone should shut the fuck up.

Ken Thompson's Unix Password
October 09, 2019 (comments)
Some Internets solve an ancient word scramble. Hackernews doesn't really care, but a famous person is in the article title so they vote for the story. In the comments, Hackernews lines up to tell stories about word scrambles they solved once. Later, Hackernews tries to understand how ancient internet tribes managed to communicate with one another using nothing but text. One Hackernews unearths ancient mailing list technology and the rest speculate on how anyone could have used this without machine learning to tell them which messages to care about.

Broken
October 10, 2019 (comments)
Apple's loyal opposition supplicates for relief. Some Apples show up in the comments to bemoan the sorry state of engineering at the company. Hackernews decides the problem is that computer programmers aren't in charge of the company, and then the comment thread collapses into a cycle of bug reports and reverse engineering the bugs based on webshit programming experience. Nobody stops sending Apple money. None of them ever will.

Why Enterprise Software Sucks
October 11, 2019 (comments)
An academic takes to Twitter to explain that people who use tools pick better tools than tools who use people. Hackernews misses the entire point and whines about pedagogical technology. Later, a few Hackernews cotton on to the academic's original message, but get the point backwards, and decide that all the dumb shit is the only reason bad software gets purchased. Finally, Hackernews complains that their job is too hard and they can't seem to get it done, but they're going to keep cashing the checks anyway.

A uBlock Origin update was rejected from the Chrome Web Store
October 12, 2019 (comments)
Google continues the war against its own users. Once enough whining occurs, a Google logs into Reddit and reports having saved the day. We are instructed by this Google to complain on Twitter if our software is mysteriously ejected from the garden. Hackernews can't decide whether Google has finally gotten so untouchably huge that it no longer needs to give a shit about any non-Google employee at all or if Google has finally gotten so unmanageably huge that it just hires morons and ships whatever garbage software they produce without any quality control. The answer is both, of course, but Hackernews gets bored with this question and decides the real problem is economics. One Hackernews posts the traditional "this monopoly must be broken up" starting gun, and the rest are off to the races, incorrecting one another on economic theory, corporate governance, the nature of commerce, and the actual definitions of any of the words used.

Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
October 13, 2019 (comments)
Some webshits, overwhelmed by nostalgia, overestimate the value of a specific remote-code execution vector. We can look forward in ten or twenty years to a followon work entitled "WebAssembly is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era." Hackernews all remember the specific eighteen-month window when Shockwave and Flash were en vogue, and so we are treated to a couple hundred stories of the one time each Hackernews did something useful with it. Many Hackernews speculate on what the next creative internet medium might be. We can take for granted it will again come in the form of a tightly-controlled corporate platform, because freedom can only truly be experienced through the lens of an honestly-acquired license key.

“My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe”
October 14, 2019 (comments)
An Internet trolls some programmers. Hackernews takes the bait; not because the troll did a particularly good job selling the joke, but because all the services upon which Hackernews relies are so poorly run that Hackernews regularly experiences the same problems. Some Hackernews correctly ascertain that the troll cannot be telling the truth, as the bug report claims Google gave enough of a shit to explain the locked account, when everybody knows that Google under no circumstances gives a single shit about anyone.