webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of August, 2021.

One Bad Apple
August 08, 2021 (comments)
An Internet is mad about Apple (business model: "Uber for spyware") turning your phone into a cop, and posts a lot of irrelevant misunderstandings about it. Hackernews follows this up with dire warnings about the state of child trafficking in the world today, complete with admonishments that there is no hope for improvement, except for venture-backed smartphone apps. None of the outrage focuses on the obvious motivation behind Apple's new spyware: if they can put a U2 album on your phone, they can put some kiddie porn on there too, and so can various national governments, and now you'll get automatically reported. There is no information in Apple's documentation regarding how low your Chinese social credit score has to get before this is automatically deployed to your iCloud account.

Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'
August 09, 2021 (comments)
Some bureaucrats, whose funding is dependent on climate change, declares climate change to be extremely important. Of course, tens of thousands of scientists around the world have been saying this for some time, but now the United Nations has paid some empty suits to read this information and grow concerned about it. Hackernews has solved all these problems in their heads some years back, casually post to this effect in comment threads, and are immediately torn asunder by other Hackernews who have solved this problem in their heads _but different_.

TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
August 10, 2021 (comments)
TikTok (business model: "Uber for Vine") is more popular than Facebook (business model: "Uber for Sino-Soviet Propaganda"), presumably because it bypasses the middleman and delivers the content straight from the source. Hackernews debates whether it's just a matter of time before it turns out to be evil, or whether a social-media application targeted at children and operated by a government full of genocidal monsters is and shall remain "fun." Other Hackernews point out that the app, which is operated by a company in which the murderous, barbaric Chinese government has an ownership stake, is mean to fat people.

GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
August 11, 2021 (comments)
Github (business model: "Uber for README.MD") directs its employees to eat its own dog food. Because of Github's acquisition by Microsoft (business model: "Uber for customer abuse"), it turns out that what Github engineers are eating came out of the dog to begin with. Hackernews tries to figure out whether they, as customers of Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to get anyone to use Azure, have any control over their information, or whether they'd be better off remaining with their existing workstation-as-a-service provider, Apple (business model: "Uber for garden walls").

Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources
August 12, 2021 (comments)
Reuters (business model: "Uber for chatlogs") reports about an Apple chatlog as though it were news. This is a continuation of the ongoing outrage over Apple's new policy of outsourcing its content moderation services to your battery. The stakes are high; three, possibly even four people have declared an intention to use Apple products slightly less over the next five to ten years. Hackernews is running out of shit to post about this, so they just link to their previous comments and go back to refreshing their order status pages.

FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website
August 13, 2021 (comments)
Google continues the war against its own users, renewing the surge at the second front recently opened (against its own developers). Hackernews thinks that any agency of any government gives a single shit about what appears on the app store besides advertising platforms with users numbering the billions. Other Hackernews dislike that Apple and Google have so much control over their own property, and look forward to the day when they can be liberated by human rights advocates Epic Games, which is famed for both caring about individual humans and for being part-owned by the Chinese government, a deadly pack of human jackals who prey on the weak at an industral scale.

Asahi Linux for Apple M1 progress report, August 2021
August 14, 2021 (comments)
Asahi (business model: "Uber for Yellow Dog Linux") goes to an extraordinary amount of effort to remove half of the value of expensive computers, and replace it with a shivering basket case of an operating system. Hackernews desperately wants to appear so technically-inclined as to run a gimmick operating system on overpriced luxury computers, but since the shit doesn't actually work and there's no benefit to getting it working, nobody has much to discuss.