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Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.

Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.

A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.

My 6yo has an iPhone which arrived OOTB with a News widget, accessible by a single swipe, including similar "breaking" content. No sign-in required. Just an internet connection. What does she want for Christmas? An iPhone 14 Pro Max. I kid you not.

Literally everyone she goes to school with has TikTok and are talking about content in that app day in and day out.

Do I like this? No. Are you a million miles from reality for pre-teens? Yes.

A song and dance about how this is a somehow simply a treatise on the decline of Microsoft is naive at best and highly disingenuous at worst. I really don't want to sound vitriolic but do y'all live in the real world? I wonder sometimes.

Convey a singular point with intent. Below is first paragraph rewritten. Just my 2¢.

---

Essays should be persuasive. But we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.

Useful writing makes a strong claim without resorting to falsehoods.

It is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of Colorado than somewhere within.

Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. Useful writing is bold and true. It tells people something important, that they might not have known, without resorting to manufactured surprise or equivocality. This is formative of fundamental insights.

Any idea will not be novel to all, but may still have impact for the many.

In argument: be correct, be important, be strong. This will ensure usefulness.

Anecdotal: was setting up some Hisense TVs at work the other day and the unit came up with a message that "all Network features" would be disabled if you declined the EULA.

Immediately thought "works for me".

I wonder if any other manufacturer offers that choice.

Edit: commercial signage panels are about as close as you get to dumb TVs these days. Rarely include any smart features, can get in quite large sizes. Not OLED or anything but if you just want a decent display...

Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content.

Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it.

Can't kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we'll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn't exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes.

Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective, insatiable gaping maw.

Also have a professional proofread your posts. 'Around the bend' is not the connotation you were looking for.

Just static route Google DNS back to your gateway. Works fine for me.

As others have said though, who buys a Google device thinking it's not gonna talk to Google?

Ironic that participants were initially contacted via FB ads.

In light of the recent "Research" app disclosure, and that in both cases a fee was paid for participation, it makes me wonder what people won't do for a few extra dollars in their bank account given a similar scenario.

The NYT article is almost apologetic about its inconclusiveness. I might wonder - should I happen to be wearing my tinfoil hat - that it is designed as a means of placation, an ode to the status quo, rather than a deterrent for the average consumer.

Every now and then I rise above the temporal miasma of popular web culture and think: why is this surprising?

BBS, AOL, Netscape, MySpace, Tumblr, FB, Insta, Snap...

Why are we surprised by this progression? All "good" things go bad. The same lessons, rinsed and repeated. Power, money corrupts. We burn effigies and mark their passing. We move on.

Tempted to say a little more history and psychology instead of fiscal fixation would make a difference. Tempted, but no. It's not how humans work.

Honest feedback: I don't see how this succeeds without integration with existing applicant workflows. The cognitive overhead of another app to store data, manually update status etc is high.

If e.g. Monster or Indeed launched this as a value-add to existing functionality it would be big, but i'm not going to make the effort you're asking for in isolation.

Unfortunately, in the Enterprise space, this setup is likely to be a zero sum game, as the challenge email would get dinged 90% of the time for spammy wording like "quarantine" and links to unknown domains (and/or blocked entirely, because inbound filtering != outbound filtering).

Large-scale email in its current form sucks, even with the Office 365 ATP tools or similar equivalents.

No. This won't fix anything. It is flying in the face of social norms and basic, narcissistic inclination. What is verboten will become desirable, and circumvention will be lauded by peers.

We live in a digital world. That isn't going away and will only become more pervasive.

Teach responsible usage. Make it like BYOB in enterprise. Require device enrollment. Block access to unproductive sites within a campus environment. Channel the compulsion to check/update/respond into something positive.

This is basic human psychology. We can't afford to be so blindly granular and willfully devoid of historical context and the obvious implications.

Working in this space, I'm convinced that email will eventually evolve from a default "blacklist" model to "whitelist" in the next 3-5 years.

There's simply too many bad actors and too many uneducated or uninterested end-users.

Microsoft is developing an interim step for this now ('Composite Auth') as part of Office 365 ATP: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycomplianc...

I hope it helps, at least in the Enterprise space, because I'm tired of playing 'Whack-A-Mole' with business communications.

It surprises me in a way that "big internet" (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc) and associated large enterprise interests have not been more staunch proponents of IPv6, at least for fixed consumer connections.

It would be trivial in that circumstance to blow away any kind of NAT and the pseudo-anonymity/plausible deniabililty it provides and make client devices performing illegitimate activity directly identifiable.

I wonder if such a ruling might be different in that context. It's a perturbing thought.

While this sentiment is applicable (and agreeable) now, I can't help but think it is a little short-sighted.

Can we really say <insert_megacorp_name_here> will do or not do 'X', or has some immutable policy 'Y', with any reliability? Historically, have we not seen that these policies change with the direction of the wind, and/or are applied inconsistently to suit narrative 'Z'?

What is true today may not be true tomorrow. There is no bastion of moral decency in cloud infra, and to make decisions based on a current stance is facile and probably pointless.

I'm far more interested in what awareness the GitLab folks have of this issue, and procedures in place to mitigate it, if any.

There’s an alternative to the Play Store for Android. F-Droid is an open source app “store” (repository would be a better term here) which only includes open source apps (which Signal thankfully is). By no means does Signal have to only be distributed through F-Droid - it’s certainly a compelling alternative. This has been proposed, and Moxie has definitively shut the discussion down.

Adjunct to the rest of this discussion: just read through that GH issue and came away with markedly different conclusions than the author of the blog post.

It reads like someone who is trying hard to justify and prioritize dev time/resourcing in the face of what is a demanding and vitriolic minority. No evidence of disingenuous intent or desire to push a particular agenda. I see nothing that would have prevented the old OSS adage: "if you want to see it, do it".

Drew, I don't know you, or the background for the argument you're making, but it seems like you have something stuck in your craw here. Maybe take a little time and try to view the situation with fresh eyes? You're obviously passionate about this subject -- and the unique perspective is appreciated -- but it devalues the rest of the info presented, and I don't buy the precept you're proposing.

In other words my current smartphone will be unsafe for everyday use after September 2018, but it may have some life left in it by protecting its operating system with some network level security.

I stopped paying attention when I read this.

Pi-Hole is an ad blocker and it is fit for that purpose. No argument from me. However, to give this advice to people for whom device and network security is not a major or even minor concern is frankly dangerous.

Buy an iPhone. Buy a Mac. Keep your Windows PCs updated. Get a mesh WiFi solution that takes care of firmware patches automatically. Run a browser-based blocker that updates in the background without interaction.

These are the low-hanging fruit that should be done long before you are trying to set up what is essentially MITM-as-an-appliance without any paid support or guarantee.

Who is this article actually helping?

I spend a fair amount of time on HN.

Among many, I think this article is probably the most succinct endictment of ADHD-ridden "modern" web programming/ecosystem practices I've read.

It's so sad to me that while the name dropping and churn for frameworks and languages continues, frenzied and unabated -- basic (pun sort of intended) analysis and problem-solving techniques go out the proverbial window.

Why learn to think critically when you can just 'npm update', fix 37 broken dependencies, and write a blog post about it? Right?

I work in a role where a bunch of Huawei devices have been deployed to non-technical end users for a particular business purpose (against my advice).

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest -- the overzealous and frankly capricious changes in their Android firmware are ridiculous and difficult to mitigate.

Sure, let's issue a comm. that says "everyone change this setting so your device will work properly". What level of adoption can be expected from that? (hint: not much)

The scenario listed here is exactly why we need to promote and support efforts toward open firmware for Android devices, or at the very least, don't compensate vendors/manufacturers that use the Android platform to slather crap across an OS that works fine without all the additional and superfluous BS.

If they get you using an app that evades in-browser ad, tracking blockers etc... so $$ is the primary reason, basically

How visible is that issue though? How likely to be digested by the masses?

"Tech company takes money and screws over customers" is a headline that writes itself.

In the next installment of "How To Make A Successful Exit While Not Give A Flying Füçk About Your Existing Customer Base Or Industry Rep. That Got You There 101"

Is anyone else as tired of this schism of material gain over all other considerations? If the tech industry wants to end up with the same ill repute as Wall Street this is certainly the right way to go about it.

Try this: http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/

Use it all the time when working from home/moving around and I don’t want my laptop to lock every 15.

I completely agree.

I do find it interesting though, as someone who through work has deployed a lot of cell phones for field ops - the situation seems to be kind of, sort of getting better in that respect.

We bought a ton of Moto G4s and G5s in last 18 months, and for the first year, I saw maybe one OS update and a couple security patches?. In the past six months, it's been noticably different (and these phones are only getting older, mind).

I'm writing this on a Moto G5+ which has 7.1.1 and the January security patches, including fix for KRACK vulnerability. G4 models have the same patch level and 7.0. Updates have been deployed fairly regularly lately (if still not quite on a monthly cycle).

This from Lenovo, who have historically been terrible for issuing updates in a timely manner.

I wonder if the message is finally getting to these OEMs that they can't afford to let current models wither on the vine in this IT security climate, even if only for their own selfish ends (e.g. avoiding bad press).

I really hope so. It's way overdue.

Disclaimer: total anecdata, handle with gloves.

Netgear R7000 [1] with AdvancedTomato [2], which is Tomato but with a pretty UI. It runs DNS, nginx as a reverse proxy, SSH gateway and some other bits & pieces with minimal fuss. Pretty sure I've never had to reboot it outside of testing configuration changes. I even managed to upgrade to a significantly newer firmware version without blowing away the NVRAM/other settings and having to redo everything from near scratch as is IME so common with custom router FW builds (note: YMMV).

It has USB 3, GigE, wireless speed has been fine etc... certainly one of the best home tech purchases I've made in the last couple years.

[1] http://www.netgear.com.au/home/products/networking/wifi-rout... [2] https://advancedtomato.com