webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of April, 2021.

Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters
April 01, 2021 (comments)
An Internet feeds gibberish into a computer and formats the resulting gibberish in TrueType. Hackernews votes for the result because it's possibly the least obnoxious April Fool's Day joke, and then spends the rest of the comments arguing about why text is.

Microsoft Coffee
April 02, 2021 (comments)
Hackernews circles back and declares that this was the April Fools story they meant to vote for. In it, some Microsofts litter in private businesses. One Hackernews remembers the original event, and the rest of Hackernews debate whether or not this entire story is a pointless lie. Later, another Hackernews recount the hilarious story of trying to ruin someone else's career.

533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online
April 03, 2021 (comments)
Facebook (business model: "Uber for Radicalization") continues its war against its own users. In this edition, casualty reports from a 2019 assault are made public. It is not clear whether Facebook regrets having its customers' data taken or whether Facebook regrets having its customers' data taken for free. Hackernews believes that people should stop trying to prevent their private information from being stolen, because the alternatives are impossible; Facebook would have to have a competent security implementation (which is not possible for PHP-related software), or people's private data would have to be worth less money (which is incompatible with every single business model in Silicon Valley), or people would have to stop using Facebook (which cannot happen because Facebook is the only way to pretend people you met twice in 2004 care about you).

New HIV vaccine with a 97% antibody response rate in phase I human trials
April 04, 2021 (comments)
Some scientists make some progress. Hackernews still hasn't worn the shine off their Armchair Epidemiology Club membership cards, and so takes this opportunity to write some more fanfiction about vaccine development. Someone wants to know why drugs cost so much, and Hackernews patiently explains that it is because Americans prefer it that way. The rest of the comments are Hackernews incorrecting one another about microbiology, often while citing URLs whose content contradicts the comment itself.

Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]
April 05, 2021 (comments)
The Supreme Court of the United States is pretty tired, and decides to watch some TV and then hit the sack. Most of Hackernews either works for, competes with, or has applied for positions in at least one of the two companies in the headline, and so this story receives four thousand votes and a thousand comments, none of which contain any accurate analysis of any aspect of this case. Since the case in question was decided with a resounding "computers are hard, please leave us alone" from the Court, Hackernews must dig deeply into the decision text in order to find something that can be spun into being even remotely interesting. The bulk of the comments are weak analogies to try and understand what the hell just happened, complaints about related legislation, and bickering about irrelevant pedantry.

Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
April 06, 2021 (comments)
Signal (business model: "Uber for SMS") introduces a new payment system; to wit, Signal users are now invited to purchase pretend money from Signal to trade amongst themselves. There is no report on whether Signal hired beenz.com founder Charles Cohen to spearhead the effort. Hackernews is mad that their favorite messaging software is fucking around with this garbage instead of fixing any bugs. It turns out that basically none of the original reasons Hackernews started using Signal apply any more, but since they convinced their idiot friends to start using it, they're all stuck with it anyway.

I refused to become an FBI informant, the government put me on the no fly list
April 06, 2021 (comments)
An Internet declines to work for free and discovers the Thin Blue Line is a garrote. Half of Hackernews reports being in a similar situation, but in Hackernews' case they scared the feds away through sheer force of will. Other Hackernews wonder if maybe a boat would work instead.

Et Tu, Signal?
April 07, 2021 (comments)
An Internet is still mad about Signal's new Fedoral Reserve Notes program. Hackernews is too. After a while of Hackernews debating which text messaging software everyone should love, the MobileCoin (business model: "Uber for Mt. Gox") Griftmaster General arrives to insist that this is not exactly the obvious scam that everyone immediately recognized it to be. Hackernews belts out extremely confrontational questions based on years of repeatedly losing their asses to almost identical scams. The M-Pissa representative is unable to muster convincing answers to any of them except why the USA is blocked from even accessing their website; however, "the regulatory landscape in the United States is complicated" is a very strange way to phrase "because what we're doing has been illegal in the US for decades now."