webshit weekly

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

The rise of never-ending job interviews
August 01, 2021 (comments)
Bureaucrats continue to fuck everything up for everyone. Hackernews points out that Google is full of this particular brand of bureaucrat, which Hackernews interprets as meaning that everyone on Earth is an incompetent moron, except Hackernews, who has all the answers. Many of those Hackernews work at Google, where they explain that they're much better at interviewing than anyone else at Google. Nobody attempts to determine whether any of these superior interviewers are in fact the same people the rest of Hackernews is bitching about.

Life before smartphones (2020)
August 02, 2021 (comments)
An Internet reminisces about the past, but forgets to mention why. Hackernews also has a past, and it was the same one the author lived in, and so this thread serves as this month's nostalgia dumping grounds.

NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]
August 03, 2021 (comments)
The National Security Agency provides a satirical document in which we are instructed how to spackle over all the cracks in the towering edifice of software we use to serve text files to six strangers per day. Hackernews doesn't even bother to read the document, but sets about reconstructing it from a combination of first principles and the horrifically embarrassing experiences they have of being hacked because they were subscribed to the wrong set of remote systems administration services. Meanwhile, half of the Kubernetes security primitives are deprecated, replaced, and then deprecated again faster than it's possible to render updated versions of the PDF.

Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow
August 04, 2021 (comments)
Your phone is a cop. Hackernews can't decide between being outraged that someone else is digging through their shit or being grateful for the Machines of Loving Grace. None of the outraged Hackernews are sufficiently incensed to actually do anything about the situation.

Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
August 05, 2021 (comments)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation attempts to explain why you should be angry about your phone being a cop. One Hackernews has cleverly avoided this situation by buying a different phone. None of the others have. A debate rages about who deserves to be spied upon, whether you can trust a phone you didn't build and program yourself from a box of transistors, exactly how much worse Apple needs to behave to convince a given Hackernews to buy a different phone, and whether children are people.

An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology
August 06, 2021 (comments)
For day three of the Apple-themed Performative Outrage Theater, some Internet rando pontificates on a single-use domain name and invites other nerds to type their names into Github. Tim Cook was available for comment, but nobody asked.

Sci-Hub is fundraising
August 07, 2021 (comments)
A piracy site stops pretending to take the high road and wants some money instead. Hackernews continues to misunderstand the purpose of peer review, can't figure out how to navigate a journal publisher's website, and thus is happy to pay the pirates for their superior indexing service.