2021-01-08

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

The serious part

Yeah, it’s been quite a time.

-Alexander Papageorgiou Koufidis, 2020–03–21

The pandemic hit all of us in different ways. I still hope you and your loved ones are okay. Honestly, as the whole social collapse thing was unraveling, it felt like my voice didn’t have much to offer so I decided to be quiet back in April — we seemed to have greater issues at hand. April turned to July, then October and now here we are, nearing the next April. Given the current estimations, I should probably get back to writing if I want to communicate before 2022. So light up the bat signal and let’s smash some tech moths!

The usual part

Hi? Is this thing on? Where do I start here, have you ever had this feeling where there’s so much to say? I have it all the time, it’s basically my life. Speaking of life, can you survive 2020?

That was obviously a joke. You didn’t sign up for minigame links, you signed up for juicy tech drama. I didn’t really save links for the entire year (jk again, you should see my list) but here’s some fun highlights from your favourite neighborhood techverse:

  • Google fired its highest profile ethics researcher after she attempted to publish research on ethics flaws with its AI products. In a cunning maneuvre to salvage the optics, her manager claimed she resigned on Twitter.
  • As a software developer and tech CEO, Tracy Chou has been fighting hard (and well) against harassment all the way since she made Quora’s block button. She recently had an AMA on Reddit (yes, the platform whose cofounder quit because there were too many Nazis on the site) to talk about harassment, which went down the drain and turned to a harassment cesspool. She turned to the mods for help — guess what she found (hint: it starts with an h). Here’s her story
  • Small positive break here — the reddit cofounder who quit above? He was the one who piloted drones against his wife, Serena Williams (yes, that one), so she could prove whether we can resist a robot uprising with tennis rackets. It’s all on xkcd, super fun to read!
  • Dancing planes deliver cargo. It may sound like a randomly generated passphrase but it’s actually real. Can’t wait for their next startup — horses correctly stapling batteries
  • Speaking of passwords, got one? Is it not admin/admin? Yes? Congrats, you now have safer processes than Nissan’s primary Git server, hosted on Bitbucket. Fun to see that internal teams at Nissan don’t provide APIs to each other which leads some teams to straight up scrape the website to get the data they needed, which just scores straight up corporate/10, as a friend would say.
  • Solarwinds Orion, a product for systems administration got hacked, which was apparently a pretty big deal judging by the affected targets. Usual stuff, like, “its customer list boasts of every branch of the U.S. military and four-fifths of the Fortune 500.”. There’s been pretty widespread chaos in the aftermath with everyone scrambling to check their patch dates. Interestingly, the hack currently seems to have been injected during the build stage in their CI/CD pipelines! Secure that stuff folks
  • Old but gold article about tech hiring with data-backed answers to the common replies and tropes
  • One of the most interesting stories of 2020, for which I cannot possibly write a better summary: “What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out”
  • There was this beautiful mess in the summer when most US Army branches started streaming wargames on Twitch, which was basically them killing bad guys on Call of Duty and setting up fake contests which led to recruitment forms. The only non-participant, US Marine Corps mentioned on a statement that they considered “War to be too serious for a videogame” or something of the like but I can’t find the original statement. AOC proposed legislation which led to this golden tweet, but that didn’t pass. Various activists/trolls followed the stream asking about war crimes and ended up getting banned but apparently that violated the first amendment, in the actual real way, not the usual one. A few weeks later, all army streaming stopped, because I guess they lost a bunch of shadow trials/lawsuits.
  • Overseas banks, insider fraud, tech bros, China, FBI, ongoing trials, massive liquidity problems. You guessed it, it’s another crypto blowout!
  • Remember when Uber was focusing on killing bikers with self driving cars? Well, turns out that the gig is now up. Uber is selling out its self-driven fleet for someone else to use for vehicular manslaughter and focuses on eventually becoming profitable sometime during the next millenium.
  • Kubernetes is often touted as one of the most inclusive and open communities, because, if your barrier for entry looks like this, you better welcome everyone. .Net slightly less so.
  • How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love PHP
  • Speaking of toxic environments, a former Tesla DevOpser is out of NDA and ready to shine. Grab some wine and read along! Random trivia, but I actually read the entire thread in a bus in Rotterdam
  • 6 months ago, Cory Doctorow spoke about the power tech workers have over their employers on refusing to build things. This was actually a very interesting discussion we had on last year’s Thalatta Conference (thanks Eva for bringing it to the table!), and the statement foreshadowed the recent announcement of Alphabet’s worker’s union (Alphabet is the parent company of Google)
  • Roman Elizarov, Kotlin’s project lead (❤) wrote a thread about the defining trait of success: Randomness!

So we got through the link part, but I just poured some wine and I think a few words are due for another ongoing, unfolding topic: Apple vs Facebook, Silicon Valley’s latest rivalry. Or old, but let’s focus on latest developments. What has been going on? Tim Cook, CEO of Apple and Mark Zuckenberg, Founder/CEO of Facebook actually showed up in the same virtual event last July and it wasn’t great news for either of them. Congressional antitrust hearings were all the rage as each CEO attempted to do the other in describing their hard, competitive space.

It’s pretty yikes already, but Apple has been on the highburner since then with multiple cases of horrible enforcement of app store policies, Fortnite (#1 app in the App store) being booted for not using Apple’s payment system, oh and some China state censorship sprinkled on top. The main crux of this is that the Apple payment system takes a 30% profit cut for Apple, and if you are on the App store, you are not allowed to use any other system. In my little village (Europe), we could call that a monopoly practice and in fact we actively legally are. Note that the US government has been critical of Apple over the latest year, because Apple would not provide them with a backdoor into its encrypted iCloud service for unlocking the data of someone who attacked a US military base.

Behind curtain number 2, you have Facebook. Now Facebook is coming in hot on the global stage, helping organize genocides in Myanmar, terrorist attacks all over the US, and generously giving PTSD to its content mods (I tried to keep it 2020 only). Facebook is also the reason I can no longer log onto my Oculus Rift despite them promising it would not happen, that my WhatsApp data is about to be advertiser lunch despite them promising it would not happen, etc. One of the things that Facebook advertising is infamous about, is their collection of your data even way, way outside Facebook. In rough terms, they create an anonymized advertisement profile for you based on your usage of all websites that include any trackers that link back to them. If the page has a Facebook like button, your data is probably being collected. If it doesn’t, well, it still probably is. Whether you are a Facebook user or not, Facebook will use this data for advertisements to you across the net. Facebook is piggybacking on the App store hate, because they would generously profit from being able to completely sidestep that so that Facebook marketplace in the App store can be cheaper for them, but also because their core business model is about freely collecting and selling your data, while Apple’s is about expensive privacy.

Apple noticed that hate and brought out the big guns — a tweet (we’re getting real) as an opportunity to also position themselves on the ethical high ground of privacy. Who needs ethical high ground against Facebook anyway, I think even the ethical basement should be enough? But anyways, Facebook fired back with a full page ad (gotta keep it boomer-y) and then another full page ad, Mark is not on twitter, we get it, smoke signals would have been enough. In those ads (honestly, how Facebook of them to reply with an ad), Facebook positions themselves as a supporter of small business, who desperately need the best spyware to target consumers. Stay tuned for the next episodes I guess.

P.S My article titles are often song lyrics. This one is kinda obscure, so here you go: She Wants Revenge — Take The World

Best wishes from my quarantine to yours

#articles