My First Death Threat (2004) | Hacker News Reader

My First Death Threat (2004)

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

129 pointswkoszek42 comments

I think the phenomenon of humans going from normal-to-violent-rage at the most trivial personal slights from strangers (e.g. road rage) is well-accepted...but it's funny to me how slight software mixups (not necessarily bugs or outright failure) can cause the same quick rise in negative feelings, even though it's most definitely not a personal, human-to-human slight. Impotent fantasies like, "I hope the assclown and everyone on their product team who decided to move that button on [whatever GUI you use most] loses their jobs" as if they conspired to screw just you and you alone...Or maybe it's just me when I haven't had enough coffee :). I chalk it up to how sometimes aggravating and dehumanizing it is in modern life to have to use software in the first place, before people start moving the buttons around.

I think they have the same root cause -- you're not having a face-to-face interaction with someone where you can read subtle cues. You react to your perception of the person's intent, not their actual intent.

That and the fact that anger doesn't compartmentalize well, so the anger from being cut off on the highway might possibly flow into your emails, for instance.

I got a death threat while working at Microsoft around 2003. Someone managed to hit the lottery on our phone tree and find me, a lowly software development engineer on Windows CE. This person was _very_ angry and was trying to open a PDF on their new Dell computer. I let them know they needed a PDF reader and I recommended Adobe's product. The person was now confused on top of angry and I was running out of patience after about 15 minutes in a circular discussion. I tried to wrap up the conversation by telling him to try support and gave him that phone number. He snapped and told me he was going to come hunt me and my family down and kill us. I hung up the phone at that point. I really didn't take him seriously, I hadn't given him any identifiable info other than I was an engineer on CE and he just sounded like a very angry person.

I called security and let them know what happened anyway. My office was invaded in about 15 minutes by 3 security folks and a Microsoft investigator. The best part was how big my coworkers eyes would get when they walked by my office and saw me surrounded by security being questioned. That afternoon the investigator followed up and asked if I was still doing ok and let me know the person was calling in from I think Kansas or some other place half way across the country. I told him I didn't feel like it was really a credible threat and that was the last I heard about the whole thing from security.

"... This may not be easy, and I will expect no help from Microsoft in finding out who this person (or persons) was that made this decision, but….eventually I will find out who made this decision, and I will kill them..."

This comment was evidently submitted in 1996, 12 years before Taken was released in theatres.

edit I couldn't help but read this quote in Liam Neeson's voice.

FYI, they finally backported XCOPY /H (I think) to the real mode DOS version in WinMe I think, unfortunately too late since they decided to disable "MS-DOS mode" before it was finally released.

Did you see after the message, the writer mentions that win95 xcopy always had the switch /H available?

That is the Win32 XCOPY (the DOS XCOPY I am talking about was in the DOS stub)

Wait, Windows 95's XCOPY had a Win32 version? Huh.

It is actually in XCOPY32.EXE (later XCOPY32.MOD), the XCOPY.EXE was a DOS-only stub for if I remember correctly to determine whether it was invoked from a batch file (needed because Win9x still used the DOS command.com).

There is no excuse for death or violence threats, but I can understand that people get crazy because sometimes decades of muscle memory (e.g. the vanished start menu, the ribbon stuff in Office/the rest of Windows) get lost or scripts that have not been touched in years have to be updated because of backwards compatibility break.

Software vendors in general really need to invest in BC testing - and run early, public beta tests where real users' feedback is heard. Because big companies ignoring their users frustrate people and it takes only a small company's mess up to tip the iceberg...

edit: It might also be an idea if you have a millions-usages-product and you feel the need to redesign or break BC, you should explain to your (paying!) customers why you negatively affect their lives. Or make the change revertable (an option in a config menu, or just a config.ini entry), so that new users (which you A/B tested your new idea on!!!) get the new behavior, and old users with muscle memory training can continue to use the old way.

> the vanished start menu

Frankly what the H... where they thinking? It made absolutely no sense at all. I still don't understand who and why it was approved. Nobody I know, likes this whole metro/modern UI thing on desktop, NONE. X years later I'll still be complaining about this fiasco, windows 10 or not, it wasted the time and the energy of so many people I can't believe it.

Death threats are obviously unacceptable but I hope someday someone write a blog post or a book about that single stuff and the process that led to that insane mistake. Was it Balmer? Synofsky? someone else? I don't know but for god sake, people work on Windows like 9 hours a day, you can't change stuff just because it looks cool on a tablet...

Pet theory: someone at MS saw Apple taking a 30% cut of app store sales. Hmm, people seem to tolerate gatekeepers on mobile/tablet more than on desktop. So the obvious answer is to get into that business. But the competition has already got trained users. No worries, just make the next version of Windows work like MS tablets and phones. People take whatever they're told is the upgrade, so shortly after the upgrade there'll be a market of people ready to buy Windows tablets and phones, with MS getting a cut of sales.

A while later, it didn't work out that way and 8.1 came out.

This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/04/volatile-software/

Boy, how I dislike upgrading Django. Look at all this breakage (and this is only the intentional, documented changes, and only across one release):

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/releases/1.9/#backward...

I appreciate much more policies like these:

    Suggestions to change the default output of these
    commands will not be treated with patience.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/CompatibilityRules#Introd...

> This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

> > and dammit the documentation on the project’s website is autogenerated from the tip of its git repo and so it doesn’t apply to the latest actual version

Oh yes. Hell yes. And no way to refer to old docs (suuuper cool if you inherit a project which was dormant for a year and you have to add features)

This "threat" was made in 1996 (not 2004 as some other commenters are noting—the _thread_ is from 2004). This is a fascinating view into how things have changed between then and now. Honestly, in 1996 you could make a threat like this and a vast _vast_ majority of recipients would recognize that you weren't being serious. It's a little sad that we've lost so much innocence on the web since then.

I think that in most contexts the vast majority of recipients would think it was dramatic exaggeration now; there might be somewhat more people who would think it was serious, and those people who think it most likely to be dramatic exaggeration might weigh the potential risk of seriousness differently, and most important it might be more likely to be relayed out of its original contexts into other forums now, and thus be seen by more people, and thus more of the people inclined to take it seriously.

What does "like this" mean to you?

I got a death threat by email in 1993. I took it seriously, and the campus police got involved.

I think it's a combination of the era and of the specific context. I would suppose that your experience potentially had other extenuating factors that caused you to give the threat more weight. Either way, I don't fault you at all for treating it as serious if you felt it was. It's not exactly a socially acceptable thing to threaten anyone—but at the time, and in this context, I think recipient would have recognized the ridiculousness of the "threat" (killing someone over the change of a command's behavior?) as an attempt at a joke.

No longer.

Yes, I would like you to describe what you mean by "specific context", because I can think of many contexts that could be described as a "threat like this".

If you mean "threats sent by email", then my experience is a counter-example.

If you mean "threats sent to the XCOPY developers" then it's entirely too restrictive to be meaningful.

Do you mean "untargeted threats send to unspecified members of a large company"? What do you think was the frequency of such events in the 1970s or 1980s, and the typical response?

Without more information, it's hard to make sense of what you mean.

I think it's obvious what he means, and you're probably just being difficult.

It's a joke because it's a threat 1) over something incredibly trivial, 2) over something that is never associated with death threats (i.e. command-line arguments), 3) done by someone who presumably isn't normally associated with death threats (i.e. a nerd), and 4) that was submitted to the microsoft.com feedback form, an absurdly broad audience if this was intended to be effective.

Right, now, how has that changed over the decades?

That's the part I'm being "difficult" about.

Yeah, because making death threats is just a "joke" right?

Not necessarily in good taste, but… yes. At this time (1996) having an obvious overreaction like this would have appeared to be a joke.

It's not necessarily in good taste, and not necessarily universally funny, but yes, it's totally possible to make anything serious into a joke. The usual technique is to bring a lot of absurdity to the situation, which truthfully I didn't see in this post.

On a personal (potentially explanatory) note, my first death threat came from a man aiming a loaded gun at my face. No joke was intended there! I think that experience has left me somewhat unable to manifest concern about threats that aren't backed up with firepower, which probably leaves me more open to seeing the humor.

I think it helps that it's not a direct threat to an actual person. The reader gets the feeling that the writer not only will not figure out who made the decision (and, therefore, who to kill), but also won't even bother trying to figure it out.

I guess if they're just a joke, they're not really death threats. But I've seen lots of things worded like death threats, that were clearly jokes.

Example: http://zedshaw.com/archive/programmers-need-to-learn-statist...

That's a joke, isn't it?

Maybe there's a bit of a gap between 'I am going to kill a hypothetical person' and 'I am going to kill Raymond Chen'.

Yes, if Raymond Chen had been named in the feedback it would have looked more like a serious threat.

> Honestly, in 1996 you could make a threat like this and a vast _vast_ majority of recipients would recognize that you weren't being serious.

Would they? If someone is angry and makes a threat of violence, how can you ever tell if they are not serious? Or, perhaps more importantly, whether you think there's any chance of them acting on it?

Sure, it's a seemingly trivial thing and it's being sent in the context of a tech support complaint email with a real name attached, so you might think you're safe, but you never know. People have died over less.

Someone should add [2004] to the title

Date: 2004.

Which brings up the question of, was it the last?

Doubtful.

The threatening message itself is actually from 1996.

I expected this anecdote to be from the person responsible for "smart quotes".

Death threats are the worst. I got one really serious one from buyer, he went ahead and started to post around things to my family. For B2C it is normal to get bad reviews once in a while, but this was just ridiculous. Getting real death threats is something that can hurt like hell.

If you want to read this in the normal, beautiful CSS, go here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/03/14758...

For some reason there's two different URLs for the blog.

I think they are migrating to a new blog system. You will see that the latest post you can read using the old URLs are about a week ago.

The *'d out name matches my name. There's a chance I wrote this as a very trolly teen. I wish I could see the full name.

Fun fact: if you want to see files as they copy, the command is

  xcopy /dickher

lol, this existed since dos 3.2, back when windows 1.0 was a command-line executable really.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

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