There's really no excuse for any of the HN crowd to be running this garbage. It's RCE as a feature! Linux, Linux, Linux, guys.
I wish this were true, but it just isn't, sorry. In reality there are excuses. E.g. we have both old and new hardware lying around which can only be programmed/debugged by Windows. There is no alternative except for maybe spending tons of man-hours trying to reverse engineer the shit out of it and come up with something vastly inferior (but, yay, runs on linux). Or again spending tons of time 'correcting' the original choice of these devices and entire eco-system built around it over the years and switch to something which does have linux support. So: no alternative. Less prominent alternative-wise but still going strong: Visual Studio. And also the pretty-much-everything-just-works principle. Now this doen't really make me love Windows, but does illustrate there are reasons for the HN crowd using it. (next to linux in my case).
I have the same background as you and I still think you're wrong here.
As I mentioned elsewhere, idealism is all well and good but pragmatic realities are often all that the people 'in the intermediary' can or will concern themselves with. You're not going to make much headway convincing them that an available option that served their purposes was 'wrong'.
Frankly, we're lucky to have Linus Torvalds et al. continuing development of the Linux kernel etc. as FOSS endeavours. Between the pushes for internet fast lanes, against it being a utility here, against hardware hacking, and so on, we're basically on borrowed time from corporate conglomerates having the right-of-way as far as tech governance goes.
I wonder if the folks from the EFF will stick around once they can no longer avoid being outlitigated and outbankrolled at every turn, or if they have a backup country they're heading to.
Yes. All your comment is doing is excusing away ethical failures. The most ethical path isn't always the easiest one.
You've still failed to convince me that there exists a "morality" mechanism that failed in Microsoft's case, per my original question, by the way. The simple fact of the matter is that they're not concerned with morality, and so long as you continue to believe in it as 'existing' in a corporate world without being able to point to 'where', you'll find that shock you felt in your initial comment more often than you'd like.
This doesn't have to be true. What should and can happen is that more people take the high road, especially technical people, and work to lower the barrier of entry and make it more practical to join them on the high road.
>You've still failed to convince me that there exists a "morality" mechanism that failed in Microsoft's case, per my original question, by the way. The simple fact of the matter is that they're not concerned with morality, and you'd be a fool to think otherwise.
I don't think otherwise, obviously. The difference between us is that it matters to me.
"Doesn't have to be" is not "is" for a reason. What "is" evolved from what "was", and what 'was' was a system that had such efforts competing with profit-motivated ones.
As I said, the market environment is one inherently toxic to those who do not prioritize profit margins - as those who do not are eventually outmoded, outmarketed, outpriced, or (at net loss) simply outwaited by those who have the bigger bankroll (or the biggest sharks capable of working from 'credit' on the backs of investor confidence).
It's not sustainable because those who 'try and take the high road' are punished with failure (and those who do not rewarded) by the simple 'agnostic' market forces generally aggregating the desire to narrow margins. Efforts to outlive that motive have existed in the past, and will likely exist in the future, but do not last because they cannot compete with that motive.
> I don't think otherwise, obviously.
Yet you believe them to have 'failed' to address the morality issue internally (which you expressed surprise at. Believing they would do otherwise?); which you ascribed to the programmers who worked on the software. They don't necessarily know what the work product's end use/implementation will be; that knowledge is likely 'kept on a need to know basis' away from them; and to somehow escape the market forces they're subject to to 'take a bigger stand' against.
Many people could and would starve taking such a stand, and it would not stop the system or slow it one whit; it would keep grinding on with further applicants to the field who do forego morality in lieu of bread on the table.
As I asked elsewhere [0], if you have some idea for how "morality" can be introduced by such actors into their decision process without jeopardizing their livelihoods - I'm sure they would happily hear you out over your third option which would allow them to have both. But if you cannot, I'd warn that asserting "what matters to them" is not as much as "what matters to you", even knowing that no route exists for them to support the cause you tell them they don't 'care' about. That would only serve to alienate them from your message.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14059446&goto=item%3Fi...
If your business relies on legacy software that can't be refactored without prohibitive cost, you're probably about to be 'disrupted' by something anyway.
Obviously. But by that time we'll have switched to something better already.
I'm really curious what you're imagining the corporate structure to be like here - what kind of "internal pushback" are you envisioning?
In particular, I don't see engineers as particularly getting paid to or even having access to the parameters of the specs they're fulfilling. Anyone bothering to wonder would likely just assume the system they'd be working on to do this would be fully covered by 'legal' in specific agreements with firms to track that info, or if asked would be told that the spec is what it is and not anything about the use case.
Legal, meanwhile, isn't going to take money to tell MS what they can't or 'shouldn't' do; but rather just to ensure they don't have exposure in doing whatever they want to do.
So I guess that just leaves the leadership - which you could argue you're surprised by, if the board/C-levels/etc were individuals particularly known for being privacy-oriented. (Yeah. At Microsoft.) Meanwhile, you have a likely strong potential profit motive in a platform able to shift that kind of control to devs, though at the 'cost' of potentially losing privacy-concerned users - and their profit motive believes they can just EEE those users out of a market of competing products, so they give the go-ahead.
So if there's a 'pushback' module that failed in this scenario, perhaps I don't see it; but I don't really see at what point you'd expect something like this to be 'stopped' internally.
Considering most engineers' main concern is just to meet a spec and get it shipped, I don't really see how the burden of ethical justification falls to them, when they don't even necessarily know how it'll be used. Can't really see how they could act as moral gatekeepers in a corporate structure.
I'm not saying it is right, but I suspect a lot of naive engineers and middle management designed the telemetry system.
They produced a product most people cannot use in good conscience; in the long run, it will be Microsoft's loss.
We humans are so lacking in moral integrity that we participate in wars, domestic violence, substance abuse, abuse of power, organised crime, the list of morally reprehensible shenanigans we get up to is as long as you want it to be.
Thinking the average software developer at large-software-company is an angel and prepared to put their head on the chopping block is fanciful.
What are you getting at? Are you telling me that I shouldn't think poorly of people who participate in wars, domestic violence, substance abuse, abuse of power, and organized crime?
>Thinking the average software developer at large-software-company is an angel and prepared to put their head on the chopping block is fanciful.
Healthy companies don't have a chopping block they put your head against for speaking up. Jesus christ people.
Probably just that you should recognize that the human potential for depraved self-interest being what it is, arguing for what "should be and can be" will never supplant what is, because 'what is' has a near-endless supply of eager workers to support it.
> Healthy companies don't have a chopping block they put your head against for speaking up
"The chopping block" equates to being fired and not able to earn enough to pay off student loans/debts/bills, which are potential costs to a person in the software engineering position you describe as the one that 'should be' taking a stand for your ethics. Job market forces will simply replace this person with minimal cost, and the effort will keep humming along without them.
Not everyone has the privilege of being able to think of idealism and earnings as a tradeoff. Many in the field are trying to earn their way to a better life than the one in their past home, for their families, etc. Idealism is several steps beyond what they can (literally) afford to be thinking about.