Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

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...just like they did with Kerberos! And just like with Kerberos they'll define a standard then refuse to follow it. Instead, they will implement subtle changes to the Windows implementation that make solutions that use Windows eBPF incompatible with anything else, making it much more difficult to write software that works with all platforms eBPF (or even just its output).

Everything's gotta be different in Windows land. Otherwise, migrating off of Windows land would be too easy!

In case you were wondering what Microsoft refused to implement with its Kerberos implementation it's the DNS records. Instead of following the standard (they wrote!) they decided that all Windows clients will use AD's Global Catalog to figure out which KDC to talk to (e.g. which one is "local" or closest to the client). Since nothing but Windows uses the Global Catalog they effectively locked out other platforms from being able to integrate with Windows Kerberos implementation as effectively (it'll still work, just extremely inefficiently as the clients won't know which KDC is local so you either have to hard-code them into the krb5.conf on every single device/server/endpoint and hope for the best or DNS-and-pray you don't get a Domain Controller/KDC that's on an ISDN line in some other country).

This to me ascribes way too much to mustache-twirling villainy at Microsoft, but to me fails to account for the fact that engineers surely make many of these implementation-detail decisions. These engineers aren’t incentivized to create lock-in. I think it’s more likely that sometimes for a feature to play well with other existing parts of the Windows ecosystem, compromises are made to the standards-compliance. Microsoft may have shipped those related interfaces before this standard had been hashed out, so they have a choice to break everything or to not perfectly follow the standard.

Note: I’m not a Windows dev so I can’t speak to specifics of anything like your Kerberos example. I just don’t believe MS is full of evil engineers, nor that Satya Nadella visits cubicles to promote lock-in practices.

> These engineers aren’t incentivized to create lock-in.

Ever heard of something called “money”?

> I think it’s more likely that sometimes for a feature to play well with other existing parts of the Windows ecosystem, compromises are made to the standards-compliance.

So you're basically saying that you're too young to remember the “good” old days of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, right...?

Embrace, extend, ...

This doesn't really seem like their strategy anymore. It's not like Edge directly interprets Typescript, for example. While they embraced and extended Javascript, any extinguishing seems to be on the technical merits rather than corporate will.

In the case of security scanners that run in the kernel, we learned this weekend that a market need exists. The mainstream media blamed Crowdstrike's bugs on "Windows". Microsoft would likely like to wash its hands of future events of this class. Linux-like eBPF is a path forward for them that allows people to run the software they want (work-slowers like Crowdstrike) while isolating their reputation from this software.

Third step of the strategy mentioned by GP is enacted when market share allows it, and Edge is far below Chrome atm.

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