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No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was:

1 to buy the users

2 to reign in an upstart empire

3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand

4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'

They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/.

A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.

It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.

For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..

/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..

/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service

- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",

"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",

"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",

"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.

So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'

Enshittification galore.

by jove, old green terminal fonts make me nostalgic. So much Moria played, so much NN news-reading.

this curtismania comment should be flagged as spam, but I can't do so from the interface. I don't know what he is eating, but it is not carbon-based. Possibly he has been eating marketing-copy, directly.

I will add to the hundreds of comments.. Whatever happened to the thin waist of the wasp, in interfaces.. So, we design a system, for showing and interacting with data over networks. When we start with this, the outset is defining say a character set of 12-20-26 alphabet letters. Already with that, you could exchange information; at least the greeks could. We also managed to design the gopher protocol, the early world wide web protocol, telnet, and (god forbid) X-Windows. Early www already had some complications: Support for images, and form controls. A lot of these things were possible to do, even on a commodore 64.

But still, take a look at the monstrosities we have built since, presumably to serve the same purpose.. It now takes an effort apparently bigger than that required to land a controlled drone on the moon, to deliver a working/full WEB BROWSER..? An application supposedly intended to allow you to browse pages of mixed text and images, require approximately --two-- (nah, one?) full virtual OS environments to function, a turing-complete sub-language, and is more complicated to build than the OS's that host it..

I often wonder if all that was really necessary. It looks to me like we have made the 'interface' the most complex part of it all, leading to almost everybody just piggy-backing on the chrome investment (or what one chooses to call it.. It is an MS-like market control mechanism is what it is).

We had a tower of bable collapse, when we switched to web UI. We gained a million things and lost a million things. There was an era from around 1985 to early 2000s, where a large majority of applications had a (somewhat) consistent UI, based partially around MS-Windows, partially around some IBM 'common ui' design guide principles. The hall-marks of it was - keyboard navigation was possible - mostly consistent keyboard nav - common limited set of UI controls with consistent behaviour - for serious applications, there was some actual thought related to how the user was supposed to navigate through the system during operation (efficiency)

Post-web and post 9/11, where web browser UI has infested everything, we are now in a cambryan explosion of crayon-eating UI design.

It seems our priorities have been confused by important things like 'Hi George. I just noticed, that for the admin panels in our app, the background colours of various controls get the wrong shade of '#DEADBF' when loading on the newest version of Safari, can you figure out why that happens?'. 'Oh, and the new framework for making smushed shadows on drop-downs seems to have increased our app's startup time on page transitions from 3.7 seconds to 9.2 seconds, is there any way we can alleviate that, maybe by installing some more middleware and a new js framework npm module? I heard vite should be really good, if you can get rid of those parts where we rely on webpack?'

one national newspaper where I live is famous for viewing everything from the perspective of 'their office'/the city they are in. An great example of this was when they discussed something happening in a different city in same country, and they would proceed to write

"... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."

which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.

how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??

anyway, the new political administration is bound to solve the problem with costly eggs any minute now, and the soaring egg prices were without a doubt caused by the previous administration :-)

this is what life is, at its finest. Not staying by a pool, but weaving and meandering this way. Though they say taste can't be argued.

There is one further problem with this entire sub-discussion: There are two mitigation strategies discussed:

- A: guaranteed SQL-injection-proof (SQL injection impossible.) - B: Having non-obvious table-names and 'secure-defaults' (e.g. INFORMATIONSCHEMA disabled).

So, the original commenter says, he wants to _hide the schema_, so that B can protect him in case of A. Well, failure of A is Amateur Hour. If you fail on A, I highly doubt you would have delivered correctly on B. To write it out in plain text: If you have set up and manage an application with SQL injection errors, I have a hard time seeing you still taking care to disable /enable obscure security defaults, or take care to avoid obvious and trivial table names.

Just to put icing on the cake: As soon as you have an SQL injection attack, a simple select * from randomTable or DESC randomTable would give you the table COLUMNS, so it utterly makes no sense to want to hide those column names - you have already lost them! (in the case you are arguing you need their protection in). ..Unless you argue that the guy making sql injection applications ALSO has set up a secure default to disallow select *..

In my experience, SQL injection is evidence of work of the sloppiest and immature nature; it was bad in 2003, and presumably still is.

Your reasoning and motivation is reductio ad absurdum. It does not make sense to base your system security on hiding from the public that your 'Users' table is called 'Users'. If you are vulnerable to this attack, the guilt rests on your deplorable application code, not whether or not your schema table names are known. If we should follow your logic, we would have to name our Users table U_ZER_CLEVER_S because naming it something people could guess would be a vulnerability.

if it matches what happened in my country during the witch hunt era, people were often burned so other people could take their loot. That is, there was a strong alignment between who drove the accusations, and who stood to gain from the victim's untimely death.

My doctor/'s office was just forced to switch to app-instead-of-website for patient interation. Ironically, the old and this new software came from same megacorp I work for (different department, same story). The old web interface was rather good and rather sensible-practical-sane. It was almost as if someone had asked a doctor what he actually needed for his patients, and then understood his answer and also managed to actually implement and deliver it.

  The new smartphone app.. Not so much. It looks more like some MBA types managed to solve "what is the cheapest thing we can get away with, lawfully?"

Internally, I know it is because the original dev team has been gutted, development outsourced to india, and just a skeleton crew from the original team manages the chinese-whispers process with the huge indian team.

As a result, the use case flow (IE the only way you can operate it..) of the app, goes as follows:

1 close the app 2 launch the app and sign in 3 do ONE action 4 enjoy the result of the action 5 repeat from 1..

You might wonder why that is.. Well, that is because your software is not allowed to display any errors - because that might indicate there were bugs.. So instead, whenever an error happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation... forever. So, technically, there are no errors, no bugs.. "IT IS JUST TAKING TOO LONG TO RESPOND". (spoiler: it will NEVER respond, because hidden behind the screen, is a series of unhandled web api errors..)

But again, as an "internal" employee, I have seen our management claim all this is a huge success (client paid/pays).

Back to using it: When I have to interact with my doctor, I write the texts on my PC, and mail them to myself. Then I cut/paste them from gmail into this wonderful app.

I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort. We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well". My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables.. We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website". Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based.. I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone, but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.

a lot of countries already have this, and without handing e.g. Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom. America for example has this: https://www.foia.gov/

no, and some not even 4 years back, sigh :-/ (I am concurring)

As an old software-dev who has both started and 'finished' projects (stayed on to make them actually useful in production for non-trivial data flows), Amen.

In today's world it is in some ways getting worse: You have older applications that are still bringing in money, built on a patchwork of outdated platforms, that e.g. Microsoft no longer supports or offer migration paths away from, apart from a full rewrite.. And unpatched security holes in the older software removes your option of 'just stay'.

I find it painful to explain to business that yes, their 5-6 year old 'greenfield' product now consists almost entirely of parts that no longer offer migration paths or maintenance :-/.

I for one would love crazy orange :-) There are, almost, dozens of us!

You can't get a revolution, but it appears you have managed to get a coup.

fix the title: "hyena has been spotted for the first time in.." I better keep my day job too.

I use a mix of sublime and vscode. I often pick sublime, because I want peace of mind. I trust it to not try to make me 'do something else'. It (mostly) doesn't pester me with things to update or that are out-of-date, it doesn't run or fail with weird things in the background I didn't ask it to do. It sticks to a minimal layout. I had a similar love relationship with early versions of paintshop-pro - it contained the right balance of 'enough to do what you need, but not too much to overwhelm you'. Whenever I ran into a too-new version of paintshop-pro, I closed it again because I didn't want to deal with their lost-sense-of-balance. Sublime for me is like that, it is a hammer where the head won't suddenly fall off.

I had an eye-opening experience with VSCode recently: I had brought one of my laptops on a car drive, where I had a few hours before the people (family) I chauffeured would come back, and I had a coding project I wanted to update some stuff on. The kicker: I didn't have internet in the car, but for local vscode editing, that shouldn't be a problem, right(?) At least, I had not thought it would be.

Well, for some reason, VSCode suddenly became stupid. It could not longer figure out where my methods and classes were defined, so I had to navigate my code-base by hand (god forbid). It also flashed something about not being able to connect to "dot net" / ".NET" or something similar. I am not quite sure what was going on, maybe copilot..? Whatever, my VSCode was in a mode where it seemed to rely on some online resource to operate, and suddenly had become braindead by severing the cord..??

This reminds me why I like sublime.

I live in denmark, and mirror your comment almost to the word. Especially the idea that programming it felt like doing magic.

They suggest the students should do this exercise in pairs. When doing so, the lucky partner is the one who doesn't have to sit in front of the radiation source.

I will reveal my ignorance: This idea of 'mining' for hydrogen, must mean applications where we can't use hydrogen sourced from splitting water molecules? So it must be cost-effective relative to splitting water molecules? So, splitting water molecules is too expensive?

not only that, you can use this laptop to _play_ factorio!

Good thing people are no longer electing such people to high office.

I'm not quite sure why he expressed himself in a way that is easily misunderstood. He probably shouldn't have used "protocol" as the word/concept he wanted to communicate. I think what he was trying to say, is that it was a new/fresh modality of communication - a new way to communicate, by having public channels you could stream to.

The same way giving people access to email opens up new behaviour, or access to networked computers allows new behaviour. Or similar to how Job's iPhone drove people to a new behaviour. Also, until they locked down their APIs in the name of control and monetization, it had a feel of access to a new protocol.* I am fully aware twitter is not an RPC specced protocol.

Another perspective is that it is a person who takes great care/is very thorough, to examine and re-evaluate his reasonings, and makes an effort to explain the logic in his reasoning, which can be helpful if you are trying to figure out if you agree or disagree.

The optimistic tone at the start of the article might just be a hallucinatory strawman set up. But as a probably old dog, I fail to see the allure of these technologies(*).

When I read the copy trying to peddle them, to me it sounds quite like someone saying "Heey.. PSST! Wanna borrow 5000$ in cash, I can give it to you right now! Don't worry about 'interest rates', we'll get back to that LATER".

When I build stuff out of 'serverless', I find it rather difficult to figure out what my operation costs are going to be; I usually learn later through perusing the monthly bills.

I think the main two things I have appreciated(?), is

(1) that I can publish/update functions on cloud in 1-5 seconds, whereas the older web services I also use, often take 30-120 SECONDS(not minutes, sorry) to 'flip around' for each publish.

(2) I can publish/deploy relatively small units of code with 'functions'. But again, that is not quite accurate. It's more like 'I need to include less boilerplate' with some code to deploy it.. Because to do anything relevant, I more or less need to publish the same amount of domain/business-logic code as I used to with the older technologies.

Part from that, I mostly see downsides - my 'function/serverless' code becomes very tied-to-vendor. - testing a local dev setup is either impossible or convoluted, so I usually end up doing my dev work directly against cloud instances.

I'm probably just old dog, but I much prefer a dev environment that allows me to work on my own laptop, even if the TCP/IP cable is yanked.

Oh yeah, and spit on you too, YAML :-) They found a curse to match the abomination of "coding in xml languages" of 20 years ago..

it wont be banned,45 just needs to collect his paycheck first