6 ms·

Jesus fucking christ! What are they thinking! I cannot comprehend how an organization of Microsoft's size was able to deploy this without huge internal pushback

Jesus fucking christ! What are they thinking! I cannot comprehend how an organization of Microsoft's size was able to deploy this without huge internal pushback. 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.

saiya-jin 10y ago
actually, win7 64b should be enough for few more years (till 2020) if one prefers win platform, no? (games, drivers, lightroom and so on... wine is not the proper way for many)
nebabyte 10y ago
> internal pushback 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.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  I seriously hope not. That sounds like a really fucked up culture, that's definitely not normal. Moral integrity as an engineer should cause you to speak up regardless of your salary and with enough internal noise higher ups should rethink their strategy.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    "Moral integrity" doesn't really have anything to apply to to the day-to-day work of an engineer. A moral compass can't work without a magnetic field of context. 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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hedora 10y ago
    Engineering tends to assume it works for the "good guys", and I suspect the people that rolled this out did not consider NSL's and the other onerous legal implications of giving themselves access to everyone's hard drives. 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.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    That's extremely idealistic. 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.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      >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. 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.
stinos 10y ago
There's really no excuse for any of the HN crowd to be running this garbage 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).
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  give me one example of any legacy system that can only be debugged or accessed by a windows 10 computer and i will send you $100 in bitcoin, right now.
  - stinos 10y ago
    I would, if I had made such claim. I already explained there is no strict 'can't do that' because given enough time there's always a way.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  No. You choose to use Windows. You choose to use shitty hardware that doesn't work with free software. You choose to use Visual Studio (protip: dev on Linux is better than on Windows even without VS). You choose, and you have chosen wrong.
  - stinos 10y ago
    Have I really? I'm verry happy with my job so that choice an sich wasn't wrong. Oh yes I started that job and entered into a world where it was mostly Windows (that, and the hardware had been chosen already btw). Well, it's ok for you to have the opinion that the young me was doing wrong by not having looked further for another job where there's no trace of Windows, but given that young me hardly even knew Linux existed that sounds pretty ridiculous. Also, stop making silly assumptions and giving false protips. You have no clue how much of my time is divided between Linux/Windows/Mac nor how much experience I have with developping on Linux, nor what kind of software, so your generalizations have no ear here.
beachbum8029 10y ago
B-but muh video games ;_;
rdiddly 10y ago
Wow thanks, what is this Linux of which you speak?

saiya-jin 10y ago

actually, win7 64b should be enough for few more years (till 2020) if one prefers win platform, no? (games, drivers, lightroom and so on... wine is not the proper way for many)

nebabyte 10y ago

> internal pushback 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.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I seriously hope not. That sounds like a really fucked up culture, that's definitely not normal. Moral integrity as an engineer should cause you to speak up regardless of your salary and with enough internal noise higher ups should rethink their strategy.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  "Moral integrity" doesn't really have anything to apply to to the day-to-day work of an engineer. A moral compass can't work without a magnetic field of context. 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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hedora 10y ago
  Engineering tends to assume it works for the "good guys", and I suspect the people that rolled this out did not consider NSL's and the other onerous legal implications of giving themselves access to everyone's hard drives. 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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  That's extremely idealistic. 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.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    >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. 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.

stinos 10y ago

There's really no excuse for any of the HN crowd to be running this garbage 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).

wheelerwj 10y ago
give me one example of any legacy system that can only be debugged or accessed by a windows 10 computer and i will send you $100 in bitcoin, right now.
- stinos 10y ago
  I would, if I had made such claim. I already explained there is no strict 'can't do that' because given enough time there's always a way.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
No. You choose to use Windows. You choose to use shitty hardware that doesn't work with free software. You choose to use Visual Studio (protip: dev on Linux is better than on Windows even without VS). You choose, and you have chosen wrong.
- stinos 10y ago
  Have I really? I'm verry happy with my job so that choice an sich wasn't wrong. Oh yes I started that job and entered into a world where it was mostly Windows (that, and the hardware had been chosen already btw). Well, it's ok for you to have the opinion that the young me was doing wrong by not having looked further for another job where there's no trace of Windows, but given that young me hardly even knew Linux existed that sounds pretty ridiculous. Also, stop making silly assumptions and giving false protips. You have no clue how much of my time is divided between Linux/Windows/Mac nor how much experience I have with developping on Linux, nor what kind of software, so your generalizations have no ear here.

beachbum8029 10y ago

B-but muh video games ;_;

rdiddly 10y ago

Wow thanks, what is this Linux of which you speak?