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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Apparently it’s not that the software is broken, it’s that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

    As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it’ll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft’s rationale here. They can’t be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it’s known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

    In the last few decades that I’ve been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I’m more frustrated at Microsoft that I’m forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.




  • This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

    As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

    The key point is this:

    […] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

    Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

    We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.


  • Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

    Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.


  • If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

    This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that’s what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

    I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I’d have no reason to other that I like it?