For Christmas I want every Google employee to be hit with a bicycle… And run over by a motorcycle…
Okay, maybe two bicycles and a motor cycle 🤔
At the same time!
@jae
Well, it's not the concept of Google that does all those evil things, but people who work for it. And it's not like they get born pre-employed by Google — it's their choice to do evil so I think that's fair.
If everyone refused to work for Google, all those nasty things simply wouldn't exist 🤷
@m0xee in theory i understand. but if you get into a certain profession not everyone is able to walk away from those big paychecks and free coffees.
would you run over a previous project-zero researcher? if so i'll lay down while you drive your bike and motorcycle. please make sure not to tire-burn my hat, it's the only one i have like this.
Sorry, the reply got out of hand — kinda hard to squeeze all my frustration in five hundred characters 😅
> able to walk away from those big paychecks and free coffees
Reasonable, but even working for Microsoft, Apple — hell, even Facebook, isn't as bad in my… hm-m, book 😆 Avoiding their products is relatively easy. Even if you have distaste for things like systemd or pulseaudio — steering clear is still possible with some effort. Avoiding things Google is nearly impossible — unless you go live in a cave. And this is coming from someone who builds his Firefox with support for WebP patched out.
But what's even worse is Google's software development culture: shorter release cycles, always having to keep everything up to date — like it's never a problem, introducing features or APIs and deprecating them shortly after, shipping security fixes together with feature updates, which in turn come with new bugs… This stuff's just toxic, this ruins the modern computing for me: very few projects have LTS versions nowadays, nothing is ever "supported" — there are no stable versions even, most have continuous version numbering (normalised by Chrome) — nothing is quite completely unusable, but everything is perpetually semi-broken. Through Google's participation in software projects, through reliance on Google's tools and libraries it made inroads into nearly everything.
I hate updating software on my computers — because every time I do that I have to spend half a day fixing things: making sure that deprecated things didn't break my own stuff, adopting newer dependencies that might have fixes, but might have new bugs — even backporting fixes from the upstream to fix bugs in versions brought in by my distro. Damn, last week after updating software on one of my computers I had to backport changes to the config file structure from upstream Alacritty to the fork with sixel support that I use — so two could co-exist nicely. Why did the configuration file structure have to change between minor versions? No idea!
Python 3.13 deprecated cgi — which was in the standard library since… forever. Luckily I could get away just updating the bottle module, but who knows what problems that might bring that I haven't noticed?
Format specification for status line in GNU screen (!) got changed — software that seemed… stale! To me it's on the scale of adopting new syntax for regular expressions in grep. Yet, all this got normalised — contaminated everything! Never fine-tune anything, never customise anything, never rely on anything — just update, what's the problem? To me it's always a problem and this makes interacting with computers utterly unenjoyable😩
Again, it's people who adopt these approaches, one might even think that Google has nothing to do with it, but it does! Because all of this was born out of Google's not having to support most things they ship. When Microsoft releases a buggy update — it's an uproar, when Google e.g. releases Chrome with broken password manager: https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/29/google_password_manager_outage/
It's: "Ha-ha, too bad for you, but it's not like you pay for it, right?"
But even when you do pay for it, it's not considered a flaw — it's perfectly in line with Google's philosophy — remember when App Engine was already a paid-for service, but went down for nearly a day despite it? I do! Just ship it as beta and start taking money for it — no problem with that!
> if so i'll lay down while you drive your bike and motorcycle
No, of course I'm not that bloodthirsty (but I hope you reconsider your sources of free coffee 😏).
Bicycles are child's play — you have to see what I put in Google's feedback forms when I have a rare opportunity 😈
It's also, as you might have guessed, a reference to ReCAPTCHA — another thing I can not choose to not use: it's the website's operator who makes this choice for me. I might of course stop using the website, or stop using the products of a company that has a website that relies on ReCAPTCHA, but… Would they ever realise that this was the reason? "Oh, come on, everyone uses it, no one has a problem!" But I do! I have to rely on VPN where I live and sometimes I have to spend a few minutes on clicking parking meters and fire hydrants just to get "Try again" 🤬
And I'm not even touching anti-competitive practices in general, frivolous approaches to privacy and "surveillance" business-model in — as you can see, my distaste for Google is much more deeply rooted than that. I do remember what Microsoft was to tech in the 90s and early 2000s — and in my opinion it pales in comparison to what Google is today.
@m0xee
> Sorry, had to vent my frustration from updating software (and interacting with ReCAPTCHA)
you're good, friend. i have the same frustrations. i just chose at one time to do security research at p0. it wasn't about the fancy coffees or supporting the evil g-empire. it was more having the opportunity to be exposed to advanced threat intel, malware patterns, and scalar attacks i wouldn't have access to otherwise. for science!
but yes, other than that piece. google is evil shit and i avoid them like the plague. i'm even discontinuing youtube consumption as revolt
@m0xee are the google employees the problem or is google?