The story is about building this product. About putting in the time(thousands of precious hours) and focus to build the extensive amount of software running Wakatime. He has listened to his users and built the integrations. There is no disputing that. This story deserves attention and is true. Let whoever else make claims about their alleged ownership on their own time. it wouldn’t change the story.
The perfect recipient would still have to be sent backdoors from many creators. Many more people would be handling the secret, each one a target to be social engineered into handing it over. I imagine when a more typical backdoor is made, very few people even know it exists let alone know the key to open it. Mandate backdoors and everyone knows they exist so more people will work to find and crack them. They would be very high value targets. Once opened, a backdoor would take a lot of work and expense to be closed, if you even know it had been opened.
Yes, the whole idea is about as plausible as this april fools joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit ... but it's been put forth and implemented too many times for comfort.
Each time these silly systems like DVD-CSS broke down and became worthless or like DIVX, were widely panned and rejected by the consumer.*
Showing how this will always and forever be the case at a more fundamental level to stop trying this deadbeat idea with different gift-wrapping would be great.
* Even in MP3, you have bits 29 and 30 which are for copyright. What were they thinking? people would re-implement /bin/cp to look for that and fail if the bit is set? Really? AAC has something similar. silly.
"if I had kids, I wouldn't tell jokes" is clearly taken out of context, so to your 'Seriously?' comment: Seriously? nice way to read it to support your own bias.
Hank's life wasn't ruined. Adria's life has been most damaged, no employment for a long time, death threats, and this article will probably cause her a lot more grief. How many people in this thread have taken it upon themselves to send more abuse her way?
Why is this article even on hacker news? To support the down-trodden software developers?
I remember reading that the code was mostly open source tools that he had done some modifications to such as fixing bugs and just wanted them for reference. He hadn't accessed the files since leaving Goldman.
ProcessPoolExecuter from the futures package essentially does this, it runs multiple instances of the interpreter and then distributes instructions to them.
The story is about building this product. About putting in the time(thousands of precious hours) and focus to build the extensive amount of software running Wakatime. He has listened to his users and built the integrations. There is no disputing that. This story deserves attention and is true. Let whoever else make claims about their alleged ownership on their own time. it wouldn’t change the story.