Superhuman media kerfuffle
-
Turns out there was a shitstorm this week, about an email platform called Superhuman. As an email platform catering to corporate and generally rich users (they charge 30 bucks a month, ffs), they offer a feature called Read Receipts. The fact Read Receipts exist made some people angry, and today it’s trendy to complain about privacy violations.
One example: https://char.gd/recharged/daily/super-outraged — a piece I could find that wasn’t behind a paywall.
The thing is, read receipts for emails are a thing for over a decade. Outlook does it for sure. Yet there was no outcry about Microsoft Outlook placing TEH EVUL TRAKIN PXIELS. Even Stallman doesn’t say a word on the subject (except mentioning that he’s using an email client which resists tracking), although he would be exactly the type to complain.
Software for email marketing campaigns also puts in tracking pixels, and if I open those promo emails, I’m being tracked thoroughly way beyond what Superhuman ever does, and I bet IAB companies know more about me than my national security agency could ever dream to. Yet somehow no one is decrying MailChimp. It’s a non story, besides, everyone knows their soul is already sold multiple times.
Read receipts on emails are evil, for 99.9% of reasons, with any amount of tracking, don’t get me wrong. But so are the media, who certainly look like they have been paid to get a particular company some bad publicity.
-
@wft hasn't Outlook been blocking all external content by default for over a decade now?
About receipts: my university's email website has a checkbox in compose window to enable read receipt for a particular email in a quick and easy way. One of my professors said that when she receives an email with a receipt, it goes straight to recycle bin without reading.
-
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
The thing is, read receipts for emails are a thing for over a decade.
Even 25 years ago, you could request this in most mailers, which would set some header in the outgoing message that would result in the receiving mailer sending a message back when the recipient opened the message. All mailers I remember using, though, prompted you whether or not you wanted the other person to know you opened the message before sending the automatic reply.
Outlook does it for sure. Yet there was no outcry about Microsoft Outlook placing TEH EVUL TRAKIN PXIELS.
Isn’t this easy to thwart by using a mailer that doesn’t load external images, though?
-
@Gurth Guess there’s a combination of laziness and stupidity at work. I mean, all the energy they put into their tweets about TEH EVUL TRACKING
INCELSPIXELS, they could spend on researching how to make your email client your fortress.And their entitled asses are inflamed by the fact they need to twiddle their settings at all.
-
RFC 3798 Message Disposition Notification.
RFC 3798: Message Disposition Notification
This memo defines a MIME content-type that may be used by a mail user agent (MUA) or electronic mail gateway to report the disposition of a message after it has been successfully delivered to a recipient. This content-type is intended to be machine-processable. Additional message headers are also...
Dated March 2004.
Sigh.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic It had power mostly the same as “please do not track me” HTTP header which everyone happily ignored. Except for MS Exchange, I guess.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
RFC 3798 Message Disposition Notification.
RFC 3798: Message Disposition Notification
This memo defines a MIME content-type that may be used by a mail user agent (MUA) or electronic mail gateway to report the disposition of a message after it has been successfully delivered to a recipient. This content-type is intended to be machine-processable. Additional message headers are also...
Dated March 2004.
Sigh.
Older than that:
RFC 2298: An Extensible Message Format for Message Disposition Notifications
This memo defines a MIME content-type that may be used by a mail user agent (UA) or electronic mail gateway to report the disposition of a message after it has been sucessfully delivered to a recipient. [STANDARDS-TRACK]
- I thought it was even older than that, but that's the earliest one I could find.
I've used them, rarely, for situations where somebody who should be replying to my emails isn't. Like, dude, are you even reading them?
-
@levicki I respond to about 1% of all emails I get, not including spam. Because most don't warrant response--they're one way communication. Most I read in the notification, so it doesn't mark them read until I do that en masse. So read receipts won't do anything for my case.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Read receipts on emails are evil
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
/RANT on
I'd make email read receipts mandatory at work (enforced through the GPO), and make it a fireable offense if you don't read mail and don't reply in a timely manner so I have to send a dozen "kind reminder" messages before you get off yor lazy ass and do your fucking job.
/RANT offThe General Post Office(1) has exactly no effect on my installation of Thunderbird-on-not-Windows. (The development target runs on a not-so-subtly modified FreeBSD, and the developers here tend to use FreeBSD or Linux+FBSDVM. Well, except the Web-GUI folks who have to at least test on Windows-hosted browsers.)
(1) Yeah, I know, Group Policy Object, but once again we are victim of a repurposed initialism.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Read receipts on emails are evil
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
/RANT on
I'd make email read receipts mandatory at work (enforced through the GPO), and make it a fireable offense if you don't read mail and don't reply in a timely manner so I have to send a dozen "kind reminder" messages before you get off yor lazy ass and do your fucking job.
/RANT offThe General Post Office(1) has exactly no effect on my installation of Thunderbird-on-not-Windows.
But firing has an effect on you.
-
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic It had power mostly the same as “please do not track me” HTTP header which everyone happily ignored. Except for MS Exchange, I guess.
Any idiot could have told the proposers that DNT was the height of fatuous and futile optimism. Smart people could have done so, too, and probably did, but reality loses when faced with fatuous optimism on that scale.
-
@Gąska said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Read receipts on emails are evil
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
/RANT on
I'd make email read receipts mandatory at work (enforced through the GPO), and make it a fireable offense if you don't read mail and don't reply in a timely manner so I have to send a dozen "kind reminder" messages before you get off yor lazy ass and do your fucking job.
/RANT offThe General Post Office(1) has exactly no effect on my installation of Thunderbird-on-not-Windows.
But firing has an effect on you.
Fortunately for me, we don't have such a moronic policy about DSNs either. Answering email in a sufficiently timely manner is all that's required. If people aren't doing that, you tell them off about it in some way or other. But in any event, my comment was more about the non-universality of GPO as an effective method for enforcing anything in modern environments.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
But in any event, my comment was more about the non-universality of GPO as an effective method for enforcing anything in modern environments.
What you should also do is use a GPO to force the installation of at least three antivirus tools, all set to audit every read from every file. That'll punish anyone with the temerity to use an operating system that pays attention to a GPO…
-
@levicki sounds like a very broad brush for a very narrow issue then. Rules with strong penalties should only cover those things that can be enforced 💯 without discretionary action. Much better for most things is hiring professionals and setting strong norms. Oh, and accepting that other people have their own work and won't just drop everything to cater to your demands. Ie a bit of charity and consideration.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Read receipts on emails are evil
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
If they have read it, they respond, that's how I know.
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
I ignore that. It adds to stress if "somebody is typing..." for an hour just to send you "OK".
/RANT on
I'd make email read receipts mandatory at work (enforced through the GPO), and make it a fireable offense if you don't read mail and don't reply in a timely manner so I have to send a dozen "kind reminder" messages before you get off yor lazy ass and do your fucking job.
/RANT offFortunately you're never going to afford me. :-)
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
Different medium, and therefore different expectations. It actually serves a useful purpose in instant messaging: if you can tell the other person is typing, you know you can expect a reply any second now, and may want to keep paying attention.
-
@Gurth when what it really means is that the text box has focus (and on mobile, that the keyboard is up). Which means very little in actual fact.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:But in any event, my comment was more about the non-universality of GPO as an effective method for enforcing anything in modern environments.
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that OS if WSL is not good enough for your developer needs.
Is there a GPO for enforcing code style? Asking for a friend.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
wft is sending a file...
Never seen this, but I'm pretty sure IRC doesn't send those kinds of messages regardless.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
But in any event, my comment was more about the non-universality of GPO as an effective method for enforcing anything in modern environments.
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that OS if WSL is not good enough for your developer needs.
No. They won't offer support for anyone using a real operating system, nor for anyone using Linux, but ...And no, absolutely not. WSL is totally unrelated to my developer needs, even if I do use Visual Code as an editor.
-
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Read receipts on emails are evil
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
If they have read it, they respond, that's how I know.
I think you have that backwards. What you probably meant was, "If they responded, then they have read it, that's how I know."
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that OS if WSL is not good enough for your developer needs.
Doesn't WSL require a newer version of Windows than what's currently the LTSB that corporate IT will be installing (1607)?
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
So you don't want to know if and when someone has read your mail?
No. I don't think people should reply to my emails immediately after reading them, as I don't do it myself. Therefore read confirmation is useless information that just adds unrealistic expectations and generates bad blood.
I have requesting read confirmation off and never send them myself. I have a deep contempt for this feature.
I wonder how do you use all those chat platforms where it says "wft is typing..." or "wft is sending a file..." on the recipient's side?
I turn this stupid notification off if I can.
/RANT on
I'd make email read receipts mandatory at work (enforced through the GPO), and make it a fireable offense if you don't read mail and don't reply in a timely manner so I have to send a dozen "kind reminder" messages before you get off yor lazy ass and do your fucking job.
/RANT offPlease inform about this during hiring interviews when you start your business. I wouldn't want to start working for you by accident.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@wft said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic It had power mostly the same as “please do not track me” HTTP header which everyone happily ignored. Except for MS Exchange, I guess.
Any idiot could have told the proposers that DNT was the height of fatuous and futile optimism. Smart people could have done so, too, and probably did, but reality loses when faced with fatuous optimism on that scale.
DNT provides one extra bit for fingerprinting.
-
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that OS if WSL is not good enough for your developer needs.
Doesn't WSL require a newer version of Windows than what's currently the LTSB that corporate IT will be installing (1607)?
-
@dcon Hmm. Thanks. I'll have to try installing it again tomorrow.
-
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@dcon Hmm. Thanks. I'll have to try installing it again tomorrow.
You may have been thinking of WSL2 before. That's only available in Windows 10 build 18917 or higher.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that
You have meltdowns about enforced code style, but this is suddenly okay? Dude, you have weird priorities.
And no, WSL 1 is not a replacement for a full Linux system. WSL 2 may be better in that regard, but who knows, since it's not released yet.
-
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader
That's the moment I would resign
-
@dfdub said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader to which GPO applies, and then you could do your development in a VM on top of that
You have meltdowns about enforced code style, but this is suddenly okay? Dude, you have weird priorities.
And no, WSL 1 is not a replacement for a full Linux system. WSL 2 may be better in that regard, but who knows, since it's not released yet.
More to the point for my situation, it's not a replacement for any kind of FreeBSD system.
-
@TimeBandit said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@levicki said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
For starters your IT department would mandate using Windows as your main OS and Outlook as your mail reader
That's the moment I would resign
I wouldn't resign, but I'd join the rest of R&D in giving the IT policy-makers the Big Finger, See Figure One, and all that.
That said, I did get up one time to walk out of a meeting. We were in the late stages of migrating from SVN to git for "main" source control, and the team leader announced that everyone likes git and is getting on well with it. I said, "No," because for me, neither was the case. People right near the TL evidently heard me, since there were chuckles. For other reasons there was an interruption, so he redo-from-started and said the same thing again, at which point I said, again, "No," and something else also interrupted him. When he said it again for the third time, I just gathered my stuff, got up, and started to walk out because I'd had enough.
That got his attention, and once it was explained and he agreed to get someone to help sort out what was going on(1), I sat down and the meeting continued. I was a little distressed that I'd had to nearly walk out in order to get his attention, although it later turned out that he had some sort of requires-surgery-to-fix medical issue with his hearing in one ear.
(1) It turned out that I was shooting the messenger. The set of seriously wanked error messages were being transmitted to me by git, but actually came from gitolite. Steps were taken to fix the problem, and everything has been smooth since. I still don't like git, but I know how to make it do what I want, even if we are afflicted with some folks who think that push-force into shared branches is an acceptable way to work. In one corner of the product's code / build system, the shared branch is a sort of 9/10 master branch, and force-push is mandated as the correct way to work.
because this predeliction caused one of the weirdest situations I've seen. I checked out this 9/10 master branch, then (the next day) did a "git pull" to update it, and got a big huge catastrophic mess of conflicts. I had edited and local-commited exactly nothing, and the whole situation was caused by a push-force that amended a commit early in the sequence, so in essence, there was almost no commonality of commits between what I had and what they had vomited onto the master repository. Er, a push-force by someone who knew I was looking at stuff for this particular project, and who didn't bother to tell me about the push-force.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
we are afflicted with some folks who think that push-force into shared branches is an acceptable way to work
You need this:
-
@TimeBandit said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
we are afflicted with some folks who think that push-force into shared branches is an acceptable way to work
You need this:
You're not wrong, especially since at the moment I have administrative reasons(1) to not change jobs.
(1) AKA a strong reluctance to deal with telling the French bureaucracy about the changes they would have make to my naturalisation dossier. It's going well at the moment, and I'd like to not disturb it. They make it clear that any change to your job, your address, your kind of occupancy there (tenant / owner-occupier / whatever else), your "état civil"(2), blah blah blah must be transmitted to them so that they can update the dossier.
(2) e.g. you get married, PACSed, divorced, unPACSed, widowed (already happened, thanks), etc., have children, lose children to the Grim Reaper, etc. and so on.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
PACSed, ..., unPACSed
Why would your picture archiving and communication system affect your immigration status?
-
PACS is the French acronym for civil union.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
force-push is mandated as the correct way to work
-
@dkf said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
force-push is mandated as the correct way to work
IoW "if using commands involving the word 'force' is an ultra-common activity, you're
"
-
Dark-theme FWP:
-
@Zecc said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Dark-theme FWP:
Now that you point it out, I notice they're different...
-
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@dkf said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
force-push is mandated as the correct way to work
IoW "if using commands involving the word 'force' is an ultra-common activity, you're
"Fortunately, it's only in this one small corner of the code base, and mostly concerns integrating a specific third-party component. Elsewhere, there is no such insanity.
-
@Zerosquare said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
PACS is the French acronym for civil union.
Specifically: PActe Civil de Solidarité.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
Any idiot could have told the proposers that DNT was the height of fatuous and futile optimism. Smart people could have done so, too, and probably did, but reality loses when faced with fatuous optimism on that scale.
It gave advertising networks the chance to optionally run non-tracking, general ads for privacy-conscious people (as if the flashy annoying shit before the advent of ubiquitous tracking wasn't bad enough). Instead, it had the effect of exposing that tracking blatantly happens even against the explicit will of the tracked, no matter what lies advertising companies tell you. Which, in turn, is good enough justification for zero-tolerance ad-blocking.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
(1) AKA a strong reluctance to deal with telling the French bureaucracy about the changes they would have make to my naturalisation dossier. It's going well at the moment, and I'd like to not disturb it. They make it clear that any change to your job, your address, your kind of occupancy there (tenant / owner-occupier / whatever else), your "état civil"(2), blah blah blah must be transmitted to them so that they can update the dossier.
A friend of mine went through the process with his wife recently, and unfortunately you have little control on the process and it seems entirely random. Contacting them may make things slower, but they could equally well make them faster...
At one point they did not hear anything for a few months and when they asked for information they were told that the file had been "lost" and they had to start again from scratch. They strongly suspect that it's due to success rate metrics: the higher-ups say that a file should be dealt with in X months, but if it gets lost then it's like the file never existed so it doesn't get into the metrics. So in their case, the file was OK (after many back-and-forths) but stayed for too long in a stack (because the administration being woefully understaffed, in part as a clear political will to make things harder for immigrants, there is no way it can be properly dealt with in the allotted time), so it was "lost". They then made a new one that, having already been checked, jumped directly to the front of the queue and was dealt with in a couple of weeks, and voilà, the metrics are happy!
-
@Zecc Userscript solution:
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
IoW "if using commands involving the word 'force' is an ultra-common activity, you're
"~$ npm install --force npm WARN using --force I sure hope you know what you are doing.
-
-
@error said in Superhuman media kerfuffle:
~$ npm install --force npm WARN using npm I sure hope you know what you are doing, idiot.FTFY
-
@TimeBandit I typically use
yarnbut it has some problems of its own.
Filed under: Broken since 2017., Don't dead, open inside
-
@error Why is that comic laid out in columns, without a visible page break?
