I tink the title is a bit misleading. This is about very low level metrics collection from the system which by definition is very system dependent. The term “portable” in a programming language usually means portability for applications but this more portability of utilities.
Expecting a portable house and a portable speaker to have the same definition of portable is unfair.
May I just say that Matthew Prince is the CEO of Cloudflare and a lawyer by training (and a very nice guy overall). The quality of this postmortem is great but the fact that it is from him makes one respect the company even more.
I am grateful to Cursor for ushering in the new age of coding beyond the "old" Github Copilot. I am also grateful to their VCs for subsidizing my coding. I am going to use their money to write subsidized code as long as the party lasts.
My Samsung TV keeps blocking around 20% of the display at random times to tell me their terms and conditions have changed. Of course I have the option of checking it by reading the whole thing on my TV and then running a diff to see what’s changed but I don’t have an option to opt out of the terms.
It’s way too frequent and runs at random times in the middle of a movie so I always choose Accept.
Samsung is truly the worst of all big tech companies. All their first party apps contain ads. They kill hard fuses if you want to change things, and meanwhile bundle the devices of a large segment of the costumer base with first party Israeli spyware with full system and background install access.
I bought a Samsung watch once, had to reverse it to enable functionality that was advertised a year before but never delivered. It died because the watch decided to suck in water during a reboot while swimming, they quoted me almost the full price to repair it, even though it was clearly a software bug that caused another advertised feature (namely it's ipx rating) to fail.
And while I also wouldn't give Xiaomi iot devices on the network full internet access, at least I can use those things normally.
Besides the fact that Xiaomi devices are completely untrustworthy, they are usually great pieces of hardware. I bought a Xiaomi vacuum years ago. Everything was in Chinese and I had to watch a youtube video to figure out how to set it up. Besides that, the whole unboxing and setup experience felt like an Apple product. That vacuum was light years ahead of the iRobot it replaced. Incredible product and cheaper than just about everything else available at the time. That's when I realized American tech was toast.
I agree with you 100% about Samsung. They make nice hardware, but the software experience is among the worst in the industry. I don't know how they can be considered a premium product. I would never use one of their phones again. Straight up adware. I'm surprised they don't inject ads into the photos you take. They have ads everywhere else - even in the phone dialing app. Their TV's are still good as long as you don't connect them to the internet. Once they start putting LTE radios in them to download ads without wifi, I will be done with those too.
Out of the cheap phones I bought over the years, Xiaomi was the only manufacturer that didn't load up their phones with crapware backdoors. Samsung and Oppo was shiped with one of those crapware backdoors that installed apps beyond your back.
Eventually I got fed up, and started using hand-me-down iPhones for second phones.
> Eventually I got fed up, and started using hand-me-down iPhones for second phones.
Wonder how it would be if you tried a hand-me-down Galaxy flagship for comparison - that would be a more fair comparison. Cheap Androids are not in the same category as iPhones.
>I would never use one of their phones again. Straight up adware.
I was reading this thinking "that sounds awful, I'm never getting a Samsung phone" before snapping back to reality and realising that I'm staring at one.
I've never seen the issues you're talking about. I don't see any ads on my phone. I'm not using the default launcher, but aside from that it's stock. I would've turned off Bixby and whatever other rubbish it has when I first got it.
Ads in the dialing app!? I agree wholeheartedly that Samsung is being enshittified, but on my phone I can't see ads anywhere, least of all when I'm dialing a number.
Right. Ads in the dialer? I saw that once, with one of the Chinese brands. Samsung? Never.
In fact, I've been exclusively on Samsung phones for over a decade now, never had any experience remotely similar to what GP describes. My greatest annoyances are 1) Bixby, and 2) apps being pretty basic and missing obvious functionality (but then it's not like any other vendor offers better apps...).
I'm going to guess GP is in the US; I'm in the EU, and maybe phones for EU market come with less of this kind of bullshit.
We literally got an email at work telling us not to watch anything work related on any Samsung TVs because by default they will take screenshots of your content and send them back to Samsung for analysis unless you opt out. Absolutely bonkers.
At the risk of a smart-ass reply, I think you could say the same for almost any consumer electronics
Even if you don't suspect malfeasance / advertising / surveillance, a lot of these devices and their software are sloppily developed and highly insecure
My devices that do this were bought off aliexpress for about a quarter the price of a reputable brand. They do function and I purchased them expecting I would have to do some finagleing to get them to work and not phone home.
I mean, only if the DNS server is one run by the company in question.
I own nonzero such devices that hit 8.8.8.8 as an internet access sanity check so I have to keep just that IP allowed for them and block all other traffic.
All I meant was that sometimes if you fully block a device it refuses to work, and you may need to selectively unblock just 8.8.8.8 for that device.
Obviously buying such a device is bad, but sometimes you get one for free or close to it and it's worth the hassle to not pay hundreds for a better one.
Services like ControlD and NextDNS have built in blocklists for IoT telemetry and bullshit. I'm sure it's easy to do it with PiHole as well.
I use ControlD and it's blocking 38% of all DNS requests in my household. 8% of that is IoT telemetry. It's unbelievable how much of this bullshit is built into the products we use.
What I've done for the small handful of wifi connected devices I have is to have them connect to "internet sharing" from my laptop's wifi.
Naturally when my laptop is using its wifi to create a hotspot it isn't actually connected to the internet, so they never actually get access to the internet.
(Doesn't work if you actually want the internet, and not just wifi, related features of course)
I think they may go the easier way first: with online only OOBE where you cannot access all tv features until you acknowledge and accept the "legal" stuff first.
You know, bit like Microsoft forces you to create online account after installation is done
This idea has been around since at least a decade ago. The truth is, only a fraction of customers care about ads or privacy, and only a fraction of technical people in that group are capable of doing network filtering (VLAN, MITM, DNS blocklist, whatever). The absolute numbers are so small, as long as manufacturers can extract enough value from the remaining 99% of customers, they just don't care.
I have had a lot of friends amazed by the fact that when they connect to my home Wi-Fi they stop seeing ads. Zero of them interested in implementing something similar in their home.
the other thing is that it would not be as effective as presumed because 5G cell service in residential areas in the US is spottier than people realize. A lot of us are relying on WiFi calling.
A couple years ago I thought my fridge was appropriately blocked from the intarwebs. But a router update flipped the bit on activating the default guest network (which I normally keep turned off.) So for about 6 months my fridge was getting out to the net via the guest network. I found out about it when I got a call from my ISP asking what the heck was going on. Apparently a bot net had found my fridge and was doing all manner of bad things.
Moral of the story is... always double check your router settings to make sure enshittified iot devices aren't making you look like a newb.
Sounds weird, why would you give your fridge your wifi password in the first place?
Well the real question is why would you buy a connected fridge in the first place. Not that I visit fridges alleys in stores on a regular basis but I have never actually seen one.
> Well the real question is why would you buy a connected fridge in the first place.
It’s getting so you don’t have a real choice. You can buy a fridge (or any appliance pretty much) that is basic and doesn’t do the connected thing. But often you want the upscaled models because of real hardware features that are desirable. And these are always bundled with the “connectivity” options. It used to be you just ignored these bits. But they’re getting more and more invasive.
I don't know about "live without", but automatic defroster, crisper drawer, ice maker, water dispenser, alarm when the door isn't closed. being divided such that my food choices fit easily into the fridge (some people want to put a large wide pizza box directly into their fridge), power consumption.I dunno if you'd call looks a hardware feature, but it has to match the rest of the kitchen decor. The TV in the door isn't something I want at all though.
I may an idiot and haven't been in the market for new appliances for a while, but between an ice maker and a door alarm, how could you possibly require Internet acccess? Does it offer an app on your phone to operate the ice maker when you're not home?
travisgriggs said refrigerator manufacturers limited desired hardware features to models which had undesired network features. This was the last comment which mentioned network features.
delaminator asked what hardware features could not be lived without.
probably the ice maker or something. I bought new appliances a few months ago, and I made sure none of them had WiFi. I even paid £50 more for the washing machine that didn't have an app.
Are there evidence it is really happening? Which open wifi network are left in residencial neighborhood? My neighbors aren't tech savy yet they use the wifi configured provided with the router which has a passphrase. I believe even in McDonalds you get the wifi password only upon purchase in the receipt. Most open networks I still encounter are in big stores such as IKEA or airports and you still have to register to connect. I doubt the signal woukd reach even the closest houses anyway.
> Which open wifi network are left in residencial neighborhood?
Some neighborhoods are mixed use. Some residences are in dense buildings. Some people configured guest networks with no password. Some ISPs made their home gateways captive portal access points.
Having a guest network doesn't mean it is open. It can just means you have a passphrase that is different than other home devices and that you may be isolating them in a separate VLAN.
I would never run an open network on my home connection, there are way too many legal risks unless you can log who is connect to it and when.
I'm still using my Samsung dumb TV from circa 2008. paired with ancient Chromecast. No way I'm going to buy a smart TV as long as this combination keeps working. No ads, and things mostly just work, and it cost me next to nothing.
Even a smart TV is dumb enough if you use it as HDMI out for your actual streaming device (Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, whatever) and never connect it to the internet. There were rumors about smart TVs connecting to unsecured wifi networks a few years ago, but I don't remember any verified cases or TVs.
I bought the 2025 Samsung smart TV that RTINGS recommended as the best OLED and connected it once at first setup to download updates. Then I blocked it in the router and disconnected it in the TV menu and it’s been smooth sailing. Everything goes through my Apple TV and there’s no ads and it just works.
This is the way. Allowing appliances to connect to the internet, when it's not necessary, is insecure.
At least with a single-purpose device, you know you're not at the mercy of some minimally-funded, likely-outsourced software team inside a hardware manufacturer.
Same!!!
I do every so often connect it to update it if a newer firmware is actually worth it…
The extra upside to not accepting the terms is that none of the samsung bloatware apps even start - the TV runs much faster than just with the wifi disconnected.
It doesnt matter if you do or dont, those things are worthless in court in any reasonable country. They frequently want their users to agree to illegal things.
The best Smart TV is the one that is just 24/24 HDMI connected to your old Linux laptop with a GUI tweaked to act as a Smart TV with an air mouse as remote.
When I upgraded my desktop, I only needed to pickup a case and a few extra parts to have enough for a functional home theater PC. Running standard Fedora Workstation, controlled with Logitech K400+.
I stubbornly refuse to ever connect my TV to the internet.
Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.
Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.
That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.
I have a Samsung smart TV it's never seen the internet, I just didn't let it connect - it's a display for a box running Fedora, that is its entire job to be dumb and display whatever is sent down the wire.
Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).
My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).
Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.
Hunh. This reminds me... I have a copy of ghidra and a bunch of JTAG adaptors. I bet I could suck the firmware out of my old model Visio TV. I already unsoldered the microphone from the motherboard.
This is ultimately what we did in my house for every Samsung TV.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.
Apple TV is much better about this. I have never had it pop up or interrupt me. When it is idle it just goes to a pleasant screen saver and then powers off after a while. It doesn’t try and promote content or display ads for shows. Granted, that could change at any time, but right now I think it is better than all the alternatives.
It is better, but I hated how some time ago they started showing trailers at the start of a show, with no option to turn this off. It’s a small thing but it’s super annoying, if I want to check out what’s new I will do it myself, thank you very much.
Ultimately the choice of platform is about trust rather than capability. Apple has been a much better citizen historically than any of the smart TV companies.
Those other smart TV companies write shit software that performs terribly on bad hardware and may have ads - YMMV but that's not really "worse" than Apple's anti-steering clauses concealing massive fees on ATV apps like Plex or ESPN and causing half the western world to revise their competition laws to outlaw many of their practices. It's just bad for different reasons.
super ultimately, the choice of platform of trust is about farming long enough to get monopoly lock in and then slot in a MBA to convert that trust to cash.
Anyone who see anything other than enshittification is living on the same month-to-month timeline that capitalism wants in their consumers.
I'm not an Apple fan, but if someone wants a 'smart TV' (access to streaming services, etc) and doesn't want to go the Linux-box-connected-to-Jellyfin route, then Apple really is just the best option.
In my experience, they've been fine for a few years so far.
That's where I ended up; I was running a linux box with Kodi for a while, but that was a subpar experience for connecting to commercial streaming services (I never was able to figure out how to get Kodi to launch firefox on the site's URL, which would have been Just Fine for us).
I've got some bad news for you, Walmart acquired Vizio two years ago:
"This acquisition is not merely about expanding Walmart's product lineup but rather part of a sophisticated commercial strategy to integrate its retail operations, owned media channels and TV hardware into a cohesive ecosystem. This ecosystem is designed to generate and share data, influence shopping behavior and, ultimately, drive sales through an innovative approach to advertising..."
"...By owning a television manufacturer, Walmart can now directly serve and, crucially, measure the impact of ads on consumer behavior. This capability significantly enhances Walmart's potential to convert advertisements into retail purchases."
Only saving grace I have is that I bought my P659-G1 in 2019. While it doesn't prevent bad updates, it's a little less likely they pushed deep changes to old models.
And I can't believe it's been over 6 years since I had already eliminated Samsung for their ad behavior, and not only have they not changed, they've doubled-down.
I use my TV as a monitor and this still happens. When you don't accept it just gets more aggressive. I'm pretty sure there's a "bug"[0] that ends up slowing the TV down because it keeps that process going.
I'm pretty confident you can't agree to a contract if you can't opt out. I don't want new features and I'm fine if everything stays the same. And no, please do not adjust the image settings again... I didn't want the AI frame interpolation then and I don't want it now
[0] with Samsung engineers I don't believe they've tested anything and just assumed the user would accept it instead of deny it 20 times. It'll also get less buggy when I do a reboot, so I'm pretty sure it's a memory leak
We are talking about a company where if I press the exit button there's a 50% chance I get the menu or not. It's literally a random result. If I'm in, say, Netflix, press exit, I'll turn to my computer screen and half the time the Samsung menu will open and half the time it won't.
Also starting the TV will flash my desktop and then go "ops, no signal" and I have to just keep restarting the TV and switching inputs (not touching the hdmi cable btw) until it works. And no, my desktop doesn't sleep and yes this issue is the reason why.
So I am 100% sure it's not conspiratorial, I'm 100% sure they just suck at their job. I'm sure the fridge will be great...
1. MinIO is a business and they don't owe anything to anyone for free.
2. People using the OSS version also are free to express their dissatisfaction.
This is not contract law though. This is about using OSS as a marketing gimmick to get mindshare, penetrate the market and then do a bait and switch.
From one hand, it is within their right to do whatever they want as marketing.
From the other hand, we as the community should be more aware of OSS as marketing vs OSS as we would like to see it.
There is a damage to the community however: this erodes trust in OSS companies, so just like "content marketing" or "influencers" or any other type of marketing, after a while it loses its effectiveness, to the detriment of real "content", real "influence" and real "OSS".
People should understand from the outset that open source contributions from for-profit companies must benefit that company.
For VC-backed companies -- or anything else where it's spend now, profit later -- the bait-and-switch is practically inevitable.
(Or, of course, the company can simply stop contributing, either from going out-of-business, or pivoting, or being acquired, etc.)
If you're considering building long term on oss from a for-profit company you should count on having to pay in the future. You should believe you have a decent understanding of their business model so you have an idea of how much you might need to pay. Of course that's usually very difficult for VC-backed "spend now, pay later" companies, so you might be best off avoiding them for anything long-term or foundational unless you think you can bear to switch, possibly on short notice.
I generally agree with your point. Over the years of being responsible for technology stack choices, I've come to apply one rule of thumb on OSS projects: is the project a core competency of the company behind it or not. For example, Github might open source their language detection library or Shopify might open source some frontend development project. These are not core competencies of Github or Shopify. Their business is somewhere else.
However, if I start a business and open source my core competency, with or without VC money, I will have to turn a profit or die, which leads to such outcomes, from MinIO to Hashicorp.
I agree with all the points you make. Just adding a detail to the following bit:
> 1. MinIO is a business and they don't owe anything to anyone for free.
I don't think MinIO discontinuing the free docker image is really the problem here. Creating and distributing such images cost them practically nothing - either in infrastructure costs or in HR costs. If they find it that difficult, they only need to say it. Either the community or another company will gladly take it up for free. Even other cloud projects have alternative distributions like Bitnami builds.
The real issue is the pattern of behavior that this move exposes. They seem to have removed the web UI from the community edition claiming that it's hard to maintain (another thing the community would have gladly taken up if they were informed). They also stopped updating the community documentation. And these largely escaped attention until the docker build was discontinued. That itself is controversial since much effort wasn't spent in letting the users know that their current image was going to suffer bitrot indefinitely. Apparently there was also a CVE which was fixed in the source. They didn't consider it necessary to at least push the fixed container as a final measure.
All these are certainly hostile and unkind towards the community and it's bordering on dishonesty. They didn't lie. But neither did they do the bare minimum expected when taking such a drastic measure. It's clear that they're withdrawing their generosity for more profits after gaining a lot of mindshare with their earlier offering. I don't believe that the docker image alone would have inflamed the community so much.
It is clear that Heroku is not interested in reducing their prices. But I don’t think this is a Heroku problem. Vercel is also the same, which makes me think there is a fundamental issue with the PaaS business model that stops it from competing on price while the commoditised part their business (data centers) are always reducing their prices.
The challenge I always face with homebrew PaaS solutions is that you always end up moving from managing your app to managing your PaaS.
This might not be true right now but as complexity of your app grows it’s almost always the eventual outcome.
I can't believe this. When status page first created their product, they used to market how they were in multiple providers so that they'd never be affected by downtime.
I can attest to that. At Cloud 66 a lot of customers tell us that while the PaaS experience on Hetzner is great, they benefit from our managed DBs the most.
This is cute but fails to mention how many times in the life a rails application we have to go from bundler to webpacker to sporkets to Propshaft and importmaps to jsbundling. Or from autoloader to zeitwerk or from Turbo to Hotwire and god knows what else.
Take a look at ads on rails newsletters and how many of them are professional services to upgrade your rails app.
I’m glad someone called this out. “Let’s just use vanilla rails” — sure, except basically every version of rails for the past 5 years has decided to completely change how they do JS.
So many gems are also still built on sprockets — even when you want to use the “rails” way, you are stuck now with a hodgepodge of JS anyways.
It’s a mess — maybe one day we’ll get it fixed, but don’t pretend it’s not partially rails fault as well.
I really don't like Hotwire and FE history (I'm playing with htmx, Datastar, Phlex and love it) but the ActiveSupport autoloader -> to Zeitwerk migration was pretty much something in the background, an implementation detail, at least in my experience. Most devs don't even know what is all this about.
I’ve done all those updates at real companies with millions of users. They took from an afternoon to maybe a week of single dev time. If you keep your garden tended, weeding it becomes less of a chore.
Hetzner has been a very reliable provider for our hosting. We combine it with Cloud 66 for server hardening and deployment automation at a fraction of the cost of a PaaS
Expecting a portable house and a portable speaker to have the same definition of portable is unfair.