WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution

Good to know everything was resolved, but did you ever find out why your signing account was suspended? That's not something you brush off as haha silly Microsoft..

Off topic: Thanks for wireguard. It is a truly great piece of software.

Somewhat on the side - but is there a wireguard that works well for ReactOS? Does the windows version just work fine?

Just curious how/if the version support might work out for ReactOS.

I really appreciate what you wrote in that post re: dropping support for pre-Windows 10 operating systems.

> following all the attention the HN thread from the other day got

That's great for you, and no offense, but what about developers who can't get buzz in a HN thread? Are they just doomed? Why is support only available to those who can raise a ruckus on social media?

Hey there, thank you for pushing this out. I saw there's a 0.6.1 update now, that also reboots the machine after updating. I don't remember if it said it'd do said reboot...

The broader general problem is that it should not be necessary to attempt amplification of a message via HN or X or other platforms to get a company to have a real human pay attention to something, and write a hand crafted response.

This seems to increasingly be the norm with people who have had their accounts locked, deleted or restricted by automated systems. You have to hope that you can write a message and get it amplified via some sort of platform read by hundreds of thousands of people, and get people to reshare your message, in order to get any form of traction.

If you're not somebody well known, noteworthy or somehow significant in a community your likelihood of having your message successfully amplified is much lower.

Your work is always appreciated.

They would be ignored. Having an audience is key to getting problems solved, whether it’s a lone hacker or a large corporation. Without an audience, you have no leverage. At that point you might as well create a new Windows account and re-apply, since that would have more luck than getting around a “we’ve closed your account and there’s no appeal process” barrier.

If that sounds Kafkaesque, it is. It’s a small miracle that getting a post to the top of HN can surmount such bureaucracy at all.

The best way to get an audience is to tell a compelling story. Make it interesting. There are ways of doing that for even the least known developers.

My point is to push back against the idea that it should be fair to everyone and that what’s morally right should prevail in every case. The hardware developer program doesn’t exist to treat every developer fairly. They exist to make money for Microsoft. pg puts it more eloquently here: https://paulgraham.com/judgement.html

While this is a small problem for software (and hardware) that needs custom kernel drivers, or software that needs to run as administrator, you seem to have jumped a long way past that to rant about FOSS on Windows with no justification- general unsigned software works just fine on Windows as it always has.

I got a modestly-similar situation resolved by buying a support package and spending 4+ hours across ... not sure, but probably 4-5 support calls? It's been 5 years. If memory serves it was the $200/mo support package for Azure.

In retrospect, I should have not spent 3 weeks trying to get their incompetent software to work and just gone straight to phone calls. And at least in my case, the support agents seemed broadly unfamiliar, but seemed to have access to higher-priority internal case submission which did finally get to someone who could fix my issue.

Software distribution is largely controlled by 3 companies; Microsoft, Google, and Apple. We used to have the web and web apps as an escape hatch, but, surprise, all 3 of those companies use a shared “safe” browsing blacklist that can be used to wipe your domain / website out of existence. Mozilla participates by using the same list which is a shame.

Big tech shouldn’t be allowed to control the platforms and the ability to distribute / blacklist software and sites. That needs to be legislated against and those companies need to be broken into a thousand pieces each.

>I think we need to start using the word evil for this. Because it is. It is gross irresponsibility. Gross abuse of a power situation, of a strong dependency, that the company quite knowingly creates.

Oh wow, good morning.

The parties which taught you the notion of "individual" (by defining you as such, and coercive-conditioning all other models out of you), all happen to be collectives: your family, your society, the institutions, the businesses' communication departments. They have the power of definition. An individual (by definition) does not.

It only gets worse from there.

For what purpose are you made "individual"? Collectives define you as "individual", in order to make you defenseless. Individuals have the useful property of being trapped within an infinite recursion of false "selves"; collectives, on the other hand, are neatly self-reifying. They do not have the organ of inhibition (pre-frontal cortex).

In the eyes of the state, corporations are something like artificial people, right? Alright, model them as legally constructed psychopaths out to get you - how to perform extralegal direct intervention upon 'em, same way they can do to us? It's only fair... wait no you can't! You'd only be hurting their constituent individuals. And you can't hurt them nearly as bad as whatever made them join the collective in the first place; it would not only be pointless but also cruel.

This notion of "individual" which lies at the center of Western individualism (and the related schools of thought which implicitly form your day-to-day behaviors in society, no reflection necessary) is an extremely fraught concept: look at it a little too intently and it begins to fall apart at the seams.

Making you see yourself as this thing called "individual", which is extensively studied with most rigorous methods, and somehow remains fundamentally inscrutable (hard problem of consciousness goes wheee!)... that's not very unlike a proprietary API or OS, is it? "Individual identity" is a useful (to whom?) abstraction over the incontrovertible, but by itself meaningless, physical being of a human organism. Unlike a collective, a body cannot be divided into constituent parts and remain itself; but Western civilization is nominally a world of minds over bodies, and minds are made out of ideas, and ideas can be taken apart and shared around just fine, within one body or among entire crowds.

So what we are observing is not evil; "evil" has meaning in the plane of independent individuals operating in mutually comprehensible moral framing. And that's always been a huge and harmful oversimplifiction.

It's much easier to view the behavior of transnational corporations as a whole as the AGI takeoff. But then one might want to consider when exactly it started - was it the LLMs that precipitated it (as many here seem to think), or is the concept of "artificial intelligence" itself a marketing smokescreen, and the NN/ML/LLM tech is just an inevitable performance optimization once the AGI has embedded itself deeply enough into human industry to direct resources towards the mass production of GPUs and other highly specialized accelerator cells.

The reality is that unless and until the PR hit from failures like this impact their stock price or their bottom line, companies won't care to fix the processes that created them.

> make sure partners understood this

Since when they were partners to Micro$lop? First, it's thug like behavior taking the ability to run code on our own computers without their approval. Second it's even more evil justifying this behaviour by calling the developers "partners".

It could be dead simple. Lock the account, but let the owner temporarily unlock it for X days so they have enough time to undergo verification.

> and had to go through the normal process?

There is no normal process. The error message clearly states "There are no appeals available, we have closed your application".

If the company makes it impossible for you to communicate with them, the only recourse is to draw public attention to it in order to shame them. This only works if you can gather enough public support and kick up enough of a stink about it. All of the small developers still locked out of their accounts are screwed.

> Whats next?

I think Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. are happy with the collateral damage caused by false positives and bad product decisions. And the way they implemented this was a bad product decision.

Think about it. If they "accidentally" destroy distribution for small projects that don't have the visibility to make waves, that's fewer possible startups that can eat their lunch. The cynic in me thinks that "at scale", "AI false positives", etc. are just an excuse for them to eliminate small developers.

They don't have to ban them all either. All they have to do is increase the risk to the point where rational people won't take the risk.

There were people that warned not to get into iOS development because it was impossible to guarantee distribution of an app. How do you build things like LoB apps under those circumstances? And who benefits when it's impossible to promise delivery of custom built apps? It favors big companies with the visibility to short circuit the system.

It's asymmetric rules; one set for big companies and another for small developers. I really hope the renewed interest in Linux takes off because it's the last chance we have at holding off big tech from taking over every little aspect of our lives.

Was the issue resolved for VeraCrypt as well?

yeah three projects, one account lock, everyone's users stop getting updates. that's the pattern

And Windscribe

What has LibreOffice got to do with any of this?

It might settle into a situation where cutting edge LLMs are a service, while older and smaller LLMs are self-hosted. So you are not at risk of being cut off, but of being degraded.

If they manage to build good memory systems, people will stop keeping personal docs and rely on the “AI” for everything. Imagine 20 years from now when people don’t even have copies of the recipe to bake bread and then you’ll see what the goal is.

This was just for WireGuardNT, the kernel driver for the NT kernel that Windows uses.

This project -- https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-nt/about/ -- is used by this app -- https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-windows/about/ . The former is what the signing situation was about. The latter is just signed using a normal boring (but very expensive!) EV code signing certificate from one of the CAs.

> "We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.

Emails are useless given the volume of trivial crap that MS emails about. Banners don't help for systems on auto-pilot. Reminders how?

Break my workflow and let me un-break it when I notice.

"it is only 0.01 promille of our customers" chopping off the long tail.

> incompetence is always more likely than malice.

"Incompetence" of this degree is malice. It is actively malicious to create a system that automatically locks people out of their accounts with absolutely no possibility for human review or recourse short of getting traction in the media. "No sir, I didn't grind those orphans up. It was this orphan grinding machine I made that did it, teehee!"

With the way things are going right now with all the corruption in governments and corporations were way past the point of giving the benefit of the doubt. These organizations are clearly making changes to their OS's to slowly remove user control.

Everything should be treat as suspicious moving forward and I am glad of the skepticism.

Society is a bit fatigued of big tech companies making their various accounts essential and then locking people out of them without any due process.

All this doesn't matter. What matters is the destructive potential and a breach of trust. CAs have been distrusted for less.

Microsoft lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.

Who needs conspiracy?

Microsoft has entitled itself to decide what I can and cannot run on the computer and OS that I paid for, this earns them no additional revenue, so they don't care to do a good job.

This system will never work properly.

> it was a bit crazy how quickly people got conspiracy-minded about it.

That's just the side effect of the Soross tracking chips hidden in vaccines activated by 5g towers

Conspiracy 1: rules from on-high about encryption projects to be suppressed. Debunked.

Conspiracy 2: Copilot all the things! Probably not too far off.

I would guess they realized they missed a notification or warning and feel a bit bad about the whole thing blowing up. Hopefully not though. The fact there were several high profile projects that got caught off guard puts the blame mostly on MS IMO.

I think the reason these things go viral is that a ton of people reading about them can see themselves in the same situation, minus the clout needed to get it resolved. A short term PR crisis is the best we can get, so everyone piles on.

I don't think MS will fix it though. IMO, they're more likely to create a program for open source code signing. That way they can capture all the high visibility projects, get a bunch of goodwill for being philanthropic, and all the small projects that don't qualify are too small to cause a fuss, so they can continue to treat them poorly.

Monopolies.

Wouldn't comply with CIA backdoor requirements, but now they do ;)