
My First Death Threat (2004) - wkoszek
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040603-00/?p=39033
======
danso
I think the phenomenon of humans going from normal-to-violent-rage at the most
trivial _personal_ slights from strangers (e.g. road rage) is well-
accepted...but it's funny to me how slight software mixups (not necessarily
bugs or outright failure) can cause the same quick rise in negative feelings,
even though it's most definitely not a _personal_ , human-to-human slight.
Impotent fantasies like, "I hope the assclown and everyone on their product
team who decided to move that button on [whatever GUI you use most] loses
their jobs" as if they conspired to screw just you and you alone...Or maybe
it's just me when I haven't had enough coffee :). I chalk it up to how
sometimes aggravating and dehumanizing it is in modern life to have to use
software in the first place, before people start moving the buttons around.

~~~
rconti
I think they have the same root cause -- you're not having a face-to-face
interaction with someone where you can read subtle cues. You react to your
perception of the person's intent, not their actual intent.

~~~
striking
That and the fact that anger doesn't compartmentalize well, so the anger from
being cut off on the highway might possibly flow into your emails, for
instance.

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gabeh
I got a death threat while working at Microsoft around 2003. Someone managed
to hit the lottery on our phone tree and find me, a lowly software development
engineer on Windows CE. This person was _very_ angry and was trying to open a
PDF on their new Dell computer. I let them know they needed a PDF reader and I
recommended Adobe's product. The person was now confused on top of angry and I
was running out of patience after about 15 minutes in a circular discussion. I
tried to wrap up the conversation by telling him to try support and gave him
that phone number. He snapped and told me he was going to come hunt me and my
family down and kill us. I hung up the phone at that point. I really didn't
take him seriously, I hadn't given him any identifiable info other than I was
an engineer on CE and he just sounded like a very angry person.

I called security and let them know what happened anyway. My office was
invaded in about 15 minutes by 3 security folks and a Microsoft investigator.
The best part was how big my coworkers eyes would get when they walked by my
office and saw me surrounded by security being questioned. That afternoon the
investigator followed up and asked if I was still doing ok and let me know the
person was calling in from I think Kansas or some other place half way across
the country. I told him I didn't feel like it was really a credible threat and
that was the last I heard about the whole thing from security.

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stygiansonic
" _... This may not be easy, and I will expect no help from Microsoft in
finding out who this person (or persons) was that made this decision,
but….eventually I will find out who made this decision, and I will kill
them..._ "

This comment was evidently submitted in 1996, 12 years before _Taken_ was
released in theatres.

 _edit_ I couldn't help but read this quote in Liam Neeson's voice.

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yuhong
FYI, they finally backported XCOPY /H (I think) to the real mode DOS version
in WinMe I think, unfortunately too late since they decided to disable "MS-DOS
mode" before it was finally released.

~~~
tonmoy
Did you see after the message, the writer mentions that win95 xcopy always had
the switch /H available?

~~~
yuhong
That is the Win32 XCOPY (the DOS XCOPY I am talking about was in the DOS stub)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Wait, Windows 95's XCOPY had a Win32 version? Huh.

~~~
yuhong
It is actually in XCOPY32.EXE (later XCOPY32.MOD), the XCOPY.EXE was a DOS-
only stub for if I remember correctly to determine whether it was invoked from
a batch file (needed because Win9x still used the DOS command.com).

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mschuster91
There is no excuse for death or violence threats, but I can understand that
people get crazy because sometimes decades of muscle memory (e.g. the vanished
start menu, the ribbon stuff in Office/the rest of Windows) get lost or
scripts that have not been touched in years have to be updated because of
backwards compatibility break.

Software vendors in general really need to invest in BC testing - and run
early, public beta tests where real users' feedback is heard. Because big
companies ignoring their users frustrate people and it takes only a small
company's mess up to tip the iceberg...

edit: It might also be an idea if you have a millions-usages-product and you
feel the need to redesign or break BC, you should explain to your (paying!)
customers why you negatively affect their lives. Or make the change revertable
(an option in a config menu, or just a config.ini entry), so that new users
(which you A/B tested your new idea on!!!) get the new behavior, and old users
with muscle memory training can continue to use the old way.

~~~
jordigh
This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

[http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/04/volatile-
software/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/04/volatile-software/)

Boy, how I dislike upgrading Django. Look at all this breakage (and this is
only the intentional, documented changes, and only across one release):

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/releases/1.9/#backward...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/releases/1.9/#backwards-
incompatible-changes-in-1-9)

I appreciate much more policies like these:

    
    
        Suggestions to change the default output of these
        commands will not be treated with patience.
    

[https://www.mercurial-
scm.org/wiki/CompatibilityRules#Introd...](https://www.mercurial-
scm.org/wiki/CompatibilityRules#Introduction)

~~~
mschuster91
> This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

> > and dammit the documentation on the project’s website is autogenerated
> from the tip of its git repo and so it doesn’t apply to the latest actual
> version

Oh yes. Hell yes. And no way to refer to old docs (suuuper cool if you inherit
a project which was dormant for a year and you have to add features)

------
tillinghast
This "threat" was made in 1996 (not 2004 as some other commenters are
noting—the _thread_ is from 2004). This is a fascinating view into how things
have changed between then and now. Honestly, in 1996 you could make a threat
like this and a vast _vast_ majority of recipients would recognize that you
weren't being serious. It's a little sad that we've lost so much innocence on
the web since then.

~~~
YorickPeterse
Yeah, because making death threats is just a "joke" right?

~~~
oldmanjay
It's not necessarily in good taste, and not necessarily universally funny, but
yes, it's totally possible to make anything serious into a joke. The usual
technique is to bring a lot of absurdity to the situation, which truthfully I
didn't see in this post.

On a personal (potentially explanatory) note, my first death threat came from
a man aiming a loaded gun at my face. No joke was intended there! I think that
experience has left me somewhat unable to manifest concern about threats that
aren't backed up with firepower, which probably leaves me more open to seeing
the humor.

~~~
rconti
I think it helps that it's not a direct threat to an actual person. The reader
gets the feeling that the writer not only will not figure out who made the
decision (and, therefore, who to kill), but also won't even bother trying to
figure it out.

------
watson
Someone should add [2004] to the title

------
brudgers
Date: 2004.

Which brings up the question of, was it the last?

~~~
abusque
The threatening message itself is actually from 1996.

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hallman76
I expected this anecdote to be from the person responsible for "smart quotes".

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funkyy
Death threats are the worst. I got one really serious one from buyer, he went
ahead and started to post around things to my family. For B2C it is normal to
get bad reviews once in a while, but this was just ridiculous. Getting real
death threats is something that can hurt like hell.

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TazeTSchnitzel
If you want to read this in the normal, beautiful CSS, go here:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/03/14758...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/03/147583.aspx)

For some reason there's two different URLs for the blog.

~~~
yuhong
I think they are migrating to a new blog system. You will see that the latest
post you can read using the old URLs are about a week ago.

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codezero
The *'d out name matches my name. There's a chance I wrote this as a very
trolly teen. I wish I could see the full name.

------
chris_wot
Fun fact: if you want to see files as they copy, the command is

    
    
      xcopy /dickher

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JohnLeTigre
lol, this existed since dos 3.2, back when windows 1.0 was a command-line
executable really.

------
headcanon
Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)

