https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/microsoft_dev_account...
Hmmm
But hardware vendors also want Windows licenses to include with their hardware, so it's pretty easy to say "do the hardware program certification if you want the discount" and that's exactly what they did in the early days, and it worked fine. Even the peripherals (which are increasingly rare now anyway) still want to be able to put the Windows logo on their product.
At which point we still have the same question: Why are they harassing the WireGuard developers, who have their own reputation for not being inept at software and therefore shouldn't need a Microsoft certification program to assure their users that their code is trustworthy to install?
I would guess this is just large organizations Seeing Like a State whereby they "seek to force administrative legibility on their subjects by homogenizing them".
Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.
Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got
> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."
> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:
> The Username: AnthonyMouse
> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)
Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since
AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that
Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".
We do need to recognise, a long history of "windows always bluescreens" was somewhat reigned in by this policy with a lot of crashes coming down to third party drivers.
Security and attribution is great, but the default assumption of everyone will sign up and do what we want doesn't work.
Why a "bug".
Also because, at least on our side, the account was in an inconsistent state: we were correctly enrolled/validated, but could not access the signing interface.
Just curious how/if the version support might work out for ReactOS.
(I couldn't quickly find a "Previous Versions" list on their website)
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?
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.