I guess the only surprise here is that they're selling it.

It's probably some contractual obligation as a registrar.

The product isn't being sold, just the domain names. And you can't exactly just delete millions of domain names, it'd be an ICANN contract violation (as well as just being a horrible idea and causing endless amounts of harm to the Internet as a whole).

Microsoft has killed more products than Google.

The difference is no one misses them.

I miss Musical Instruments. That was fun to browse.

At least until Clippy dies, at which point some people will miss loving him, and probably a few more will miss hating him. Either way, he will be missed.

Uh, Office hasn't included Clippy in decades? Are you posting from 90s Slashdot, too?

(quiet gasp) He's gone? I must have lost track of the time I guess. Anyway, I'm gonna go get some exercise playing a VR game (kneels down and leans head forward uncomfortably to look into a Gameboy Virtual Boy).

Most of them still run, though. Either directly on modern Windows or with something like ReactOS. You can't keep using Inbox once it's shut down.

>Most of them still run

specifically, how are those audio files bought from the M$ mu$ic store when they pulled the plug on the licensing server for their DRM?

your claim of still running on modern Windows would be impressive if it is actually true, but saying to use a completely different OS is not something the vast majority of people not typically reading HN are going to do.

I mean, I'm still running Paint Shop Pro 5 and Winamp on Windows 11 like I'm still in the late 90s.

Windows and Microsoft are the legendary backwards compatibility outlier in the software industry where essentially everyone else moves fast and breaks shit.

Oof, Winamp? Check this out: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2008-0065/

Why dafuq would I care about a bug related to a streaming service I've never even heard of when all I do is play locally stored music files?

Incidentally, I still have not come across a suitable replacement for Winamp all these years later. They all have crappy UIs or bring features that I do not want and get in my way.

The best replacement for Winamp is… also Winamp! https://getwacup.com/

weird.. why isn't this copyright infringing? wacup seems to be using 'fair use'..

Fair enough. If you're only playing local files that were obtained from a trustworthy source then you wouldn't be affected.

With a complete RCE like that though, I would definitely not advise playing music downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. While I'm not familiar with the exact requirements to exploit the vulnerability, I would err on the side of caution and assume that music files can be crafted that contain malicious metadata which can achieve similar results without actually being connected to the streaming service.

The details are all right there: It's a vulnerability with the in_mp3.dll plugin (it's the decoder for playing MP3s), specifically with insufficient checks against malformed name and artist tags (probably ID3 tags?).

It's fixed in Winamp v5.52 and above, and the version I use is v5.531 so I'm not affected as it turns out.

I'm sure there are other bugs that I'm affected by, but again: Not really concerned about it.

Yeah, to clarify, the part I wasn't sure about is if it was required to somehow integrate your local Winamp installation with the streaming service, or if it could be exploited simply by playing a downloaded music file. It sounds like it could indeed be exploited without being connected to the service.

Aren't they a bit older? Time let's these numbers stack. Maybe percent alive to dead is the metric?

Microsoft has also set more products in solid granite than Google.

Good old Windows Cement. https://external-preview.redd.it/1WN9Vrz1gjERiGjyfJ8kUZEANRB...

Windows today is unironically cement solid.

Windows XP incorporated more user-centric elements from 9x, which culminated with ME, into NT.

Windows 8 incorporated more mobile-centric elements from CE into NT.

Windows is still rock solid at running programs from almost 30 years ago.

Shit, there are computers doing productive work and going strong on MSDOS 6.22 here in Mexico. Released in 1994, that makes it 30 year old software working without issues.

Google software can only DREAM of doing that. Microsoft was doing software while Google people were still even not planned to be born.

Fun trivia of the day: MS-DOS 1 through 7.0 only reached EOL in 2001, and MS-DOS 7.1 and 8 which were shipped with Windows 9x only reached EOL in 2006.

If we consider the start year to be 1981, the year MS-DOS 1 came out, that is twenty years of official, commercial support, if we count 7.1 and 8 that's twenty five years.

If you need software you can count on to still be there a few decades down the line, if not more de facto, count on Microsoft to deliver.

Without a source mentioned, I assume you refer to this[1]?

A comparison shows most products that should be dead are on that list.

G, on the other hand, has products actively used and loved by users.

[1] https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

How many of the products on the Killed by Google list do you think is "products actively used and loved by users"? Like half a dozen on that whole list? How many had you even heard about?

This Domains shutdown definitely qualifies for the short list though, and is the most mystifying shutdown of theirs in like a decade. It was a paid service with clear strategic importance and clearly a ton of happy customers.

Things I am or was actively using (and mostly liked): Inbox, Domains, Reader, Wave, GChat, (Hangouts, but it doesn't fully count), AdSense mobile app, Google+, goog.gl, Play Music (YouTube Music sucks), Buzz, Labs (particularly in Gmail), Google WiFi app (the home app is worse), Picasa, and I can probably find more.

I have stopped using any new Google product, and am slowly phasing out my reliance on their other products.

Also, a quick skim of that page lists products from at least the 1990s before Google even existed which seems unfair if you are trying to objectively match up counts. Microsoft does have a few more decades on Google.

Microsoft kills products that were dead anyway. Google hypes you up, cuddles you, tells you that you're the best and then pushes you off the cliff when you're not looking because you farted in bed the other night.

I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.

Please stop it.

I watched the recent developments to Twitter, Google and Reddit, and loved it all.

The only way for self-hosted service to catch up is wait for the big companies to mess up, and they're messed up very well at this moment.

Google previously changed their account expiration policy, and decided to lock users out of their usernames instead of allowing the old owner to re-active it, making the expiration permanently destructive for the user.

This effectively told their users that use of Google services is not "maintenance-free", you have to constantly engage with Google to keep it alive. And funny enough... maintenance costs is one of the reasons why people choose to abandoned their soft-host services.

Now the pendulum swings another way, it's great.

This is the most hilarious meme on HN

Meme or not, it legitimately was my favorite "social media" site ever. I'd read interesting things on my feed, and share it to a pool with my other friends, who'd also share the interesting things they read, and we'd all be able to discuss it. It was like reddit but just for my group of friends. It was great.

Nothing ever came close. I simply stopped using RSS altogether.

It also doesn't help that most sites broke their RSS feeds.

Same here. Although TBH I feel like it was mostly a waste of time. Now I can waste time in different ways like reading HN or reddit