The same as the pink ribbon for breast cancer: awareness. “Why is everyone praising Clippy?” becomes “Who the hell is Louis Rossman?” becomes “Why is Rossman so angry at tech?”.

But beyond a certain point, I think it just adds noise. Rossman’s original intention is to educate people about anti-consumer practices, and more importantly, to call people to action. Many people will stop at Clippy because it feels like they did something without any real effect. It becomes a feel-good pretend non-activism, like Kony 2012, or that one time David Guetta ended racism.

Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.

I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.