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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

The future of personal computing is really dark these days. I just attended an apple event for education and government. The amount of data tracking and the standardization/normalization of this behavior is dystopian.

What happened to computers being just fun and a source of exploration and freedom?

Microsoft, Gooogle, Apple all constantly push their cloud based accounts … where everything is tracked.

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> What happened to computers being just fun and a source of exploration and freedom?

Having this experience isn't any harder than it was in the old days, it's just that there are so many more people participating in computing in some form that it's harder to find the people who truly own their computing experience.

The companies that made "personal computing" easy enough for the masses want to profit off of that, and they've settled on strip mining data and robbing user control as the best way to make money. This leaves their mass-marketed version of "personal computing" a hollow shell of the original, but it doesn't remove the original.

You can still install a privacy-friendly Linux or BSD with only FOSS software. You can still self-host your data and retain full control and privacy. What you can't do is benefit from the ease of use that mass-market computing provides while still retaining full individual control.

Friendly reminder that Apple shares their iCloud data (users' docs, pictures, messages, etc.) with the Chinese government in exchange for market access:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Apple shares icloud data with the US government as well.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

That's per warrant requests for individuals, IIRC.

Apple shares with the CCP for all users by default.

I think it's worth clarifying that this is just Chinese users, though that was probably clear to most. The Chinese and rest-of-the-world iClouds are completely separate.

It's very comforting to know that they treat the data of their Chinese users with such respect. For a company that insists on privacy being a human right, they sure do seem to have a flexible definition of human!

Take it up with the CCP.

Not that I really disagree. I wish more companies would refuse to do business under those kinds of conditions.

The point is that Apple sells their user data for market access. Google won't even do that.

This is antithetical to Apple's privacy branding.

On the other hand, Atlassian’s stock lost 66% of its value, and it could be because investors notice that converting people to the Cloud is not currently working.

Atlassian should have better bet on their Server solutions, but they really really wanted to be a cloud operator. “For strategic reasons.” Maybe for governmental reasons, who knows.

> it could be because investors notice that converting people to the Cloud is not currently working

Given the barn storming financial performance of other cloud operators and Atlassian's impressive record in (un)reliability, I think investors are quite aware that converting people to the cloud is going swimmingly most places that aren't Atlassian.

It's a contentious issue in AppSec where most vendors want you to upload source code to their cloud for anything other than the most basic of scans. There are SLAs for how long the vendors can retain the source code they scan, but many clients are not aware of how much of these scans are performed manually behind the scenes by humans and how few of the vendors have their compliance audited. The possibility of a vendor failing to properly secure your source code is risky enough on its own, but it being accompanied by detailed reports of the security vulnerabilities in the code should cause some hair to stand on end.

> It's a contentious issue in AppSec where most vendors want you to upload source code to their cloud for anything other than the most basic of scans.

Write the source code in some Assembler language (or even binary code ;-) ). Or use some obscure programming language that the vendor cannot scan, thus having a reason not to upload it.

In case you weren't being tongue in cheek, the purpose of the scan is to find security vulnerabilities so they can be rectified. If the scan cannot understand the code, it can't find the vulns that need remediation. Unfortunately, you don't even need to pick an obscure language. Almost all vendors of SAST products are chronically behind schedule on supporting the latest versions of languages and frameworks, and some of the biggest names have significant gaps in which commonly used languages they support.

That was never a thing. It was always an illusion for the advancement of artificial intelligence.

Why do you think they are going so hard on the Semantic Web shit? It's not for the disabled - it's for the blind, deaf and dumb AI that needs the entire content of the web to train on.

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