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Comment by alephxyz | Hacker News Reader

> Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies

That makes it _really_ hard to believe they're debating in good faith.

Anyway the entire thread makes it sound like they're temporarily backing down but still intenting to implement something similar in the future:.

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In my town, a couple (both doctors) unilaterally gated a forest service road that led to a popular outdoor area used by the citizens for years.

Apparently rights of way are tough to determine on this road that's well over a century old, but the Forest is working on it.

In the meantime, the doctors' business were figuratively destroyed and their property vandalized. [I don't approve of illegal actions.]

And I think they're genuinely confused by the reaction of the general public. They are so far out of touch, they just can't understand.

Google pushing things like this and being surprised by the violent backlash has the same feel.

> violent backlash

There's no backlash. Is there anyone stating to stop buying Google Ads? Moving to Firefox (since there's no else alternative non-Google-chromium-based browser out there)? Except the HN audience, if course.

There's no danger from "users" for Google. Because their users are huge enterprises paging billions for ads. Not us.

DRM is what banks love. Recently, there're several major banks' mobile apps in Singapore stopped working as they started scanning all apps installed on a device, and some they don't like (MS Authenticator, for instance; F-Droid, and any opensource apk from there, also any developers installed app). This is nightmare as mobile bank apps are a first class citizen now. Web just does not open without push dialog. Not sms otp anymore, but the app push dialog. The only way to handle it is to buy a cheapest android and install all bank apps there.

> There's no backlash. Is there anyone stating to stop buying Google Ads? Moving to Firefox [...] ?

I've actually noticed and increased number of "this is it, I move to FF" posts, here and on Reddit. Since FF fixed their main performance problems, switching is not particularly burdensome anymore; and now the assumption that Google is "evil" has reached the same level of popularity that Microsoft used to have at the peak of their powers.

I think we're in a similar position as early-00s opensource: commercially fledgling, but establishing a solid mindstream in geek circles that will shape the future in unpredictable ways that are not favourable to Google.

Wait what? Do you have any further details about the f-droid and Ms auth? Damnit I'm going to have to do a PSA at work if this is true.

> DRM is what banks love.

> Recently, there're several major banks' mobile apps in Singapore stopped working as they started scanning all apps installed on a device, and some they don't like

This seriously triggers me. I can't even enable developer mode on my phone without these apps flipping out.

Banks in my country (Brazil) have a long standing tradition of doing this. Even on PCs they have these asinine "security plugins" for browsers. You literally cannot log into their systems without the goddamn thing installed. Not a single person managed to explain to me what they do, so years ago I was bored at work and tried my hand at reverse engineering the plugin to figure out why it made the computer so unusably slow.

I caught it intercepting every single network connection.

Didn't bother to check anything else. Just assumed it was phoning home with private information and started treating it like the malware it is from then on. Actually switched banks to one which didn't require this crap. These freaking banks think their "fraud prevention" justifies anything.

There's a package for this "banking security tool" in the Arch User Repository.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/warsaw

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/warsaw-bin

Who the hell knows what this thing does nowadays? Maybe it doesn't monitor people anymore, it's been years and we even have a GDPR equivalent now. But I will never install it.

South Korea is the same. I knew Brazil were our only brothers in arms when it came to this hellscape but I was under the impression that unlike here, in Brazil over the last 5 years or so this had become a thing of the past and you don't have to deal with this crap anymore, making Korea unique in the world.

I take it this is not the case, and theyre still making you install malware?

Yes, it is completely a thing of the past for most if not all banks

If you're using a phone, maybe. If you're using a desktop computer, you still have to install that malware.

What's the country mentioned above with the mandatory bank security plugins?

Brazil.

Check this out. They even have a Linux support page, complete with screenshots depicting it running as root.

https://seg.bb.com.br/duvidas.html?question=10

https://seg.bb.com.br/img/faq/linux/verificar_modulo2.png

I looked it up the package I posted above and found a gist with the unpacked contents:

https://gist.github.com/fititnt/8d94b0574c6a4ec7e8c4088c6474...

Literally asks for your root password, downloads some proprietary software off the internet and runs them without even computing checksums or anything.

Corporation that made this thing is owned by Diebold, the corporation that made our voting machines. Bone chilling.

> Corporation that made this thing is owned by Diebold, the corporation that made our voting machines. Bone chilling.

Right, let me just put my tin foil hat.

It's hilarious how some people's stance on voting machines did a 180 after the 2020 elections (or at least, all the pro voting machine people started coming out of the woodwork). Politics really is the mind-killer

I remember when Diebold were Dick Cheney's personal election-riggers in 2004, although it seemed like a bad long-term plan since the plan was always for Bush to cancel elections in 2008, but I guess quarterly earnings are king.

It won't help.

> There's no backlash.

Why did they roll it back, then?

I moved to Firefox. This nonsense was the final straw on that.

The Verheydens?

They're saying anything that disagrees with them is bullying and criminal. But, labelling anything that disagrees with them as bullying, is a bullying tactic to try to silence dissent.

Why do they want to silence opposition? Because their position does not stand up to scrutiny.

Pushing anything in tech uses this playbook. Look at systemd and Wayland. They take the bullying approach and act like their intentions can't be questioned.

We need a stronger response to their arrogance. Something that will affect network performance and intercept revenue. We can start by blocking them at the DNS level. Host with Google? Too bad your choice in tech sucks.

> Pushing anything in tech uses this playbook.

no, they don't. Google just criminally accused the opposition to their new "internet law" of being doing so in order to continue committing crimes.

Point out a single Big Deal in tech that wasn't misrepresented or accusing the opposing side of some character flaw.

The behavior from Google fits the same bill. The way they're doing it is just the difference between FOSS 'communities' and multi billion dollar corporations.

They likely have psychs on staff to manipulate the narrative around their totalitarian software and services.

>They're saying anything that disagrees with them is bullying and criminal.

That is not want was said. People making direct and indirect threats against the author are not acting in good faith and want to just silence the author without anyone fairly evaluating the proposal.

>Why do they want to silence opposition?

Threats are not productive for deciding if a proposal should be adopted. They are just noise. Wanting to get rid of noise and focus on signal is not "silencing opposition."

> People making direct and indirect threats against the author

Indeed that would be the case if that were so, yet it looks like what actually occurred here is the author is abusing the labelling of bullying and criminal in order to falsely tar all disagreement as that.

This labelling abuse is itself a bullying act designed to intimidate and shame into silence any disagreement by misrepresenting it as a threat. Which is itself a threat: agree with me or I will accuse you of evil and silence you.

That's what it seemed like at the time. Let's note that the quoted comments are from a months' old thread.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim about there being direct and indirect threats?

>Do you have any evidence to support your claim about there being direct and indirect threats?

Read the Github issue and you will see people irrationally freaking out about this, indirectly and directly threatening to sue the author, etc. The people disagreeing and bring up problems were much more civilized until it went vital and then it turned into a cess pool of unproductive discussion.

In the linked Groups post, the author reports "physical threats and other forms of abuse". I find that very easy to believe and your post reads very uncharitable, unless you have concrete reasons to think that the author is lying.

I find that very easy to believe

Yes, and that's the problem the GP is pointing out. We're a social species that's predisposed to defend a victim, that's why playing the victim is a very successful bullying tactic.

There's a big difference between using robust language and threatening someone. What we're seeing here is an obvious attempt by a small minded individual to play the victim.

There isn't playing the victim here. He was pointing out the large amount of noise around this. 99% of the people making this noise have not even read the proposal and do not actually understand what it means. It is hard to engage in a productive conversation if people are arguing against a something that your proposal doesn't even do.

> It is hard to engage in a productive conversation if people are arguing against a something that your proposal doesn't even do.

First thing they should stop taking for granted the right to make proposals. Which obviously leads to the fact that they should accept when their BS is rejected.

Threats can never be a justification for them to act against all of internet users, this is BS. One threat which can be manipulated by themselves (false flag) and now they have an excuse? Bullshit. If they have any problem with that, call the police, that's no excuse.

Justifying shady corporate practices by pretending to stand the moral high-ground is nothing new. Just recall Apple's child pornography nonsense.

"We are introducing web DRM to protect users from those evil people out there..."

The hell you are.

>who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses

While benefiting unethical businesses like Google? That's called a cartel.

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