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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason why Free Software (as in freedom) was invented: To ensure that those who create the software do not overpower those who use the software. The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. And it is wrong, because to be a human in the 21st century means in most cases, that your digital devices and your digital interactions are a core part of who you are as a private person. Invading the privacy of one's digital space is a violation that goes as deep as reading someone's diary when we look back and the time when life was more analog.

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> The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong.

You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will. If the object can act in a way that favors someone else's interests over yours, you do not own it. This is true of pretty much any device running proprietary software.

A litmus test: can you make your device lie to the manufacturer's servers? Regardless of the legality or morality of doing so.

However this article is really about something else: the vulnerability of centralized services in the face of government oppression. Signal only has the ability to log messages because it is a centralized service that controls both the client and the server. The benefits of E2EE is greatly reduced if the client and the server is controlled by the same entity (tomorrow Signal can push out an update that would send a plaintext backup to their servers, and you wouldn't know it until later). Moreover, the non-free distribution mechanisms on mobile phones (stores) limits a company's ability to resist.

Also only possible because we use Signal as compiled by themselves and not by trusted third parties from a source kept clean of any future client-side backdoors. The client is open source, right? https://github.com/signalapp

(Reproducible builds is a cool technique.)

I have unpopular opinions about this, because Signal has been so hostile to anyone other than Signal themselves being involved.

But to be specific: "open source" claims go out the window when they're;

1. Not reproducible (before anyone links me to the "reproducible steps" please actually read them because they tell you directly that they will not create a reproducible output).

2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories.

Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has.

EDIT: I don't really care if bots or shills downvote me, can you really, with a straight face, say it's NOT "trust us bro" ideology that makes people use Signal?

Can you point out where it says it won't be a reproducible output?

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

Ah nice; they got rid of that explicit warning - instead though we have the entire section about "bundlePlayProdRelease" including an externally sourced binary blob.

A significant improvement.

I don't understand how the details of the build process matter if the resulting files can be checked to be bit by bit identical? I can only think of something like Signal and Google conspiring to backdoor the binaries during the build process via this external binary blob. But if Google is part of this, they could also do it within Android which is not fully open source.

If you don't like this, you use the non-Play Store build instead (which supposedly doesn't include any binary blobs, but I haven't checked).

I skimmed and didn't see that but the "apkdiff" script extracting the apk because "diff doesn't work well on zips" made my gut twitch.

Why can't I sha256sum the two apk?

It seems there are multiple reasons. For one, the apk files include a digital signature and you won't have Signal's and Google's private keys available to recreate their signatures.

Thank you for this nice response. Did you already know or did you look it up? please don't tell me you just copied and pasted my question into an input form somewhere and it gave a bunch of reasons...

i should have done that.

I was interested in this so I had a look at the tools.

Now that I asked ChatGPT, it didn't include this reason - perhaps it's too obvious and no-one has written it down before.

Archive formats are hard to make reproducible because there are lots of ways of making different yet equivalent archives. So it’s not surprising to me that someone would fail at this hurdle and find it frustrating to resolve. Nix defined their own format for this to avoid this exact problem.

I’m throwing a +1 your way. Hiding development for a year to launch a get-rich-quick coin isn’t the way a trustworthy FOSS organization should behave.

As someone who got their whole network to switch to Signal before that happened, it was absolutely disgusting watching that all play out.

https://molly.im for a more FOSS and safer fork of Signal

> 2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories. Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has.

The MobileCoin work and the source code not being published on the public repository for nearly a year was an extremely ill thought move. It soured my view of Signal as well.

Yes, this is part of the problem. Application developers and the packagers should be distinct unrelated entities to reduce the chance of a malicious update being pushed to users if the developer sells out.

F-Droid and Debian/etc show how this is done.

Without reproducible builds, this just means you have to trust the packager instead of the developer. Sometimes that's a good trade-off, but you still haven't really solved the problem, just moved it.

With reproducible builds, you don't have to trust the packager or the developer as long as you trust at least one person who reviewed the source code.

Packagers have proven to be more reliable. Sometimes they make mistakes but there's no case of a packager ever selling out (correct me if I'm wrong.) On the other hand, there are numerous cases of developers selling out.

That does not solve the problem. A country can forbid F-Droid and Debian and anything else that is not in a short list of vetted app stores that comply with the law of that country to backdoor everything.

A sovereign country creating and enforcing domestic laws is not a problem that can be overcome with software.

Splitting the developer and the packager doesn't inherently reduce the chance of a malicious update any more than using a VPN reduces the chance of being snooped on by an ISP. All it accomplishes is change who you have to trust to not be malicious. You might have good reason to believe that you can trust one party better than you can trust another, but unless you're building the package yourself there's still no guarantee that the package that you install is built from the source code you can inspect.

It's all based in trust in the packager and only the packager—there are no checks and balances. The only reason why splitting up the responsibilities might help is if you find the F-Droid maintainers to be inherently more trustworthy than the Signal developers, not due to simply separating the concerns.

> to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will

Not by a long shot. Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images.

I'm not saying I'm a fan of even more exceptions of that kind, but I don't think there are any particular inherent rights arising from property ownership beyond from what society agrees on there are (e.g. the first sale doctrine for physical media). That's what makes it even more important to codify these rights.

Note that I said "can", not "legally can". You can destroy currency, alter passport, reproduce copyrighted images if you want to. There may be legal consequences but you can. You can also stab a person with a knife you own, even if you will be punished for it. I'm not talking about rights, but capabilities.

You can't make your phone lie to an app developer about its location, rooted status, etc. You can't make your HP printer print with unsanctioned ink. Therefore, you do not own them.

I also can't make a pen and a sheet of paper contain a proof showing whether P is equal to NP. Does that mean I don't own them either?

Now you could of course say that the difference is somebody having intentionally designed an object in a way that makes it capable of withholding some functionality from me but not others, and I'd agree.

But all in all, I just don't think "property rights" is the right lens to think about computing devices.

You can also not use a service. I think anonymity is a better measure than the ability to lie for co-operative systems.

> Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images.

These aren't counterexamples, they prove the rule. A US passport literally has the text "this passport is the property of the United States" printed inside of it, and I imagine the same is true in most countries: you are the recipient of a passport, not the owner of one.

The same applies to copyrighted images— when you purchase a book you own the physical copy and can fully subject it to your own will, but you don't own the right to make additional copies of it. You own the copy, not the intellectual property.

As for currency, it may not legally be the property of the US government like a passport, but I would argue that the fact that you can't modify it does in fact mean that you don't own the bill, the bill is a representation of an abstraction of "money" that you do own.

Afaik currency (as in the physical banknote) is actually state property too. What you really own is a promise from the national/federal bank to pay you the value that is written.

Yeah, that has been my understanding, but I couldn't find a citation for that right away, so I didn't want to assert it confidently. But I've heard the same thing.

> You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will.

Let’s explore that.

If the law says I can’t ride my motorcycle the wrong way down the street, does that mean I don’t own it?

What about if we add traffic cameras that absolutely guarantee I will be prosecuted?

What about it if we add a black box that reports transgressions automatically to the authorities?

What about if the black box automatically cuts power to the engine?

I don’t think ownership is a binary using your criterion, or perhaps it’s simply that different people will put the dividing line in different places.

You don't own the streets.

You can do what you want with the bike, but your analogy falls flat because it implies that despite you owning the bike you get to drive through your neighbours living room: because your right to own a bike somehow trumps their right to own land and a home.

You don't need to run the server to backdoor the client. You just need access to push updates to the client. It doesn't matter who runs the server.

> Invading the privacy of one's digital space is a violation that goes as deep as reading someone's diary when we look back and the time when life was more analog.

Which police with a warrant can very much do.

Or, for that matter, analog correspondence or notes can absolutely be subpoened in many sorts of court proceedings, including civil.

That is a significant hurdle. They have to do it for each individual target, show up in person and each case can be contested in court.

Scalable surveillance is different, just as scalable weapons are different.

It’s a good thing we have FISA then to protects us from the scalable surveillance. /s

There’s no warrant protection in this bill. They want to keep a copy of everyone’s data so they can look back at old stuff after the fact.

Even if there was warrant protection, I’d still be against it. People have traditionally had the right to speak to each other without giving a transcript to the police. I think it’s unreasonable to make that illegal.

Testimony under oath can be compelled

In theory. In reality, no. "I don't remember/I don't recall" is a famous dodge.

Yes but people can genuinely forget the exact words they spoke time ago, even one minute ago, or a whole conversation. Examples: Who did I talk to yesterday? Did I met that neighbor of mine yesterday or was it the day before? I don't know.

I think generalizing forgetting information ignores that certain conversations would likely have a better chance to be remembered

They are not the same thing.

Sure but I was responding to the point that a diary can't be searched. It can be. The key difference is that doing this for analog conversations was expensive for the police as it required them to devote finite human time. Digital is not the case.

Comparing to analog is I think flawed because even if it mapped 1-to-1 it does allow for a level of search that is problematic given the low cost of digital surveillance.

Unfortunately, when we switched from letters to emails, the legal privacy protections we enjoyed back then, were not carried over do the digital realm. We're still suffering and have to use encryption to protect ourselves from the lack of legal protection.

Legal protections are great and everything, but if I had to choose between abstract legal protections or concrete protections based on physical properties, I'll choose the later every time. Obviously both is ideal, but I'd use encryption for most of my correspondence regardless of my levels of legal protection.

It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy.

The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption, and now Signal being in a similar situation, shows that you can't just focus on technology and ignore policy and politics.

And you'll find out that a ton of people here on HN will care, but most of the public won't.

People should take XKCD 538 really to heart (The 5$ wrench one). It's not the same point, but very similar. https://xkcd.com/538/

> It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy.

It very much can. In a battle between human force and physics, physics win every time. If I send an encrypted email to you, you have the choice to not give up the key, even if you'll be in jail. With physical letters, you don't have this option. Technology gives you the ironclad ability to keep a secret, only limited by the fortitude of your character.

You clearly haven't felt a 5$ wrench on your body. Giving up your secrets under torture isn't a character flaw, it's what will happen to 99.99% of people under torture. I can't help you if you don't believe that this is true.

And I hope you understand that 5$ wrench is a euphemism for what would 'really' happen.

All this to say that no, technology does not triumph over politics and policy.

Technology very much does. It's the flesh that has a hard time triumphing over force. To counteract this, you can also engineer a system that can resist it through e.g. split secrets on multiple people located in different jurisdictions.

If you split a secret over two people, first, we use the 5$ wrench on one of you to identify the other and the rest is easy.

If the second person is somewhere else in a different jurisdiction, how are you going to communicate with each other to get the two halves of the secret together to encrypt/decrypt messages? It's an unworkable situation.

As I see it, you create a fantasy situation that would not work if you just want to communicate with people in a secure way. No amount of technology or encryption is going to work, especially in the real practical world.

You can always burn a physical letter or delete a file.

This bill is akin to making it illegal to destroy your own correspondence.

Did Apple cave to UK's demands? I thought instead they removed their product from the market, like Signal.

We're talking about companies though, not technology. Something like Bitcoin or BitTorrent can be regulated, but not stopped.

Not fully, but making transacting in Bitcoin outright illegal would probably go a long way to making it completely unattractive to 99% of all potential users.

And if Apple and Google were forced to remove all wallets from their app stores, it would largely be game over.

Transacting in Bitcoin is already unattractive to 99%+ of potential users.

In addition, simply taking out the on/off ramps, such as Coinbase, would destroy the utility of cryptocurrency as well, since the grand majority of folks dealing in the stuff are only interested in flipping it for more cash money on the other end by finding the next sucker in the chain.

Very few people actually care about the principles of Bitcoin and the like. Maybe the core devs and some very early adopters?

I think a large part of the success of Bitcoin can be explained by the combination: It allows people to say (and even believe!) that they're in it for the ideology, while the real motivation is primarily that of capital gains.

Whether it's useful to the current "grand majority" or not / holds the value it does today is orthogonal to whether the technology can be stopped and whether it still provides value to those who continue to use it.

I did worry this example would be too political, hence including the BitTorrent example as well.

Much like how PGP was disseminated by Phil Zimmermann, and then the government decided to come down on him like the plague in the early 90s. What the US government didn't know was that it was too late and such technology was out in the zeitgeist. Bitcoin is in a similar situation.

The actual software and code? Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle now. But, you can certainly hamstring it in other ways, and frankly, that should be good enough. I say this as someone who is absolutely not a fan of the project and find the perverse incentives in PoW especially to be pure garbage, but I am also a realist.

When you have folks like Peter Zeihan declaring that Bitcoin *will* go to zero - that is, I think, the epitome of hubris. We don't know what will happen next, and with our current administration, I'm only seeing Bitcoin become more influential in the interim, much to my chagrin.

I think we're in agreement.

> The actual software and code? Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle now. But, you can certainly hamstring it in other ways, and frankly, that should be good enough.

This is my point - the technology is out of the bottle. You can't stop it. You can disincentivize its use in all sorts of social and legal manners, but to go all the way back to my original comment: you can stop Apple (Coinbase) from operating, you can penalize individuals for using encryption (or cryptocurrency in this case), but encryption (and blockchain) still exists and can be self-hosted, and individuals can continue to utilize those tools.

Again, look at torrents. Its primary use case is illegal. What.CD, Oink, even TPB (at various points) have all been taken down. Yet torrenting still enjoys widespread use across the globe.

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency either, but I do want to note that "hamstringing" it at this point will likely have many negative downstream effects on the overall economy.

>I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency either, but I do want to note that "hamstringing" it at this point will likely have many negative downstream effects on the overall economy.

This part does terrify me. Too many hedge funds and more common investment vehicles have gotten exposure to this. If there ever is a huge rugpull, regular folks will get nailed. Sad times.

> technology can't beat politics and policy.

It often only can't in a world of mandatory centralized app stores. That's not the only possible world.

We technologists will probably be able to circumvent any Signal-ban. But we don't exist in a vacuum, we are a small part of a larger society. Who's at the other end of your conversation?

Most 'regular/normal' people won't and most importantly - don't want to - jump through the technical hoops to keep using Signal.

Although the downside of the official app stores is clear, the alternative might result in a swift return to the '90s and '00s where malware and viruses were rampant. Pick your poison.

I think malware and viruses are less common for many reasons, but I suspect increased awareness and security posture (including the architecture of modern OS) has more to do with this than "walled gardens." Malware does make it onto closed app stores, and many users (e.g. on Windows) still don't use app stores.

The answer you're looking for is probably to build more decentralized, FOSS software with better UX. Much easier said than done of course.

The antidote to XKCD 538 can be steganography. They won't beat you with a $5 wrench if they don't suspect you of doing anything at all. End-to-end encryption can become illegal, but as long as you can run arbitrary code on your machine, you can hide and decode messages with steganography. JavaScript can do the job, so even locked down mobile devices will work if you go to CodePen, JSFiddle, JSBin, etc.

Steganography isn't some magic shield to avoid surveillance though. If authorities are already monitoring you for some other reason, then they can burn a zero-day exploit and see anything you do on your device. And if your entire city is covered in cameras with facial recognition, well... you can have your secret messages but I don't know what kind of resistance you're going to be putting up. So to some degree you're right that you can't fully ignore policy and politics.

Not sure how to get most of the public to care though. I get most people have more immediate concerns in there lives, and crime is a legitimate issue, but even a cursory knowledge of history will show the hell life can be under authoritarian governments. I think far too many people think "it can't happen here", which seems insane considering how often it has occurred even in liberal democracies (Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and many more.) In less liberal and less stable democracies, it has happened even more times. I'm not sure why people have some unfounded faith that their government could never become authoritarian and oppressive.

I'm not saying take down every CC camera and get rid of intelligence agencies -- they are important tools for fighting crime. But there's a difference between a few traffic cameras and CC cameras in places people would presumably commit a crime, and burning targeted exploits for surveillance of truly notorious criminals, and just mass surveillance through banning end-to-end encryption. With zero-day exploits, the government is inherently limited in the surveillance they can do, so it's a limiting factor on their potential for abuse, as the more they use it, the more likely they are to be discovered and patched. But with no end-to-end encryption, the potential for abuse is limitless.

>The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption

Apple "caving" would've looked different; in fact, we probably never would have known, given the insidious nature of the underlying statute in the UK.

Apple is making noise about the fact that they pulled the product, and the tech press is making it clear WHY even though Apple itself is legally prohibited from giving any additional context.

I feel like that was probably the best move available to them given the cards dealt. Fighting in secret courts is unlikely to be fruitful.

Removing the advanced encryption option for new accounts is really 'caving' to the demands of the government in my view.

And in time, they will also remove the e2e encryption on existing accounts using the e2e feature to comply with UK demands.

They may have sounded the alarm, which I appreciate, but they still have to 'cave' and do as the UK government tells them or they have to cease operations in the UK.

What I'm really noting here is that Apple had no good options.

Capitulating would've meant giving the UK government the back door they wanted. They didn't do that. They complied in a loud and public way, which unmistakably shined a light on the insane request.

The only other options for them were withdrawal from the UK market entirely, or a secret court fight they'd probably lose.

To me, their actual response reads more like malicious compliance than "caving," which usually implies giving up completely.

> It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy.

There's definitely a strain of thought which perceives almost everything in society as being outcroppings of the progress of technology (however you define that), and especially in the 1990s imagined/expected everything to fall over under the mantle of "information wants to be free" etc.

I think you're right that this is an intellectual dead-end. Many of us lived through the 90s hype wave and into now, and have watched things take a complete circle. The Internet didn't transform society into utopia, the real-world dystopia transformed the Internet into a high definition image of itself.

I think that this highlights exactly why we need decentralized, open source software.

Back when Moxie Marlinspike made a thoughtful critique of Web3 (the most thoughtful one I had read, actually), I put together a reply. It’s worth a read for anyone on HN who cares about user freedom and how society is structured:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

A note to the younger HN crowd who may have grown up with locked-down devices: the “hacker ethos” used to mean the freedom to tinker and buuld your own. It wasn’t always the case. The Personal Computer and Apple came about through the Homebrew app. And before that, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were even building blue boxes for “phreakers”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI

Before he became a corporate golden boy, Mark Zuckerberg built Synapse for regular users and open sourced it instead of selling it to Microsoft and wanted to build Wirehog, but Sean Parker proudly said he and Peter Thiel “put a bullet in that thing”

https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/

I don’t want to just be the “wake up sheeple” guy or some unkempt Stallman clone. But there is a real culture clash between the hackers and the corporations, and I feel like the HN denizens who knee-jerk downvote of anything decentralized today don’t get the point of open source decentralized hacker ethos and how the people who practice it produce the next big thing. Working for FAAMGA and “the cloud” ain’t it folks. Here’s why “the cloud sucks” by Steve Wozniak: https://gizmodo.com/why-the-cloud-sucks-5932161

In short — read my rejoinder to Moxie Marlinspike, in my first link. It is ironic because all these years later, I end up being right: it is exactly his company that’s getting hit with this, exactly because it is centralized.

And if you are Moxie or Durov and think your centralized company has somewhere to run… here is the bigger picture around the world — governments are coming for you and the war on user freedom is coming through you: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

This principle seems out of touch with most people’s reality: products hardly ever do everything you want and often work against you. If someone has a device that doesn’t do what they want and there’s no setting to change its behavior, replacing it is usually the only practical option. (Or if it’s a problem with an app, they might be able to install a different app.)

If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them. Only software developers care about such things. (There is an indirect effect on what software is available.)

Yes, because we largely don't have Free Software.

> If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them.

It's of indirect use; they could use a modified version of the software that does what they want, created by someone else. This is why you generally don't see user-hostile features in Free Software; someone would just fork the project and edit them out.

The problem is that some forks are malware [1], so switching to a fork by developers you don't know is risky. How do non-technical users learn which software developers to trust?

[1] https://www.securityweek.com/malware-delivered-via-malicious...

Worst-case, they could hire someone they trust to review the source code.

More realistically, you generally don't have to switch to a fork in the first place because the mere threat of a fork is enough to prevent the deployment of user-hostile features. And when a project does get forked it's often a highly publicized affair with a lot of community drama which produces no shortage of information about who's trustworthy and who's not.

This is only somewhat true for the software most popular with technical users - the sort of thing the average Hacker News reader might be familiar with.

There is a long tail of malware in app stores, despite the efforts of app vendors to police such things. Nobody would be bothering to fork them because most technical users don't care about them, but they still attract lots of victims.

Example: malicious Chrome extensions. Authors of Chrome extensions receive enticing offers to sell and sometimes they do.

Yes, malware does exist in app stores. I don't really see how that's related to Free Software though?

When I say user-hostile features I'm not talking about malware. Yes, I suppose theoretically you could fork a Free Software malware app and make it not-malware, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about things like Samsung putting ads on your TV home screen[1], or BMW charging a monthly subscription to access your car's seat heaters[2], or Sweden trying to install a backdoor in Signal. With Free Software, users get the final say on whether those features are installed on their devices or not.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/184a1j6/why_do_i_h...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208

If malware isn’t user-hostile, I don’t know what is? It works both ways. A fork can fix something that’s user-hostile, but it can also introduce malware into an otherwise useful app that didn’t already have it, and many users won’t know which one to install. There’s no guarantee that any security researcher is watching. In practice we rely largely on reputation, and sometimes that’s the blind leading the blind.

Users don’t get final say in what their devices do unless a software developer is willing and able to help them. Most are actually pretty helpless on their own.

Yes, forks can do anything. That's the point: to make it possible to create software that behaves the way the user wants and not just the way it was originally programed.

There are lots of ways to figure out what version to install; which is a lot better than having literally no choice because there's only one option available: the one with homescreen ads/government backdoors/seat heater subscriptions.

Will some users make the wrong choice? Yes. Is that a valid justification for treating everyone like children unable to make decisions for themsleves? Absolutely not. Just as there are other ways to prevent real-world crime than by locking everyone in concentration camps, there are other ways to prevent cybercrime than by locking everyone in an inescapable walled garden.

OP is not out of touch, OP is literally saying that this is happening and that it is a bad thing.

I can speak for german law: If you buy something, it becomes your property, and you have full power of disposal ("Verfügungsgewalt") over it. If vendors deny you from exercising this right, they are violating their part of the purchase contract.

Rights are of limited use if there's no practical way to exercise them. Hiring a software developer to change an OS or an app is rarely a practical option for most consumers.

You can install Linuxor a custom ROM. And if the manufacturer has DRM like SecureBoot in place to prohibit that, you can file for damages and basically get the device for free.

Correct. It's not practical because those apps usually aren't Free Software and because the hardware or firmware they're running on often aren't Free and include anti-features that prevent you from installing Free alternatives.

If they were Free, users wouldn't necessarily even need to hire a developer to change their app or OS; those changes would most likely already exist in some form somewhere and the user could simply purchase the modified version.

Unfortunately, the philosophy of Free Software does not account for the scale at which software is being run now.

Having the source code to a printer driver available is a completely different thing than being dependent on a platform, because all your friends and relations are using it.

Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services, which makes the article we're discussing ironic at the least, or complicated.

"Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services" I understand where you're coming from, "the ultimate goal of a company is to profit and so we can not trust it to protect their users/consumers interests instead of their own" but... you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war right? That it is a blob of power, controlled by people right? This goverment = good that you see people believing these days is such a childish view of reality.

Government and charity can be corrupted (and usually are, to at least a small degree). Private industry is corrupt bt default: to the extent possible, it will intentionally serve owners at the expense of other stakeholders.

This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry.

Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.

There are a lot of pragmatic pro-government people here, holding tightly to the "51% > 49%" core principle of democracy, which sadly turns into a mess at the scale of humanity, just like any other model we've invented so far. There isn't a real alternative for us collectively now but to submit to power – so any even slightly anarchistic views are not welcome here most of the time...

So much this! The internet does not have to be a monolith controlled by the mega-corp/govt flavor-of-the-month. It originally was (and still can be) a network of smaller federated ecosystems controlled by individuals or smaller groups.

> This government = good that you see people believing these days is such > a childish view of reality.

There are plenty of immature ideas about running human affairs going around. History has shown that a social contract obtained by popular assent is the only viable choice, unless you relish war, insurrection, terrorism, and social collapse [0].

Government is good almost by definition because we grant its existence on that basis of benevolence. Indeed one should be ready to defend good government and lay down ones life to make it good, including overthrowing existing bad government.

This was well established 80 years ago and we seem to have forgotten.

I know there are some around here agitating for tyranny and dictatorship. That in my opinion is the "childish view", a result of too much screen-time and a lack of life experience.

Would you be willing to fight for good government? [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/soe/

you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war

You're merely playing word games here. A person keeping another human being against their will is called slavery or abduction instead of prison. Similarly, it's only called war when it's a government doing it, otherwise it's called activism, terrorism, or gang warfare (note the overload of the term).

The main difference between a corporation and a real democratic government is that a government is accountable to all its citizens, instead of its shareholders. I understand that this is a difficult concept to grasp for US citizens, but the rest of us living in actual European democracies don't deserve your childish derision. No system is perfect, but don't make the mistake of thinking that the US government is the best (or even a good) example of democracy out there.

Why do you presupose I am a US citizen?

Because you're repeating the typical US defeatist trope that government is other people. That attitude is how democracy dies. FSM help us all.

I'm brazilian. My complete and utter disdain for any trust whatsoever put on goverment (i.e. government officials, i.e. people) comes from hard earned experience. I would rather leave my life in the hands of an "evil" corporation than any bureaucrat.

It seems you have already accepted your subjugation. So it shall be, then.

> Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services,

I can't see why you'd say that.

Governments (and private corporations) are not operated to faithfully serve the public, certainly not the public as a set of individuals and small groups of people. It's not that "government services are bad", but rather, than governments, even democratically-elected ones, are practically certain to wiggle out of the straightjacket of strict protection of individual needs and interests for legitimate or illegitimate "greater good"; specifically, they will not resist the desire and the interest to spy on you. And the potential for government abuse of private information is quite high.

Bakunin put it best:

"There is only one essential difference between a monarchy and even the most democratic republic—in the former, bureaucrats oppress and plunder the people in the name of the monarch; in the latter, they do it in the name of the people's will." - Statism and Anarchy

The core problem isn’t the form of government, but the concentration of power itself.

A government run social anything would be the most milquetoast experience, wouldn't it?

I suppose if I needed to make sure there was a public immutable record of something it would be useful. Like "I made this thing no later than this post"

But who would use it?

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