The Candid Naivety of Geeks | Hacker News Reader

The Candid Naivety of Geeks

ploum.net

157 pointsSlackingOff12383 comments

Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs.

Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

The other important fact is that there are multiple entities keeping an ever-growing dossier on you which you cannot see, delete, or correct.

Every step you take, every word you write, every picture or video you look at, every single thing you pay for, every place you go, every person you call/message, or are physically near to. And the times when you left your phone behind. For everyone, combined, analyzed, searchable, with machine-learning-everything thrown at it to find and predict patterns and of course to stalk exes, political activists, anybody.

Imagine what the Stasi police could do with all of this and know that your current administration is doing it.

It’s a bit depressing even if put to the music of I’m Watching You by hmmm… the Police.

>NSA dragnet Can you tell me more? What specifically, are they collecting? The porn I've looked at on /s/?

>always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs Are we talking about IME? That's more of a 'theoretically it could execute code, but they'd need a crazy amount of software engineering to really use it to monitor you'. Besides, you can MITM your network traffic and see if it's phoning home. And I'm sure people do, and I've read no cases of it actually being used that way.

Not that I'm okay with this or happy about it. It's just less dire than could be since, although the infra is there, it's not being used.

GP basically called himself a schizo so they know, at least subconsciously, they went too far down that rabbit hole. Even though they just called us idiots.

My particular hot take, speaking partially from experience, is that indeed, there are insurmountable amounts of data collected - but it's collected by hundreds of disconnected, inhomogeneous and incompetent organizations with conflicting goals. There's no global all-knowing conspiracy, even governmental organizations in a single country have poor data sharing capabilities. And this should be trivial - it gets much harder when you take into account commercial organizations that store user data but it's not their main focus, commercial organizations that want to sell user data, but not for free, commercial organizations that really want to pretend they care about user privacy, foreign organizations, foreign organizations from hostile countries, and everreaching bureaucracy related to getting data from basically any of those.

Not a hot take at all, this is pretty realistic. But notice at no point is pure privacy a serious option, instead we count on hopium. Sure they DO have a lot of our data and they COULD be up to no good, but they wont, because.. reasons. I also never said anything about a conspiracy, just simple facts like how VPNs and social media sites are legally required to keep usage logs in case of illegal activity.

Yeah im memeing, i personally dont care but think "privacy enthusiasm" is a cope. Even signal I wouldn't trust, which OPs whole sales pitch. Exchanging a OTP in person is probably your best bet, but i personally have no use case. So yeah hardware telemetry might be an extreme example, but its certainly happening at every other layer.

Not all are naive on some kind of layer. That would imply sticking your neck out and proposing solutions. There are also the fatalists. They are immune to being wrong because they think it is hopeless. That means never being able to be called an idiot, a very important protection for some.[1] They also literally don’t care so there’s that too.

[1] There’s so much surveillance that it is very easy to fall into the trap of being a naive idiot. Not to worry. We can be fatalist and not have to worry about that charge.

You can get hung up on the "attitude" like most people, or realize that the first step to a solution is facing the facts. I'm not being blunt to be condescending, but its tedious how we're constantly sold half-baked "solutions." "Just use Signal!" No I'm not handing all my data over to yet another company because made a super duper promise to respect privacy. I'm still waiting to hear an actual solution except for the obvious: don't use the internet. And even then the world is still full of cameras, microphones and satellites.

Now you care? One comment ago you personally didn’t care. And I’m responding to someone who said that “there's nothing you can do about it”. Where was the in for anyone to take the “first step”? No, I’m not taking the first step towards facing the solution since you already said that’s off the table.[1]

Now you can get hung up on someone pointing out that this fatalism is intellectually a three-feet deep pond and trying to pivot to someone else having their feelings hurt by your badass attitude. But it’s clearly all heat and no light.

[1] For the first step I would ask someone serious about the subject.

You're really desperate to get this dunk, but you don't have to try so hard. Its really simple: prove me wrong.

Prove what wrong? You keep changing what your message is.

I’m not a fatalist because I believe there’s always a way to remove oppressive measures. The world got to this point through a series of events that favored certain groups. It’s possible to make a world that serves everyone.

You've confused absence of comprehension for absence of argument, but your lack of counter point is abundantly clear as you've resorted to projecting a lot of hot air. Do YOU even care about privacy? I think you're just self righteous contrarian, arguing from feelings, not facts.

My message is clear and consistent, here is your chewed food:

I care about privacy. I don't care for privacy enthusiasm, which means using products like VPNs and Signal that pretend to give you privacy but really don't. It is impossible to have a modern internet experience and real privacy at the same time, and I don't pretend otherwise. I have yet to see a real solution - not a made up hope-based idealism - to this problem. You either use internet and accept it (when i say i don't really care) or stop using the internet and go live in the woods.

> Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

But this nihilistic, all-or-nothing attitude is another kind of naïvety.

There are absolutely still ways for people to keep large chunks of their online presence and activity private. Using E2EE services like Matrix and iMessage, for instance. De-Googling sharply reduces the amount of information Google has about you. Etc, etc.

It may not be accessible—or even understandable—for everyone, but the idea that absolutely everything we say, do, want, and think will be collected and tracked and there's nothing we can do about it is just not true.

Plus, privacy leaks are plugged one at a time - we'll never get to private computing if we immediately give up because there's more than one thing spying on us, so fixing any one thing won't solve everything.

And it's a lot harder to spy en masse if for each act of spying you risk exposing your chip-level backdoor, instead of just asking Facebook for the data.

I said nothing you can do about logging. Of course you can stop using large parts of the internet (or stop using it altogether) but that kind of defeats the purpose if there's no good alternative, regardless of accessibility. The point is that perfect privacy on the web is impossible, so why should OP worry about amazon storing voice data when tons is already logged in google meet, microsoft teams, zoom, webex, discord etc.

I’ve always been puzzled by the proposition of E2EE when you have no control of the ends.

If Meta wants to read your WhatsApp messages they’d just do it on your device. How would you know?

"You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise."

This type of statement usually comes from the "schizo" who is "living on the internet", not the "normie" who has a life away from the internet and only uses it occasionally. It is a common "all-or-nothing" perspective that has been shared on HN for at least a decade. Meanwhile so-called "tech" companies spend millions on lobbying against privacy regulation and pay millions in fines and settlements for violations.

Perhaps whether one has "privacy" is not as important as whether one believes they might be able to get it. As long as the possibility of "getting it" exists in people's minds, and people take action toward that end, then so-called "tech" companies face a potentially existential threat. It interferes with the progression of their only "business model". The "all-or-nothing" view of "privacy" seen in HN comments is particularly suspect when one considers that those invested in so-called "tech" companies have a financial interest in erasing the _possibility_ of "privacy", i.e., the motivation to take action, however small and seemingly insignificant, from people's minds.

There are ways to use the internet that send minimal useful data to so-called "tech" companies and there are ways to use the internet that send maximum amounts of data to so-called "tech" companies. Neither is "internet privacy" in the absolute sense. But each has a different effect on the "business model" of so-called "tech" commpanies.

More importantly, less use of the internet may result in less data being shared with so-called "tech" companies. Good luck getting the "schizo" to reduce their internet use. It is not suprising the "schizo" would suggest an absolutist standard of "internet privacy" where achieving it is impossible. For the "schizo" who is wedded to the computer, this is probably true.

Despite your assertions that someone who thinks that lacking privacy online is indicative of a specific hallucinatory mental illness, it may surprise you to learn that plenty of people lacking that mental illness think similarly.

It's less a function of mental illness or time spent online, and more simply pointing out the old-as-writing state of affairs where companies will do whatever they can do to you to make more money. See the "Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir" for a timeline of this.

It is not hallucinatory to observe that companies take advantage of people given the opportunity to do so, and it is not indicative of mental illness to be unhappy about being on the receiving end.

NB. The term "schizo" and "normie" are the parent commenter's choice of words, not mine. Hence each is in quotes. No reference to actual, medically-diagnosed mental illness is made; I presumed the parent commenter's terms are simply another attempt to divide internet users into groups. This "us" and "them" perspective, e.g., "technical" and "non-technical", "schizo" and "normie", etc., as silly as it is, pervades a majority of HN comments.

Au contraire, the vast majority of normies are married to the internet via TikTok and Instagram, the difference is the schizo knows it. The divisive hyperbole is my own dramatic flair bc of my own frustration with the issue, not a conspiracy to divide.

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar.

Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon.

Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many employees its through design not luck.

> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl.

This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incentives too.

The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident in 20+ years is a huge success given the scope.

> Google revealed to TechCrunch that a second Google employee had also been caught violating user privacy and was also dismissed. Google didn't reveal any details about what or when this occurred, other than to say the other case didn't involve minors.

I agree largely that the efforts have been successful but there’s more than one incident. I’ll even speculate wildly without any evidence that there have been more than two.

Upvote. Employees are the actual enforcement of tech ethics. See Google project maven pushback

It's a moral race to the bottom when the salary's good and competition is fierce. It's great that Google pushed back against Project Maven, but nothing stopped the other 21+ companies from participating.

Oh wow. Do you really want to die on that hill? Big tech is responsible for a HUGE MOUNTAIN of absolutely hideous shit, destroyed lives and dead people—and you’re telling me that the engineers with a freely adjustable consciousness that built this machinery uphold some sort of ethics? The same guys that created algorithms optimised to glue children to screens for most of the day, driving young people into depression and suicide, and allowing the emergence of „alternative facts“?

And yes, Amazon employee #18447272. You are just as responsible for empowering Bezos to fuck over the WaPo as the rest of them. Employees of big tech corporations are the silent accomplices of the tech oligarchy we’re headed into.

There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with.

Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of privacy regardless.

Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but there have been arguments against it.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...

Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership).

On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent

OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far.

The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features to plausibly differentiate along these lines. And privacy is one thing that they know Google will never be able to offer, given its business model, so it makes perfect sense for Apple to double down on that.

(Ironically, this means that Apple users benefit from Android being the dominant platform.)

That is kind of proving OPs point, though: the differentiating factor isn’t actual privacy, it’s an impression of privacy that you’re sold; the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re using a superior product because you’re special and this phone is for special people that have important data that needs to be protected, and as a manufacturer of special people devices, Apple obviously takes care of this—because you’re important, duh!

If they can get away with appearing to care about privacy instead of actually doing so, they will. That’s all it takes to look better than Google.

You don't even have to make the argument that Apple is untrustworthy. The stronger argument is that you can't know what Apple will be like in the future, or even if they will still be independent (which seems far fetched since they're so big) or a division that deals with user data won't get sold off with the data even if it's to a respectable company, because that company may eventually sell if to a slightly less respectable company, and repeat.

The risk for PII being utilized nefariously never goes away as long as it exists, so the only same stance is to not allow it to exist in others handle if at all possible. It's the same reason you don't share your banking credentials with your friends. Sure, you might trust them, but you can't know the future, so why even expose yourself to risk you don't have to?

That is true, but the catch is that reputation is very easy to lose and very hard to gain.

> Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

> This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit

This is the important thing I'm always trying to note to people that think incentives are enough (as I used to). You can never know what the incentives of the company will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, or whether that company or division will exist or have been sold to some other company.

Incentives based on current conditions only matter for outcomes that don't have ramaifications far into the future. That's definitely not data collection and privacy, where you could find that 10 years worth of collected information about you has been sold at some future date.

And lest anyone think they can predict the stance a company will have on a topic a decade or two later, all I can say is that any example someone can point to of a company that has stayed the course we can easily look at point in history where a series of events could have gone the other way and they would be close to being bought out if not defunct. Even Apple had a period where they were bailed out by investment from Microsoft, and many other large names of that period were gobbled up.

Always keep in mind, Sun was an amazing company with amazing products and engineers that embraced open source and competed with Microsoft in the enterprise market, and eventually after declining they got bought by Oracle.

> The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up

> In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate.

> The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice

> The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"

> And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.

12+ years of instilling faith in schooling and science does work. So when people realise that this is a corporate world, that money directs everything, even what they have been trained to think, it comes as a bit of a shock. But mostly people carry on anyway, as they have the habit.

Repeated games are studied in game theory, and the winning strategy is to "trust, retaliate, and trust again". Logic isn't limited to first order logic.

Having better priors can be useful, but they're no substitute for evidence. These assertions about how naive you supposedly should have been about some company are less useful than sharing evidence about what the company actually did.

I came here to say this. Does the author not think that dozens of these “geeks” have enough technical acumen to figure out what information their Echo is sending to Amazon’s servers? It would have been a noisy scandal.

I agree so far, but:

>But was is happening in your inbox, really? >Most spam is not "black hat spam". It is what I call "white-collar spam": perfectly legitimate company, sending you emails from legitimate address. You slept in a hotel during a business trip?

This is pure survivor paradox. This is true for your Gmail account, because all "black hat spam" was already filtered! I own two unfiltered email accounts that were sadly scraped from the internet, and the spam is - by far - almost completely malspam, romance scam, cryptocurrency spam, scam attempts, spoofs, phishings.

I have a protonmail account with close to 0 spam. In fact, I get more spam on my legacy gmail account.

Email spam is not the huge problem people make it out to be. Common sense goes a long way.

There’s actually a meta-naivety in geeks where they write stuff like this and then get on the soapbox to shill some random project that is somehow better and that we can actually trust some random service for reasons that fall apart if you apply the exact same scrutiny to them. Really, they’re just smug about being smarter.

Let’s take the two advertisements that the author has. I call them advertisements because, despite being sure neither Signal or Protonmail paid this guy, he fell into the obvious trap of “xyz sucks, here’s what to use instead”.

Amazon is bad, Apple is bad, Kagi is bad because they all take your money. But Protonmail is good because they…take your money? They take your money and if they did something bad you wouldn’t pay them. Ok? And this obviously has happened to all the secure apps that people continue to use despite them being hacked, or the companies that rebrand after it’s found out they were leaking your information? If Protonmail was found out tomorrow to be a front for the CIA, who suffers? What’s stopping the people running it from just making Electronmail tomorrow and claiming that they aren’t a front for the CIA?

Meanwhile Signal is an open source project and that means everyone has reviewed the code and trusts it. What happened to giving companies money so that they suffer when they violate your privacy? If Signal makes it so that you don’t want to use it, what harm do they suffer? If they add new code that backdoors the app or sells ads or harvests your contacts, what are you going to do about it? Will you publish a blog post explaining how you were the geek who got conned this time?

I actually have nothing against these specific projects, just as I generally don’t have specific vendettas against the other dozen things these blog posts tend to shill (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Quebes, GrapheneOS, Firefox, whatever). My point is that the geek is perpetually vulnerable to thinking his choices are good because of some technical reasons, when in reality we choose what we associate with based on trust and human factors. You probably choose your software because your buddy from IRC told you it is good. A lot of people choose their software because they saw an advertisement showing that this company actually cares about their privacy. Neither of you is dumber than the other and making people feel bad for not keeping up with the evolving landscape of privacy is generally not productive.

so what's your point? rant about the rant?

if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress

That’s exactly the thing the author is calling people “naive” for.

so we should remain in silence and just use the most popular because it's a lost game?

No, we should apply the same evaluation criteria to whatever we're considering recommending as we do to whatever we're bashing.

apparently Proton has its source-code open (https://proton.me/blog/security-audit), regards Signal and the other search engine i don't know... i bet none of them are the panacea on privacy but it's also quite naive to counter the author rant placing Google, Meta and whatever are at the same ethical ballpark of the former companies when they were involved in a bunch of scandals over their history and are making A BUNCH of money on their evasive telemetry (often shaping culture, see what Youtube turned; click-bait titles, prolix dialogue because the algorithm of [more time watched = more revenue] and even questionable thing like "album reactions" or just silly stuff that feels an offense to the enviroment like filling a swimming-pool with slime or some absurd shit on Youtube Kids)

edit: i could also go on what Instagram turned out to be...

Guy on a good soapbox, but heavy on assertions and high emotion. Those damn trade-offs!

Except the trade offs only go one way. Its a rachet. You never get more free, open systems. Over time your life and the life of your children only gets more bound. It's frog boiling.

You're displaying the exact naivety he's trying to point out.

Maybe, but these types of complaints have a very long history. Photographs are an invasion of privacy. And many forms of technology. We are embedded in complex societies. The idea of being a sacrosanct private silo is a Western mode of thinking, and not an old one either.

the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up.

A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends. They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit, that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter, but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden.

You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple storing your voice.

It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to ask me why I'm being difficult.

The cognitive dissonance in the article when it comes to Signal and Protonmail is the same thing the author is deriding with people trusting Apple et al.

Apple has far more to lose monetarily than protonmail if it comes out that Apple sells off iMessage contents or similar.

I agree with the ideal of the article and the plight, but the shilling of Signal and Protonmail absolutely destroy the message because it goes right back to who you decide to trust to run a closed source service for you.

A corporation betraying a relationship with a customer is not a magic property of a corporation. It can happen just as easily with non-profits, coops, and any other org structure.

They are all groups of people in the end who you don’t know and fundamentally cannot trust to be acting as an agent of your interests.

100% we need more of Stallman or someone pushing actual open source.

Signal and Protonmail are not that. They are just other SaaS providers that you have to trust the marketing of.

Even if you self-host on own domain using libre software, you have to trust the registrar and certificate authorities. Thinking you can cut out all trusted third parties is naive,too.

No you don’t. The CAs are only necessary if you want random public devices to be able to validate your domain.

And you don’t have to trust the registrar because of what I just said. You don’t need to depend on PKI.

As a tech employee who has worked on software privacy controls for consumer devices at amazon I have a couple thoughts. First, let me clarify that I am still highly skeptical about any tech companies privacy promises. That being said, the privacy control I worked on for one of Amazon's devices was a pita. It was a hardware switch which completely powered down all sensors, and modifying code related to it required extensive testing to preserve customer privacy. Amazon at least emphasizes to employees earning and retaining customer trust. The real reason I actually semi trust tech companies privacy policies is the ethics of individual employees. Maybe I'm projecting my disgust at privacy infringements onto my coworkers, but I generally believe these large corps can't hire sufficient teams of devs to build privacy compromising systems without at least one person whistleblowing.

My $.02

Sure they can. Just build something that allows for abuse, set up controls that prevent individual employees from abusing it, then have an exec secretly do whatever they want without your involvement.

The ethics of individual employees only lasts until the next firing, unfortunately.

> But most importantly, Signal sole existence is to protect privacy of its users. It’s not even a corporation and, yes, this is important.

"Not a corporation" means little if there's no transparency to how the nonprofit's board members are appointed or elected.

See the controversy that is the WordPress Foundation, which is also a 501(c)(3): https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t...

I guess geeks should be sceptical of legal structures that might get passed off as "feel good" marketing too. :)

People still giving credit to Apple even when THEY HAVE GOTTEN CAUGHT of listening all of the people's conversation in order to train Siri back in 2019[1] are a really good illustration that you can't have a working democracy when gigantic corporation have such a control over what people will think about them no matter what they do.

[1]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parl...

Thought the title said greeks and was very confused when I started reading about amazon. Very good article though.

My jump to conclusions mat says "The author doesn't understand tech!"

I worked on on-device speech at Google, both frontend and backend. Unless there was a secret cabal mirror team that did all the evil stuff and made us think we were writing the code that was shipping, it doesn't come close to describing how things actually were worked through internally.

Most trivially, and narrowly, Most Evil Amazon would be just as happy with a transcript of what you said that was recognized locally. There's 0 reason they need the audio. I'd also hazard a guess they're not streaming audio to the server, no one would create a hotword detector that would rely on that, due to the latency and bandwidth demand alone.

He's not wrong, but he's also not right. I suppose it mostly comes close to screaming into the void and not helping with anything.

The way things are is also a mirror of large society. It takes a lot to keep it all going, combined with nobody has time or wants to care about the technology in their life. At best there are some negative events that makes people think about it for a little while, and for some there will be a bad memory, but in the end it just fades out of focus to the same place where oil changes and filter changes go.

The Candid Naivety of Geeks

> Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.)

Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is going to change anything?

Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz. Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in, for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it, because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would commit to long-term memory.

No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds like something between bad impulse control and idiocy.

I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to convince.

100% agreed. This is just someone self-reporting on their own recently discovered naivete, but projecting it into others.

yeah it sucks that a lot of the rust ecosystem is pushing permissive licenses over copyleft

copyleft is less free than permissive. noone should be compelled to share their work if they don't want to.

But we collectively should be compelled to protect it under IP law?

I’m personally completely fine(legally not morally) with people or organizations who want to keep trade secrets secret, but not if they also want society to protect anyone copying their work. The tradeoff is you show society how to accomplish your innovation and we’ll guarantee you profits for X years with the might of law

Edit: this was in response to the comment about no one should be compelled to share their work. I don’t know enough about the nuances of copyleft vs permissive licenses to have useful commentary

Individual freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is only effective if collective freedom is aimed and enforced. Having the freedom to live under a roof at the condition that you have enough money isn't something I'd consider actual freedom, and yet someone is free to restrict access to land and empty housing. That is plain stupid for a healthy society

the "freedom" being limited in this case is the freedom to privatize otherwise public work

privatise your additional work on top of the public work. the public work doesn't stop being public.

In theory. In practice it does stop being public because it is either sold or used as a leverage as a whole, public and private parts together.

Rust libraries "have to" be permissive due to the way they are compiled. Rust's current compilation method requires everything to be compiled with the exact version of the compiler at the same exact setup due to lack of ABI compatibility guarantees. This means everything has to be compiled from source. LGPL doesn't work since it will force companies to release their entire source code.

Without the ease for proprietary software development Rust wouldn't get as popular nor it would receive the same support from big tech. Without that popular support it wouldn't be as performant, nor it would attract the top system programmers it did.

It is also extremely naive to think that copyleft licenses aren't actively violated. It is rampant and at this point violating them is the industry standard actually. Making software effectively "ownerless" by accepting many independent developers makes it also equally hard to defend its licenses. The socioeconomic system of the West prioritizes private ownership. Without a clear private owner (or a consortium acting on behalf), it is hard to defend GPL and the rights.

a permissive license is essentially the worst case scenario for a violated copyleft license

“spammers are more consistent at making SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correct than are legitimate senders.”

LOL!

Yea this one confused me. DKIM and DMARC are about preventing impersonation. Haha. Nothing to do with unsolicited email.

I was laughing at the point that they are doing the extra steps to be compliant to all pass DKIM and DMARC yet legitimate companies are still running open relays.

Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-supported.)

But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is definitely a thing of value.

And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one that is attempting to compete on the basis of privacy.

And so they have e2e encryption on iMessages, most of iCloud, are the only people doing meaningful things with homomorphic encryption and AI, etc. They recently, very publicly, turned off these features in the UK due to recent legislation.

But if I look at what they're doing, and the audits they're admitting, and the political hits they're taking, and if I dismiss all that I'm supposed to be "candidly naive"?

Do you want us to choose our platforms on the basis of privacy, or not?

And I'm not just "trusting" Apple, I'm looking at their financial incentives. Which are focused around selling extremely overpriced, decent quality hardware. Not ad targeting. For me to believe that Apple is wantonly and deliberately harvesting my data would require that I believe they have an entire secondary advertising business that has remained completely under the radar.

Again, fuck you for making me defend Apple. They have so many issues. But also if we just go pure nihilist and don't even allow companies to compete on the basis of proper security, what's left, unless we go offline entirely?

> We want companies to compete on features that have value to users.

What we want and what actually happens are two different things. In many cases there isn't a whole lot of competition. For example, Apple's only competitor for mobile OS is google.

principal naivety here seems to be by the author

Ploum's Doctorow-adjacent nuance-free condescending nerd-rants always makes me want to channel n-gate.

Funny read.

> And that’s why I see Apple as a cult: most tech people cannot be reasoned about it.

After presenting zero actual reasons to believe they are not taking privacy seriously. Just.. beliefs.

> Corporations are lying. You must treat every corporate word as a straight lie until proved otherwise.

> I don’t say that Signal is perfect: I say I trust them to believe themselves what they announce.

I share the distrust in corporations, but there is zero technical reason to believe Signal apps are more secure than Apple's unless you reviewed the code yourself, entirely, and built it from source.

Pot, meet kettle.

He says he has read some code:

> First of all, Signal is open source. And, yes, I’ve read some of the source code for some feature I was interested in. I’ve also read through some very deep audit of Signal source code.

Pedantic, but the naivete of spelling it as "naivety" (diacritics dropped when anglicized, for those even more pedantic)? I'm pretty sure that (mis)spelling did not exist (or was certainly not commonly used) 10 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com