Now, we're locking people out of society for having the audacity of wanting to decide what gets run and not run on their computers?
Now, we're locking people out of society for having the audacity of wanting to decide what gets run and not run on their computers?
Kinda weird, if you think about it. But that seems to be the way it's heading.
Anything remotely more advanced than that, please let me use my computer and an app or website with, you know, an interface designed for more advanced operations.
Trying to do anything on a smartphone/touchscreen only device is nothing but an effort in pure frustration for me.
Of course in Canada we have a banking oligopoly that is effectively there just to rob people, but ironically any of the “challenger” startup banks are 100% app based afaik
I did install app from CIBC for one single and the only purpose - deposit cheques sent to me by clients to my business account without having to go to ATM or the bank teller.
> Of course in Canada we have a banking oligopoly that is effectively there just to rob people
Are there any OECD nations that don't have a banking oligopoly? I can think of at least one: Germany, because they have Sparkasse (community banks). Does Canada have community banks like Germany and the United States? If yes, then you should vote with your wallet and switch.In my experience they are more pleasant to deal with, tend to be smaller/more conservative with tech and you can speak to a human when shit goes sideways.
Mine has never laundered money for the cartels (unlike my other bank) which is a plus as well.
No, the much more secure while at the same time liberty-preserving way to do this are heavily sandboxed secure enclaves with attestation, or even better standalone tamper-proof devices capable of attestation.
Like the ones practically every bank customer already has in their wallet, and for which most phones have a built-in reader these days... The only thing missing is a secure input and output channel, like a small built-in display and a button or biometric input.
In any case, I somewhat empathize with banks in that they want to ensure that my transaction confirmation device is not compromised, but getting to dictate what software does and doesn't run on my own hardware outside of maybe a narrow sandbox needed to do that is a no-go.
It's not money-preserving though. You need an extra device, and an extra phone number. The separate phone number is another privacy-preserving feature though.
A cheap Android phone is pretty much the opposite of a Yubikey, in terms of trusted computing base and attack surface.
That is one of the reasons the crypto market is behaving like some radical innovation instead of just a group of bozos speedrunning financial history. For the first time since the invention of capital we have an asset class where it doesn't take the cooperation of a group of armed thugs to guarantee the integrity of the system.
Merkle trees can prevent tampering after the fact, yes.
But if you include collusion, there's no way for the blockchain itself to know who is colluding and where they are so.
Smart contracts may be vulnerable or malicious.
Wallets can be emptied.
Centralized exchanges and similar entities still exist.
Policing systems are still needed, because as long as there is something of value and there is still "evil" in the world, someone will try to steal it or damage it.
My favorite, basic example is this: I'd like to create my own basic widget showing me my account balance on my phone's home screen. Doesn't have to be real-time, but accurate to +/- few minutes to what the bank app would say when I opened it. It has to be completely non-interactive - no me clicking to confirm, no reauthorizing every query or every couple hours. Just a simple piece of text, showing one number.
As far as I know it, there's no way of making it happen without breaking sandboxing or otherwise hacking the app and/or API endpoints in a way that's likely to break, and likely to get you in trouble with the bank.
It should not be that way. This is a basic piece of information I'm entitled to - one that I can get, but the banks decided I need to do it interactively, which severely limits the utility.
This is my litmus test. Until that can be done easily, I see the other side (banks, in cooperation with platform vendors) overreaching and controlling more than they should.
The point of the exercise isn't to just see the number occasionally; I can (begrudgingly) do that from the app. The difference here is that having the number means I can use it downstream. Instead of a widget on the phone screen, I could have it shown on a LED panel in my home office or kitchen[0], or Home Assistant dashboard. Or I could have a cron job automatically feeding it to my budgeting spreadsheet every 6 hours. Or I could have an LLM[1] remind me I've spent too much this week, or automatically order a pizza on Saturday evening but only if I'm not below a certain threshold. Or...
Endless realistic, highly individual applications, of a single basic number. The whole point of general-purpose computing empowering individuals. If only I could get that single number out.
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[0] - Why would I want that is besides the point.
[1] - E.g. via Home Assistant.
Sure, you should definitely be able to do what you want with your computer, but you're actually demanding more here (at least in the case of transaction initiation and confirmation): For others to also trust the outcome of whatever you did on your own computer.
Banks are often legally required to cover losses resulting from unauthorized account access, so I can somewhat understand them wanting to minimize the chance of that happening. Sandboxed trusted computing, when done well, can strike that compromise much better than annoying non-solutions like root detection heuristics or invasive full-system attestation.
> As far as I know it, there's no way of making it happen without breaking sandboxing or otherwise hacking the app and/or API endpoints in a way that's likely to break, and likely to get you in trouble with the bank.
Banks should probably be required to make such a read-only API available (and in the EU, they are, to some extent – unfortunately only to "trusted", i.e. regulated and registered, service providers, raising the old question of who determines who is and isn't trusted). This is a very different story from transaction initiation.
Unfortunately, there are also caveats here. It's getting more and more common for companies to require me to "connect my bank account", which often means nothing less than granting them full and persistent account view access.
I think having the API still outweighs the downsides of others also starting to make demands for that access, but it's a slippery slope. For example, Airbnb not too long ago wanted full access to all(!) my Chase accounts to "verify my credit card".
Thats what is being required. The problem is making sure the policy is enforced correctly includes local business logic and user experience components. The money transfer needs to come from an authenticated user providing consent, not from some software that happens to have managed to get installed on the phone with sufficient permissions to interface with the secure element or to have their version of a library loaded.
That means one needs to validate user-facing software, and not just the API to a black box. Thus one is requiring a chain of custody validation up to the boot loader.
Maybe in US. In Vietnam, $300 is the average monthly salary, and the minimum wage is around $150. Probably the majority of people don't have a primary phone worth more than $300.
Much like I expect my employer to provide me hardware, and that hardware is used exclusively for work.
I shouldn't have to spend my own money on another device, nor should they be asserting their desires for control onto my own devices.
Otherwise, they just get to be OK with offering me a website or letting me transact with them on my own device that's under my own control without stipulations like requiring attestation, or prohibiting root.
The point is, governments nor banks or other private entities, should be getting to dictate what can and cannot be done on someone's computing device.
It's been popular demand, not financial institutions, driving the change to “the smartphone can do everything, I don't want to take debit/credit cards with me everywhere.”
People don't want an additional card, or yubi key, or printed second factor, or whatever, to authenticate.
They want an app that uses a data connection, and a fingerprint to replace even needed a PIN. They tolerate a second channel: an SMS, if the app automatically reads it. That's as much inconvenience as the general public is willing to put up with.
They're starting to demand that this works offline for smaller spends. And they'll put up with a phone call as a 3rd factor for when they want to unblock a really high spend, like purchasing a car, but it can't happen all the time.
They want this to work reliably, even on holidays, all around the world. And they want the banks to cover losses if it all goes south.
Now try to design a system that covers the requirements people are demanding for, without trusting the terminal the people decided they want to access it from.
Like....why can't we just go back to that? Banks were "fine"(doesn't mean happy) to shoulder the cost of these devices then.
A country that is a dictatorship - I can understand why their slaves have to go through this. I fail to see why a true democracy would do this though. There is zero need to be required to have a smartphone; all those transactions work perfectly fine on a desktop computer system too, under Linux. People then may have a second device at home, some card reader and/or a thing such as Yubiko or something like that. IMO not even this should be required, but to mandate an app that would not be permissive under Linux - that is true dictatorship. I am surprised the government of Vietnam went that way.
(From the kernel-level anti-cheat discussion the other day)
Just "a phone" with a bad update policy is $100.
Piracy isn’t merely a virtue, but a moral imperative, an obligation to uphold civic freedom.
It is immoral not to pirate. It is everyone’s duty to do their part in normalizing and encouraging piracy.
The problem here isn't the money, it's the lack of privacy and control.
The best analog I can think of to piracy in this situation would be rooting the phone/installing GrapheneOS. And, yeah, that's definitely something people should do if they want that control, but I really hope people don't put it in the same category as piracy...
See also this article from Cory Doctorow:
How many companies even produce these controllers?
But that weak ass crime, that we like to call pirating in order to appear cool, No, that is not theft at all.
No need for the scare quotes. Forcefully removing people's agency over themselves is pretty much the definition of evil. We do not hurt criminals as punishment anymore, in the civilized age, but we still lock them up.
Now, of course we should not equate physical prisons and digital prisons in any other way, but we should absolutely call both forms of imprisonment evil, plain and simple.
Singapore is quite civilized, and they conduct caning strokes.
Now that physical media is all but gone, computer manufacturers (both personal computers and phones) found it behooved them to essentially control the market with regards to what can get installed on your computer. Oh, and conveniently, they charge a fee for developers to use this "service," and take a percentage of what the developer earns by selling software on their "service." And somehow in the late 2000s early 2010s, it just became normalized, and somehow the term for being able to install software on a device you supposedly own became a scary term, "jailbreak."
Granted, jailbreaking was often used for piracy, but the fact that there needed to be a process at all confounds me.
My mom has an iPhone and she manages to install a bunch of weird things on her phone, like anti-virus software that almost certainly don't scan for viruses, but are all too happy to take your money to make your phone more secure. These are things that the App Store "service" should have guarded against if they were indeed doing their jobs and protecting consumers from bad software.
And, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd be locked out of her banking app eventually because [insert entity here] deems her phone too old to update her banking app. She's "following the rules" and still getting screwed over.
Through the 00s, Apple practically built their reputation on being "virus-free" which really just meant they locked out the user from being able to do anything too extreme.
The real irony here is the use of free software to tear down everything the free software movement stood for.
I do not know whether Vietnam has any pretence of digital sovereignty, but many countries that do are doing this like this to actively move away from it.
I really hope we can convince enough people to care about general computing.
Cory Doctorow lays it all out in his speech about the Post-American Internet: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Businesses, in general, have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason except when their refusals either explicitly, or implicitly by pattern of behavior, derive from one or more characteristics that are protected from discrimination under law. The characteristic of having rooted, and/or having modified, a device is not currently protected from discrimination, and so businesses — who are self-serving to the extreme and minmaxing risk vs. profit just like any good video game player would — are within their legal rights to discriminate against users who modify their mobile phones.
You can see a similar pattern taking effect in the car modification industry; California requires tens of thousands of dollars to assess whether a car modification is "legal" to sell there, due to the intersections of gas vehicle smog laws and the tendency of vehicle owners who modify their vehicle to be likely to, just as businesses do above, selfishly minmax lower-emissions vs. higher-performance behaviors in the car's components and programming. As there exists no categorical protection against undue discrimination for "those who modify their property", one such as myself who modifies their vehicle without intent to reduce or defeat low-emissions behaviors has no recourse to claim that the state's $20,000 test fee is discriminatory against personal use by individuals. I support the societal-level necessity of enforcement in this area, but that doesn't excuse charging $20,000 to a for-profit business and then $20,000 to a personal-use resident.
So, the true solution, in a U.S. constitutional context anyways, is to amend the protected categories under the Bill of Rights to include "individuals who modify their own possessions" as a category that is protected from undue discrimination. It's a simple enough change from a written perspective. Perhaps California or the E.U. will enact it first?
Note, however, that undue does not mean always. Digital ID checks should be restricted to devices booted into sealed-attested mode for the same reason that notarization apps should — faked/stolen digital IDs carry severe and broad-spectrum risks to an entire society of individuals — but banks simply trying to decrease their fraud reimbursement expenses have insufficient cause to discriminate against account holders accessing their accounts. I would absolutely accepted "not permitted to initiate outbound transfers in excess of $10,000" as a compromise.
It becomes more unclear when you consider e.g. Apple Pay, and Apple Music. Both currently deny service to those whose macOS is not sealed and attested. One could make a very convincing case that digital wallets are a case where the benefits of sealed attestations are a necessary case of discrimination against those who modify their devices; financial fraud is a nightmare for both users and banks, after all! But there is no convincing case that being able to listen to music albums with a modified device is somehow a threat both to users and to the music industry, and so Apple would find their demand for sealed+attested to be illegal discrimination by Apple Music.
I suspect the outcome here is that we see devices that offer a sealed-attested 'wallet' mode, activated by a hardware switch function of some fashion, that temporarily seizes control of the device in order to create a protected environment — with some sort of indicator that can't be falsified by any other software on the device, i.e. the camera green / mic orange LED — so that users can interact with attestation-critical services like ID checks, NFC payment, and MFA requests without having to reboot their device from modified mode. Those who want to install their own attested environment can do so, with the understanding that a great deal of legwork remains to not only earn the world's trust that third-party environments can be secured, but also that both government and corporate environments detest having to decide who to trust themselves and will do their very best to either reject all parties other than a single corporation (E.U. age checks, I'm looking at you!) or will create arcane bullshit obstacles that make it difficult to DIY a secure wallet. Some of that difficulty is completely appropriate for exactly the reasons that secure attestations are appropriate in specific, narrow cases only (same reason I appreciate paper currency having physical anti-counterfeiting technology, but not the stupid constellation): counterfeiting predates humanity, sealed-attestation environments are an excellent defense against entire categories of attacks, and a reasonable level of bureaucratic slowdown is an excellent defense against opportunistic hit-and-run fraud.
In fact this is what led me to unlocking the bootloader, swapping the OS and rooting my phone. The infuriating situation where if you setup so called "corporate owner" (or mdm) during the first login you can add your own certificates, but if you don't... Basically the "corporate owner" of your phone is Google.
Yes, literally, you do not own it.
Also it is worth noting certain countries where "rooting/bootloader unlocking is illegal" - namely China and the horrible stupidity of people claiming EU Gdpr prevents manufacturers from offering simple bootloader unlocks for their phones.
We absolutely need to vote with our walkers. I bought a Samsung before and a Xiaomi recently only because both allow relatively simple unlock (ok the Xiaomi requires you to wait to press "request unlock" exactly at midnight Beijing time", and it only works for non-Chinese phones, but still unlocks fine.
You can protect against that by requiring the app to have a valid signature. You cannot guarantee that the signature is valid unless you can guarantee that the kernel has not been modified. You cannot guarantee that the kernel has not been modified if the phone has been rooted.
For what it's worth, my banking app for my Canadian bank (and the app which does second-factor authentication for web transactions when doing web-based online banking) will not run on a rooted phone. For good reason, I think.
My bank used to use SMS for second-factor authentication, but no longer does so. For good reason. When I do online banking from my desktop, I still have to use the second-factor authentication login on my phone. Or sim-less tablet, interestingly. Whatever the mechanism, is, it is not SMS based.
That's why you can't have root access to the modem even though you technically own it.
App sandboxing and system file integrity is one of the most beneficial security features of modern computing, and the vast majority of people have no desire to turn it off. You can buy rootable phones. People overwhelmingly choose iPhones instead.
Even if Apple sold the SRD at scale, nobody would buy the weird insecure hacker iPhone except us and maybe kids who realllly want Fortnite.
For the masses, lack of system-level access is a benefit because they won't be able to ruin their device. For hackers and hobbyists, lack of system-level access is a hindrance because they won't be able to control their device.
All other things being equal, we should try to protect people. But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
Of the few people using rooted phones to begin with, there's even fewer that don't know what they're doing.
Much more likely is this is a decision to get in line with the well documented and rapidly spreading surveillance laws of the past few years.
> But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
You are acting like it's easy to accidentally root your phone
We also limit investing in certain types of investments to so-called “accredited investors” which is just legal jargon for “millionaires”.
I don’t think the point you are trying to make about letting people own-goal is as strong as you think it is. (I would have gone with “roulette is legal”, which is a better one that the investment one, as the accredited investor rule is in all 50 states.)
If you are interested in the public good, I think it is pretty clear that we should ban roulette overnight since it has a negative expected value for everyone but the casino. On the other hand (still presuming you're interested in the public good), I think you have to consider very carefully whether it's good or bad to lock people out of investments or to restrict people's access to health care.
Why can "normal people" be trusted with a car then? Or firearms? Or kitchen knives?
Tylenol is another example. Building materials is a third (building and fire codes are a relatively recent invention). Hell, even penicillin is by prescription only.
Letting the circumstance happen where median people can easily cause externalities through ignorance or carelessness is how we incinerated the planet and destroyed the biosphere as we know it with fossil fuel emissions, because it’s nbd (still even now in 2026, when we know about runaway polar greenhouse curves) to get in your ICE car and drive to the corner store.
When normal people had GP computers, we got botnets millions strong and DDoS in the Tbit/sec range and keyloggers on every hotel lobby computer hooked up to the boarding pass printer. Median people are way safer on the internet now than before.
If you mean Indonesia (the county closest to 3.5% of the human population) or the US (the nearest above 3.5% at 4.1%+) then you are high by an order of magnitude. Two jumbo jets are around 1000 people. US car deaths are around 100 a day and Indonesia is a little lower.
If you mean Pakistan (the next country after Indonesia at 2.9%) you are high by close to two orders of magnitude. They have around 15 deaths a day.
Much in the same way we try to limit physical addiction, which hypothetically only affects the person taking the substance, and gambling (though we're moving backwards on sports betting).
Some hypothetical social ills: 1 If it's a good source of money, it becomes more ubiquitous. This leads to entire illegal markets, which will typically lead to additional crimes, up to and including human trafficking, slavery, organ harvesting, and murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center.
2. The victims of scams will often feed shared or even stolen assets into the scam, desperately relying on an eventual return that will never come. This mirrors one of the better known social ills of gambling and addiction.
3. Even for people that never fall victim, defending against scams is tiring, irritating, and damages social fabric. An easy example is how spam cuts down on the utility of phone calls. In general, to be safe you have to be almost irrationally suspicious of anyone being surprisingly friendly, which makes non in-person connections -one of the greatest benefits of the internet - much harder and more dangerous to forge.
What do you think, is that enough reasons?
4. These kinds of "social ills" hypothetically affecting only individuals, actually spill over to affect their families, and, at scale, communities.
That being said, in most cases it still doesn't justify this level of drastic intervention. Otherwise, cigarettes and alcohol and even Lotto would've been banned out of existence by fiat.
No, your reasons are laughably bad, because the societal damage caused by these scams isn't even 5% of the societal damage caused by smartphone addiction in general, and not even 1% of "general smartphone addiction" + "tiktok/instagram/infinite scroll video feed addiction" + "gacha game addiction". Let alone "(sports) betting app addiction" for the many countries where this is a thing.
You can have sandboxing and system integrity while still giving the user overrides. But hey this is not Google and Apple's business model because it makes you less dependent on them. And it interferes with their sweet 30% rent-seeking app stores.
Mobile security works this way not because it's best for us but because it's best for making them money.
> You can buy rootable phones.
Eh yeah but the problem is of course being locked out of apps if you actually root it.
I don't want Google or Apple to decide what I can do with my phone. Or the government like in this case. This also opens the door for evil spyware like chatcontrol in europe. Even today they are trying to enforce a backdoor into whatsapp to block "harmful content" which is of course impossible without breaking or circumventing the E2E on-device.
> People overwhelmingly choose iPhones instead.
Maybe in America, not here in Spain. I guess not in Vietnam either.
I think this is wishful thinking, and the most experienced organizations in the world in this field agree with me. You can’t square this circle.
We can pretend that these two things can coexist, but they cannot. Where there are overrides, there are youtube tutorials on how to disable the overrides to install malicious botnet vpn surveillance proxy apps to get free robux. (to borrow a turn of phrase from @ptacek iirc)
If you give users an escape hatch, they will get malware in ring 0 and Apple Pay will stop being a thing because people’s cards will start getting remotely skimmed at scale. (Or Amazon will give you 1.5% off all purchases to install a rootkit that uploads your complete realtime cc nfc purchase boop history and email receipts and location track so they can figure out which businesses to clone/dump on next.)
If you say “…but not the SEP” then you’re just admitting that you need a part of the phone the user does not and cannot control. Most users care about the privacy of their nudes and sexts so they’d rather it be the whole damn phone.
Did we forget that even the not-full-scale escape hatch that was enterprise app certs was abused by Meta (then Facebook) to install surveillance VPN backdoors on customer phones at scale? Apple didn’t even know bc they were sideloading them via enterprise certs and when they found out they revoked them across the board, but by then thousands of people had had 100% of their phone’s network traffic surveilled by an ad company without consent.
Got it.
And remember the consequences when Apple starts scanning all your photos and sends a SWAT team to arrest a father who took a picture of his son's rash and sent it to a doctor, because surely he was engaging in child abuse.
I rather have Meta steal info of the 100mln idiots that install their root kits on their devices than have Apple and Google do the same for Billions (with a B) to protect from the former.
And that swat example wasn’t Apple.
How? What kind of overrides? You mean that Safetynet could still report attestations?
I have no idea how it works, but doesn't it require a chain of trust, starting from a known boot image, then every process that can write to arbitrary memory needs to be a known image? (And even that might not be enough if there are ways to dynamically exploit them.)
In those systems, it won't boot without a good signature, so the user is protected against attacks that break the user's chosen chain of trust.
Remote attestation of consumer devices, e.g. Safetynet is evil.
I don't believe in remote attestation anyway. It didn't even say the service is secure. It just proves it's as released by Google. But security doesn't have to rely on a big brother checking things for you. You can have security without it.
There was never going to be anything preventing non-technical folks from buying iPhones. They can and should have what they like.
Why should there be a law that forces that same compromise onto anyone who can only afford a single device and needs to use it to access their bank?
If there is a series of buttons you can press to circumvent the anti-scam measures, then the scammers simply walk you through pressing those buttons. If you cover them in giant warning labels the scammers simply add explanations into their patter. The buttons must physically not exist, for gullible people to not get scammed out of money.
The next response will be 'well maybe we shouldn't accommodate them'. They vote, and there's more of them than you.
The average user simply does not have the skill to determine real from fake and any heuristics to do so will be defeated by the scammers. You have to be able to understand what could be done with access, not what's "intended" with the access.
No, only when you don't do this and nothing else to improve security. You're presenting a false dichotomy.
> If there is a series of buttons you can press to circumvent the anti-scam measures, then the scammers simply walk you through pressing those buttons.
If the scammers can walk somebody through doing all that, why would they stop at just asking them to send money over to them "to safekeep it because of a compromised account" or whatever the social engineering scheme of the week is?
We shouldn't be protecting someone that gullible at the expense of everyone else who is smart enough to actually read whats on the screen and not fall for such simple scams.
Not that long ago most of this forum was very much against giving up freedoms in favor of catering to the lowest common denominator. What happened?
People need to take responsibility for their own actions and educate themselves, not rely on a lack of freedom to protect them.
My uncle, an engineer, was scammed out of his life savings last year. He was a smart guy, he just got older.
I don't care. Society doesn't exist to keep people safe from their own bad decisions.
Regardless, it isn’t a law that you have to buy an iPhone.
Bullshit. Big tech's war on general purpose computing hasn't stopped scam. It's a pretext for rent seeking and control and you know it. It's the reason we don't have a popular ecosystem of FOSS alternatives on mobile. It's the reason we can't run virtual machines on tablets when the hardware very much can.
If combating scam is a priority of big tech, I know where to start. Get rid of ads! That would actually be enormously effective as it gets rid of the primary entry point of scams.
> If there is a series of buttons you can press to circumvent the anti-scam measures
So the best you can come up with is an imaginary button on phones that can magically circumvent checks that should be implemented server-side? Have you any idea how software works?
Further, the people promulgating this sort of solution know this. The evil is that they are wittingly using a problem as the excuse and the cover to get something else they want which they would otherwise never get and have no right to.
For everyone who is doing this knowingly, there are countless other sincere but unwitting tools haplessly just buying the line sold to them. So you might be able to say you are not evil for supporting this kind of policy, but all that means is that you are either a witting or unwitting tool of the evil policy.
"Rapes happen behind closed doors, therefore we have to remove all doors. No one denies that rape happens and that it's a bad thing. And it's irrerfutable that without doors that close, no one would be able to get away with a rape. And so, the only grown-up thing to do is agree to give up doors that close. It's not an evil at all."
This is kind of a shitty compromise, the second you leave a tiny crack open in the security, maybe through root access, maybe some better sideloading, somehow people WILL be tricked into installing malware, and it baffles me...
I've seen it happen multiple times with my older (and younger, though less often) relatives and acquaintances, I'm really not sure how like a solid 5 dialogs that scream at them with sayings like "do not do this", "this is dangerous", "if someone is telling you to do this they're a scammer", and that somehow raises zero alarms, however if you tell them to consider the possibility that they're downloading a virus, or that the nice IT man on the phone is probably not that trustworthy, they will simply not believe you.
That's why I kind of get the paranoia, though most of it is just that and I really believe that software freedom is a whole lot more important.