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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.

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Auto update is basically a root backdoor, it's especially troublesome when you are not the customer, you are the product!

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

I think with Windows you probably are the customer and the product

Cory Doctorow had an essay about that years ago, except he didn't artificially limit it to Windows:

"Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product: Incentives matter, but impunity matters more."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar...

Man, this is a dumb take even by HN standards.

No, the dumb take is believing that if you pay for something you are not the product anyway.

He meant the face-value of your comment is dumb.

But I think it as sarcasm is also wrong.

I definitely feel less a product on macOS than anything Google-orientated. I don't know where Windows fits into that exactly, given "paying for Windows" is not really how it's even seen, given major updates were 'free' (with extra ads).

With Linux you can control up to the detail any auto-update, and any update in general, all the way to being able to inspect the code.

With GNU/Linux, yes. With Android/Linux, not so much. [1]

(I used to dislike this "GNU/Linux" term, it seemed unimportant - Android showed me why the GNU part of it is)

[1] https://keepandroidopen.org/

Only if you have the closed-source Google Play Services... Just like desktop, there are plenty of Android distros like LineageOS

I don't think anybody implied or thought of Android in this subthread, just because it nominally runs the Linux kernel. I for sure understood it as just "Linux = whole OS-level distros of the laptop/PC bound type" not "anything with a Linux kernel even if it's a proprietary mobile phone OS".

Why is nobody building a paid for browser with built in search engine and LLM assistant? Should probably make it open source for transparency. And before anyone says you would build/compile it yourself if it was open source, those ppl are already running their self compiled tools and are not the target market.

Who would pay for it when literally every other option has been free for a lifetime?

Isn't that essentially Dia? (Pro is 20USD/month.) https://www.diabrowser.com/

(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)

And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

(Tell me if I'm misunderstanding you?)

You are still the product with commercial OSes. Paying doesn't stop them from shoving ads and telemetry wherever they can.

This is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.

Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.

> ... don't understand consent.

The word you're looking for is "respect". They understand consent, the same as JBS* understands animal rights.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V.

For anyone else wondering why that link doesn't work, the hacker news formatting is dropping the final period. Add it back in and the link works.

It is almost the standard:

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later

but the Google version is:

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later / we did it anyway, you'll need to search to find out how to turn it off, maybe ask the new AI model we've just back-door installed?

I think they do. They just don’t care. We’re the fleetingly small percentage of nerds in the corner who will notice and complain. Were useful to them for other reasons but we’re not really the concern here.

It’s probably a business misplay to tell the other 99% of users about something they weren’t going to think about. But if by chance it goes awry and there’s outcry, just apologize and commit to do better.

Do you understand consent?

1. Yes

2. Ask me later

There is a difference between

- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)

- software company decides to release a new version. The Debian packaage maintainer checks if the update is fine, is compatible with Debian policies, then includes it in the packages repositories.

In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.

Yes, and it is precisely that kind of curation that makes Debian as valuable as it is.

I'm on an Arch flavor, so its whenever I feel like updating. I try to update frequently enough, but if i wait weeks or months, nothing breaks, it always just works, and I get the latest of everything.

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