1,253 karma · joined October 24, 2017
On the outside a browser seem harmless, but Qihoo 360, Alibaba, Tencent and all the other Chinese companies that operate popular browsers, kindly showed the world what they’re capable of when they decided to make the 966 GitHub repo inaccessible to everyone using the Chinese browsers (which many people are unknowingly doing since they come preinstalled with their cheap phones).
Just to be clear, they didn’t block GitHub as a whole, but they instead rewrote the content of a specific repo despite HTTPS being present. They could do the same with every website in the world, such as rewriting the content of Wikipedia articles, rewrite the content and websites returned in your Google search results, in your Facebook, YouTube feeds.. write fake NYTimes articles and modify the frontpage to link to them, or push the fake article to a specific group of users on social media, or rewrite Google Chrome’s download page to download a modified version that is bundled with malware. The possibilities are endless, and keep in mind that the companies themselves were willing to abuse this power to silence software developers complaining about long work hours.. imagine what the CCP would force them to do.
If your crime is downloading Frozen, and the authorities can’t find any trace of the movie on the device the logs claim was used, then it would be shameful if the logs alone were enough to convict the person.
Imagine you’re selling chocolate that you want people to associate with luxury/wealth. To achieve this you might want to limit resellers to be 5 star hotels and luxury stores rather than the 1 dollar store.
If you want to market yourself as a champion of privacy, then the absolute minimum criteria should in my opinion be that your codebase is open source.
If you hosted your own instance then it would be a lot more reliable since the IP wouldn’t send a suspiciously high amount of requests.
As for your trust argument, I couldn’t disagree more. You choose to trust DuckDuckGo, who happens to be closed source, because of their branding. The same way people trust/trusted Google/Apple/etc. because of theirs. This thread is a perfect example why being open source is the most important thing for any privacy service (because otherwise this privacy leak likely wouldn’t have been discovered, and people wouldn’t have known that the company so carelessly violate people’s privacy and fail to correct it when people point it out.. it should really make you wonder what’s happening in the search engines codebase).
If you're willing to sacrifice search quality for privacy, as in switching from Google to DuckDuckGo, then you might as well take a step further and switch from Google to Searx/Ask.Moe.
I’m not familiar with the browser situation in India, but it’s yet another reason why we should recommend and support Firefox, and why we should avoid software and hardware from authoritarian countries.
That being said, I of course know that the Chinese government didn’t force Apple to implement this privacy violating feature, and I know that the Chinese government didn’t force Apple to allow TikTok to abuse it. But many people see Apple as a privacy conscious company thanks to its marketing, and its good to remind people that for Apple, privacy is simply a marketing gimmick.
Aren’t you a CCP member?
(Sorry in advance if you take offense to me assuming your nationality and political allegiance based on your comment history.)
Does/did slavery only affect black people?
It’s really tiresome to see companies and celebrities voice support for equality, freedom, human rights in America while staying quiet (and even telling people to keep politics away from their platform) when it comes to the Hong Kong protests.
I love DDG, but at the end of the day they’re for-profit, US-based and closed source.
> “We have asked Twitter why it blocked our account,” Sodhi said. “We are waiting for the reply.”
Sounds like they suffered from more than a simple CAPTCHA before their login (in which case it also sounds absurd to publicly restrict the account).
Twitter says:
> “Safety and security of the accounts is a key priority for us and to ensure an account has not been compromised sometimes we require the account owner to complete a simple reCAPTCHA process,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. “These challenges are simple for authentic account owners to solve, but difficult [or costly] for spammy or malicious account owners to complete.”
This makes no sense. It's a ~9 year old verified account with 250k followers, operated by one of the largest companies in India, with no unusual tweet activity.
The founder also claimed that Waterfox was never pivoted as a privacy-focused product.
That might be how you feel. For me, GDPR and the “Cookie Law” have been amazing, as they make it incredibly easy to detect which websites and businesses you should avoid.
I do however wish they’d be a lot more aggressive with the fines.
I’d probably use it for pet projects if they made it easier to automate backups to the cloud, and I’d use it for all projects if they offered a hosted solution.
> “Yeah but you can’t trust any of those numbers coming out of China. It’s gotta be way worse than they’re letting on”
Please be mindful that it’s not just Chinese or Asians being targeted, and that the racism foreigners are experiencing in China right now is far worse than what the Chinese are experiencing elsewhere.
If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg