Hardly. The company still has not owned up to their major fuck up in my book. They are willing to save themselves on the account of their customers. Dead company in the world of security, but might drag on in the scam world.
281 karma · joined December 31, 2016
I’m sick of seeing blind Proton defenders on HN, has the company bought some shills to defend them by diluting and misdirecting the community’s attention? I wonder!
The issue is that Proton lied. Plain and simple. Their marketing and promos were targeting everyone, specifically non tech savvy people, aka those who don’t know or can’t use pgp.
It’s not the end of the world, and mistakes happen, but Proton purposefully mislead their customers, and they should own up to it to even recover a tiny bit of their reputation. Otherwise the company is dead in my book and I would never ever recommend them.
Saying they caved in is putting it mildly. You can even say the purposely misled their customers, and as of now, have not exactly owned up to it yet.
Edit: I’m also sick of the usage of the word problematic. Using problematic is problematic itself.
The joke here is that Jack, Mark (and others) already live in an unreal metaverse. These people are so far out of touch with reality that they're thinking about creating an even deeper virtual world than the fakeness they live in, just to escape it.
What we need is a proper community effort to fork (and say fuck-you-and-fuck-off) to Mozilla people. Take your social justice and virtue signaling bullshit elsewhere. We need the Brave for Gecko basically.
And please for fuck's sake, DON'T MAKE IT ALL ABOUT FUCKING CRYPTO.
PS: Is it me or does it seem like NGOs that dabble in politics (or as a fellow commentator called it; political theater) are run extremely horribly and basically verging on a scam at this point?
Sometimes good opportunities are at times when you're not ready for them. We all get some sort of a "shot" but it's very difficult to see sometimes, or to make the risky move of accepting it.
https://scribe.rip/@jamesrainbows/why-i-am-getting-out-of-so...
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
Doesn't seem like it's done with the same level of care though. I checked the other projects, and although Typefully for example follows almost the exact same aggressive flyover popup thing that obstructs interaction with the background before getting that number counter to flip one more time via a sign up, it still has the "try instead" link.
FeedMage still does not. For a service that was built in 2 weeks, adding a tiny hide button shouldn't take more than 3 days.
While you're free to do whatever you see fit for your business and brand, I'm just letting you know that people pick up on this. IMO tactics and darkpatterns like this are the root of a lot of awfulness on the web (but that's another matter). To me this is really disrespectful to your company's user base and the fact that it's still (checked as I'm typing this comment) doesn't have a close option sort of proves it. Even those aggressive ads have a tiny albeit hidden "x".
It should. But what sort of payment processor does NYT use? Isn't it possible to block/cancel/prevent their charge from your bank's end?
People here are getting boggled down in details about how is it possible for this to happen and what sort of policies apple has internally for it to be possible, but that doesn't really matter. Any company even 10% the size of APple should not be given the benefit of the doubt because obviously they'd all prefer not to have the major/minor embarrassment, if they can. Bounty programs exist not because they care about security of their customers only, but it's also a way to promote the company as security-conscious and avoid having 0days sold on the black market.
But to overcome this you can just continue publishing 0-days straight to the public. Put really easy to use sourcecode on github/bucket/srht/etc... allowing script-kiddies and copy-pasters to make use of them easily. This will either drive people to lose trust or force Apple to scramble to release fixes, either way it will push them to respect researchers and fix their bounty program or setup better security guidelines in general.
Props to the author for following through and releasing.
- want the convenience - are not willing to pay for it - and have gone out of your way to avoid doing your research on how this thing works
== it's on you
but i'm not saying this to blame people really, i want people who are in this position to take responsibility for themselves and look up wtf is (for example) google doing and how is it free, then choose if they're ok with that (and stop complaining) or are not (and quit it). Enough people leaving Gmail will absolutely make a dent in how Google thinks. I'm optimistic about this. More people are waking up to the technological-slavery we're living in.
> Even if they have a vague awareness that companies are conspiring against them, they give up because they have been told that "'They' already have all my data so there is nothing I can do."
Yeah like I said, it's a nihilistic attitude. For example saying that more countries should have nuclear weapons just because around 9 have it already is cannot be an argument. 10 countries having them is more dangerous than 9.
And by the same rational, if Google already owns you, it doesn't mean that you it's ok to sign your soul away to TikTok now!
What I think is a fallacy is that _any_ of us even understands exactly what that means. The data science crap is (from what I hear from people in the industry) is mostly hype.
> I will never, ever blame the user for being exploited.
It's not exactly exploitation if the user is aware of what's happening and change causes them only inconvenience. People don't even turn off GPS on their phone even though they only actively use positioning like once a week just to avoid the inconvenience of having to go to privacy settings and turn it on/off, basically they'd rather be tracked the whole time just to save 3 seconds. If you do this you're not being exploited, you're willingly accepting this transaction. It's their loss.
The thing that every single person can see is that these companies don't have the customer's interest primarily in mind. Google is not giving free stuff because they're generous (and they shouldn't be, people should understand that companies exist to make money by "supposedly" providing value). Their standard position is hypocritical. Amazon argues for higher min wage not because they care about welfare, but because they want to prevent competition from even a 1% chance of gaining a tiny share in some market, as long as min wage can only be paid by Amazon and not some random small business, they're winning.
Our problem is not that companies are doing any of this. It's that when EA did that whole gambling/surprise-box crap, people complained and complained for months, but a lot of those same people STILL played the same stuff and bought stuff from the company. This leads to the conclusion that people don't want anything to be different, but they like to complain and have moral high standing.
Complaining about companies will change nothing as long as there are people using them. Whenever the privacy topic comes up a few people come back with I have nothing to hide, or it's too difficult to figure out which is good, or my life is busy and I can't focus on that, or it's all fucked might as well just install cameras in my shower. All this means is that: a lot of people don't care or are too nihilistic to want to change, and neither of these groups deserves sympathy.
If you still use Gmail, you don't get to complain that they scan your email, or use it to sell you stuff, etc... If you use Alexa you don't get to complaint that they might be using other trigger words to register interest, or that your parrot ordered something by mistake. These companies have been making their position on all of this extremely well understood over the last freaking decade.
If you're in a position to let someone who's genuinely not aware of this and still uses Google, you can maybe consider telling them, if they change then that's a net positive on the side of humanity, if they don't then it's on them.
Side note on the design that's sort of a personal opinion, I absolutely despise websites that immediately shove a non-closable modal forcing me to sign up before even seeing anything checking things thoroughly. The idea of having something in the background with modal on top that's not closable just to entice/attract me as a user is a MAJOR signal that some sort of a shady data-selling something is going on in you background, aka service doesn't care-about/respect actual users but just trying to increase the number of signups/gather-more-data. Even if I was ok with signing up with Twitter, this sort of dark pattern is an instant close-tab for me, I wouldn't even bother removing the overlay crap with ublock.
Obviously it’s always sad to see such a great amount of work go to waste, but at what point are we just going to start blaming people like that who are just careless with their data.
Don’t use a cloud you don’t have total control over for something that you absolutely need control over. At the very least don’t use fucking google.
I mean the possibility of her not giving insider info to her husband is very slim to none imo.
Overstatement of the day.