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This is silly. Apple publishes their privacy policy. If they were found to be violating it, they would lose business and be liable for expensive lawsuits. And s

This is silly. Apple publishes their privacy policy. If they were found to be violating it, they would lose business and be liable for expensive lawsuits. And security researchers are extremely good at finding these things. So yes, Apple has a very powerful incentive to tell the truth. As for the theory of "open source community," see the MyBTGWallet scam. This open source project, recommended by the Bitcoin Gold team, stole $5 million via a single line of code. Being open source isn't much protection really.

gear54rus 8y ago
He's telling you about the fact that there's conflict of interest between you and crapple and you tell him an anecdote where some scum of this earth stole money and open source software was involved. Does this really sound like a compelling argument?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Yes. There are bad and good actors on all sides. Just because something is closed source doesn’t make it bad. And just because something is open doesn’t automatically make it good.
  - gear54rus 8y ago
    It does however increase the chance that it will be bad, because the average snake that produces closed source software is likely to be motivated by greed, so it has the incentive to milk you as hard as it can without turning you away from products (using lies of course, you can't check anything after all, it's closed shit). But seeing sibling explanation being downvoted into oblivion makes me think no one is interested in discussing this anyway so why waste breath.
  - consider_invert 8y ago
    Agreed. But what can we infer from this? Let's suppose "good" refers to "privacy respecting", with regard to users. The primary difference is that closed source cannot feasibly be determined to be good. This is an inherent property of being closed -- we, as the users, have no proper access to investigate the actions performed by the program. Open source software can, potentially, be classified as privacy respecting. As others have mentioned, this is not a trivial task. It requires significant contributions from the community to audit the code perpetually. We cannot exercise complacency here and presume someone else has already performed this action on our behalf. (Tangent: Perhaps we need to develop a system to keep track of which sections of which open source projects have been audited, and by whom. A list of volunteer auditors for each source file on a GitLab repository, for example? With each audit being associated with a hash/commit for that file. In the current model, reading the code without finding any privacy concerns means no commit. Whether there is value in keeping track of this occurrence and leveraging it to conclude an increase in trustworthiness of the project is both a philosophical and practical question.) So being open source does not magically make software more privacy respecting. But it does open the door, and invite us to investigate its claims and behavior; something that closed source does not. It's our responsibility to capitalize on that advantage. Considering the current state of privacy violators and malicious actors in this industry, a "guilty until proven innocent" approach might be the most pragmatic. This is not a form of scaremongering; this skepticism applies to both closed and open source software equally, contributing to a solid foundation of good OpSec and assisting to shape the industry into more ethical business models.

gear54rus 8y ago

He's telling you about the fact that there's conflict of interest between you and crapple and you tell him an anecdote where some scum of this earth stole money and open source software was involved. Does this really sound like a compelling argument?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mattkevan 8y ago
Yes. There are bad and good actors on all sides. Just because something is closed source doesn’t make it bad. And just because something is open doesn’t automatically make it good.
- gear54rus 8y ago
  It does however increase the chance that it will be bad, because the average snake that produces closed source software is likely to be motivated by greed, so it has the incentive to milk you as hard as it can without turning you away from products (using lies of course, you can't check anything after all, it's closed shit). But seeing sibling explanation being downvoted into oblivion makes me think no one is interested in discussing this anyway so why waste breath.
- consider_invert 8y ago
  Agreed. But what can we infer from this? Let's suppose "good" refers to "privacy respecting", with regard to users. The primary difference is that closed source cannot feasibly be determined to be good. This is an inherent property of being closed -- we, as the users, have no proper access to investigate the actions performed by the program. Open source software can, potentially, be classified as privacy respecting. As others have mentioned, this is not a trivial task. It requires significant contributions from the community to audit the code perpetually. We cannot exercise complacency here and presume someone else has already performed this action on our behalf. (Tangent: Perhaps we need to develop a system to keep track of which sections of which open source projects have been audited, and by whom. A list of volunteer auditors for each source file on a GitLab repository, for example? With each audit being associated with a hash/commit for that file. In the current model, reading the code without finding any privacy concerns means no commit. Whether there is value in keeping track of this occurrence and leveraging it to conclude an increase in trustworthiness of the project is both a philosophical and practical question.) So being open source does not magically make software more privacy respecting. But it does open the door, and invite us to investigate its claims and behavior; something that closed source does not. It's our responsibility to capitalize on that advantage. Considering the current state of privacy violators and malicious actors in this industry, a "guilty until proven innocent" approach might be the most pragmatic. This is not a form of scaremongering; this skepticism applies to both closed and open source software equally, contributing to a solid foundation of good OpSec and assisting to shape the industry into more ethical business models.