31 ms·

My trust in software, an all time low

246 points by lawik 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago
Good software behavior decreased staunchly in closed environments and especially on mobile. People aren't asked about telemetry, data hording is hidden in some lengthy TOS that you have to accept in most cases anyway. Work at any company and want to decline the TOS of MS Word? Good luck... Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  They're all terrified that if they do ask, they'll be declined, or held accountable for misuse, abuse, or leaks. It's much better to hide "telemetry" in the fog of tos or eula walls of text. Maintain your customer's blissful ignorance at all costs. Privacy and liberty are inseparable at the highest levels of interacting with society. Compromising private personal information can only weaken individuals against abuse by society at large, whether by mega corporations, governments, Twitter hordes, or spam callers. It's become overwhelmingly apparent that there's no benefit to the consumer by allowing telemetry in almost any form. The purported advantages are paltry straw men compared to the nightmare of identity and surveillance infrastructure.
  - Cybotron5000 5y ago
    …staggering that unchangeable/indelible personal, political, financial and even biometric/medical data which could potentially be leveraged against users, eg. in an aggregate profile by various forms of AI, is often seemingly slapdashedly stored/shunted around various shady ‘cloud’ services/data brokers. After all, seemingly ‘solid’ companies may go bust/become desperate, governments may change radically/may have radically different values if you plan/are forced by circumstances to move around the world, or what’s to stop eg. insurance policies/mortgages/rental contracts etc. etc. unfavourable to various dubiously-defined ‘categories’ of people in future being based on inferences made from these profiles/dystopian ‘social credit’-like schemes being introduced that could be calibrated based on all manners of unforeseen criteria…
- ElViajero 5y ago
  > Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask. Collecting data might be sensible ... for corporations. But, it is rarely for the consumer. That is why it is so hard to ask. "Can I do this thing that you do not understand but probably have the feeling that is only going to be bad for you?". That is a hard question to ask, that is why the question is hidden behind weird concepts, lists of consent checkbox, or other dark-pattern mechanisms. Collecting data might be sensible.. but only for one side of the deal. Data collection is a clear WIN-LOSE situation, a situation that is only accepted because there is an unsymmetrical amount of power in the relationship.
  - johncolanduoni 5y ago
    I mean, charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers, created by an asymmetrical power balance. There are good arguments for regulating data collection, but “customers should be able to pick and choose any aspect about using a product they’d rather not have and jettison it” is not one of them.
    - ElViajero 5y ago
      > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation. I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation. I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange. I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        > > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers > That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation. I get a product which spies on me and I cannot turn it off (android, win 10). Win for them, loose for me. > I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation. I paid for this channel - so win for them , loose for me. > I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange. > I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways. Yes. And they also pay politicians and lobbyists.
- cjfd 5y ago
  This isn't particularly strange. Give one group of people power over another group of people and they will find a way to abuse it. The solution is that it should always be possible to install a new OS on any computing device that you buy and that there should be a way to install software in that OS that does need approval of the makers of the OS. Anything less is basically an invite to power abuse.
fmajid 5y ago
Even before that, installing additional software increases instability on your system. That’s why, despite being a power user, I refuse to install mouse drivers and buy only basic mice like the Logitech B100 that don’t require them to function.
chaps 5y ago
Just putting this out there, since the post mentions he basically can't switch to Linux because of gaming: gaming on Linux is pretty great right now. 6mo ago, I could play maybe 80% of games. Today, all single player* games work flawlessly (through steam+proton, I can't comment much on others). So if gaming is what's stopping you from going to Linux full time... it's not a bad time to really consider switching. *That said, there are some games do extremely invasive windows kernel level anti-cheat stuff.. so, some games' multiplayer won't work. Apex legends and doom eternal's multiplayer are two I've tried and failed to play in the past 3mo. Though doom eternal single player works swimmingly.
- lodovic 5y ago
  Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.
- ayane_m 5y ago
  I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.
  - 0x0 5y ago
    How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?
  - golergka 5y ago
    > server can then authenticate the client's state I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?
pabs3 5y ago
There is a solution* to this: open source *not a solution for everyone (lots of proprietary things have no open equivalent), nor for all open source software (Audacity etc have telemetry)
- oytis 5y ago
  You can disable telemetry in Audacity on build time AFAIK. Having source code is empowering even if you don't agree with all developers' choices.
- zekica 5y ago
  Audacity's telemetry is (for now) just: - OS/IP/Audacity version when checking for updates (opt out) - should be opt-in if you ask me - Crash reports if you choose to send the individual one which can include personal data
- groby_b 5y ago
  It's not even a solution for software that isn't Audacity :) I run a good chunk of OSS software, and I pray to the gods every day that somebody somewhere actually read all the three bazillion packages I need to install as dependencies. (Why does ffmpeg require a DNS resolver again?) Yes, theoretically all that is out in the open and would be found by somebody. Practically, nobody has time to verify all software they run, and the smaller/less interesting packages are basically completely taken on trust. There is no solution outside of trust. You are running things that vastly exceed the complexity you could fully understand in several lifetimes. You have to trust somebody it does what it says on the tin. I'm fairly certain that OSS has survived so far because exploits there would mostly target small groups of people. (In the end-user scenario. The server/commercial user scenario is different, and often gets attention from several companies for each package)
  - pabs3 5y ago
    I certainly trust all that open software much more than any proprietary software, since the incentives are often very different. There is however a solution to this complexity; distributed code review, for eg: https://github.com/crev-dev/ https://github.com/crev-dev/
nix23 5y ago
I say i again and again, Microsoft your Windows is one of the best Application run-times on the Planet, why try to platform it? You are not good at this, you will once again loose against apple and google, focus on a clean and lean OS, make Windows the number one Dev/Office/Game Machine, and stop that OneDrive/Cortana/Marketplace/Different Windows-Edition BS...that's not what your Customers want and that's NOT what your good at. BTW: The presentation of Win11 was a big second hand embarrassment.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Unfortunately Microsoft is unlikely to listen to this. Their moves this past decade have signaled quite clearly that they hate personal computing and want the Desktop OS to die so they can sell you their version of a walled garden and/or some cloud-based-dumb-terminal bullshit.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Maybe not what you want, but it seems to me that people are still using Windows as much as ever.
  - nix23 5y ago
    That was NOT the point...read again.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      I'm saying customers (but perhaps not the average HN poster) may actually want cortana/onedrive/win11/etc. shrug
MattGaiser 5y ago
This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported. So what if Windows is not trusted? Are you willing to spend any meaningful amount of money/time on an alternatives? Most are not.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  But windows is paid software? In fact most microsoft software is. If not paid for by you, it's paid for by your OEM or organization.
- swiley 5y ago
  At this point keeping Windows working costs more time and money than just installing something like Pop!_OS.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I would pay good money for an alternative that was at least close to Windows for my needs, if one existed. Sadly making a new operating system today is a gigantic undertaking thanks to the proliferation of hardware and the non-universality of drivers. Rump kernels seem to be (very slowly) making this a little better.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported. People were paying for Windows when it wasn't ad supported. People are still paying for Windows now that it is ad supported. Its completely clear that the only thing that matters is whether software businesses want to betray user trust or not - users don't really have much of a say in the matter. They do everything right, but user growth slows down, business growth needs to continue, so they try to extract extra value from each user instead of trying to add extra value that users happily pay more for.
EGreg 5y ago
Except in smart contracts on blockchains Billions in total value locked
- nix23 5y ago
  There is no value locked, the money (the real one) is where you got your coins.
blt 5y ago
This article uses the word "psychotic" to describe Facebook's user tracking, but they probably meant "psychopathic".
- lawik 5y ago
  Probably. I wrote it and I can't decide which would be more appropriate.
  - uniqueid 5y ago
    'Depraved', 'deviant', 'perverted', 'unhinged', 'sociopathic', 'criminal'... the list of adjectives that apply to Facebook is very long indeed.
hermitcrab 5y ago
Windows 10 is incredibly nosey and endlessly demanding. I would be happier to stick with Window 7, but it makes more sense to use the same OS most of my customers are on.
shoto_io 5y ago
Anything that is eating the world shouldn’t be trusted.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  Like humans?
tamlin 5y ago
Disappointing article. The title suggested it might have some data rather than being just a non-technical rant.
- andrey_utkin 5y ago
  How about "the data" really being how many independent voices you see conclude that "Windows is an Adversary of the User" and other things?
  - tamlin 5y ago
    How many "independent" voices you see depends on your bubble. How many users are there of these platforms? What fraction wrote a rant? Not saying those opinions are wrong, but it's not particularly insightful.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      See, a company that is user orientated would be appalled by such resonance regardless of numbers and would try to alleviate concerns. Microsoft doesn't do any of that. Their escalating behavior cannot really be explained away. Sure, maybe there is a happy island somewhere with enthusiastic users, but working in the industry, I doubt that very much. Also, many of their forums about their frameworks have developed into ghost towns. So if you now that happy isle, I would gladly like to see it.
- lawik 5y ago
  Unfortunate that you found it disappointing and it wasn't my intent for the title to imply data. It was intended to describe my experience. I can see how you were primed to think otherwise. This is very much a rant. Hope you find your numbers elsewhere :)
  - uniqueid 5y ago
    I too visited the article expecting to find the results of some survey, but I was not disappointed. It was a magnificent rant.
tlarkworthy 5y ago
This is a topic close to my heart and I am trying my best to create a serverside platform that can only run open source software. My hope is making digital services transparent half the shenanigans will go away. For two reasons 1. bad actors can't hide B.S. 2. good actors have something they can point to that has 3rd party validation. So for digital services where the source code is always available, my runtime dynamically loads the source code indicated in the URL each request. So you are free to go to the URL directly, and you can figure all the routing out in advance of data leaving your device (in theory). For the sake of moving fast, the 1st supported code repository the runtime can run serverside code from is Observablehq, which has the additional property of being a code IDE which simplifies greatly how you actually upload code to a public location. The core building block: https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells Some blogspam: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/towards-a-better-serverless-28330158e5a6 https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/towards-a-better-serverless... I built the IndiaAuth provider using this transparent technique, so you can see exactly how it works. https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth
draw_down 5y ago
Displacing all this onto “software” is not credible in my opinion. Companies build these things, people with incentives and motivations inside the companies make the decisions that lead to the outcomes we see. Take the next step and look at how these things happen and why. Nobody should “trust software” to begin with. That’s a meaningless phrase and idea, like “trusting information” - where did the information come from, whose purposes does it serve, what have they omitted? Time to put on our big boy and big girl pants and stop with the utopian stuff. Ask why, to what specific end, does Microsoft put ads and tracking in their products? Not, why did they crap up the nice good software with things I don’t like?
quanticle 5y ago
I've flagged the post because I found the headline misleading. The headline is, "Trust in Software At an All Time Low", which implies that it's some kind of survey of software users or something. Instead, the post is just about how the author's own trust in software is at an all time low. Headline should read, "My Trust In Software Is At An All Time Low", or maybe "I Trust Software Less Than Ever".
- lawik 5y ago
  I can see that interpretation, did not have it in mind while writing it and I tend to post what I write here with the title I gave it as HN asks. I apologize if it felt misleading. That was unintentional. I don't believe I can edit it.
  - dang 5y ago
    I've added "My" to the title to make clear that it's the author's (your!) perspective. I hope that's ok.
    - lawik 5y ago
      Absolutely fine by me :)
- Cybotron5000 5y ago
  The trust of the author, in a survey of one software user, is obviously at an all-time low, the trust of seemingly a large number of people reading it, judging by the comments, is similarly low, eg. Apple seems keen on marketing privacy, so maybe Apple at least feels that a certain segment of their customer base’s trust in software is at an all-time low (or should be)? That’s at least some ‘my’s and ‘their’s… How would you quantify feelings of trust quanticle? What would be sufficient proof to make a general claim about a nebulous emotional quality like ‘trust’? Perhaps it is poorly phrased as a headline/not the most accurate title ever, but how do you feel about what the article says? Do you agree? Should people not be allowed to write/post articles based on qualia?
- deleted 5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
At least MS makes it pretty obvious when they are being predatory. Of course they dont need to know your email , yet they even have a huge telemetry control panel. Meanwhile author is being hush about apple that you could never use without them having your email and credit card. Trust is not just low, it has been hacked and become a marketing term.
- majewsky 5y ago
  > Meanwhile author is being hush about apple I take it he just doesn't use any Apple stuff. > you could never use without them having your [...] credit card This is provably wrong. I have an iPhone and iPad. I never entered any credit card information. If I were to purchase apps, I would do so by buying a gift card at a retail store.
- lawik 5y ago
  I've mostly transitioned off of Apple stuff. So I didn't dwell on them. My thoughts on them have also been on here a good while back. https://underjord.io/the-mac-is-losing-me.html https://underjord.io/the-mac-is-losing-me.html In the end I use them all. The point is mostly that they are all disappointing. I haven't recently suffered additional annoyances from Apple, so this post speaks to recent frustrations. edit: In addition, I don't feel like I need to address every actor in my rants. I would never get past LinkedIn.
jfengel 5y ago
Congratulations on catching up with the old joke. Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  Similarly: Non-magic users: collect crystals, call their pet a familiar, draw pentagrams Magic users: the most magical things I keep in my house are rocks, and I keep a hammer next to them in case they act up You are not a expert in something until you know when not to use it.
  - yakubin 5y ago
    Is that a reference to a book I don't know?
cherrycherry98 5y ago
This resonated with me a lot. Windows 10 is a bit of a mess but mostly still tolerable. Once it's EOL I'll replace my current PC (from '09) but I'll try to avoid Windows 11. The MS account requirement really annoys me. I'm currently playing with Pop!_os in a VM and like it so far. I also like that I can pay for it, which I plan to. Developing a quality desktop needs resources, paying directly is far preferable to me than paying indirectly through ads or data collection.
zwieback 5y ago
The sad part is that it's totally possible to run Windows without any of the snooping and annoying extras: our corporate Windows PCs run great, no distracting anything. It's just the consumer that gets screwed and, let's be honest, who is willing to pay the actual price of a SW license anymore? I remember paying hundreds of dollars for SW in the pre-internet era. So instead of paying in dollars you now pay with your data. The fact that Linux is still underrepresented on the desktop just shows that we're willing to put up with it to get the shiny thing.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I'm happy that I pay for my macOS software license each time I buy a computer. I was happy paying for Windows in the past too. I was happy to accept free software from Canonical for my little Ubuntu Eee PC and I think I once donated $10 or something like that. I don't mind paying software developers for great software. But if they start pumping it full of antipatterns and trackers I'm out.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    FWIW, it's rarely developers who establish the incentives for "antipatterns and trackers". There's a very, very strong sentiment out there about what does and doesn't qualify as a "fundable business" with respect to both business models and shapes of products. This backdrop creates very strong incentives to make one's business and associated products conform to those archetypes. Right now "antipatterns and trackers" one of the allowable archetypes. For better or worse, depending on the perspective.
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      I don't disagree, but I don't fully agree either. Developers can usually choose whom they work for. If the boss brings in trackers and such they can usually leave for another job. I know there are employment visas that complicate things, but broad strokes it is true. I have empathy for the developers of Windows at Microsoft. They really do have high stakes, real impact work and it is hard to differentiate "gal who stopped the whole global economy from grinding to a halt" from "guy who wrote the tracker tech" but at the end of the day I'm not paying for an OS that tracks me. I won't pirate it either, but I won't pay. I am sick and tired of this model and for some things it's just a bridge too far for me to accept. I accept that I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I use Google Chrome and I use Google Search and I know they're not perfect, but at least I know that it is confined to "web stuff" and not buried in the OS. Call it old fashioned but if Canonical didn't let me uninstall Amazon bloatware I would not have used Ubuntu, and thankfully that dark chapter in their history is over.
denton-scratch 5y ago
Accept/Ask Me Later is particularly irritating, because it shows such disrespect. It's not the popup, it's the blatant, shameless annoyingness.
Animats 5y ago
It's frustrating. I gave up Windows after Windows 7, because Windows 10 had ads. I've switched entirely to Ubuntu Linux. I still have one Windows 7 desktop, and one subnotebook. I suppose I should turn them on to see if they still work. Even there, Firefox wants me to "log in with my Firefox account" so I can use Pocket or give them my passwords or something. They also made the local bookmarks feature worse some time back, to force the use of Pocket. And Ubuntu keeps updating "snaps" of dubious value. My phone uses F-Droid and Fennec, and when I got the unlocked phone, I said no to Google and deleted most of their stuff, without ever agreeing to any Google terms. I haven't logged into a "Google account" in years, and the only reason I have one is to update an add-on. This is a pain. I'm not fanatical about this. I just don't like being pushed around.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Used to be with vanilla Ubuntu but switched in Mint a few years ago and haven't looked back.
- turtletontine 5y ago
  Firefox is not a problem for me, I find the account useful for sending links and syncing the few extensions and settings I use between devices. Pocket is annoying but they do not push it very hard, I changed my default homepage to be clean of pocket articles and that was about it. I use bitwarden for passwords and FF gives me no problems. I think the fatigue of being pressed for new settings/accounts can be wise than the thing itself. You see your device pushing some new bloat, and even if disabling it is three clicks away, the exhaustion of remembering all those frustrating settings you COULDN'T disable makes you too tired to find out. But maybe that's just me. I agree with the author about windows through - I have a dual boot and only use the windows part for gaming. Even as featured as it is, the bloat and ads and Cortana you can never quite turn off are too exhausting for me to use it for anything else.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Firefox offering to login vs. Windows showing Ads are completely different levels of invasive crappiness. One is optional, the other is forced on you.
maerF0x0 5y ago
Mostly riffing on the title more than the content (which is about Win 11), I've noticed a massive degradation in how software is managed (as in bug fixes, quality designs etc) over the years and it straight frightens me that cars, planes, financial apps etc are all being "disrupted" by this new software. It seems to me the future is going to be so full of edge bugs that if one is an outlier you're going to basically be smashed back into the mean by the bureaucracy.
justbored123 5y ago
I feel your pain. I don't have adds on my Windows 10 version but I still can't stand that It needs an email account and that it harasses me about dumb irrelevant sh*t and that It was incredible hard to disable those notifications and unsolicited apps like the "xbox bar" because of the mess they did with the control panels. But lets face it, the alternatives are not much better. Yesterday I spend half an hour trying to update a free opensource software called Amass on my Debian based distro, a dependency was corrupted and I had to uninstall that dependency with apt, re-install it with snap and then I was able to finally update the app with apt. And, of course, the config file wasn't updated and it didn't even warned me that it needed to. I had to go to github and check by hand. I can't ask my grandma to do that.
ivraatiems 5y ago
This article describes my feelings exactly. I trust almost none of the tools I use on a daily basis very far. Every piece of software I use is liable fall prey at some point or another (and sometimes constantly) to some combination of the following: * Continuous mandatory updates which make various things worse or introduce new "features" I don't want * Continuous mandatory updates which break things without warning that I was reliant on * Integrated advertising or dark-pattern behavior I have to frequently circumvent * Unreasonable levels of lack of security or security theatre * Getting retired or crippled because the company which makes it goes out of business or gets acquired with no transition plan The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that nobody cares about users except in abstract anymore. They care about funding, brands, growth, the Hustle, not making something that is in any way good or usable long-term. And anything that is good can be summarily ruined in the pursuit of the above goals, with no warning. It's exhausting.
- atoav 5y ago
  I'd exclude certain software from this tho. Something like Blender becomes usually just faster and better with every update, there is other software where this applies as well. The software where this doesn't apply is usually everything "consumer".
ldarby 5y ago
It's ironic reading this and then seeing the page track your progress reading it. Here's a screenshot of my browser dev tools: https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-tracking.png https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-t.... It's a websocket connection to wss://wisps.underjord.io:8601/socket/websocket?vsn=2.0.0.
JohnFen 5y ago
I agree with this wholeheartedly. My trust in commercial software bottomed out years ago, to the point where I largely just stopped using it entirely. I also stopped adopting new Android apps about 5 years ago, because mobile apps are the second-least trustworthy segment of an untrustworthy industry (in my opinion, the least trustworthy is anything that is running in the cloud) I truly despair for the state of the software industry.

246 points by lawik 5y ago

Good software behavior decreased staunchly in closed environments and especially on mobile. People aren't asked about telemetry, data hording is hidden in some lengthy TOS that you have to accept in most cases anyway. Work at any company and want to decline the TOS of MS Word? Good luck... Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.

robbedpeter 5y ago
They're all terrified that if they do ask, they'll be declined, or held accountable for misuse, abuse, or leaks. It's much better to hide "telemetry" in the fog of tos or eula walls of text. Maintain your customer's blissful ignorance at all costs. Privacy and liberty are inseparable at the highest levels of interacting with society. Compromising private personal information can only weaken individuals against abuse by society at large, whether by mega corporations, governments, Twitter hordes, or spam callers. It's become overwhelmingly apparent that there's no benefit to the consumer by allowing telemetry in almost any form. The purported advantages are paltry straw men compared to the nightmare of identity and surveillance infrastructure.
- Cybotron5000 5y ago
  …staggering that unchangeable/indelible personal, political, financial and even biometric/medical data which could potentially be leveraged against users, eg. in an aggregate profile by various forms of AI, is often seemingly slapdashedly stored/shunted around various shady ‘cloud’ services/data brokers. After all, seemingly ‘solid’ companies may go bust/become desperate, governments may change radically/may have radically different values if you plan/are forced by circumstances to move around the world, or what’s to stop eg. insurance policies/mortgages/rental contracts etc. etc. unfavourable to various dubiously-defined ‘categories’ of people in future being based on inferences made from these profiles/dystopian ‘social credit’-like schemes being introduced that could be calibrated based on all manners of unforeseen criteria…
ElViajero 5y ago
> Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask. Collecting data might be sensible ... for corporations. But, it is rarely for the consumer. That is why it is so hard to ask. "Can I do this thing that you do not understand but probably have the feeling that is only going to be bad for you?". That is a hard question to ask, that is why the question is hidden behind weird concepts, lists of consent checkbox, or other dark-pattern mechanisms. Collecting data might be sensible.. but only for one side of the deal. Data collection is a clear WIN-LOSE situation, a situation that is only accepted because there is an unsymmetrical amount of power in the relationship.
- johncolanduoni 5y ago
  I mean, charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers, created by an asymmetrical power balance. There are good arguments for regulating data collection, but “customers should be able to pick and choose any aspect about using a product they’d rather not have and jettison it” is not one of them.
  - ElViajero 5y ago
    > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation. I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation. I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange. I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      > > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers > That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation. I get a product which spies on me and I cannot turn it off (android, win 10). Win for them, loose for me. > I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation. I paid for this channel - so win for them , loose for me. > I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange. > I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways. Yes. And they also pay politicians and lobbyists.
cjfd 5y ago
This isn't particularly strange. Give one group of people power over another group of people and they will find a way to abuse it. The solution is that it should always be possible to install a new OS on any computing device that you buy and that there should be a way to install software in that OS that does need approval of the makers of the OS. Anything less is basically an invite to power abuse.

fmajid 5y ago

Even before that, installing additional software increases instability on your system. That’s why, despite being a power user, I refuse to install mouse drivers and buy only basic mice like the Logitech B100 that don’t require them to function.

chaps 5y ago

Just putting this out there, since the post mentions he basically can't switch to Linux because of gaming: gaming on Linux is pretty great right now. 6mo ago, I could play maybe 80% of games. Today, all single player* games work flawlessly (through steam+proton, I can't comment much on others). So if gaming is what's stopping you from going to Linux full time... it's not a bad time to really consider switching. *That said, there are some games do extremely invasive windows kernel level anti-cheat stuff.. so, some games' multiplayer won't work. Apex legends and doom eternal's multiplayer are two I've tried and failed to play in the past 3mo. Though doom eternal single player works swimmingly.

lodovic 5y ago
Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?
- eptcyka 5y ago
  With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.
ayane_m 5y ago
I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.
- 0x0 5y ago
  How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?
- golergka 5y ago
  > server can then authenticate the client's state I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?

pabs3 5y ago

There is a solution* to this: open source *not a solution for everyone (lots of proprietary things have no open equivalent), nor for all open source software (Audacity etc have telemetry)

oytis 5y ago
You can disable telemetry in Audacity on build time AFAIK. Having source code is empowering even if you don't agree with all developers' choices.
zekica 5y ago
Audacity's telemetry is (for now) just: - OS/IP/Audacity version when checking for updates (opt out) - should be opt-in if you ask me - Crash reports if you choose to send the individual one which can include personal data
groby_b 5y ago
It's not even a solution for software that isn't Audacity :) I run a good chunk of OSS software, and I pray to the gods every day that somebody somewhere actually read all the three bazillion packages I need to install as dependencies. (Why does ffmpeg require a DNS resolver again?) Yes, theoretically all that is out in the open and would be found by somebody. Practically, nobody has time to verify all software they run, and the smaller/less interesting packages are basically completely taken on trust. There is no solution outside of trust. You are running things that vastly exceed the complexity you could fully understand in several lifetimes. You have to trust somebody it does what it says on the tin. I'm fairly certain that OSS has survived so far because exploits there would mostly target small groups of people. (In the end-user scenario. The server/commercial user scenario is different, and often gets attention from several companies for each package)
- pabs3 5y ago
  I certainly trust all that open software much more than any proprietary software, since the incentives are often very different. There is however a solution to this complexity; distributed code review, for eg: https://github.com/crev-dev/ https://github.com/crev-dev/

nix23 5y ago

I say i again and again, Microsoft your Windows is one of the best Application run-times on the Planet, why try to platform it? You are not good at this, you will once again loose against apple and google, focus on a clean and lean OS, make Windows the number one Dev/Office/Game Machine, and stop that OneDrive/Cortana/Marketplace/Different Windows-Edition BS...that's not what your Customers want and that's NOT what your good at. BTW: The presentation of Win11 was a big second hand embarrassment.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Unfortunately Microsoft is unlikely to listen to this. Their moves this past decade have signaled quite clearly that they hate personal computing and want the Desktop OS to die so they can sell you their version of a walled garden and/or some cloud-based-dumb-terminal bullshit.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Maybe not what you want, but it seems to me that people are still using Windows as much as ever.
- nix23 5y ago
  That was NOT the point...read again.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    I'm saying customers (but perhaps not the average HN poster) may actually want cortana/onedrive/win11/etc. shrug

MattGaiser 5y ago

This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported. So what if Windows is not trusted? Are you willing to spend any meaningful amount of money/time on an alternatives? Most are not.

bruce343434 5y ago
But windows is paid software? In fact most microsoft software is. If not paid for by you, it's paid for by your OEM or organization.
swiley 5y ago
At this point keeping Windows working costs more time and money than just installing something like Pop!_OS.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I would pay good money for an alternative that was at least close to Windows for my needs, if one existed. Sadly making a new operating system today is a gigantic undertaking thanks to the proliferation of hardware and the non-universality of drivers. Rump kernels seem to be (very slowly) making this a little better.
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported. People were paying for Windows when it wasn't ad supported. People are still paying for Windows now that it is ad supported. Its completely clear that the only thing that matters is whether software businesses want to betray user trust or not - users don't really have much of a say in the matter. They do everything right, but user growth slows down, business growth needs to continue, so they try to extract extra value from each user instead of trying to add extra value that users happily pay more for.

EGreg 5y ago

Except in smart contracts on blockchains Billions in total value locked

nix23 5y ago
There is no value locked, the money (the real one) is where you got your coins.

blt 5y ago

This article uses the word "psychotic" to describe Facebook's user tracking, but they probably meant "psychopathic".

lawik 5y ago
Probably. I wrote it and I can't decide which would be more appropriate.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  'Depraved', 'deviant', 'perverted', 'unhinged', 'sociopathic', 'criminal'... the list of adjectives that apply to Facebook is very long indeed.

hermitcrab 5y ago

Windows 10 is incredibly nosey and endlessly demanding. I would be happier to stick with Window 7, but it makes more sense to use the same OS most of my customers are on.

shoto_io 5y ago

Anything that is eating the world shouldn’t be trusted.

worldsayshi 5y ago
Like humans?

tamlin 5y ago

Disappointing article. The title suggested it might have some data rather than being just a non-technical rant.

andrey_utkin 5y ago
How about "the data" really being how many independent voices you see conclude that "Windows is an Adversary of the User" and other things?
- tamlin 5y ago
  How many "independent" voices you see depends on your bubble. How many users are there of these platforms? What fraction wrote a rant? Not saying those opinions are wrong, but it's not particularly insightful.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    See, a company that is user orientated would be appalled by such resonance regardless of numbers and would try to alleviate concerns. Microsoft doesn't do any of that. Their escalating behavior cannot really be explained away. Sure, maybe there is a happy island somewhere with enthusiastic users, but working in the industry, I doubt that very much. Also, many of their forums about their frameworks have developed into ghost towns. So if you now that happy isle, I would gladly like to see it.
lawik 5y ago
Unfortunate that you found it disappointing and it wasn't my intent for the title to imply data. It was intended to describe my experience. I can see how you were primed to think otherwise. This is very much a rant. Hope you find your numbers elsewhere :)
- uniqueid 5y ago
  I too visited the article expecting to find the results of some survey, but I was not disappointed. It was a magnificent rant.

tlarkworthy 5y ago

This is a topic close to my heart and I am trying my best to create a serverside platform that can only run open source software. My hope is making digital services transparent half the shenanigans will go away. For two reasons 1. bad actors can't hide B.S. 2. good actors have something they can point to that has 3rd party validation. So for digital services where the source code is always available, my runtime dynamically loads the source code indicated in the URL each request. So you are free to go to the URL directly, and you can figure all the routing out in advance of data leaving your device (in theory). For the sake of moving fast, the 1st supported code repository the runtime can run serverside code from is Observablehq, which has the additional property of being a code IDE which simplifies greatly how you actually upload code to a public location. The core building block: https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells Some blogspam: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/towards-a-better-serverless-28330158e5a6 https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/towards-a-better-serverless... I built the IndiaAuth provider using this transparent technique, so you can see exactly how it works. https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth

draw_down 5y ago

Displacing all this onto “software” is not credible in my opinion. Companies build these things, people with incentives and motivations inside the companies make the decisions that lead to the outcomes we see. Take the next step and look at how these things happen and why. Nobody should “trust software” to begin with. That’s a meaningless phrase and idea, like “trusting information” - where did the information come from, whose purposes does it serve, what have they omitted? Time to put on our big boy and big girl pants and stop with the utopian stuff. Ask why, to what specific end, does Microsoft put ads and tracking in their products? Not, why did they crap up the nice good software with things I don’t like?

quanticle 5y ago

I've flagged the post because I found the headline misleading. The headline is, "Trust in Software At an All Time Low", which implies that it's some kind of survey of software users or something. Instead, the post is just about how the author's own trust in software is at an all time low. Headline should read, "My Trust In Software Is At An All Time Low", or maybe "I Trust Software Less Than Ever".

lawik 5y ago
I can see that interpretation, did not have it in mind while writing it and I tend to post what I write here with the title I gave it as HN asks. I apologize if it felt misleading. That was unintentional. I don't believe I can edit it.
- dang 5y ago
  I've added "My" to the title to make clear that it's the author's (your!) perspective. I hope that's ok.
  - lawik 5y ago
    Absolutely fine by me :)
Cybotron5000 5y ago
The trust of the author, in a survey of one software user, is obviously at an all-time low, the trust of seemingly a large number of people reading it, judging by the comments, is similarly low, eg. Apple seems keen on marketing privacy, so maybe Apple at least feels that a certain segment of their customer base’s trust in software is at an all-time low (or should be)? That’s at least some ‘my’s and ‘their’s… How would you quantify feelings of trust quanticle? What would be sufficient proof to make a general claim about a nebulous emotional quality like ‘trust’? Perhaps it is poorly phrased as a headline/not the most accurate title ever, but how do you feel about what the article says? Do you agree? Should people not be allowed to write/post articles based on qualia?
deleted 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

At least MS makes it pretty obvious when they are being predatory. Of course they dont need to know your email , yet they even have a huge telemetry control panel. Meanwhile author is being hush about apple that you could never use without them having your email and credit card. Trust is not just low, it has been hacked and become a marketing term.

majewsky 5y ago
> Meanwhile author is being hush about apple I take it he just doesn't use any Apple stuff. > you could never use without them having your [...] credit card This is provably wrong. I have an iPhone and iPad. I never entered any credit card information. If I were to purchase apps, I would do so by buying a gift card at a retail store.
lawik 5y ago
I've mostly transitioned off of Apple stuff. So I didn't dwell on them. My thoughts on them have also been on here a good while back. https://underjord.io/the-mac-is-losing-me.html https://underjord.io/the-mac-is-losing-me.html In the end I use them all. The point is mostly that they are all disappointing. I haven't recently suffered additional annoyances from Apple, so this post speaks to recent frustrations. edit: In addition, I don't feel like I need to address every actor in my rants. I would never get past LinkedIn.

jfengel 5y ago

Congratulations on catching up with the old joke. Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

a1369209993 5y ago
Similarly: Non-magic users: collect crystals, call their pet a familiar, draw pentagrams Magic users: the most magical things I keep in my house are rocks, and I keep a hammer next to them in case they act up You are not a expert in something until you know when not to use it.
- yakubin 5y ago
  Is that a reference to a book I don't know?

cherrycherry98 5y ago

This resonated with me a lot. Windows 10 is a bit of a mess but mostly still tolerable. Once it's EOL I'll replace my current PC (from '09) but I'll try to avoid Windows 11. The MS account requirement really annoys me. I'm currently playing with Pop!_os in a VM and like it so far. I also like that I can pay for it, which I plan to. Developing a quality desktop needs resources, paying directly is far preferable to me than paying indirectly through ads or data collection.

zwieback 5y ago

The sad part is that it's totally possible to run Windows without any of the snooping and annoying extras: our corporate Windows PCs run great, no distracting anything. It's just the consumer that gets screwed and, let's be honest, who is willing to pay the actual price of a SW license anymore? I remember paying hundreds of dollars for SW in the pre-internet era. So instead of paying in dollars you now pay with your data. The fact that Linux is still underrepresented on the desktop just shows that we're willing to put up with it to get the shiny thing.

3pt14159 5y ago
I'm happy that I pay for my macOS software license each time I buy a computer. I was happy paying for Windows in the past too. I was happy to accept free software from Canonical for my little Ubuntu Eee PC and I think I once donated $10 or something like that. I don't mind paying software developers for great software. But if they start pumping it full of antipatterns and trackers I'm out.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  FWIW, it's rarely developers who establish the incentives for "antipatterns and trackers". There's a very, very strong sentiment out there about what does and doesn't qualify as a "fundable business" with respect to both business models and shapes of products. This backdrop creates very strong incentives to make one's business and associated products conform to those archetypes. Right now "antipatterns and trackers" one of the allowable archetypes. For better or worse, depending on the perspective.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    I don't disagree, but I don't fully agree either. Developers can usually choose whom they work for. If the boss brings in trackers and such they can usually leave for another job. I know there are employment visas that complicate things, but broad strokes it is true. I have empathy for the developers of Windows at Microsoft. They really do have high stakes, real impact work and it is hard to differentiate "gal who stopped the whole global economy from grinding to a halt" from "guy who wrote the tracker tech" but at the end of the day I'm not paying for an OS that tracks me. I won't pirate it either, but I won't pay. I am sick and tired of this model and for some things it's just a bridge too far for me to accept. I accept that I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I use Google Chrome and I use Google Search and I know they're not perfect, but at least I know that it is confined to "web stuff" and not buried in the OS. Call it old fashioned but if Canonical didn't let me uninstall Amazon bloatware I would not have used Ubuntu, and thankfully that dark chapter in their history is over.

denton-scratch 5y ago

Accept/Ask Me Later is particularly irritating, because it shows such disrespect. It's not the popup, it's the blatant, shameless annoyingness.

Animats 5y ago

It's frustrating. I gave up Windows after Windows 7, because Windows 10 had ads. I've switched entirely to Ubuntu Linux. I still have one Windows 7 desktop, and one subnotebook. I suppose I should turn them on to see if they still work. Even there, Firefox wants me to "log in with my Firefox account" so I can use Pocket or give them my passwords or something. They also made the local bookmarks feature worse some time back, to force the use of Pocket. And Ubuntu keeps updating "snaps" of dubious value. My phone uses F-Droid and Fennec, and when I got the unlocked phone, I said no to Google and deleted most of their stuff, without ever agreeing to any Google terms. I haven't logged into a "Google account" in years, and the only reason I have one is to update an add-on. This is a pain. I'm not fanatical about this. I just don't like being pushed around.

sandworm101 5y ago
Used to be with vanilla Ubuntu but switched in Mint a few years ago and haven't looked back.
turtletontine 5y ago
Firefox is not a problem for me, I find the account useful for sending links and syncing the few extensions and settings I use between devices. Pocket is annoying but they do not push it very hard, I changed my default homepage to be clean of pocket articles and that was about it. I use bitwarden for passwords and FF gives me no problems. I think the fatigue of being pressed for new settings/accounts can be wise than the thing itself. You see your device pushing some new bloat, and even if disabling it is three clicks away, the exhaustion of remembering all those frustrating settings you COULDN'T disable makes you too tired to find out. But maybe that's just me. I agree with the author about windows through - I have a dual boot and only use the windows part for gaming. Even as featured as it is, the bloat and ads and Cortana you can never quite turn off are too exhausting for me to use it for anything else.
r00fus 5y ago
Firefox offering to login vs. Windows showing Ads are completely different levels of invasive crappiness. One is optional, the other is forced on you.

maerF0x0 5y ago

Mostly riffing on the title more than the content (which is about Win 11), I've noticed a massive degradation in how software is managed (as in bug fixes, quality designs etc) over the years and it straight frightens me that cars, planes, financial apps etc are all being "disrupted" by this new software. It seems to me the future is going to be so full of edge bugs that if one is an outlier you're going to basically be smashed back into the mean by the bureaucracy.

justbored123 5y ago

I feel your pain. I don't have adds on my Windows 10 version but I still can't stand that It needs an email account and that it harasses me about dumb irrelevant sh*t and that It was incredible hard to disable those notifications and unsolicited apps like the "xbox bar" because of the mess they did with the control panels. But lets face it, the alternatives are not much better. Yesterday I spend half an hour trying to update a free opensource software called Amass on my Debian based distro, a dependency was corrupted and I had to uninstall that dependency with apt, re-install it with snap and then I was able to finally update the app with apt. And, of course, the config file wasn't updated and it didn't even warned me that it needed to. I had to go to github and check by hand. I can't ask my grandma to do that.

ivraatiems 5y ago

This article describes my feelings exactly. I trust almost none of the tools I use on a daily basis very far. Every piece of software I use is liable fall prey at some point or another (and sometimes constantly) to some combination of the following: * Continuous mandatory updates which make various things worse or introduce new "features" I don't want * Continuous mandatory updates which break things without warning that I was reliant on * Integrated advertising or dark-pattern behavior I have to frequently circumvent * Unreasonable levels of lack of security or security theatre * Getting retired or crippled because the company which makes it goes out of business or gets acquired with no transition plan The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that nobody cares about users except in abstract anymore. They care about funding, brands, growth, the Hustle, not making something that is in any way good or usable long-term. And anything that is good can be summarily ruined in the pursuit of the above goals, with no warning. It's exhausting.

atoav 5y ago
I'd exclude certain software from this tho. Something like Blender becomes usually just faster and better with every update, there is other software where this applies as well. The software where this doesn't apply is usually everything "consumer".

ldarby 5y ago

It's ironic reading this and then seeing the page track your progress reading it. Here's a screenshot of my browser dev tools: https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-tracking.png https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-t.... It's a websocket connection to wss://wisps.underjord.io:8601/socket/websocket?vsn=2.0.0.

JohnFen 5y ago

I agree with this wholeheartedly. My trust in commercial software bottomed out years ago, to the point where I largely just stopped using it entirely. I also stopped adopting new Android apps about 5 years ago, because mobile apps are the second-least trustworthy segment of an untrustworthy industry (in my opinion, the least trustworthy is anything that is running in the cloud) I truly despair for the state of the software industry.