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There is a reason why Free Software (as in freedom) was invented: To ensure that those who create the software do not overpower those who use the software. The

There is a reason why Free Software (as in freedom) was invented: To ensure that those who create the software do not overpower those who use the software. The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. And it is wrong, because to be a human in the 21st century means in most cases, that your digital devices and your digital interactions are a core part of who you are as a private person. Invading the privacy of one's digital space is a violation that goes as deep as reading someone's diary when we look back and the time when life was more analog.

throwaway28409 2y ago
> The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will. If the object can act in a way that favors someone else's interests over yours, you do not own it. This is true of pretty much any device running proprietary software. A litmus test: can you make your device lie to the manufacturer's servers? Regardless of the legality or morality of doing so. However this article is really about something else: the vulnerability of centralized services in the face of government oppression. Signal only has the ability to log messages because it is a centralized service that controls both the client and the server. The benefits of E2EE is greatly reduced if the client and the server is controlled by the same entity (tomorrow Signal can push out an update that would send a plaintext backup to their servers, and you wouldn't know it until later). Moreover, the non-free distribution mechanisms on mobile phones (stores) limits a company's ability to resist.
- Canada 2y ago
  You don't need to run the server to backdoor the client. You just need access to push updates to the client. It doesn't matter who runs the server.
- tuukkah 2y ago
  Also only possible because we use Signal as compiled by themselves and not by trusted third parties from a source kept clean of any future client-side backdoors. The client is open source, right? https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp (Reproducible builds is a cool technique.)
  - dijit 2y ago
    I have unpopular opinions about this, because Signal has been so hostile to anyone other than Signal themselves being involved. But to be specific: "open source" claims go out the window when they're; 1. Not reproducible (before anyone links me to the "reproducible steps" please actually read them because they tell you directly that they will not create a reproducible output). 2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories. Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has. EDIT: I don't really care if bots or shills downvote me, can you really, with a straight face, say it's NOT "trust us bro" ideology that makes people use Signal?
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      https://molly.im https://molly.im for a more FOSS and safer fork of Signal
    - ibotty 2y ago
      Can you point out where it says it won't be a reproducible output? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
      - dijit 2y ago
        Ah nice; they got rid of that explicit warning - instead though we have the entire section about "bundlePlayProdRelease" including an externally sourced binary blob. A significant improvement. /s
- lxgr 2y ago
  > to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will Not by a long shot. Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. I'm not saying I'm a fan of even more exceptions of that kind, but I don't think there are any particular inherent rights arising from property ownership beyond from what society agrees on there are (e.g. the first sale doctrine for physical media). That's what makes it even more important to codify these rights.
  - throwaway28409 2y ago
    Note that I said "can", not "legally can". You can destroy currency, alter passport, reproduce copyrighted images if you want to. There may be legal consequences but you can. You can also stab a person with a knife you own, even if you will be punished for it. I'm not talking about rights, but capabilities. You can't make your phone lie to an app developer about its location, rooted status, etc. You can't make your HP printer print with unsanctioned ink. Therefore, you do not own them.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      I also can't make a pen and a sheet of paper contain a proof showing whether P is equal to NP. Does that mean I don't own them either? Now you could of course say that the difference is somebody having intentionally designed an object in a way that makes it capable of withholding some functionality from me but not others, and I'd agree. But all in all, I just don't think "property rights" is the right lens to think about computing devices.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      You can also not use a service. I think anonymity is a better measure than the ability to lie for co-operative systems.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. These aren't counterexamples, they prove the rule. A US passport literally has the text "this passport is the property of the United States" printed inside of it, and I imagine the same is true in most countries: you are the recipient of a passport, not the owner of one. The same applies to copyrighted images— when you purchase a book you own the physical copy and can fully subject it to your own will, but you don't own the right to make additional copies of it. You own the copy, not the intellectual property. As for currency, it may not legally be the property of the US government like a passport, but I would argue that the fact that you can't modify it does in fact mean that you don't own the bill, the bill is a representation of an abstraction of "money" that you do own.
- Angostura 2y ago
  > You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will. Let’s explore that. If the law says I can’t ride my motorcycle the wrong way down the street, does that mean I don’t own it? What about if we add traffic cameras that absolutely guarantee I will be prosecuted? What about it if we add a black box that reports transgressions automatically to the authorities? What about if the black box automatically cuts power to the engine? I don’t think ownership is a binary using your criterion, or perhaps it’s simply that different people will put the dividing line in different places.
  - dijit 2y ago
    You don't own the streets. You can do what you want with the bike, but your analogy falls flat because it implies that despite you owning the bike you get to drive through your neighbours living room: because your right to own a bike somehow trumps their right to own land and a home.
smokel 2y ago
Unfortunately, the philosophy of Free Software does not account for the scale at which software is being run now. Having the source code to a printer driver available is a completely different thing than being dependent on a platform, because all your friends and relations are using it. Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services, which makes the article we're discussing ironic at the least, or complicated.
- kikokikokiko 2y ago
  "Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services" I understand where you're coming from, "the ultimate goal of a company is to profit and so we can not trust it to protect their users/consumers interests instead of their own" but... you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war right? That it is a blob of power, controlled by people right? This goverment = good that you see people believing these days is such a childish view of reality.
  - amalcon 2y ago
    Government and charity can be corrupted (and usually are, to at least a small degree). Private industry is corrupt bt default: to the extent possible, it will intentionally serve owners at the expense of other stakeholders. This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry. Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.
  - gloosx 2y ago
    There are a lot of pragmatic pro-government people here, holding tightly to the "51% > 49%" core principle of democracy, which sadly turns into a mess at the scale of humanity, just like any other model we've invented so far. There isn't a real alternative for us collectively now but to submit to power – so any even slightly anarchistic views are not welcome here most of the time...
Tepix 2y ago
Unfortunately, when we switched from letters to emails, the legal privacy protections we enjoyed back then, were not carried over do the digital realm. We're still suffering and have to use encryption to protect ourselves from the lack of legal protection.
- hx8 2y ago
  Legal protections are great and everything, but if I had to choose between abstract legal protections or concrete protections based on physical properties, I'll choose the later every time. Obviously both is ideal, but I'd use encryption for most of my correspondence regardless of my levels of legal protection.
marcinzm 2y ago
> Invading the privacy of one's digital space is a violation that goes as deep as reading someone's diary when we look back and the time when life was more analog. Which police with a warrant can very much do.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Or, for that matter, analog correspondence or notes can absolutely be subpoened in many sorts of court proceedings, including civil.
- the8472 2y ago
  That is a significant hurdle. They have to do it for each individual target, show up in person and each case can be contested in court. Scalable surveillance is different, just as scalable weapons are different.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    It’s a good thing we have FISA then to protects us from the scalable surveillance. /s
- hedora 2y ago
  There’s no warrant protection in this bill. They want to keep a copy of everyone’s data so they can look back at old stuff after the fact. Even if there was warrant protection, I’d still be against it. People have traditionally had the right to speak to each other without giving a transcript to the police. I think it’s unreasonable to make that illegal.
  - Braxton1980 2y ago
    Testimony under oath can be compelled
    - adamc 2y ago
      In theory. In reality, no. "I don't remember/I don't recall" is a famous dodge.
louwrentius 2y ago
It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption, and now Signal being in a similar situation, shows that you can't just focus on technology and ignore policy and politics. And you'll find out that a ton of people here on HN will care, but most of the public won't. People should take XKCD 538 really to heart (The 5$ wrench one). It's not the same point, but very similar. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- throwaway28409 2y ago
  > It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. It very much can. In a battle between human force and physics, physics win every time. If I send an encrypted email to you, you have the choice to not give up the key, even if you'll be in jail. With physical letters, you don't have this option. Technology gives you the ironclad ability to keep a secret, only limited by the fortitude of your character.
  - louwrentius 2y ago
    You clearly haven't felt a 5$ wrench on your body. Giving up your secrets under torture isn't a character flaw, it's what will happen to 99.99% of people under torture. I can't help you if you don't believe that this is true. And I hope you understand that 5$ wrench is a euphemism for what would 'really' happen. All this to say that no, technology does not triumph over politics and policy.
    - throwaway28409 2y ago
      Technology very much does. It's the flesh that has a hard time triumphing over force. To counteract this, you can also engineer a system that can resist it through e.g. split secrets on multiple people located in different jurisdictions.
      - louwrentius 2y ago
        If you split a secret over two people, first, we use the 5$ wrench on one of you to identify the other and the rest is easy. If the second person is somewhere else in a different jurisdiction, how are you going to communicate with each other to get the two halves of the secret together to encrypt/decrypt messages? It's an unworkable situation. As I see it, you create a fantasy situation that would not work if you just want to communicate with people in a secure way. No amount of technology or encryption is going to work, especially in the real practical world.
skybrian 2y ago
This principle seems out of touch with most people’s reality: products hardly ever do everything you want and often work against you. If someone has a device that doesn’t do what they want and there’s no setting to change its behavior, replacing it is usually the only practical option. (Or if it’s a problem with an app, they might be able to install a different app.) If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them. Only software developers care about such things. (There is an indirect effect on what software is available.)
- Ajedi32 2y ago
  Yes, because we largely don't have Free Software. > If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them. It's of indirect use; they could use a modified version of the software that does what they want, created by someone else. This is why you generally don't see user-hostile features in Free Software; someone would just fork the project and edit them out.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    The problem is that some forks are malware [1], so switching to a fork by developers you don't know is risky. How do non-technical users learn which software developers to trust? [1] https://www.securityweek.com/malware-delivered-via-malicious-pidgin-plugin-signal-fork/ https://www.securityweek.com/malware-delivered-via-malicious...
    - Ajedi32 2y ago
      Worst-case, they could hire someone they trust to review the source code. More realistically, you generally don't have to switch to a fork in the first place because the mere threat of a fork is enough to prevent the deployment of user-hostile features. And when a project does get forked it's often a highly publicized affair with a lot of community drama which produces no shortage of information about who's trustworthy and who's not.
      - skybrian 2y ago
EGreg 2y ago
I think that this highlights exactly why we need decentralized, open source software. Back when Moxie Marlinspike made a thoughtful critique of Web3 (the most thoughtful one I had read, actually), I put together a reply. It’s worth a read for anyone on HN who cares about user freedom and how society is structured: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... A note to the younger HN crowd who may have grown up with locked-down devices: the “hacker ethos” used to mean the freedom to tinker and buuld your own. It wasn’t always the case. The Personal Computer and Apple came about through the Homebrew app. And before that, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were even building blue boxes for “phreakers”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI Before he became a corporate golden boy, Mark Zuckerberg built Synapse for regular users and open sourced it instead of selling it to Microsoft and wanted to build Wirehog, but Sean Parker proudly said he and Peter Thiel “put a bullet in that thing” https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ I don’t want to just be the “wake up sheeple” guy or some unkempt Stallman clone. But there is a real culture clash between the hackers and the corporations, and I feel like the HN denizens who knee-jerk downvote of anything decentralized today don’t get the point of open source decentralized hacker ethos and how the people who practice it produce the next big thing. Working for FAAMGA and “the cloud” ain’t it folks. Here’s why “the cloud sucks” by Steve Wozniak: https://gizmodo.com/why-the-cloud-sucks-5932161 https://gizmodo.com/why-the-cloud-sucks-5932161 In short — read my rejoinder to Moxie Marlinspike, in my first link. It is ironic because all these years later, I end up being right: it is exactly his company that’s getting hit with this, exactly because it is centralized. And if you are Moxie or Durov and think your centralized company has somewhere to run… here is the bigger picture around the world — governments are coming for you and the war on user freedom is coming through you: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-encryption/214 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

throwaway28409 2y ago

> The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will. If the object can act in a way that favors someone else's interests over yours, you do not own it. This is true of pretty much any device running proprietary software. A litmus test: can you make your device lie to the manufacturer's servers? Regardless of the legality or morality of doing so. However this article is really about something else: the vulnerability of centralized services in the face of government oppression. Signal only has the ability to log messages because it is a centralized service that controls both the client and the server. The benefits of E2EE is greatly reduced if the client and the server is controlled by the same entity (tomorrow Signal can push out an update that would send a plaintext backup to their servers, and you wouldn't know it until later). Moreover, the non-free distribution mechanisms on mobile phones (stores) limits a company's ability to resist.

Canada 2y ago
You don't need to run the server to backdoor the client. You just need access to push updates to the client. It doesn't matter who runs the server.
tuukkah 2y ago
Also only possible because we use Signal as compiled by themselves and not by trusted third parties from a source kept clean of any future client-side backdoors. The client is open source, right? https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp (Reproducible builds is a cool technique.)
- dijit 2y ago
  I have unpopular opinions about this, because Signal has been so hostile to anyone other than Signal themselves being involved. But to be specific: "open source" claims go out the window when they're; 1. Not reproducible (before anyone links me to the "reproducible steps" please actually read them because they tell you directly that they will not create a reproducible output). 2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories. Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has. EDIT: I don't really care if bots or shills downvote me, can you really, with a straight face, say it's NOT "trust us bro" ideology that makes people use Signal?
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    https://molly.im https://molly.im for a more FOSS and safer fork of Signal
  - ibotty 2y ago
    Can you point out where it says it won't be a reproducible output? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
    - dijit 2y ago
      Ah nice; they got rid of that explicit warning - instead though we have the entire section about "bundlePlayProdRelease" including an externally sourced binary blob. A significant improvement. /s
lxgr 2y ago
> to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will Not by a long shot. Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. I'm not saying I'm a fan of even more exceptions of that kind, but I don't think there are any particular inherent rights arising from property ownership beyond from what society agrees on there are (e.g. the first sale doctrine for physical media). That's what makes it even more important to codify these rights.
- throwaway28409 2y ago
  Note that I said "can", not "legally can". You can destroy currency, alter passport, reproduce copyrighted images if you want to. There may be legal consequences but you can. You can also stab a person with a knife you own, even if you will be punished for it. I'm not talking about rights, but capabilities. You can't make your phone lie to an app developer about its location, rooted status, etc. You can't make your HP printer print with unsanctioned ink. Therefore, you do not own them.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    I also can't make a pen and a sheet of paper contain a proof showing whether P is equal to NP. Does that mean I don't own them either? Now you could of course say that the difference is somebody having intentionally designed an object in a way that makes it capable of withholding some functionality from me but not others, and I'd agree. But all in all, I just don't think "property rights" is the right lens to think about computing devices.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    You can also not use a service. I think anonymity is a better measure than the ability to lie for co-operative systems.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. These aren't counterexamples, they prove the rule. A US passport literally has the text "this passport is the property of the United States" printed inside of it, and I imagine the same is true in most countries: you are the recipient of a passport, not the owner of one. The same applies to copyrighted images— when you purchase a book you own the physical copy and can fully subject it to your own will, but you don't own the right to make additional copies of it. You own the copy, not the intellectual property. As for currency, it may not legally be the property of the US government like a passport, but I would argue that the fact that you can't modify it does in fact mean that you don't own the bill, the bill is a representation of an abstraction of "money" that you do own.
Angostura 2y ago
> You are hinting at something important here. Let me strengthen your point: to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will. Let’s explore that. If the law says I can’t ride my motorcycle the wrong way down the street, does that mean I don’t own it? What about if we add traffic cameras that absolutely guarantee I will be prosecuted? What about it if we add a black box that reports transgressions automatically to the authorities? What about if the black box automatically cuts power to the engine? I don’t think ownership is a binary using your criterion, or perhaps it’s simply that different people will put the dividing line in different places.
- dijit 2y ago
  You don't own the streets. You can do what you want with the bike, but your analogy falls flat because it implies that despite you owning the bike you get to drive through your neighbours living room: because your right to own a bike somehow trumps their right to own land and a home.

smokel 2y ago

Unfortunately, the philosophy of Free Software does not account for the scale at which software is being run now. Having the source code to a printer driver available is a completely different thing than being dependent on a platform, because all your friends and relations are using it. Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services, which makes the article we're discussing ironic at the least, or complicated.

kikokikokiko 2y ago
"Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services" I understand where you're coming from, "the ultimate goal of a company is to profit and so we can not trust it to protect their users/consumers interests instead of their own" but... you know that it is always the government that will put you in prison, or send you to war right? That it is a blob of power, controlled by people right? This goverment = good that you see people believing these days is such a childish view of reality.
- amalcon 2y ago
  Government and charity can be corrupted (and usually are, to at least a small degree). Private industry is corrupt bt default: to the extent possible, it will intentionally serve owners at the expense of other stakeholders. This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry. Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.
- gloosx 2y ago
  There are a lot of pragmatic pro-government people here, holding tightly to the "51% > 49%" core principle of democracy, which sadly turns into a mess at the scale of humanity, just like any other model we've invented so far. There isn't a real alternative for us collectively now but to submit to power – so any even slightly anarchistic views are not welcome here most of the time...

Tepix 2y ago

Unfortunately, when we switched from letters to emails, the legal privacy protections we enjoyed back then, were not carried over do the digital realm. We're still suffering and have to use encryption to protect ourselves from the lack of legal protection.

hx8 2y ago
Legal protections are great and everything, but if I had to choose between abstract legal protections or concrete protections based on physical properties, I'll choose the later every time. Obviously both is ideal, but I'd use encryption for most of my correspondence regardless of my levels of legal protection.

marcinzm 2y ago

> Invading the privacy of one's digital space is a violation that goes as deep as reading someone's diary when we look back and the time when life was more analog. Which police with a warrant can very much do.

ghaff 2y ago
Or, for that matter, analog correspondence or notes can absolutely be subpoened in many sorts of court proceedings, including civil.
the8472 2y ago
That is a significant hurdle. They have to do it for each individual target, show up in person and each case can be contested in court. Scalable surveillance is different, just as scalable weapons are different.
- dylan604 2y ago
  It’s a good thing we have FISA then to protects us from the scalable surveillance. /s
hedora 2y ago
There’s no warrant protection in this bill. They want to keep a copy of everyone’s data so they can look back at old stuff after the fact. Even if there was warrant protection, I’d still be against it. People have traditionally had the right to speak to each other without giving a transcript to the police. I think it’s unreasonable to make that illegal.
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  Testimony under oath can be compelled
  - adamc 2y ago
    In theory. In reality, no. "I don't remember/I don't recall" is a famous dodge.

louwrentius 2y ago

It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption, and now Signal being in a similar situation, shows that you can't just focus on technology and ignore policy and politics. And you'll find out that a ton of people here on HN will care, but most of the public won't. People should take XKCD 538 really to heart (The 5$ wrench one). It's not the same point, but very similar. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

throwaway28409 2y ago
> It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. It very much can. In a battle between human force and physics, physics win every time. If I send an encrypted email to you, you have the choice to not give up the key, even if you'll be in jail. With physical letters, you don't have this option. Technology gives you the ironclad ability to keep a secret, only limited by the fortitude of your character.
- louwrentius 2y ago
  You clearly haven't felt a 5$ wrench on your body. Giving up your secrets under torture isn't a character flaw, it's what will happen to 99.99% of people under torture. I can't help you if you don't believe that this is true. And I hope you understand that 5$ wrench is a euphemism for what would 'really' happen. All this to say that no, technology does not triumph over politics and policy.
  - throwaway28409 2y ago
    Technology very much does. It's the flesh that has a hard time triumphing over force. To counteract this, you can also engineer a system that can resist it through e.g. split secrets on multiple people located in different jurisdictions.
    - louwrentius 2y ago
      If you split a secret over two people, first, we use the 5$ wrench on one of you to identify the other and the rest is easy. If the second person is somewhere else in a different jurisdiction, how are you going to communicate with each other to get the two halves of the secret together to encrypt/decrypt messages? It's an unworkable situation. As I see it, you create a fantasy situation that would not work if you just want to communicate with people in a secure way. No amount of technology or encryption is going to work, especially in the real practical world.

skybrian 2y ago

This principle seems out of touch with most people’s reality: products hardly ever do everything you want and often work against you. If someone has a device that doesn’t do what they want and there’s no setting to change its behavior, replacing it is usually the only practical option. (Or if it’s a problem with an app, they might be able to install a different app.) If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them. Only software developers care about such things. (There is an indirect effect on what software is available.)

Ajedi32 2y ago
Yes, because we largely don't have Free Software. > If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them. It's of indirect use; they could use a modified version of the software that does what they want, created by someone else. This is why you generally don't see user-hostile features in Free Software; someone would just fork the project and edit them out.
- skybrian 2y ago
  The problem is that some forks are malware [1], so switching to a fork by developers you don't know is risky. How do non-technical users learn which software developers to trust? [1] https://www.securityweek.com/malware-delivered-via-malicious-pidgin-plugin-signal-fork/ https://www.securityweek.com/malware-delivered-via-malicious...
  - Ajedi32 2y ago
    Worst-case, they could hire someone they trust to review the source code. More realistically, you generally don't have to switch to a fork in the first place because the mere threat of a fork is enough to prevent the deployment of user-hostile features. And when a project does get forked it's often a highly publicized affair with a lot of community drama which produces no shortage of information about who's trustworthy and who's not.
    - skybrian 2y ago

EGreg 2y ago

I think that this highlights exactly why we need decentralized, open source software. Back when Moxie Marlinspike made a thoughtful critique of Web3 (the most thoughtful one I had read, actually), I put together a reply. It’s worth a read for anyone on HN who cares about user freedom and how society is structured: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... A note to the younger HN crowd who may have grown up with locked-down devices: the “hacker ethos” used to mean the freedom to tinker and buuld your own. It wasn’t always the case. The Personal Computer and Apple came about through the Homebrew app. And before that, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were even building blue boxes for “phreakers”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI Before he became a corporate golden boy, Mark Zuckerberg built Synapse for regular users and open sourced it instead of selling it to Microsoft and wanted to build Wirehog, but Sean Parker proudly said he and Peter Thiel “put a bullet in that thing” https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ I don’t want to just be the “wake up sheeple” guy or some unkempt Stallman clone. But there is a real culture clash between the hackers and the corporations, and I feel like the HN denizens who knee-jerk downvote of anything decentralized today don’t get the point of open source decentralized hacker ethos and how the people who practice it produce the next big thing. Working for FAAMGA and “the cloud” ain’t it folks. Here’s why “the cloud sucks” by Steve Wozniak: https://gizmodo.com/why-the-cloud-sucks-5932161 https://gizmodo.com/why-the-cloud-sucks-5932161 In short — read my rejoinder to Moxie Marlinspike, in my first link. It is ironic because all these years later, I end up being right: it is exactly his company that’s getting hit with this, exactly because it is centralized. And if you are Moxie or Durov and think your centralized company has somewhere to run… here is the bigger picture around the world — governments are coming for you and the war on user freedom is coming through you: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-encryption/214 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

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