9 ms·

The Candid Naivety of Geeks

157 points by SlackingOff123 2y ago

beeflet 2y ago
yeah it sucks that a lot of the rust ecosystem is pushing permissive licenses over copyleft
- facile3232 2y ago
  [dead]
- arccy 2y ago
  copyleft is less free than permissive. noone should be compelled to share their work if they don't want to.
  - lovich 2y ago
    But we collectively should be compelled to protect it under IP law? I’m personally completely fine(legally not morally) with people or organizations who want to keep trade secrets secret, but not if they also want society to protect anyone copying their work. The tradeoff is you show society how to accomplish your innovation and we’ll guarantee you profits for X years with the might of law Edit: this was in response to the comment about no one should be compelled to share their work. I don’t know enough about the nuances of copyleft vs permissive licenses to have useful commentary
  - rakoo 2y ago
    Individual freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is only effective if collective freedom is aimed and enforced. Having the freedom to live under a roof at the condition that you have enough money isn't something I'd consider actual freedom, and yet someone is free to restrict access to land and empty housing. That is plain stupid for a healthy society
  - beeflet 2y ago
    the "freedom" being limited in this case is the freedom to privatize otherwise public work
    - arccy 2y ago
      privatise your additional work on top of the public work. the public work doesn't stop being public.
      - rini17 2y ago
        In theory. In practice it does stop being public because it is either sold or used as a leverage as a whole, public and private parts together.
- okanat 2y ago
  Rust libraries "have to" be permissive due to the way they are compiled. Rust's current compilation method requires everything to be compiled with the exact version of the compiler at the same exact setup due to lack of ABI compatibility guarantees. This means everything has to be compiled from source. LGPL doesn't work since it will force companies to release their entire source code. Without the ease for proprietary software development Rust wouldn't get as popular nor it would receive the same support from big tech. Without that popular support it wouldn't be as performant, nor it would attract the top system programmers it did. It is also extremely naive to think that copyleft licenses aren't actively violated. It is rampant and at this point violating them is the industry standard actually. Making software effectively "ownerless" by accepting many independent developers makes it also equally hard to defend its licenses. The socioeconomic system of the West prioritizes private ownership. Without a clear private owner (or a consortium acting on behalf), it is hard to defend GPL and the rights.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    a permissive license is essentially the worst case scenario for a violated copyleft license
MiiMe19 2y ago
Thought the title said greeks and was very confused when I started reading about amazon. Very good article though.
robwwilliams 2y ago
Guy on a good soapbox, but heavy on assertions and high emotion. Those damn trade-offs!
- itsanaccount 2y ago
  Except the trade offs only go one way. Its a rachet. You never get more free, open systems. Over time your life and the life of your children only gets more bound. It's frog boiling. You're displaying the exact naivety he's trying to point out.
  - robwwilliams 2y ago
    Maybe, but these types of complaints have a very long history. Photographs are an invasion of privacy. And many forms of technology. We are embedded in complex societies. The idea of being a sacrosanct private silo is a Western mode of thinking, and not an old one either.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
Ploum's Doctorow-adjacent nuance-free condescending nerd-rants always makes me want to channel n-gate.
cavisne 2y ago
Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar. Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon. Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many employees its through design not luck.
- thakoppno 2y ago
  > In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl. This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incentives too.
  - afc 2y ago
    The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident in 20+ years is a huge success given the scope.
    - thakoppno 2y ago
      > Google revealed to TechCrunch that a second Google employee had also been caught violating user privacy and was also dismissed. Google didn't reveal any details about what or when this occurred, other than to say the other case didn't involve minors. I agree largely that the efforts have been successful but there’s more than one incident. I’ll even speculate wildly without any evidence that there have been more than two.
- 2y ago
delusional 2y ago
the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up. A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends. They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit, that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter, but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden. You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple storing your voice. It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to ask me why I'm being difficult.
skybrian 2y ago
Having better priors can be useful, but they're no substitute for evidence. These assertions about how naive you supposedly should have been about some company are less useful than sharing evidence about what the company actually did.
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  I came here to say this. Does the author not think that dozens of these “geeks” have enough technical acumen to figure out what information their Echo is sending to Amazon’s servers? It would have been a noisy scandal.
zitterbewegung 2y ago
There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with. Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of privacy regardless. Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but there have been arguments against it. [1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-says-its-not-google/ https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...
- troupo 2y ago
  Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor. This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership). On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent
  - int_19h 2y ago
    OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far. The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features to plausibly differentiate along these lines. And privacy is one thing that they know Google will never be able to offer, given its business model, so it makes perfect sense for Apple to double down on that. (Ironically, this means that Apple users benefit from Android being the dominant platform.)
philo_sophia 2y ago
As a tech employee who has worked on software privacy controls for consumer devices at amazon I have a couple thoughts. First, let me clarify that I am still highly skeptical about any tech companies privacy promises. That being said, the privacy control I worked on for one of Amazon's devices was a pita. It was a hardware switch which completely powered down all sensors, and modifying code related to it required extensive testing to preserve customer privacy. Amazon at least emphasizes to employees earning and retaining customer trust. The real reason I actually semi trust tech companies privacy policies is the ethics of individual employees. Maybe I'm projecting my disgust at privacy infringements onto my coworkers, but I generally believe these large corps can't hire sufficient teams of devs to build privacy compromising systems without at least one person whistleblowing. My $.02
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Sure they can. Just build something that allows for abuse, set up controls that prevent individual employees from abusing it, then have an exec secretly do whatever they want without your involvement.
- egometry 2y ago
  The ethics of individual employees only lasts until the next firing, unfortunately.
kleton 2y ago
> The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up > In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate. > The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice > The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect" > And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.
- namaria 2y ago
  Repeated games are studied in game theory, and the winning strategy is to "trust, retaliate, and trust again". Logic isn't limited to first order logic.
- verisimi 2y ago
  12+ years of instilling faith in schooling and science does work. So when people realise that this is a corporate world, that money directs everything, even what they have been trained to think, it comes as a bit of a shock. But mostly people carry on anyway, as they have the habit.
- swagmoney69 2y ago
  [dead]
jlg23 2y ago
The Candid Naivety of Geeks > Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.) Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is going to change anything? Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz. Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in, for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it, because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would commit to long-term memory. No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds like something between bad impulse control and idiocy. I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to convince.
- antonvs 2y ago
  100% agreed. This is just someone self-reporting on their own recently discovered naivete, but projecting it into others.
lukev 2y ago
Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-supported.) But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is definitely a thing of value. And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one that is attempting to compete on the basis of privacy. And so they have e2e encryption on iMessages, most of iCloud, are the only people doing meaningful things with homomorphic encryption and AI, etc. They recently, very publicly, turned off these features in the UK due to recent legislation. But if I look at what they're doing, and the audits they're admitting, and the political hits they're taking, and if I dismiss all that I'm supposed to be "candidly naive"? Do you want us to choose our platforms on the basis of privacy, or not? And I'm not just "trusting" Apple, I'm looking at their financial incentives. Which are focused around selling extremely overpriced, decent quality hardware. Not ad targeting. For me to believe that Apple is wantonly and deliberately harvesting my data would require that I believe they have an entire secondary advertising business that has remained completely under the radar. Again, fuck you for making me defend Apple. They have so many issues. But also if we just go pure nihilist and don't even allow companies to compete on the basis of proper security, what's left, unless we go offline entirely?
- thayne 2y ago
  > We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. What we want and what actually happens are two different things. In many cases there isn't a whole lot of competition. For example, Apple's only competitor for mobile OS is google.
refulgentis 2y ago
My jump to conclusions mat says "The author doesn't understand tech!" I worked on on-device speech at Google, both frontend and backend. Unless there was a secret cabal mirror team that did all the evil stuff and made us think we were writing the code that was shipping, it doesn't come close to describing how things actually were worked through internally. Most trivially, and narrowly, Most Evil Amazon would be just as happy with a transcript of what you said that was recognized locally. There's 0 reason they need the audio. I'd also hazard a guess they're not streaming audio to the server, no one would create a hotword detector that would rely on that, due to the latency and bandwidth demand alone.
ricardobeat 2y ago
Funny read. > And that’s why I see Apple as a cult: most tech people cannot be reasoned about it. After presenting zero actual reasons to believe they are not taking privacy seriously. Just.. beliefs. > Corporations are lying. You must treat every corporate word as a straight lie until proved otherwise. > I don’t say that Signal is perfect: I say I trust them to believe themselves what they announce. I share the distrust in corporations, but there is zero technical reason to believe Signal apps are more secure than Apple's unless you reviewed the code yourself, entirely, and built it from source. Pot, meet kettle.
- verisimi 2y ago
  He says he has read some code: > First of all, Signal is open source. And, yes, I’ve read some of the source code for some feature I was interested in. I’ve also read through some very deep audit of Signal source code.
kiitos 2y ago
principal naivety here seems to be by the author
littlestymaar 2y ago
People still giving credit to Apple even when THEY HAVE GOTTEN CAUGHT of listening all of the people's conversation in order to train Siri back in 2019[1] are a really good illustration that you can't have a working democracy when gigantic corporation have such a control over what people will think about them no matter what they do. [1]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parle-d-un-systeme-de-surveillance-massif-denonce-un-ancien-analyste-de-donnees-d-apple_5844608.html https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parl...
saagarjha 2y ago
There’s actually a meta-naivety in geeks where they write stuff like this and then get on the soapbox to shill some random project that is somehow better and that we can actually trust some random service for reasons that fall apart if you apply the exact same scrutiny to them. Really, they’re just smug about being smarter. Let’s take the two advertisements that the author has. I call them advertisements because, despite being sure neither Signal or Protonmail paid this guy, he fell into the obvious trap of “xyz sucks, here’s what to use instead”. Amazon is bad, Apple is bad, Kagi is bad because they all take your money. But Protonmail is good because they…take your money? They take your money and if they did something bad you wouldn’t pay them. Ok? And this obviously has happened to all the secure apps that people continue to use despite them being hacked, or the companies that rebrand after it’s found out they were leaking your information? If Protonmail was found out tomorrow to be a front for the CIA, who suffers? What’s stopping the people running it from just making Electronmail tomorrow and claiming that they aren’t a front for the CIA? Meanwhile Signal is an open source project and that means everyone has reviewed the code and trusts it. What happened to giving companies money so that they suffer when they violate your privacy? If Signal makes it so that you don’t want to use it, what harm do they suffer? If they add new code that backdoors the app or sells ads or harvests your contacts, what are you going to do about it? Will you publish a blog post explaining how you were the geek who got conned this time? I actually have nothing against these specific projects, just as I generally don’t have specific vendettas against the other dozen things these blog posts tend to shill (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Quebes, GrapheneOS, Firefox, whatever). My point is that the geek is perpetually vulnerable to thinking his choices are good because of some technical reasons, when in reality we choose what we associate with based on trust and human factors. You probably choose your software because your buddy from IRC told you it is good. A lot of people choose their software because they saw an advertisement showing that this company actually cares about their privacy. Neither of you is dumber than the other and making people feel bad for not keeping up with the evolving landscape of privacy is generally not productive.
- luqtas 2y ago
  so what's your point? rant about the rant? if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress
upvotebrigade 2y ago
[dead]
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
“spammers are more consistent at making SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correct than are legitimate senders.” LOL!
- brody_hamer 2y ago
  Yea this one confused me. DKIM and DMARC are about preventing impersonation. Haha. Nothing to do with unsolicited email.
  - alfiedotwtf 2y ago
    I was laughing at the point that they are doing the extra steps to be compliant to all pass DKIM and DMARC yet legitimate companies are still running open relays.
ValentineC 2y ago
> But most importantly, Signal sole existence is to protect privacy of its users. It’s not even a corporation and, yes, this is important. "Not a corporation" means little if there's no transparency to how the nonprofit's board members are appointed or elected. See the controversy that is the WordPress Foundation, which is also a 501(c)(3): https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-the-wordpress-foundation-board/ https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... I guess geeks should be sceptical of legal structures that might get passed off as "feel good" marketing too. :)
disambiguation 2y ago
Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs. Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.
- andrei_says_ 2y ago
  The other important fact is that there are multiple entities keeping an ever-growing dossier on you which you cannot see, delete, or correct. Every step you take, every word you write, every picture or video you look at, every single thing you pay for, every place you go, every person you call/message, or are physically near to. And the times when you left your phone behind. For everyone, combined, analyzed, searchable, with machine-learning-everything thrown at it to find and predict patterns and of course to stalk exes, political activists, anybody. Imagine what the Stasi police could do with all of this and know that your current administration is doing it. It’s a bit depressing even if put to the music of I’m Watching You by hmmm… the Police.
- boppo1 2y ago
  >NSA dragnet Can you tell me more? What specifically, are they collecting? The porn I've looked at on /s/? >always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs Are we talking about IME? That's more of a 'theoretically it could execute code, but they'd need a crazy amount of software engineering to really use it to monitor you'. Besides, you can MITM your network traffic and see if it's phoning home. And I'm sure people do, and I've read no cases of it actually being used that way. Not that I'm okay with this or happy about it. It's just less dire than could be since, although the infra is there, it's not being used.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    GP basically called himself a schizo so they know, at least subconsciously, they went too far down that rabbit hole. Even though they just called us idiots. My particular hot take, speaking partially from experience, is that indeed, there are insurmountable amounts of data collected - but it's collected by hundreds of disconnected, inhomogeneous and incompetent organizations with conflicting goals. There's no global all-knowing conspiracy, even governmental organizations in a single country have poor data sharing capabilities. And this should be trivial - it gets much harder when you take into account commercial organizations that store user data but it's not their main focus, commercial organizations that want to sell user data, but not for free, commercial organizations that really want to pretend they care about user privacy, foreign organizations, foreign organizations from hostile countries, and everreaching bureaucracy related to getting data from basically any of those.
kortilla 2y ago
The cognitive dissonance in the article when it comes to Signal and Protonmail is the same thing the author is deriding with people trusting Apple et al. Apple has far more to lose monetarily than protonmail if it comes out that Apple sells off iMessage contents or similar. I agree with the ideal of the article and the plight, but the shilling of Signal and Protonmail absolutely destroy the message because it goes right back to who you decide to trust to run a closed source service for you. A corporation betraying a relationship with a customer is not a magic property of a corporation. It can happen just as easily with non-profits, coops, and any other org structure. They are all groups of people in the end who you don’t know and fundamentally cannot trust to be acting as an agent of your interests. 100% we need more of Stallman or someone pushing actual open source. Signal and Protonmail are not that. They are just other SaaS providers that you have to trust the marketing of.
- rini17 2y ago
  Even if you self-host on own domain using libre software, you have to trust the registrar and certificate authorities. Thinking you can cut out all trusted third parties is naive,too.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    No you don’t. The CAs are only necessary if you want random public devices to be able to validate your domain. And you don’t have to trust the registrar because of what I just said. You don’t need to depend on PKI.
oneplane 2y ago
He's not wrong, but he's also not right. I suppose it mostly comes close to screaming into the void and not helping with anything. The way things are is also a mirror of large society. It takes a lot to keep it all going, combined with nobody has time or wants to care about the technology in their life. At best there are some negative events that makes people think about it for a little while, and for some there will be a bad memory, but in the end it just fades out of focus to the same place where oil changes and filter changes go.
Ferret7446 2y ago
Pedantic, but the naivete of spelling it as "naivety" (diacritics dropped when anglicized, for those even more pedantic)? I'm pretty sure that (mis)spelling did not exist (or was certainly not commonly used) 10 years ago.
poincaredisk 2y ago
I agree so far, but: >But was is happening in your inbox, really? >Most spam is not "black hat spam". It is what I call "white-collar spam": perfectly legitimate company, sending you emails from legitimate address. You slept in a hotel during a business trip? This is pure survivor paradox. This is true for your Gmail account, because all "black hat spam" was already filtered! I own two unfiltered email accounts that were sadly scraped from the internet, and the spam is - by far - almost completely malspam, romance scam, cryptocurrency spam, scam attempts, spoofs, phishings.
- buyucu 2y ago
  I have a protonmail account with close to 0 spam. In fact, I get more spam on my legacy gmail account. Email spam is not the huge problem people make it out to be. Common sense goes a long way.

beeflet 2y ago

yeah it sucks that a lot of the rust ecosystem is pushing permissive licenses over copyleft

facile3232 2y ago
[dead]
arccy 2y ago
copyleft is less free than permissive. noone should be compelled to share their work if they don't want to.
- lovich 2y ago
  But we collectively should be compelled to protect it under IP law? I’m personally completely fine(legally not morally) with people or organizations who want to keep trade secrets secret, but not if they also want society to protect anyone copying their work. The tradeoff is you show society how to accomplish your innovation and we’ll guarantee you profits for X years with the might of law Edit: this was in response to the comment about no one should be compelled to share their work. I don’t know enough about the nuances of copyleft vs permissive licenses to have useful commentary
- rakoo 2y ago
  Individual freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is only effective if collective freedom is aimed and enforced. Having the freedom to live under a roof at the condition that you have enough money isn't something I'd consider actual freedom, and yet someone is free to restrict access to land and empty housing. That is plain stupid for a healthy society
- beeflet 2y ago
  the "freedom" being limited in this case is the freedom to privatize otherwise public work
  - arccy 2y ago
    privatise your additional work on top of the public work. the public work doesn't stop being public.
    - rini17 2y ago
      In theory. In practice it does stop being public because it is either sold or used as a leverage as a whole, public and private parts together.
okanat 2y ago
Rust libraries "have to" be permissive due to the way they are compiled. Rust's current compilation method requires everything to be compiled with the exact version of the compiler at the same exact setup due to lack of ABI compatibility guarantees. This means everything has to be compiled from source. LGPL doesn't work since it will force companies to release their entire source code. Without the ease for proprietary software development Rust wouldn't get as popular nor it would receive the same support from big tech. Without that popular support it wouldn't be as performant, nor it would attract the top system programmers it did. It is also extremely naive to think that copyleft licenses aren't actively violated. It is rampant and at this point violating them is the industry standard actually. Making software effectively "ownerless" by accepting many independent developers makes it also equally hard to defend its licenses. The socioeconomic system of the West prioritizes private ownership. Without a clear private owner (or a consortium acting on behalf), it is hard to defend GPL and the rights.
- beeflet 2y ago
  a permissive license is essentially the worst case scenario for a violated copyleft license

MiiMe19 2y ago

Thought the title said greeks and was very confused when I started reading about amazon. Very good article though.

robwwilliams 2y ago

Guy on a good soapbox, but heavy on assertions and high emotion. Those damn trade-offs!

itsanaccount 2y ago
Except the trade offs only go one way. Its a rachet. You never get more free, open systems. Over time your life and the life of your children only gets more bound. It's frog boiling. You're displaying the exact naivety he's trying to point out.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  Maybe, but these types of complaints have a very long history. Photographs are an invasion of privacy. And many forms of technology. We are embedded in complex societies. The idea of being a sacrosanct private silo is a Western mode of thinking, and not an old one either.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

Ploum's Doctorow-adjacent nuance-free condescending nerd-rants always makes me want to channel n-gate.

cavisne 2y ago

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar. Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon. Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many employees its through design not luck.

thakoppno 2y ago
> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl. This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incentives too.
- afc 2y ago
  The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident in 20+ years is a huge success given the scope.
  - thakoppno 2y ago
    > Google revealed to TechCrunch that a second Google employee had also been caught violating user privacy and was also dismissed. Google didn't reveal any details about what or when this occurred, other than to say the other case didn't involve minors. I agree largely that the efforts have been successful but there’s more than one incident. I’ll even speculate wildly without any evidence that there have been more than two.
2y ago

delusional 2y ago

the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up. A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends. They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit, that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter, but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden. You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple storing your voice. It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to ask me why I'm being difficult.

skybrian 2y ago

Having better priors can be useful, but they're no substitute for evidence. These assertions about how naive you supposedly should have been about some company are less useful than sharing evidence about what the company actually did.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago
I came here to say this. Does the author not think that dozens of these “geeks” have enough technical acumen to figure out what information their Echo is sending to Amazon’s servers? It would have been a noisy scandal.

zitterbewegung 2y ago

There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with. Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of privacy regardless. Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but there have been arguments against it. [1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-says-its-not-google/ https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...

troupo 2y ago
Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor. This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership). On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent
- int_19h 2y ago
  OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far. The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features to plausibly differentiate along these lines. And privacy is one thing that they know Google will never be able to offer, given its business model, so it makes perfect sense for Apple to double down on that. (Ironically, this means that Apple users benefit from Android being the dominant platform.)

philo_sophia 2y ago

As a tech employee who has worked on software privacy controls for consumer devices at amazon I have a couple thoughts. First, let me clarify that I am still highly skeptical about any tech companies privacy promises. That being said, the privacy control I worked on for one of Amazon's devices was a pita. It was a hardware switch which completely powered down all sensors, and modifying code related to it required extensive testing to preserve customer privacy. Amazon at least emphasizes to employees earning and retaining customer trust. The real reason I actually semi trust tech companies privacy policies is the ethics of individual employees. Maybe I'm projecting my disgust at privacy infringements onto my coworkers, but I generally believe these large corps can't hire sufficient teams of devs to build privacy compromising systems without at least one person whistleblowing. My $.02

saagarjha 2y ago
Sure they can. Just build something that allows for abuse, set up controls that prevent individual employees from abusing it, then have an exec secretly do whatever they want without your involvement.
egometry 2y ago
The ethics of individual employees only lasts until the next firing, unfortunately.

kleton 2y ago

> The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up > In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate. > The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice > The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect" > And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.

namaria 2y ago
Repeated games are studied in game theory, and the winning strategy is to "trust, retaliate, and trust again". Logic isn't limited to first order logic.
verisimi 2y ago
12+ years of instilling faith in schooling and science does work. So when people realise that this is a corporate world, that money directs everything, even what they have been trained to think, it comes as a bit of a shock. But mostly people carry on anyway, as they have the habit.
swagmoney69 2y ago
[dead]

jlg23 2y ago

The Candid Naivety of Geeks > Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.) Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is going to change anything? Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz. Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in, for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it, because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would commit to long-term memory. No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds like something between bad impulse control and idiocy. I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to convince.

antonvs 2y ago
100% agreed. This is just someone self-reporting on their own recently discovered naivete, but projecting it into others.

lukev 2y ago

Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-supported.) But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is definitely a thing of value. And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one that is attempting to compete on the basis of privacy. And so they have e2e encryption on iMessages, most of iCloud, are the only people doing meaningful things with homomorphic encryption and AI, etc. They recently, very publicly, turned off these features in the UK due to recent legislation. But if I look at what they're doing, and the audits they're admitting, and the political hits they're taking, and if I dismiss all that I'm supposed to be "candidly naive"? Do you want us to choose our platforms on the basis of privacy, or not? And I'm not just "trusting" Apple, I'm looking at their financial incentives. Which are focused around selling extremely overpriced, decent quality hardware. Not ad targeting. For me to believe that Apple is wantonly and deliberately harvesting my data would require that I believe they have an entire secondary advertising business that has remained completely under the radar. Again, fuck you for making me defend Apple. They have so many issues. But also if we just go pure nihilist and don't even allow companies to compete on the basis of proper security, what's left, unless we go offline entirely?

thayne 2y ago
> We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. What we want and what actually happens are two different things. In many cases there isn't a whole lot of competition. For example, Apple's only competitor for mobile OS is google.

refulgentis 2y ago

My jump to conclusions mat says "The author doesn't understand tech!" I worked on on-device speech at Google, both frontend and backend. Unless there was a secret cabal mirror team that did all the evil stuff and made us think we were writing the code that was shipping, it doesn't come close to describing how things actually were worked through internally. Most trivially, and narrowly, Most Evil Amazon would be just as happy with a transcript of what you said that was recognized locally. There's 0 reason they need the audio. I'd also hazard a guess they're not streaming audio to the server, no one would create a hotword detector that would rely on that, due to the latency and bandwidth demand alone.

ricardobeat 2y ago

Funny read. > And that’s why I see Apple as a cult: most tech people cannot be reasoned about it. After presenting zero actual reasons to believe they are not taking privacy seriously. Just.. beliefs. > Corporations are lying. You must treat every corporate word as a straight lie until proved otherwise. > I don’t say that Signal is perfect: I say I trust them to believe themselves what they announce. I share the distrust in corporations, but there is zero technical reason to believe Signal apps are more secure than Apple's unless you reviewed the code yourself, entirely, and built it from source. Pot, meet kettle.

verisimi 2y ago
He says he has read some code: > First of all, Signal is open source. And, yes, I’ve read some of the source code for some feature I was interested in. I’ve also read through some very deep audit of Signal source code.

kiitos 2y ago

principal naivety here seems to be by the author

littlestymaar 2y ago

People still giving credit to Apple even when THEY HAVE GOTTEN CAUGHT of listening all of the people's conversation in order to train Siri back in 2019[1] are a really good illustration that you can't have a working democracy when gigantic corporation have such a control over what people will think about them no matter what they do. [1]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parle-d-un-systeme-de-surveillance-massif-denonce-un-ancien-analyste-de-donnees-d-apple_5844608.html https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parl...

saagarjha 2y ago

There’s actually a meta-naivety in geeks where they write stuff like this and then get on the soapbox to shill some random project that is somehow better and that we can actually trust some random service for reasons that fall apart if you apply the exact same scrutiny to them. Really, they’re just smug about being smarter. Let’s take the two advertisements that the author has. I call them advertisements because, despite being sure neither Signal or Protonmail paid this guy, he fell into the obvious trap of “xyz sucks, here’s what to use instead”. Amazon is bad, Apple is bad, Kagi is bad because they all take your money. But Protonmail is good because they…take your money? They take your money and if they did something bad you wouldn’t pay them. Ok? And this obviously has happened to all the secure apps that people continue to use despite them being hacked, or the companies that rebrand after it’s found out they were leaking your information? If Protonmail was found out tomorrow to be a front for the CIA, who suffers? What’s stopping the people running it from just making Electronmail tomorrow and claiming that they aren’t a front for the CIA? Meanwhile Signal is an open source project and that means everyone has reviewed the code and trusts it. What happened to giving companies money so that they suffer when they violate your privacy? If Signal makes it so that you don’t want to use it, what harm do they suffer? If they add new code that backdoors the app or sells ads or harvests your contacts, what are you going to do about it? Will you publish a blog post explaining how you were the geek who got conned this time? I actually have nothing against these specific projects, just as I generally don’t have specific vendettas against the other dozen things these blog posts tend to shill (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Quebes, GrapheneOS, Firefox, whatever). My point is that the geek is perpetually vulnerable to thinking his choices are good because of some technical reasons, when in reality we choose what we associate with based on trust and human factors. You probably choose your software because your buddy from IRC told you it is good. A lot of people choose their software because they saw an advertisement showing that this company actually cares about their privacy. Neither of you is dumber than the other and making people feel bad for not keeping up with the evolving landscape of privacy is generally not productive.

luqtas 2y ago
so what's your point? rant about the rant? if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress

upvotebrigade 2y ago

[dead]

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

“spammers are more consistent at making SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correct than are legitimate senders.” LOL!

brody_hamer 2y ago
Yea this one confused me. DKIM and DMARC are about preventing impersonation. Haha. Nothing to do with unsolicited email.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  I was laughing at the point that they are doing the extra steps to be compliant to all pass DKIM and DMARC yet legitimate companies are still running open relays.

ValentineC 2y ago

> But most importantly, Signal sole existence is to protect privacy of its users. It’s not even a corporation and, yes, this is important. "Not a corporation" means little if there's no transparency to how the nonprofit's board members are appointed or elected. See the controversy that is the WordPress Foundation, which is also a 501(c)(3): https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-the-wordpress-foundation-board/ https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... I guess geeks should be sceptical of legal structures that might get passed off as "feel good" marketing too. :)

disambiguation 2y ago

Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs. Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

andrei_says_ 2y ago
The other important fact is that there are multiple entities keeping an ever-growing dossier on you which you cannot see, delete, or correct. Every step you take, every word you write, every picture or video you look at, every single thing you pay for, every place you go, every person you call/message, or are physically near to. And the times when you left your phone behind. For everyone, combined, analyzed, searchable, with machine-learning-everything thrown at it to find and predict patterns and of course to stalk exes, political activists, anybody. Imagine what the Stasi police could do with all of this and know that your current administration is doing it. It’s a bit depressing even if put to the music of I’m Watching You by hmmm… the Police.
boppo1 2y ago
>NSA dragnet Can you tell me more? What specifically, are they collecting? The porn I've looked at on /s/? >always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs Are we talking about IME? That's more of a 'theoretically it could execute code, but they'd need a crazy amount of software engineering to really use it to monitor you'. Besides, you can MITM your network traffic and see if it's phoning home. And I'm sure people do, and I've read no cases of it actually being used that way. Not that I'm okay with this or happy about it. It's just less dire than could be since, although the infra is there, it's not being used.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  GP basically called himself a schizo so they know, at least subconsciously, they went too far down that rabbit hole. Even though they just called us idiots. My particular hot take, speaking partially from experience, is that indeed, there are insurmountable amounts of data collected - but it's collected by hundreds of disconnected, inhomogeneous and incompetent organizations with conflicting goals. There's no global all-knowing conspiracy, even governmental organizations in a single country have poor data sharing capabilities. And this should be trivial - it gets much harder when you take into account commercial organizations that store user data but it's not their main focus, commercial organizations that want to sell user data, but not for free, commercial organizations that really want to pretend they care about user privacy, foreign organizations, foreign organizations from hostile countries, and everreaching bureaucracy related to getting data from basically any of those.

kortilla 2y ago

The cognitive dissonance in the article when it comes to Signal and Protonmail is the same thing the author is deriding with people trusting Apple et al. Apple has far more to lose monetarily than protonmail if it comes out that Apple sells off iMessage contents or similar. I agree with the ideal of the article and the plight, but the shilling of Signal and Protonmail absolutely destroy the message because it goes right back to who you decide to trust to run a closed source service for you. A corporation betraying a relationship with a customer is not a magic property of a corporation. It can happen just as easily with non-profits, coops, and any other org structure. They are all groups of people in the end who you don’t know and fundamentally cannot trust to be acting as an agent of your interests. 100% we need more of Stallman or someone pushing actual open source. Signal and Protonmail are not that. They are just other SaaS providers that you have to trust the marketing of.

rini17 2y ago
Even if you self-host on own domain using libre software, you have to trust the registrar and certificate authorities. Thinking you can cut out all trusted third parties is naive,too.
- kortilla 2y ago
  No you don’t. The CAs are only necessary if you want random public devices to be able to validate your domain. And you don’t have to trust the registrar because of what I just said. You don’t need to depend on PKI.

oneplane 2y ago

He's not wrong, but he's also not right. I suppose it mostly comes close to screaming into the void and not helping with anything. The way things are is also a mirror of large society. It takes a lot to keep it all going, combined with nobody has time or wants to care about the technology in their life. At best there are some negative events that makes people think about it for a little while, and for some there will be a bad memory, but in the end it just fades out of focus to the same place where oil changes and filter changes go.

Ferret7446 2y ago

Pedantic, but the naivete of spelling it as "naivety" (diacritics dropped when anglicized, for those even more pedantic)? I'm pretty sure that (mis)spelling did not exist (or was certainly not commonly used) 10 years ago.

poincaredisk 2y ago

I agree so far, but: >But was is happening in your inbox, really? >Most spam is not "black hat spam". It is what I call "white-collar spam": perfectly legitimate company, sending you emails from legitimate address. You slept in a hotel during a business trip? This is pure survivor paradox. This is true for your Gmail account, because all "black hat spam" was already filtered! I own two unfiltered email accounts that were sadly scraped from the internet, and the spam is - by far - almost completely malspam, romance scam, cryptocurrency spam, scam attempts, spoofs, phishings.

buyucu 2y ago
I have a protonmail account with close to 0 spam. In fact, I get more spam on my legacy gmail account. Email spam is not the huge problem people make it out to be. Common sense goes a long way.