4 ms·
I've been saying this since 2023 > If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company
by kepano 7mo ago
I've been saying this since 2023
> If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124188
- cj 7mo agoEdit: Okay, sounds like you guys are pissed to the point where it seems like the pro tip here is to stop using GitHub. Pro tip: sign up for the business/enterprise version when reasonable in price. I do this with Google Workspace. You can also do it with GitHub. (Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc)
- throwuxiytayq 7mo agoIt's not a pro tip if it only fucks you over slightly later. How's the weather in Stockholm?
- thot_experiment 7mo agoProbably don't reward extortion with money.
- kelnos 7mo agoYou don't have to use their free service if you don't like its terms. "Extortion" is a bit of an exaggeration here. Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed. I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even. Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part. If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL. I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
- thot_experiment 7mo agoEhhh sort of, I see what you're saying about it maybe not meeting the technical definition of extortion but I think you're missing the forest for the trees a little bit. The whole point is that when a company tries to force you to pay them through manipulative practices, you should not do that. That when companies manipulate you even if it makes economic sense to pay you shouldn't. That's fully compatible with not using the free service if you don't like the terms. Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.
- margalabargala 7mo ago> Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc ...yet
- bilbo0s 7mo agoThis. The belief of business users that this will remain true is grounded more in hope than in cold, dispassionate, business based decision making. If it's not life or death, encrypt every byte of data you send to the cloud. If it is life or death, you should probably not be letting that data traverse the open internet in any form.
- arcanemachiner 7mo agoOr, they don't train on it, but who's to say they're not harvesting analytics which may or may or not code samples, prompt data, etc. Which are then laundered through some sort of anonymization pipeline, to the point where they can argue that it no longer qualifies as your data, and can be freely trained upon. Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.
- schubidubiduba 7mo agoNothing conspirational about it. Getting data that their users or customers don't actually intend to give is the bread and butter of these companies. And they will do what they can to get it.
- worble 7mo agoPro tip: You could instead spend that money to spin up a forgejo instance for as little as $2 a month https://www.pikapods.com/apps#development https://www.pikapods.com/apps#development (not affiliated, just a happy customer) Please don't reward these companies with money.
- hirako2000 7mo agoI did exactly that. Containerized it and Forgejo simply became a small instance part of the fleet. UI is much snappier then GitHub. And more importantly: zero outages.
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoOr, alternatively, self-host a gitea instance!
- kriops 7mo agoNo. Money-grab incoming. Use forgejo.
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoHuh? Care to elaborate how Gitea is an inevitable cashgrab? Sure, it's not strictly copyleft, but it is licensed with the MIT License, and that is also the most popular license on GitHub.
- groby_b 7mo agoGithub's enterprise version "starts at" $21.99/seat, and requires you to "contact sales". And I don't see any mention that that exempts you from being trained on. (Yes, the blog says you're still covered, but at that price I'd like to see a contract saying that)
- saghm 7mo agoAt the risk of stating the obvious, I don't think it makes sense to reward them with money for trying to pull a bait-and-switch on this.
- Lio 7mo agoAn enterprise licence won't save you, Google, Microsoft, et al have happily been breaking copyright laws for years. If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time. They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.
- mememememememo 7mo agoYes I think you are right. Even a super ethical company can be taken over. There may be exceptions but it is more luck. I work for a SP500 that absolutely won't dont this and locks down prod access so a rogue staff can't do it. But if Larry or Zuck or Bezos buys them out, who knows.
- miohtama 7mo agoMicrosoft would never do this (-:
- chistev 7mo agoI don't like when people make sarcastic remarks and sign off in a way that indicates it was sarcasm. It kills it for me. Lol. Like using that /s or using that smiling emoji sign you used. A good joke would land even if some other people miss it because of the text format. "Microsoft would never do this" would have landed for me.
- sellmesoap 7mo agoIn Soviet Russia, Microsoft is the shit!
- abustamam 7mo agoAs opposed to other places where Microsoft is just shit? :)
- sellmesoap 7mo agoIt's my favorite slow burn, 'the shit' is a good thing, but everything is backwards in Soviet Russia...
- abustamam 7mo agoThat's what I understood, just wanted to make sure I wasn't reading too deeply into it :)
- moralestapia 7mo agoThank you for your service. We really need more "canaries in the mine" giving out early warnings of things that might not be evident on a first glance. Any takes on what 2029 will look like? (related to this topic, ofc)
- slowhadoken 7mo agoI’m still concerned about MS using the code I write on my laptop to train AI. Tinfoil hat wearing Linux users are starting to make a lot of sense to me.
- DougN7 7mo agoI thought that’s more what the CoPilot change is really about - not your repo, but all the code CoPilot read while it is offering helpful completions, etc - so literally the code on your laptop. I cancelled my account.
- b112 7mo agoIt's not tinfoil, it's aluminum foil. I.. I mean, I heard it's that.
- qaadika 7mo agoIt's been interesting the past year or so watching myself turn more and more into one of the tin-foil wearing linux users. I'm not sure how it happened, but self-hosting became more and more alluring and hyperfocusing on taking as much data as I can offline became worth spending entire weekends on. I didn't become paranoid, everybody else didn't!
- account42 7mo agoYou don't need a tinfoil hat so see the value in having a computer you fully own as opposed to one where some company can push whatever you want and all you get to say is "yes master" or perhaps if you are really lucky, "maybe later".
- hugodan 7mo agoand it is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't own the keys, avoid bullshit
- random3 7mo agoThe “do it first, apologize later” will be the general principle with anything. It’s going to be hard and futile to prove even if they don’t do it through ToS first. Amazon has one of the largest corporate training sets out there:)
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo agoYou're right, of course, and I find it frustrating that people are so thick as to not see your claim as obvious. Stallman is always right.
- worik 7mo ago> Stallman is always right. Not really. Almost always right....
- jamiek88 7mo agoAbout technology. About communication with other humans he’s pretty much always wrong. Imagine we’d had a better communicator who wasn’t a gross toe nail picking troll fronting free software? It shouldn’t matter. Only the ideas should matter . But the reality is different.
- itsdesmond 7mo agoHe argued against EU proposals for ISPs to filter CSAM on the basis of protecting free expression. Not always right about technology, either.
- tryauuum 7mo agoMass scale internet censorship in Russia also started with the premise of "protecting the children" When you put in law that ISPs should adhere to some government-provided blocklist, this is already a game over. No matter how sane your government is. The government in 10 years might be vastly different, and the ability to control the ISPs is too alluring to not abuse I'd rather live in a world where you could find words like "kill all russians", or child porn, or blatant propaganda than to live with the government censorship. I lived in Russia and the experience was nightmare. Who knows, maybe if the government didn't have the tools they had then the independent media would still be reachable by an average russian, the pictures of the pointless massacre would be public and the war would be over in a week
- itsdesmond 7mo ago