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Google's software mistreats or harms the user

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Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#161

Post by pwinnski »

saagarjha wrote: post #132
tylerl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs? Are you joking? Of to the 2 Billion people using Chrome, point out just one for whom the privacy implications around autocomplete have imposed a non-theoretical cost. There's the cost you impose on yourself for paranoia, but lay THAT at the feet of the FSF. And if you say bandwidth you're fired. It's privacy the FSF is grumbling about. And for that it's been rhetoric and theoretical suffering, but no actua…

> point out just one for whom the privacy implications around autocomplete have imposed a non-theoretical cost Type "p" in the address bar at work?

paycomonline.com

Don't visit sites on work computers you don't want others to know about!

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#162

Post by anchpop »

leshow wrote: post #39
Ajedi32 wrote: post #25

Almost all of this is heavily exaggerated, presenting relatively innocuous features as if they were harmful, or calling out simple bugs as if they were intentional and actively malicious. None of it is flat-out wrong per-se (at least as far as I can tell), and I can certainly see where GNU is coming from, but I think for the average user most of the features they're criticizing actually do a lot more good than harm.…

> - They describe Google's demonstrated ability to remove malware from user's devices as a "backdoor" from wikipedia "A backdoor is a method, often secret, of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in a computer system, a product, or an embedded device " Seems to fit. > - They describe parental controls as "censorship" "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the…

This is an example of the noncentral fallacy. It's quite easy to do this for other situations.

Was Martin Luther King a criminal? A criminal is someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peacefully protesting against segregation, so yes.

Is it sexist to only hire women for a lingerie ad? Discrimination on the basis of sex is sexist, so yes.

Is it murder for a doctor to euthanize someone who wishes to die, even if it's not allowed in their area? Murder is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another, so yes.

But for all these things, if you just describe them as "criminals", "sexists", and "murderers", you're saying "we agree x is bad, y is an example of x, so y is bad", even if the reason x is bad doesn't really apply to y.

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#163

Post by spookthesunset »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #148
holy_city wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you want to send data to an untrusted destination and want the data to be read-only and non-copyable. DRM is the solution. That's not malware, it's part of the threat/loss prevention model for certain kinds of data. There are plenty of issues with DRM from a practical and philosophical level. But I think calling it malware is disingenuous. Alice doesn't cede her rights over her data by transmitting it to Bob, and…

By sending it me you have to copy it, either onto a medium or network, I then have to copy it (from some medium/network at least into main memory and then copy either into video or audio memory which then do magic to highlight pixels or create audio waves) The copy is essence of what a computer does. A computer can essentially only do some math and copying. If you ask me to install some DRM software (or maybe even so…

These kinds of reductionist arguments don't hold much water in the real world. Using arguments like this you can justify ransomware--after all ransomware is just CPU instructions running on a computer. That is what computers do is run instructions. Therefore, it is totally okay if the instructions happen to encrypt the entire contents of a disk and prevent the user from accessing it until they pay money.

Here in meatspace, we have this notion of ownership and property rights. DRM is a mechanism to protect those rights. They may not be perfect, and they might not always make much business sense but that is their intent.

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#164

Post by AndunD »

joshuamorton wrote: post #140
dredmorbius wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSF have an incredibly annoying track record of being precisely right, about a decade ahead of everyone else. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Pretty much nothing here resembles the world I live in. Can you precisely articulate which pieces are right now? I've been reading a lot recently, and so buying a lot of books. Some digital, some not. As far as I can tell I own a single copy of the physical ones. I can transfer them to someone by handing them my copy. I can do the same with digital ones. It's legal for other people to read my paperback, or for me to…

Being poor and computer illiterate.

No space for books and no software for cracking DRM.

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#165

Post by spookthesunset »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #159
Drew_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL authorization is malware apparently.

Software running on my computer, not letting me things do I want to do is malware. Yes.

You own your computer, yes. But you don't always own the data on it. Ownership of something is a legal and social construct, not a technical one.

PS: I think most DRM works against the businesses that attempt to implement it. But it isn't malware. It is a data protection layer.

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#166

Post by kodt »

tedunangst wrote: post #146
TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who you consider the user. Children subject to parental control censorship aren't voluntary parties.

Wait, I thought it was a good thing for the owner of a phone to decide how it can be used?

IDK according to my kid it's "his ipad".

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#167

Post by jazoom »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #65
kd3 wrote: post #46

We need the Librem phone today. It is long overdue.

We? Pardon me, I'll rather wait for the next Pixel.

We = kd3 + jazoom + whoever else kd3 was referring to.

"We" doesn't have to include all 7 billion human inhabitants of Earth. You were not included.

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#168

Post by esotericn »

mfontani wrote: post #77
lima wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse: tethering uses a different APN, which allows providers to rate limit tethered traffic, and without root access, you can't bypass it.

I'm fairly sure tethering can also be trivially detected by inspecting the TTL of packets, as a device sitting "behind" the tethering device will increase the TTL by one. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47819/how-can-ph... seems to have more on the matter.

Clever! I hadn't considered that at all. I suspect you mean decrement by one, though.

On Linux:

`sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl` (mine was 64) `sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65`

Done ;)

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#169

Post by favorited »

elamje wrote: post #155
favorited wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Stallman hates Netflix because they use DRM, but I don't know what part makes it "malware."

Yeah, that makes sense why it’s in the article. As much as people hate DRM, I can’t see a way for Netflix to be offered for the same price and content selection if the users were able to own the content indefinitely. It seems like it would just devolve into the iTunes Store where you purchase each episode/movie. Am I misunderstanding what DRM accomplishes?

They could just stream unencrypted movies in the browser, but that would make it trivial for people to save copies of the stream, and no big film distributer would go for that.

Even moves you buy from the iTunes Store have DRM so they only play on authorized devices (to keep one person from buying it, and giving all of their friends a copy).

Re: Google's software mistreats or harms the user

#170

Post by johannes1234321 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #163
johannes1234321 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By sending it me you have to copy it, either onto a medium or network, I then have to copy it (from some medium/network at least into main memory and then copy either into video or audio memory which then do magic to highlight pixels or create audio waves) The copy is essence of what a computer does. A computer can essentially only do some math and copying. If you ask me to install some DRM software (or maybe even so…

These kinds of reductionist arguments don't hold much water in the real world. Using arguments like this you can justify ransomware--after all ransomware is just CPU instructions running on a computer. That is what computers do is run instructions. Therefore, it is totally okay if the instructions happen to encrypt the entire contents of a disk and prevent the user from accessing it until they pay money. Here in meat…

The ransomware doesn't do what I as owner of the computer want and nothing which serves me a purpose. The comparison doesn't work.

If you look for a comparison: DRM is like a book publisher printing books on special paper which prevents copying and which can only be read in a specific angle so I can't easily take notes containing quotes from the book. All to protect those rights. (Edit: actually that example is missing a piece - you need special reading glasses to be able to read it, that's what DRM is doing on my machine)

And yes - Napster was an issue for the music industry. Suddenly their content was there for free and easily accessible. But then there was Apple, giving music away DRM-free with even better usability and for an acceptable fee.

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