261–270 of 291 posts
This article claims that Netflix is malware. I don’t have an opinion about Netflix, but would like to hear why someone considers it malware.
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Yes, this is a keylogger. Autocomplete with a remote backend is too. The Overton window has moved so far in the last ten years. A while back we (and by we I don't mean me, I mean hackers collectively) would consider a piece of software that opened a TCP socket unless it had a real reason to malware. Now? It's fairly common for like, webpages to send back every keystroke you might accidentally make whilst a tab is foc…
The Overton window describes what the public will accept as "sane" (to use your term). You're free to disagree with the rest of the world, of course. But you might want to focus on trying to shift the Overton window. What you're doing in this comment is simply asserting that you disagree with everyone else.
Because you seem to be asserting what "everyone else" thinks.
If I ask non-technical people about this autocomplete feature and whether they would like to disable it (assuming they have this option), after explaining it sends every keystroke to Google, they (generally) will reluctantly agree to have it enabled, why?
It's not because they believe sending every keystroke to Google is a super reasonable sacrifice for having the benefit of autocomplete on search queries.
No, ask them, they will invariably sigh "Well, Google knows everything about me already, anyway, so ...".
That's NOT the reasoning of someone making a well thought-out decision, it's the reasoning of someone beaten into submission. And we know this is true, because we feel it too, every time you read a comment about somebody trying to escape the Google Ecosystem, but not yet having a satisfying replacement for this one service .. You don't get to make a fair choice about it.
That is why they say Google mistreats their users, because they made them give up, not just giving up their privacy, but giving up on their belief they even have a choice about it.
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The GNU completely ignores the value that you get from Google. For instance this point: > Google Chrome contains a key logger that sends Google every URL typed in, one key at a time They are describing the auto complete feature... I get that people should be making informed choices about what data they share, but for the FSF to so intentionally mis-describe what is going on does not help inform anyone.
If only there were some middle ground between "not having autocomplete" and "ruthlessly data mining the everliving fuck out of everything I do in order to sell me shit." Oh well, nothing we can do, I guess, except shut up and take it.
That's basically holding my privacy hostage for what is stupidly basic UX functionality.
And it's not like I was given a choice about it. Maps used to remember your search history just fine, until they pulled that a few years ago, and I "just" had to give them my location history, so they would remember my fucking search queries.
You might recognize these tactics from heroin dealers and similar scum.
It's amazing how unnecessarily less useful Maps is, if you have to retype the addresses every. single. time. But you don't want Google to keep a log of everywhere you've been.
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> - 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 wi…
parental controls are good (?), so this functionality to suppress what-we-define-as-objectionable content is good.
autocomplete is good, so this keylogger is good.
Google Assistent is good (?), so having it just pop up unprompted and just start recording is good (It managed to record me a few times, even though I have zero interest in voice controlling my phone--I have NO idea what triggered it, so yeah that's malware).
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…
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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…
Amazon can — and have — reach into your Kindle and delete books you have there (notably, they did this to 1984, proving that real life can be ironic).
You cannot lend one Kindle book to someone else, without lending the entire Kindle.
Your phone, computer and TV run binary code which can do literally anything (say, logging your passwords and transmitting them in unused protocol headers), which you are not permitted to remove or modify, in the name of DRM and similar user-restricting technologies.
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> Is there anything these guys like? Free (as in freedom) Software. > Stallman and Gnu are extremists The word you're looking for is "radicals"; "extremists" carries connotations with violence and illegal behavior, which is the exact opposite of what Stallman/FSF stand for. Are these views radical? Yes. But are they wrong ? The way I see it, RMS has been writing about what's wrong with the software world for decades…
How weird to argue about the connotations of a word like extremist in response to a comment about calling Apple malware.
That seems like an ad hominem to me. The linked article presents clear arguments for why the FSF consider Apple software to be malware:
- backdoors
- disabling features when non-Apple hardware is installed or attached
I think that those are compelling, and can be termed malware. The extremism isn't the FSF's for calling Apple out: it's Apple's, for … producing, selling and advertising malware.
Other stuff, like forbidding users to run software from third parties on their devices or censorship, doesn't fall under the category of malware IMHO, but it is a kind of evil nonetheless. One might claim labelling that stuff as malware is extreme, I suppose.
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I'm fairly sure that a hypothetically retired RMS would have no problem calling a restaurant, over a landline or hopefully a freedom-respecting mobile device. Also that, should he go for a drive, maybe to a folk-dancing festival, he would use GPS and maps, maybe the paper variety. As for the people inviting him to speak at a conference taking care of his scheduling and accommodation, I think that's fairly common and…
(a) he does not do it (b) it is not really possible for those whom he wants to "empower" to live like it is 1980s while maintaining life as it is needed in 2019. This is why he rubs people the wrong way when he peddles his philosophy as something that is possible in practice. Do I, a person who is pretty happy playing with computers, writing code, sometimes helping others with their technological issues or helping th…
You're confusing wants and needs. We need food, shelter and water; we want up-to-the-minute traffic maps in our pockets.
> This is why he rubs people the wrong way when he peddles his philosophy as something that is possible in practice.
He practices it, therefor it is possible in practice! QED
I happen to be like you: I'm willing to put up with a few violations of my freedoms in order to get features I want. But I chafe at them, because I know that they aren't essential: there's no legitimate reason for the DRM in TVs and computers nowadays; there's no legitimate reason for devices I own to refuse my commands.
Ironically, I opened this in a new tab just before going on a two hour saga of fighting Chrome's autocomplete behavior and losing. That particular decision of Google's is so painful to deal with, and I'm not alone, this issue is well worth skimming through, just for fun: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587466 It's been three years since they broke autocomplete="off", and in the meantime forms ar…
FSF has its own screeching issues in any case. I understand much of where Stallman comes from, and how this influences the FSF, but I don't necessarily agree with Stallmaan or the FSF on every point. In particular, I think that GPLv3 is useful for some individuals, but a hindrance to others, who are free to use GPLv2 (or BSD/MIT/...) as they wish.
The screeching, at times, comes across like that of PETA.
Also: a lot of this post is old and needs to be updated. Android 5.0 anyone?