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Earlier quoted context omitted.
the "freedom" being limited in this case is the freedom to privatize otherwise public work
privatise your additional work on top of the public work. the public work doesn't stop being public.
> 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.
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 motivat…
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
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.)
> 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…
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 dist…
> 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.
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 ext…
> 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…
[1]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/apple/entretien-on-parl...
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.