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The Candid Naivety of Geeks

ploum.net

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Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#51

Post by ValentineC »

> 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-t...

I guess geeks should be sceptical of legal structures that might get passed off as "feel good" marketing too. :)

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#52

Post by JoshTriplett »

luqtas wrote: post #49
saagarjha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the thing the author is calling people “naive” for.

so we should remain in silence and just use the most popular because it's a lost game?

No, we should apply the same evaluation criteria to whatever we're considering recommending as we do to whatever we're bashing.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#53

Post by disambiguation »

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.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#54

Post by andrei_says_ »

disambiguation wrote: post #53

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 i…

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.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#55

Post by swagmoney69 »

kleton wrote: post #23

> 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…

[dead]

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#57

Post by luqtas »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
luqtas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so we should remain in silence and just use the most popular because it's a lost game?

No, we should apply the same evaluation criteria to whatever we're considering recommending as we do to whatever we're bashing.

apparently Proton has its source-code open (https://proton.me/blog/security-audit), regards Signal and the other search engine i don't know... i bet none of them are the panacea on privacy but it's also quite naive to counter the author rant placing Google, Meta and whatever are at the same ethical ballpark of the former companies when they were involved in a bunch of scandals over their history and are making A BUNCH of money on their evasive telemetry (often shaping culture, see what Youtube turned; click-bait titles, prolix dialogue because the algorithm of [more time watched = more revenue] and even questionable thing like "album reactions" or just silly stuff that feels an offense to the enviroment like filling a swimming-pool with slime or some absurd shit on Youtube Kids)

edit: i could also go on what Instagram turned out to be...

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#58

Post by boppo1 »

disambiguation wrote: post #53

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 i…

>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.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#59

Post by kortilla »

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.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#60

Post by oneplane »

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.

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