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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

    Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

    Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

    If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

    But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

    People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

    Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.



  • The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.

    But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”

    You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

    Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.

    As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.





  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzNever Forget
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    2 months ago

    For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.

    Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.

    But that never happened because he killed himself.

    We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.


  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzNever Forget
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    2 months ago

    He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.

    And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.

    And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.

    Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.

    He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.


  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzNever Forget
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    2 months ago

    Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

    He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

    We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.


  • At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?

    Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don’t know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can’t protect you from.

    It shouldn’t be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It’s not like their marketing team isn’t aware of the fact most people don’t know any better.

    It’s in their best interests, too, because it doesn’t matter how many times you say “we provide privacy not anonymity”, the headlines are a bad look.




  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    2 months ago

    I mean, unironically, yeah.

    It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

    Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).