BeyondMachines 
Short story about the death of #privacy
BrianKrebs@beyondmachines1 This pretty much describes the software industry, and why cybercriminals will always have an unending stream of new bots: So many people cannot bring themselves to purchase software. So they download some cracked version that works just fine, oh and it backdoors the system, turns it into a proxy, and steals all the passwords.
@briankrebs Stealing dubious code predates computers, to the 19th century and the theft of Jacquard's loom punched cards.
But with web application, the code itself is not the only dubious thing. It's the person(s) running the code and trying to profit from their users.
I wonder what would have happened if the master weavers in the 19th century found a way to exploit the looms of the people stealing their patterns.
@beyondmachines1"I wonder what would have happened if the master weavers in the 19th century found a way to exploit the looms of the people stealing their patterns."
You've the makings of a good retro sci-fi novel there :)
@briankrebs Steampunk, here we come!
Diego Elio Pettenò@flameeyes @beyondmachines1 Yep. I know plenty of people who have more money than they know what to do with who are also diametrically opposed to buying software, or ebooks.
@briankrebs @beyondmachines1 yeah was having a similar discussion on Bluesky.
I'm happy to both support artists and content makers...
Barely relevant https://flameeyes.blog/2017/08/03/in-defence-of-ads-over-subscriptions/
@flameeyes @briankrebs Advertisments are not inherently evil.
But somewhere down the line the greed, ambition or lack of enough funding turned advertising into a an arms race of who can track the individual in more details.
That's where we lost the "Don't be evil"
@beyondmachines1 @briankrebs full disclosure, I used to work on Google Ads.
People have been referring to "Don't be evil" incorrectly for years, and they *still* have no idea of who's actually being evil, in my opinion.
Older, relevant: https://flameeyes.blog/2016/11/08/my-opinion-on-internet-ads/
(Though totally agreed on the arms race and the effect of it.)
Mad Argon 
@beyondmachines1 @flameeyes @briankrebs for me it is not a problem with ads itself until there is popup in the middle of the screen. Problem is with TRACKING me and linking all my activities to one particular user and profiling. Currently I even use Tor ~60% time of desktop browsing to have random IP and further reduce particularly this.
Paid services have similar "problem", I want to have a way to pay without linking my personal data with particular account. In last 3 years I donated to some open source projects I use, via simple bank transfer. This way e.g. Signal couldn't even know if I have an account.
Paid services have similar "problem", I want to have a way to pay without linking my personal data with particular account. In last 3 years I donated to some open source projects I use, via simple bank transfer. This way e.g. Signal couldn't even know if I have an account.
@madargon @flameeyes @briankrebs Agreed. The greed and the "red ocean" of advertising competition moved the fairly easy to understand trade of 5 minutes of random ads for benefits into the dark realm of psychographics, selling customer data and laser-precise profiling. And most people don't understand it
LisPi@briankrebs @beyondmachines1 Unless the purchase comes with source, there's no real way to trust it either.
Games on Steam semi-frequently come with badly secured rootkits included (anticheat, they say).
Source-included also doesn't explicitly grant you the right to fix it or remove objectionable behavior like #FreeSoftware does.
Pyperkub@beyondmachines1 nah, I'm blaming it on surveillance capitalism and #enshittification - there has always been a market for good, paid for software, as long as the market isn't being undercut by crappy, surveillance software.
@pyperkub surveillance capitalism enabled the "free software", and everybody is super happy to give their data for something free, because "they are not important".
Nobody thinks about how much their "not important" data can be used to influence them and how big of a market there is for such influence.
Ben Sizer@pyperkub @beyondmachines1 Surveillance capitalism is a symptom rather than a cause. Think IE vs Netscape, or nobody paying for WinRAR. Ads just allowed this to blossom further.
@kylotan @pyperkub Ads were the, for lack of a better word - an almost honest exchange. You get a product, they send you ads in the UI.
Greed and massive scale processing turned random ads into tracking of digital and physical identities and near-perfect psychographic profiling.
And the googles and facebooks of the world now spin that tracking is ok because
@beyondmachines1 @pyperkub Don’t get me wrong, I agree that surveillance capitalism is awful. But I think that ads can’t be a truly honest exchange because the user never knows the price.
@kylotan @beyondmachines1 Well, the elephant in the room is that for decades, the user absolutely knew the price - a bit of their attention - whether it was a commercial or print ad. The lack of price transparency is a recent "innovation" coupled with the surveillance business (and gossip about others was also a 'business' but now it goes to 11 (thousand)
@pyperkub @beyondmachines1 True, so let me reword to be more accurate - the user knew the price, but they never knew the true cost of the service. Ad-funded models hide that from them and make it harder for businesses to compete with models other than advertising.
Seán Fenian@beyondmachines1 If somebody else is paying for your web applications, your web applications will be written to meet somebody else's needs.
@zakalwe a true Special Circumstances approach, don't you think?
@stevewfolds@stevewfolds @zakalwe although compilers are not that frequently used on individual machines as in 1984, who does check the compilers for back doors these days?
@beyondmachines1 @stevewfolds One pretty much has to trust that the package maintainers did their jobs. But there's a lot of eyes on the critical pieces.
@beyondmachines1 @zakalwe
Now it seems software repositories are compromised and updates have been poisoned.
Played with yacc & lex. Work had a TRS-80 (8” floppies) Xenix machine in 1984. Idle hours spent using the C-language ‘learn’ tutor.
Now it seems software repositories are compromised and updates have been poisoned.
Played with yacc & lex. Work had a TRS-80 (8” floppies) Xenix machine in 1984. Idle hours spent using the C-language ‘learn’ tutor.
Chris Hammond@beyondmachines1 Feels like victim blaming to me. Tech companies didn't exactly make clear the trade they were offering before it was too late. In many cases the services actually were free until they decided they wanted more money.
[ Jer moved instances ]@beyondmachines1 alt text:
What do we want?
Great web applications!
Who should pay for them?
Somebody else!
What do we want?
Great web applications!
Who should pay for them?
Somebody else!
hapbt@beyondmachines1 I know we’ll use simple unobtrusive ads! - people thirty years ago