Dan Fixes Coin-Ops3d ago

I got a bunch more motion sensors and I've been putting them around the house so I can program Home Assistant to do stuff like turn off lights in rooms that aren't being used, turn on lights when we're going downstairs with hands full of laundry, obviously just flipping a switch is easy but in some rooms the switch is on the opposite side of the wall and if I put a button on the entry-side then I don't trip over the cat, telling the water heater to get hot before we shower, having a $10 smart plug tell me when my 80's washing machine has finished, having a button to make the lights go cosy, y'know just nice helpful stuff that I do because I like making the house better for my spouse and kid and as I was putting up all these motion sensors I was thinking,

man,

there's NOTHING in this program to detect when it's being used for evil

And like there really should be? Like someone could legit fucking torment their family with this, this could be used as a tool of manipulation and control and fostering the abusive sort of dependence

And then I think of how me and spouse are moving away from google and onto like self-hosted stuff, nextcloud and searxng and xmpp and shit like that, and I can't help but think, *know* really, that right now there's someone controlling their intimate partner with those same technologies, like something that's supposed to be liberating you from corporate-style General Abuse is being leveraged towards a form of very focused abuse against you specifically by someone on whom you depend

I don't think enough software devs spend enough time thinking about how their projects can be used to hurt people

Has anyone smarter than me written any long posts thinking about this and what we can do about it

Show threadAndrew Drake

@ifixcoinops I think a lot of developers in open-source projects talk themselves out of it because they're acutely aware that any limits they put in place can just as easily be removed. If you had an open-source AirTag, for example, it would be easy to flash a version of the firmware without the functionality that enables finding a stalker's tag.

Of course this misses the fact that a relatively small percentage of bad actors are also skilled enough developers to do that, and so those safeguards could still have a lot of positive impact!

Mar 28 at 8:47pmWeb
Show threadAndrew Drake3d ago
@ifixcoinops I'm definitely prone to that line of thinking. My instinctive reaction was "what's the point of adding safeguards when the abuser can just comment them out". But I've been programming for nearly as long as I have memories, and it's been nearly 20 years since the last time I saw a piece of open-source software as something I couldn't just change to do what I wanted. It takes some conscious effort to remember that isn't how it is for everyone!