I noticed that seemed to be sending all my data to Microsoft. Is that normal?
Maybe it's part of a free backup service? You just have to do your recovery via the FBI or NSA, depending on where you live. If you've been an especially bad boy, you may have to appeal directly to Herr Donald. (Don't worry. He also don't read Slashdot.)
I'd give you the funny mod if I ever had a mod point to give. Unfortunately at this point I think that upgrades of the Slashdot moderation system are not coming... EVER.
Also thanks for reminding me of my initial feedback to MS, but I'll share that in another comment. Probably a new thread unless I can find a match somewhere...
Actually, I'm not sure if this approach would work in this case, but the obvious cure for the abuse of regular link shorteners is to redirect the link and lock it down. For example, if the scammer is claiming to redirect for a lottery ticket, the NEW link (that the scammer can no longer touch) would be a website warning potential suckers about the risks of fake lotteries. Of course this approach would work especially well for emailed links, since every spam message already sent would become an irretrievable countermeasure that the scammer can't even cancel.
Yes, it would still need a reporting mechanism to call the suspicious redirections to someone's attention, but the strong penalty might be sufficient. The last the the scammers want is risk exhausting the supply of suckers.
I think you [darkain] are saying that your previous reply was intended to be taken as sarcasm? Some sort of sarcastic form of agreement?
Now the "obligatory" XKCD reference? I actually had an interesting email discussion with him about using fake satellites within buildings to provide more widely useful GPS locations without requiring new user-side hardware. You make me want to revive that discussion to consider signal echos and reflections... So the conclusion is that we need a really useful search engine to find the appropriate XKCD comic for any occasion?
I still can't decide if you are agreeing with me that too little choice is fundamentally bad and antithetical to freedom or if you were thinking about something else, perhaps the efficiency considerations. In the case of efficiency, I would rank it even lower than profit, Amazon notwithstanding... (I actually believe we should switch to more rational distribution systems than piling stuff in certain locations and hoping enough customers wander into the store and buy it before it's worthless, but it would be really bad (and worse than Walmart) if Amazon becomes the ONLY shopping option.)
*sigh* Constructive criticism seems to be a dead art form. Not just on Slashdot, but pretty much everywhere I look on the Internet. For this we developed double-buffering with DMA?
Oh, there is competing architectures! Just go get an Itanium computer. No problemo at all. It'll run everything just fine!!
Thanks for proving my point? But that doesn't seem to be the point of your reply? Or are you just incoherent?
If you don't understand, perhaps you should ask for clarification? I acknowledge that I did write rather tersely, primarily because of time considerations and because I cannot guess what prior knowledge you have. If any.
If you can't understand what I wrote, then why did you say nothing? "Go away, son, you're bothering me." (At least in the sense of wasting time.)
I knew that was the kind of "reasoning" to expect on today's Slashdot, but it still saddens me. Shallow is the kindest adjective I can think of.
Think of competition from the other side. The choice and freedom side. Zero choices or one choice is not really any choice at all. Two is the minimal potentially meaningful choice, but in the cited example Intel and AMD offer two flavors of the same architecture, which is scarcely meaningful and we certainly don't know that it's the best one because Intel and Intel's accomplices have succeeded in crushing the alternative choices. (Well, actually TRON is still out there, but not competing in the same space. Ditto smartphone CPUs.) Research into short-term memory indicates we can actually handle 3 to 7 options at a time, and I have concluded that the optimum locus of choice for maximizing freedom is probably around 5 options. When you get way up there with too many options in play, the choice again becomes meaningless because it's too confusing and you're more likely to be manipulated than to find the best option. (See the "Paradox of Choice" and related work.)
Seems I better include the full form of my sig without the Slashdot-imposed limitation:
Solution time: Progressive profits tax based on market share. If the objective is to insure the market has 5 choices, then that works out around 20% each, but because the objective is to encourage change and new ideas, you have to allow quite a bit of wiggle room, so say the higher tax rates start around 30% of the market. If a merger (in this specific example) pushes market share way up there, then the tax rate on the profits should rise so high that the two companies won't even consider it unless there really is a natural monopoly of an overwhelming sort--and in that case the government needs that tax money to regulate the heck out of the dominant company, while supporting research to break the monopoly.
Profit is less important than freedom. Corporate cancers can NEVER solve their FAKE problems of insufficient profit.
NOT exactly, but I suppose it is close enough for you if you read with that sort of preconception or without thinking clearly. Or perhaps the fault is my own for believing that my assumptions should be obvious enough from my conclusions?
From my perspective, Oracle is essentially taking the users hostage to maximize Oracle's profits, and will primarily be driven by profit considerations in deciding whether or not to offer any support options, and how long to offer them. Oracle is balancing the relative profits from the different versions, which includes some hidden profit (AKA brand value) from maintaining control over the Java brand.
If there were true competition driven by the real needs of users, then that would also control the frequency of new releases. My suggestion is to focus on cost recovery, not profit maximization. It doesn't even bother me that there will be some freeloaders benefiting from the availability of the software as long as the per-user cost is kept low enough so that most users can decide to support the software without financial stress. That's not how Oracle sees Java or saw OpenOffice.
I suggest you go back and read what I wrote. As it stands, your reply simply makes me wonder what you are mumbling about or if you thought you were replying to someone else. The totally decontextualized and selective quote is NOT clarifying, but more likely an indicator of deliberate deframing.
If you had been the author of the post to which I was replying, then it is conceivable your comment had some meaning.
Is there any reason not to migrate to the newest version of Java? Is any effort even required?
Sure. You don't need or even want any of the new functionality and you believe that the additional complexity has made the new version less secure rather than more. Even stronger reason if you think any of the new features are negative rather than positive. Effort is NOT the real question.
Too bad we don't have any such option.
I think we're going about this all wrong. Old versions should be supported as long as sufficient numbers of people are actually willing to pay for whatever support they require. If they want to deprecate an old version, the way to do it is NOT by arbitrary announcements of when the new version shall be shoved down your throat, but rather by rational explanations of the various new versions and encouraging the users of the older version to consider one of the new ones.
Now if there are too few users of the old version who are willing to pay for the costs, then that's a different question. In that case the old version may need to be more strongly retired, and the users may be obliged to make choices, but they might prefer to gather around an even older version that still does what they want, or they might want to go forward. It should be the users driving the versions based on their real needs, not the corporate cancer (Oracle in this case) driving things as part of the never-ending quest for infinite profit.
I actually think it should go down to a feature-by-feature basis. In particular, features and functions that have security considerations should be obliged to check for their own validity before executing, possibly becoming inoperable if the security threat is too high. In terms of providing more freedom, there should be options for similar functions that don't have the problems...
Just spent a long time looking for "insightful" thoughts on Slashdot. Today I started with the key words like "divide", "conquer", "property", "elite", and some related terms whose relevance I'll clarify in a moment. Then I went for "funny" in the hopes of finding some disguised insights. Then I went for "insightful", where this brief note by JoeyRox was probably the best of the slim pickings. All in all it felt like a colossal waste of time. Pretty sad.
The fundamental problem with education in America is that public education was deliberately destroyed using a divide and conquer strategy. There are a few residual good schools for the elite or lucky students, but most of the public schools have been converted into obedience schools that you wouldn't send your dog to. Other students were allowed to or even encouraged to "escape" to private schools or home schooling. Sad again.
Why? I used to think that it was mostly to appeal to religious nuts who wanted to insure their own kids were as ignorant as they were, and that has some relevance in terms of capturing their votes. However now I'm convinced the money was much more important. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, but if you defund and destroy the public schools, it turns out you are eliminating the need for property taxes, which can then be cut more easily. Who benefits? Mostly the large real estate speculators (such as Trump imagines himself to be). More sadness.
Now about those testing standards. Complicated topic. You might start with Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone, even though he's mostly looking in the wrong direction by defending trivia. There really are domains of expertise, but what matters is how you use that expertise to solve problems. You don't need to know all the trivia, but you do need to understand the shape and size of the multidimensional problem space, and sampling your trivia is one way to assess your coverage. Unfortunately, the big problem with that approach that probably negates it is the prior assumption that there is one answer. Any important question is not answered so simply. Yeah, that's sad, too.
Bill Gates of the rose colored glasses? Lottery winners tend to see things that way. Too much sadness.
Having trouble trying to imagine the technology-based link of this article. How SNS run amok allows super-liars to take over countries and cling to power? Doesn't seem to apply very well to North Korea, especially back when Kim's grandfather became dictator.
Big picture context: China does NOT want a strong and unified Korea. That could be quite troublesome. China would probably prefer an extremely weak and unified Korea, but if they can't get that, then the current divided mess is acceptable. There isn't going to be any REAL peace in Korea unless China approves. I actually thought the Chinese were going to make a deal of taking Taiwan in exchange for giving up North Korea...
I think that right now Kim Jong-Un is just teeing Trump up for a YUGE kick. Kim is NOT going to retire to a dacha, no matter what Putin promises, and he knows it. Kim is just pretending to be the reasonable dictator. Case 1: He's going to trust Trump to tell the truth? Case 2: He's trusting Trump to phuck it up and give him a YUGE enemy? Dictators LOVE enemies, and the more incompetent the better. Actually Trump already teed himself up. By threatening to walk out to "win", Trump has defined a game of reverse chicken. Whoever walks out first "wins". If they ever meet, I'm betting Kim walks out first.
If anyone is actually pulling Kim's strings, it must be Putin. The punchline there is that Putin is making money on every side. By controlling the timing, he can make money betting on every side. No one actually knows where his money is hidden, but he can even sell his own companies short when he triggers stuff that looks bad for them, then bet on the other side when he flips the switch.
However, just for the record, below is my relatively shallow submission on the same topic. What I was asking Slashdot about a couple of weeks ago was also relevant, essentially for tools to reconstruct what the google knows about each of us on OUR side, not the google's. I already got the data (from both Facebook and the google), but it means pretty much nothing to me.
Part of my approach was avoiding the WSJ and their paywall. I think the financial models most strongly supporting by the WSJ are NOT part of the solution to any of our problems... Corporate cancerism sucks. In solution terms, I still think we need REAL competition, not the pointless quest for infinite profit.
Basically ditto, even including the eating of meat, though whoever changed it to "won't accomplish much" with presumed reference to yours truly probably has a vicious streak and will accomplish even less.
In non-ad-hominem terms, I would put it that I'm primarily an idealist. Most people are strong in various dimensions. Perhaps the most important are the idealist dimension for ideals, the materialist dimension for things (or tokens like money), and the humanist dimension for people. There is also a dimensional weighting thing, but I put ideals way too high. The people who do impact things tend to be much more balanced, with strengths in multiple dimensions and also among the weighting of the dimensions.
Seems to me that Bezos is strong in two, but not the humanist dimension. Certainly not down to the lower levels of his money machine.
Whoops, forgot two of the predictions from the Cap'n:
(4) Make sure the book doesn't become a best seller on Amazon.
(5) Alert the trolls, even on Slashdot. (Not a real prediction. I already saw their comments.)
Actually, I was rather surprised to find that Amazon even carries the book, but not surprised to see that they're down to their last copy. Some kind of glitch in the book ordering system, I'm sure. Not like Amazon to try to be out of stock and route customers to other books about people being treated badly at other companies, eh? Of course not!
And no, I wasn't tempted to shop Amazon, but I'm pert' shure I won't be able to find this book in any local bookstore.
Bibliophile that I am, I will NOT ever buy another book from Amazon. I reached that conclusion more than 15 years ago, and I've resisted every temptation since then. Amazon is just Walmart on steroids--and I never shop at Walmart.
How long until they starve me into submission?
Anyway, remember the creed of the corporate cancers that have killed capitalism and communism and that are now working (AKA bribing and lying and scheming) to kill the last vestiges of socialism, too:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Amazon is gawd's #1 prophet!"
That's calling it on market cap in relation to the current proprietor, but on profit alone it should be Apple. Top 10 for gross profit (and I do mean gross) includes a bunch of gigantic casinos pretending to be banks.
If it is "free" software it is much more likely to have "malicious functionalities" because the world is NOT free. I'm calling TANSTaaFL on rms. Much more could be said, but I've been called for food and Slashdot is not much motivation these years.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that seemed to be sending all my data to Microsoft. Is that normal?
Maybe it's part of a free backup service? You just have to do your recovery via the FBI or NSA, depending on where you live. If you've been an especially bad boy, you may have to appeal directly to Herr Donald. (Don't worry. He also don't read Slashdot.)
I'd give you the funny mod if I ever had a mod point to give. Unfortunately at this point I think that upgrades of the Slashdot moderation system are not coming... EVER.
Also thanks for reminding me of my initial feedback to MS, but I'll share that in another comment. Probably a new thread unless I can find a match somewhere...
I think you are arguing against HTML email or any of the richer forms? If so, I think that bus has left the station. About 10 years ago.
Shall we start arguing about inline versus top posting? Or should I try to "redirect" the discussion back to the original topic?
Actually, I'm not sure if this approach would work in this case, but the obvious cure for the abuse of regular link shorteners is to redirect the link and lock it down. For example, if the scammer is claiming to redirect for a lottery ticket, the NEW link (that the scammer can no longer touch) would be a website warning potential suckers about the risks of fake lotteries. Of course this approach would work especially well for emailed links, since every spam message already sent would become an irretrievable countermeasure that the scammer can't even cancel.
Yes, it would still need a reporting mechanism to call the suspicious redirections to someone's attention, but the strong penalty might be sufficient. The last the the scammers want is risk exhausting the supply of suckers.
Z--5
I think you [darkain] are saying that your previous reply was intended to be taken as sarcasm? Some sort of sarcastic form of agreement?
Now the "obligatory" XKCD reference? I actually had an interesting email discussion with him about using fake satellites within buildings to provide more widely useful GPS locations without requiring new user-side hardware. You make me want to revive that discussion to consider signal echos and reflections... So the conclusion is that we need a really useful search engine to find the appropriate XKCD comic for any occasion?
I still can't decide if you are agreeing with me that too little choice is fundamentally bad and antithetical to freedom or if you were thinking about something else, perhaps the efficiency considerations. In the case of efficiency, I would rank it even lower than profit, Amazon notwithstanding... (I actually believe we should switch to more rational distribution systems than piling stuff in certain locations and hoping enough customers wander into the store and buy it before it's worthless, but it would be really bad (and worse than Walmart) if Amazon becomes the ONLY shopping option.)
*sigh* Constructive criticism seems to be a dead art form. Not just on Slashdot, but pretty much everywhere I look on the Internet. For this we developed double-buffering with DMA?
Oh, there is competing architectures! Just go get an Itanium computer. No problemo at all. It'll run everything just fine!!
Thanks for proving my point? But that doesn't seem to be the point of your reply? Or are you just incoherent?
If you don't understand, perhaps you should ask for clarification? I acknowledge that I did write rather tersely, primarily because of time considerations and because I cannot guess what prior knowledge you have. If any.
If you can't understand what I wrote, then why did you say nothing? "Go away, son, you're bothering me." (At least in the sense of wasting time.)
I knew that was the kind of "reasoning" to expect on today's Slashdot, but it still saddens me. Shallow is the kindest adjective I can think of.
Think of competition from the other side. The choice and freedom side. Zero choices or one choice is not really any choice at all. Two is the minimal potentially meaningful choice, but in the cited example Intel and AMD offer two flavors of the same architecture, which is scarcely meaningful and we certainly don't know that it's the best one because Intel and Intel's accomplices have succeeded in crushing the alternative choices. (Well, actually TRON is still out there, but not competing in the same space. Ditto smartphone CPUs.) Research into short-term memory indicates we can actually handle 3 to 7 options at a time, and I have concluded that the optimum locus of choice for maximizing freedom is probably around 5 options. When you get way up there with too many options in play, the choice again becomes meaningless because it's too confusing and you're more likely to be manipulated than to find the best option. (See the "Paradox of Choice" and related work.)
Seems I better include the full form of my sig without the Slashdot-imposed limitation:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
Solution time: Progressive profits tax based on market share. If the objective is to insure the market has 5 choices, then that works out around 20% each, but because the objective is to encourage change and new ideas, you have to allow quite a bit of wiggle room, so say the higher tax rates start around 30% of the market. If a merger (in this specific example) pushes market share way up there, then the tax rate on the profits should rise so high that the two companies won't even consider it unless there really is a natural monopoly of an overwhelming sort--and in that case the government needs that tax money to regulate the heck out of the dominant company, while supporting research to break the monopoly.
Profit is less important than freedom. Corporate cancers can NEVER solve their FAKE problems of insufficient profit.
DSAuPR, atAJG.
Z^-4
NOT exactly, but I suppose it is close enough for you if you read with that sort of preconception or without thinking clearly. Or perhaps the fault is my own for believing that my assumptions should be obvious enough from my conclusions?
From my perspective, Oracle is essentially taking the users hostage to maximize Oracle's profits, and will primarily be driven by profit considerations in deciding whether or not to offer any support options, and how long to offer them. Oracle is balancing the relative profits from the different versions, which includes some hidden profit (AKA brand value) from maintaining control over the Java brand.
If there were true competition driven by the real needs of users, then that would also control the frequency of new releases. My suggestion is to focus on cost recovery, not profit maximization. It doesn't even bother me that there will be some freeloaders benefiting from the availability of the software as long as the per-user cost is kept low enough so that most users can decide to support the software without financial stress. That's not how Oracle sees Java or saw OpenOffice.
I suggest you go back and read what I wrote. As it stands, your reply simply makes me wonder what you are mumbling about or if you thought you were replying to someone else. The totally decontextualized and selective quote is NOT clarifying, but more likely an indicator of deliberate deframing.
If you had been the author of the post to which I was replying, then it is conceivable your comment had some meaning.
Is there any reason not to migrate to the newest version of Java? Is any effort even required?
Sure. You don't need or even want any of the new functionality and you believe that the additional complexity has made the new version less secure rather than more. Even stronger reason if you think any of the new features are negative rather than positive. Effort is NOT the real question.
Too bad we don't have any such option.
I think we're going about this all wrong. Old versions should be supported as long as sufficient numbers of people are actually willing to pay for whatever support they require. If they want to deprecate an old version, the way to do it is NOT by arbitrary announcements of when the new version shall be shoved down your throat, but rather by rational explanations of the various new versions and encouraging the users of the older version to consider one of the new ones.
Now if there are too few users of the old version who are willing to pay for the costs, then that's a different question. In that case the old version may need to be more strongly retired, and the users may be obliged to make choices, but they might prefer to gather around an even older version that still does what they want, or they might want to go forward. It should be the users driving the versions based on their real needs, not the corporate cancer (Oracle in this case) driving things as part of the never-ending quest for infinite profit.
I actually think it should go down to a feature-by-feature basis. In particular, features and functions that have security considerations should be obliged to check for their own validity before executing, possibly becoming inoperable if the security threat is too high. In terms of providing more freedom, there should be options for similar functions that don't have the problems...
DSAuPR, atAJG.
Z^-3
Just spent a long time looking for "insightful" thoughts on Slashdot. Today I started with the key words like "divide", "conquer", "property", "elite", and some related terms whose relevance I'll clarify in a moment. Then I went for "funny" in the hopes of finding some disguised insights. Then I went for "insightful", where this brief note by JoeyRox was probably the best of the slim pickings. All in all it felt like a colossal waste of time. Pretty sad.
The fundamental problem with education in America is that public education was deliberately destroyed using a divide and conquer strategy. There are a few residual good schools for the elite or lucky students, but most of the public schools have been converted into obedience schools that you wouldn't send your dog to. Other students were allowed to or even encouraged to "escape" to private schools or home schooling. Sad again.
Why? I used to think that it was mostly to appeal to religious nuts who wanted to insure their own kids were as ignorant as they were, and that has some relevance in terms of capturing their votes. However now I'm convinced the money was much more important. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, but if you defund and destroy the public schools, it turns out you are eliminating the need for property taxes, which can then be cut more easily. Who benefits? Mostly the large real estate speculators (such as Trump imagines himself to be). More sadness.
Now about those testing standards. Complicated topic. You might start with Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone, even though he's mostly looking in the wrong direction by defending trivia. There really are domains of expertise, but what matters is how you use that expertise to solve problems. You don't need to know all the trivia, but you do need to understand the shape and size of the multidimensional problem space, and sampling your trivia is one way to assess your coverage. Unfortunately, the big problem with that approach that probably negates it is the prior assumption that there is one answer. Any important question is not answered so simply. Yeah, that's sad, too.
Bill Gates of the rose colored glasses? Lottery winners tend to see things that way. Too much sadness.
Z^-2
Z^-1
Good metaphor and I wish I someday saw a mod point to give you.
Having trouble trying to imagine the technology-based link of this article. How SNS run amok allows super-liars to take over countries and cling to power? Doesn't seem to apply very well to North Korea, especially back when Kim's grandfather became dictator.
Big picture context: China does NOT want a strong and unified Korea. That could be quite troublesome. China would probably prefer an extremely weak and unified Korea, but if they can't get that, then the current divided mess is acceptable. There isn't going to be any REAL peace in Korea unless China approves. I actually thought the Chinese were going to make a deal of taking Taiwan in exchange for giving up North Korea...
I think that right now Kim Jong-Un is just teeing Trump up for a YUGE kick. Kim is NOT going to retire to a dacha, no matter what Putin promises, and he knows it. Kim is just pretending to be the reasonable dictator. Case 1: He's going to trust Trump to tell the truth? Case 2: He's trusting Trump to phuck it up and give him a YUGE enemy? Dictators LOVE enemies, and the more incompetent the better. Actually Trump already teed himself up. By threatening to walk out to "win", Trump has defined a game of reverse chicken. Whoever walks out first "wins". If they ever meet, I'm betting Kim walks out first.
If anyone is actually pulling Kim's strings, it must be Putin. The punchline there is that Putin is making money on every side. By controlling the timing, he can make money betting on every side. No one actually knows where his money is hidden, but he can even sell his own companies short when he triggers stuff that looks bad for them, then bet on the other side when he flips the switch.
However, just for the record, below is my relatively shallow submission on the same topic. What I was asking Slashdot about a couple of weeks ago was also relevant, essentially for tools to reconstruct what the google knows about each of us on OUR side, not the google's. I already got the data (from both Facebook and the google), but it means pretty much nothing to me.
Part of my approach was avoiding the WSJ and their paywall. I think the financial models most strongly supporting by the WSJ are NOT part of the solution to any of our problems... Corporate cancerism sucks. In solution terms, I still think we need REAL competition, not the pointless quest for infinite profit.
https://slashdot.org/journal/3...
Z^-1
That's another problem with rms. He doesn't understand what freedom means. Because of Slashdot limitations, below is only a partial equation.
What do you think is the motivation of the sunset?
What do you think is the motivation of creating software?
Possibly false premise in the verb.
Basically ditto, even including the eating of meat, though whoever changed it to "won't accomplish much" with presumed reference to yours truly probably has a vicious streak and will accomplish even less.
In non-ad-hominem terms, I would put it that I'm primarily an idealist. Most people are strong in various dimensions. Perhaps the most important are the idealist dimension for ideals, the materialist dimension for things (or tokens like money), and the humanist dimension for people. There is also a dimensional weighting thing, but I put ideals way too high. The people who do impact things tend to be much more balanced, with strengths in multiple dimensions and also among the weighting of the dimensions.
Seems to me that Bezos is strong in two, but not the humanist dimension. Certainly not down to the lower levels of his money machine.
Whoops, forgot two of the predictions from the Cap'n:
(4) Make sure the book doesn't become a best seller on Amazon.
(5) Alert the trolls, even on Slashdot. (Not a real prediction. I already saw their comments.)
Actually, I was rather surprised to find that Amazon even carries the book, but not surprised to see that they're down to their last copy. Some kind of glitch in the book ordering system, I'm sure. Not like Amazon to try to be out of stock and route customers to other books about people being treated badly at other companies, eh? Of course not!
And no, I wasn't tempted to shop Amazon, but I'm pert' shure I won't be able to find this book in any local bookstore.
Caption Obvious makes his predictions for Amazon:
(1) Improve working conditions? No.
(2) Improve screening of new hires? Yes.
(3) PROFIT!
Bibliophile that I am, I will NOT ever buy another book from Amazon. I reached that conclusion more than 15 years ago, and I've resisted every temptation since then. Amazon is just Walmart on steroids--and I never shop at Walmart.
How long until they starve me into submission?
Anyway, remember the creed of the corporate cancers that have killed capitalism and communism and that are now working (AKA bribing and lying and scheming) to kill the last vestiges of socialism, too:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Amazon is gawd's #1 prophet!"
That's calling it on market cap in relation to the current proprietor, but on profit alone it should be Apple. Top 10 for gross profit (and I do mean gross) includes a bunch of gigantic casinos pretending to be banks.
If it is "free" software it is much more likely to have "malicious functionalities" because the world is NOT free. I'm calling TANSTaaFL on rms. Much more could be said, but I've been called for food and Slashdot is not much motivation these years.