I can't stress enough how much the parent poster's point matters: you're choosing to install a spy in your home/office.
People make the same choice when they take a tracker (aka "cell phone", "mobile phone") with them when they use the toilet or leave it next to their bed. Would it be okay if someone trailed you with a mic on a boom and hung it over the stall as you used the toilet or had sex in your bed? Ask people that and they'd probably object on the grounds of a loss of privacy. Yet if that mic (which is connected to the Internet, operated with proprietary software, and doesn't have an indicator light) also let you browse the web, check your email, and play games this becomes okay? Then the concept of privacy was never the issue.
We've learned most people apparently don't need voice control to order stuff from Internet-based distributors including amazon.com. You should not trade away your privacy, ever, and the low price some place on their privacy indicates they need more education.
This situation doesn't back up your point at all. Technical considerations about features and what's easy to learn versus hard to learn are remarkably subjective. What's objectively clear is that Sharepoint (a proprietary CMS) doesn't allow users to inspect what it's doing, alter the code, or share improved versions. Any problems with Sharepoint have to be fixed by the proprietor (Microsoft), and a backdoor in Sharepoint may well not be viewed as something that needs to be "fixed" from the proprietor's point of view.
WordPress, by contrast, respects a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify. Site owners can decide how much time and effort they want to put into keeping their WordPress install secure. If they find a problem, improvements can be vetted, shared, and completely understood. The limits of review and improvement are the site owner's to choose and site owners retain the freedom to fully control their site (so long as they host on free software systems). Even bad free software (for any definition of "bad") is better than nonfree software because users have software freedom. Writing one's own code would grant one the freedoms only Microsoft gets with Sharepoint.
It's not fair to WordPress to conflate a WordPress plugin with WordPress itself ("Wordpress is a joke") or being horribly vague about what is so bad about various free CMSes. WordPress can't take responsibility for what others put in their WordPress plugins. They can only delist the malware plugins and describe why users shouldn't run that plugin downloaded from another source.
Finally, your point fails to describe how this particular WordPress plugin is critical to useful WordPress sites. This matters to WordPress' main audience—nontechnical users—who might want to know why they should not want particular functionality the plugin ostensibly delivers, or how to get comparable functionality another way. Lots of users aren't technical and won't know why they shouldn't install a bunch of plugins, or how to vet the plugins they find provide genuinely necessary functionality (including not blindly accepting every upgrade but vetting the changes along the way). I don't like malware either, but it's not fair to conflate software freedom with non-freedom (as if nonfree software was inevitable or just as reasonable a choice, an alternative), or to blame one party (WordPress in this case) for another' choices, and objections are far more useful when they are specific.
Please re-read my post slowly and in its entirety, or consider reading virtually any other post I've written on/.. I clearly point out that proprietary software is the problem and software freedom is the fix. The points I linked to in the grandparent post refer to Microsoft specifically because that organization is relevant in this thread, not because Microsoft is somehow a more unacceptable proprietor than other software proprietors.
Among the copyright holders and distributors (Apple, Disney, NBC/Comcast, etc.) mutual greed assures that no single site will offer the convenience, freedom from digital restrictions management, and respect for watching in privacy that sharing sites like The Pirate Bay do.
Among customers (particularly those on/.) who should know better than to do business with Disney: Doing business with Disney means feeding the organization that treats you badly on copyright law (another retroactive copyright term extension, more power for software proprietors to implement more digital restrictions management, anyone?). Your shortsightedness and unwillingness to put your choices in the context of something more important will reinforce Disney's strong seat at the bargaining table. This will adversely affect you even for using services you're (foolishly) willing to trade your freedom to get: more DRM-riddled temporary access to movies with plenty of spying.
So despite knowing that Microsoft is an early NSA collaborator, forcing and tricking users into "upgrading" to Windows 10, distributes proprietary software (all of which is untrustworthy by default which prevents even technical users from fixing problems and distributing improved software to others), and Microsoft blatantly disregarded user choice and privacy, shipped with bad defaults for privacy, got caught lying to users about how Windows 10's euphemistically named "privacy controls" worked, you believe the headline that Microsoft "will soon give users more control over app permissions" and therefore want to talk about this in the context of the rose-colored vision of the past for Windows users? Microsoft has made so many choices against "giving users more control" over anything there's no reason to believe they'll ever make such choices, just like any other software proprietor.
That is exactly what the masses should be determining.
People should be trained in what software freedom means and why it matters. Instead they're trained in evaluating all options on the basis of price (and misstating the price, at that, because no price is placed on their privacy or their other rights), convenience (without regard to other values), and on fashion (functionally, there's very little that separates the older button-oriented look & feel UI from the modern swiping and OpenGL-effects-laden UIs but that the latter requires more expensive hardware which can mostly be operated only with nonfree software).
So people should determine how computers are used by critically examining ethical arguments they're never taught to value until it's too late. This puts most computer users at a severe disadvantage and software freedom activists are up against very wealthy adversaries. But we all know that software freedom treats people in a defensibly better way we can explain in detail. We should argue for improving public education along lines that matter—software freedom and the underlying ethics of that social movement—not price, fashion, and convenience in the moment.
From the article and blindly copied into the/. submission:
One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading.
If you want to advocate for publicly specified formats without encumbrances, then have the spine to do that. That would be great work to do and should be celebrated for its own sake. But there's nothing about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which somehow grants any of the features being claimed above.
RSS is merely a feed format. What goes into that feed is up to the site that publishes the feed. Even if users are given control over their feed, that's merely a site function and this flexibility will differ from site to site. A site could publish an RSS feed which doesn't "catch everything a site publishes", a feed that contains "just the articles that have proved popular with other users [...] just the articles from today [or] just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter". There's nothing inherent in RSS that keeps you "in full control of what's in your feed". Users necessarily deal with a proper subset of what was ever published in a site's RSS feed. If most RSS feeds contain everything the site publishes and leave the user to decide what to include in their view of the feed, that's great, but that has nothing to do with the RSS XML vocabulary. The lack of clear distinction, conflating multiple issues, and giving credit to RSS for those benefits makes the benefit of RSS unclear and confusing to those who don't know what RSS is and read articles like this in hopes of learning.
First off, you're using the word "Linux" as though that were an operating system. Linux is not now and never was an OS, it was and remains an OS kernel. You can't run the software you use as examples if all you have is the Linux kernel. Secondly, democracy is messy. People start projects which other people don't like. But we're all free to start our own projects and include the free software we like. Nobody "forc[ed] systemd into Debian". Debian GNU/Linux decided to include systemd, and for a community that is still going strong you'd never know that Debian had been "tor[n] apart" as you claim.
Contrary to your way of putting it, the initial work behind GNOME was quite practical and, coming from the GNU Project, started in making free software more practical. GNOME was started because the K Desktop Environment (KDE) had nonfree dependencies, notably Qt which used a nonfree license until around mid-1999. Thus KDE was unsuitable for the GNU Project which aims to provide an OS which respects a user's software freedom (to run, share, modify, and distribute). A second project aiming to do roughly the same job as Qt was also started by the GNU Project (a Qt API-compatible project called "Harmony"). Qt ended up being relicensed as free software and GNOME ended up being useful. So we have both KDE and GNOME today. Thus a pragmatic pursuit of software freedom, which you apparently eschew, was quite effective at delivering a modern GUI look-and-feel for users who want that (which, I'm guessing, would be most computer users).
"Splintering the community" is a natural outcome of software freedom just as people use their freedom of speech to express different and sometimes conflicting views. People try to work together to meet their needs but sometimes that just isn't possible. This kind of thing happens in science all the time; people with different ideas on how something works set out to investigate their hypotheses in parallel and sometimes we end up with multiple divergent theories and, over time, some convergence. When it comes to software development we should celebrate, not minimize or disdain the software freedom to express ourselves in such a way.
Please do cite examples to back up your claims. Stallman doesn't talk about "closed source" because that's a reference to open source, a group founded on rejecting the ethics-based free software movement he founded over a decade before open source began. In fact, Stallman has been known to point out why open source misses the point of free software and open source is a right-wing reactionary counter to free software probably because open source proponents are ready to drop their development methodology if a sufficiently robust and powerful proprietary program comes along. That choice reveals a scam akin to "greenwashing" among polluters who want to look more environmentally-conscious than their behavior would deserve. Virtually every story on/. can be described as yet another story that wouldn't have adversely affected users if the users had software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software).
Despite your clear misunderstanding of what Stallman argues for, why, or what the relevant issues at hand are, it should be interesting to you defend "open source is being pushed down peoples throats with the exact same lockins and customisations on devices".
You mean people actually controlling the devices they own and deciding for themselves how that device should be maintained? Why that's completely unknown territory for automobiles, computer software, and so many other things. Oh, the horror of freeing oneself from corporate control.
For years Eben Moglen has been pointing out "Stallman was right" in his talks. Moglen regularly cites how Stallman got there years before the corporate-minded press (and thus repeater sites like/. don't promote that point of view). It's very much the problem we see with the open source advocacy for nonfree software (or, put differently, the open source enthusiasts' unwillingness to stand by their pitched development methodology). I understand it rankles to read someone pointing out that free software and open source aren't the same, but when it comes to endorsing proprietary software they certainly are not and this endorsement ought not be pushed aside. Red Hat has a cozy relationship with Microsoft which includes bundling.NET software despite patent claims that render such software nonfree particularly if one wants to do something with the software they can do with free software—adding covered code to another project.
You still see people here (even on this topic) posting something that demonstrates an unfounded belief they have more control over their nonfree OS-running computer than they have. "At least on PCs I could figure out what was crap, and delete it.", for example. Taking "PC" not to mean "personal computer" but computer running Microsoft Windows, there are plenty of examples of programs that either don't include working uninstallers or installers that purposefully leave something behind which can't be easily uninstalled (Sony's rootkit which also interfered with CD ripping, for example).
/.'s user-driven censorship scheme effectively increases the odds that freedom-talk goes unseen. If you want to see your post never get moderated up (and thus be less likely to show up for most/. readers using default settings), try pointing to any of the GNU Project's malware pages. These pages are highly informative lists which are helpfully divided into useful subcategories. They all explain how nonfree or proprietary software most computer users run deserve the alternative name "user-subjugating" and point to stories written by others, naming names and leaving no doubt as to their authenticity./. wants clicks and like any click/like-oriented publication, adherence to established corporate norms is the heart of the effort. Stories like this come along once in a while but clearly the mainstay of tech press is convincing people to argue over minor technicalities while they narrow the allowable debate to which proprietary programs shall run on one's system.
You express the case for "Open Source" quite well, and that's where your entire post misses the points I raised and offers no response to them. Open source claims to support much the same thing as free software but you've inadvertantly put your finger right on where they differ, where it matters most: respect for software freedom. Open source was designed to throw away software freedom in a bid to speak to business interests (most notably software proprietors) and offer the reactionary right-wing response it has offered since its beginning.
Free software predates open source by over a decade and is at heart a social movement centered around the ethics of how to treat other people where computer software is concerned. Open source is a development methodology proprietors prefer because of the very tradeoff you expressed wherein robust proprietary software is adopted (thus showing how ready open source proponents are to throw away their meager development methodology). This difference is the night-and-day difference between free software and open source. The GNU Project covered this issue many years ago in their essays on the difference between free software and open source (old essay, newer essay). I recommend you read the newer one in particular, "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" because you've certainly missed the points I raised in my grandparent post. Calling proprietary software "more robust support" compels one to ask 'More robust than what?' as there is no other so-called "support" available for proprietary software; proprietary software so-called "support" is a monopoly. That's one of the points you completely missed: You can't know what else that proprietary software is doing without the inspections you aren't allowed to carry out on the proprietary software (irrespective of your will to do said inspection or to hire the job out to be done by someone more skilled than you). If that proprietary software ever doesn't do what you want (for any definition of "doesn't do what you want") you have no recourse to understand what all the software is doing or to change it in ways the proprietor doesn't allow. If you build promises on top of that software (such as running a business which keeps other people's sensitive data a secret) your promise is impossible to keep and you've made a bad choice in trusting a black box you're disallowed from inspecting, improving, (and sometimes even running) to keep those secrets for you. I hope you're contributing to the Samba team so that they can afford to spend more time developing the software to act as a full replacement for the directory service you point out.
The issue is not robustness of code; in fact, there's no argument that some proprietary software is more featureful and remarkably robust. The issue is also not whether you choose to learn enough programming and possess the curiosity to look into what the software is doing. The issue is what one is allowed to do with one's own computer, and recognition of the underlying ethics of this situation. The ethical way to treat other people where computer software is concerned requires respecting their software freedom. What you've said is what the newer of the two aforementioned essays describe, and I quote below:
The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.
A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our d
You have the right conclusion—there is a scam going on—but the wrong cause.
Programs aren't trustworthy or untrustworthy because of who wrote them. They're trustworthy or not trustworthy because they respect a user's software freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify. Computers don't evaluate the nationality of the people who entered the source code or developed the algorithms, computers execute the instructions they're instructed to execute. The catch is whether those instructions are available to be run, inspected, modified, and shared by the computer's owner (respecting a user's software freedom) or not. Software freedom lets us work together to make sure the programs we run are reliable, safe, robust, and do what we want them to do (even if that means evaluating source code ourselves or taking source code to someone to do trusted evaluations on our behalf for a fee).
No one person can inspect all the free software out there, there's too much. But collectively we can look out for ourselves. This is also no guarantee against bugs; there is no such guarantee as all large programs have bugs. This is as close as we can come to making sure the computers we trust obey our instructions (and those of 3rd parties because we've first given the OK).
There's no defensible argument that concludes Microsoft's, Norton's, or McAfee's anti-malware software (to name a few examples) are trustworthy but Kaspersky's anti-malware is not trustworthy. All of those programs are proprietary (user-subjugating and nonfree), so you're right: they're all untrustworthy.
All proprietary software regardless of ostensible purpose is untrustworthy. Proprietary OSes being "defended" with proprietary anti-malware software is using one black box to guard another black box from inscrutable weaknesses. The fix is software freedom: run a free software OS, use and support (financially as well as in conversations) free software anti-malware software, and (since the public clearly has plenty of money to spend on these programs) pay for programmers to develop and maintain free software anti-malware programs and free software OSes. Since modern societies rely on computers more and more, this is also another opportunity for us to develop cross-platform, free software, anti-malware software funded with taxpayer money. We know what the proprietors offer: secrecy and untrustworthiness. I think we can do better and respect our software freedom while simultaneously offering living-wage paying jobs for long-term development and maintenance.
Nonfree software didn't recently "add spying/telemetry/etc". The malware was a part of nonfree OSes (such as Windows, iOS, MacOS) for a long time in both the OS and various apps. Here are a few examples concerning Windows: the backdoor in Windows by which Microsoft can impose any change it wants and when this was used, and who can forget Microsoft's choice to trick or force Windows 7 and Vista users into Windows 10 "upgrades". Since that software was nonfree even technical users and developers couldn't legally remove the malware and distribute the improved malware-free variant to help others.
When it came to spying, Windows 10 gave users a UI that apparently deceived them into believing that the user had a say in how much their OS ratted them out. Windows 10 shipped with bad defaults for preserving user's privacy and continued "talking to Microsoft" (as Condé Nast put it) "even if a user turn[ed] off its Bing search and Cortana features, and activate[ed] the privacy-protection settings" (quoting the GNU Project). So now Microsoft assures Windows users things are better, but one has to wonder for whom and what users are legally allowed to do if they discover the proprietor's words aren't how the software behaves.
Nope. At least on iOS the app cannot access your address book without you giving it explicit permission (apparently also the case on newer version of Android according to the article). Neither can it access anything else.
So long as the software is proprietary, technical users have no idea what the proprietary program is programmed to do (what it's capable of). And when that software is changed (patched or updated) programmers who can figure out what that program does have to re-learn what the program does. That's a lot of work to do every time a program is changed. This is why proprietors don't respect a user's freedom to run, share, inspect, and modify; proprietors use their power against the user. The consequence of this is that claims to the contrary (such as your assertions above) are not believable because they're either beyond the claimant's knowledge or the claims come from the untrustworthy proprietor.
By the way, accessing the address book in order to find out if any of your friends are making use of the service is a legitimate reason to access the address book.
Not without the explicit consent of the user, preferably in a form non-technical users can grant and rescind without having to go through a licensing agreement.
More importantly for the public: the golden parachute and engineer's imprisonment does nothing to give affected cars (not just VWs) control of the cars they "own". The car's software should be published, sent to each registered owner in source and binary forms with complete build instructions and licensed under a free software license (I suggest the GPLv3 or later).
This means Brad Kuhn's warning still holds true: Software Freedom Doesn't Kill People, Your Security Through Obscurity Kills People and vehicle owners who want to keep their vehicle and make it abide by emissions laws without having to trust the parties that put them in danger in the first place can't do so. This is near to symbolic punishment in that it's very real for the individual engineer (nothing symbolic about that) but a way for the government and manufacturers say "Look! We're 'Doing Something'!" with no threat to their power to do this again. That power should be taken away from them and turned into freedom for the affected car owners so we can get cleaner air to breathe and verifiable operation out of what might otherwise be perfectly functional vehicles.
It feels kinda weird that it's a story about Kimmie and he's NOT the biggest asshole involved...
Do you have evidence of something he did that can compare with what was done to him and his family? Something that can compare to an armed raiding party invading the Dotcom family house at the behest of the US Government and the MPAA, and being lied about?
My suspicion is rooted in how flippant the mainstream media have been throughout this case and how ready the public is to believe what the mainstream media (repeating US Government lies) tell them without following up on the details. I've seen allegations (perhaps charges by now) of Kim Dotcom owning child pornography and an allegation of something to do with "terrorism propaganda" that have yet to be backed up by the prosecutors. After the raid, Kim Dotcom was said to be found holed up in his family house with a loaded gun in a locked "safe room", but the police later admitted he was actually found unarmed in an unlocked safe room. The raid was ostensibly justified because Kim Dotcom might set off some kind of "doomsday device that was in the [Dotcom] mansion somewhere that would, if activated, would destroy evidence of wrongdoing anywhere in the world" (David Fisher, around 57m into the documentary) according to yet there's no evidence such a device exists. Then there's the GCSB (New Zealand's NSA equivalent) illegally spying on Dotcom and Prime Minister Key alleging such illicit spying on New Zealanders is "this is really a matter of mistake and human error not one of conspiracy" (around 1h9m). These are a few examples from the "Kim Dotcom: Caught In The Web" documentary which shows the paperwork, names the names of who is involved (including members of the FBI and CIA which were apparently in on this case from the outset) and now we're seeing "The whole New Zealand-based spying operation against Kim Dotcom and his Megaupload co-defendants was illegal, the High Court has ruled". Given that background I see your post which (sans evidence to back up your strong claim of being surprised that "he's NOT the biggest asshole involved") reads more like character assassination or trying to graft an vaguely unpleasant feeling onto his very serious case which Americans ought to be far more concerned about.
While Rashid is right to challenge the Russophobic line inherent in this story (which draws from and is a repeat of the 'Russiagate' lies meant to distract the public from Hillary Clinton's 2nd presidential campaign loss and unwillingness to take sole credit for her choices which led to and explain that loss and stoke fear which could lead to war with Russia), Rashid misses the point that there is a great reason to reject Kaspersky's software: it's nonfree (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. This is the reason to reject any other nonfree software regardless of that software's purpose, certainly when said software purports to keep one safe from security threats such as malware.
Handing over Kaspersky source code to the US Government is no solution: regardless of whether Kaspersky is malicious this does nothing for the users of the program outside the US Government who deserve software freedom to be respected.
Malware is certainly worth looking out for and worth taking steps to avoid, but trusting one black box to keep one safe from the threats of another is no way to do this job. We should hire programmers to improve free software anti-malware solutions so computer users aren't put in a position of having to blindly trust one proprietor instead of another. Switching masters is not the course to freedom, liberating oneself from masters is.
Chrome is nonfree software (aka user-subjugating, proprietary software). Users are not free to run, share, modify, or inspect the complete corresponding source code and build instructions. Only Google, Chrome's copyright holder and proprietor, can do this.
Therefore the alleged "permanency" of any feature in Chrome is up to the proprietor, just as all other features are with any nonfree program. If Google decides to later take this feature away (possibly reframing the decision in a press release with some euphemism as a cover to distract users away from the user's lack of control over the program and thus their computers), so be it. What is pitched as permanent suddenly becomes revealed to be impermanent and up to the whim of the proprietor.
This and all the other problems (when viewed from a user's perspective) with nonfree software apply. You can't trust it will do what you want it to do and even if you find it useful, reliable, and robust against errors (as some nonfree software is) you can't take steps to maintain that or vet it in any serious way. Software freedom (a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify all published computer software for any purpose at any time) is a value unto itself. It's wise not to get lost in the shuffle of new features; even less technically featureful free software is a better choice than robust and featureful nonfree software because features can be added but freedom is usually not added.
If a data storage service advertises "unlimited" storage they're lying to you. Nobody has the capacity to store unlimited data and businesses aren't keen to purchase storage because users take the business at their word.
No, if a data storage business shuts down or sharply curtails a so-called "unlimited" storage plan, it's because they got caught being taken at their word and learned they were unwilling to make good on a promise of service they never should have made in the first place. It's not possible to abuse a data storage plan that claims to let one store as much data there as they like (as opposed to paying more for storing more and using technical means to limit how much one can store on the service).
Your Synology NAS probably has the Synology "Package Center" software. That proprietary software's license has an interesting clause which looks like it has the potential to do what Sonos is claiming:
1.6. When you install or use of any of Third Party Package, you have to keep it in mind that its developer may change its terms and conditions governing the Third Party Package, or modify, suspend, cancel or stop its services thereof at any time; and that Synology is also entitled to change, cancel or stop the Third Party Package and its services, at any time and for any reason. No warranty or commitment is provided therefor by Synology.
So when the Package Center asks you to tick a box confirming that you agree to the software's terms of service (which apparently change over time), this could mean either tick the box or take the consequences which (depending on the software) could mean letting Synology render the software non-functional. And if that software is needed to make the NAS work, that could mean rendering the NAS non-functional. After all, didn't Synology recently change the software in the Package Center so that some of it can't be turned off, can't be uninstalled, and may provide functionality you don't want anyhow? What's to stop them from putting more functionality into packages managed via the Package Center?
Software freedom would help liberate users from the untrustworthy control of Sonos here. Even if Sonos backs down and doesn't follow through on this threat of effectively rendering a Sonos device non-functional, the principled objection is that they have the power to do that in the first place.
Free software for the Sonos devices could give users control over their own devices and put them in a position where they don't have to care about Sonos' spyware (data collected "includes email addresses, IP addresses, and account login information -- as well as device data, information about Wi-Fi antennas and other hardware information, room names, and error data") and other forms of malware that effectively constitute a threat to accept any new terms of service post-sale.
Corporate and proprietary software sycophants will no doubt claim to want that. Posters like you find right here on/.. But this is another situation where software freedom and fully-free software driven hardware could have saved people from experiencing the problems described. Users could be notified of an update, download the complete corresponding source code to that update (and the software already installed in their locks) and then do due diligence for their own locks: inspecting the complete corresponding source code and finding bugs, altering that software, and sharing their improved code with others (a job opportunity). Non-technical users (who, I imagine, make up the largest percentage of computer users and owners of these locks) could have hired people they trust to do this same inspection and improvement work on their behalf.
Instead users apparently get updates from the very organization they can't trust to render their locks inoperative ("bricked" locks) and angry customers await lock replacements.
I ask the same question you asked about many computer-driven things posters here claim to want:
voice-controlled systems that always listen for the users to give the command word (TV remote controls, phones, stationary devices intended to sit in one's bedroom, kitchen, or living room),
mic/camera devices that are not detachable from the computer (such as those built into most laptops and tablet computers) driven with proprietary software drivers and often attached to computers running proprietary software,
computers featuring Intel's AMT or any workalike (a cryptographically-signed computer system separate from the main computer but connected to the system's bus thus granting AMT access to USB, sound, storage, and network and AMT works across any OS installed on the main computer). All of this backdooring is pitched to sysadmins as a management advantage which would be true if AMT were free software which the computer owner could sign with their key and remove any keys they don't want to keep.
On/. you'll find posters claiming to think highly of them all chiefly driven by either paid shills or convenience-seeking sycophants who don't foresee the obvious security and privacy implications of these horrible designs.
If it costs them less to file the claim than the claim than they will get back on the average, they'll do it.
Reminds me of the "Happy Birthday" song scam Warner/Chappell Music pulled on so many artists who included that song in their work, collecting royalties from them based on a fraudulent copyright ownership claim that was later deemed invalid in court (the music and lyrics of "Good Morning and Happy Birthday" were published without a copyright notice which was required at the time so the song was already in the public domain). Jennifer Nelson sued based on her research showing the copyright claim was invalid. She paid $1500 in royalties and wanted her money back and monies returned to those who paid. Warner/Chappell had been earning $2M/year on licensing this song and ended up agreeing to pay back $14M to licensees since 2009 (which was quite generous to Warner/Chappell since Warner/Chappell had been collecting royalties well before 2009. She won and liberated the Happy Birthday song that Warner/Chappell Music never should have been able to collect any money from in the first place.
This is a good example of why people shouldn't be so quick to take a corporation's word for what they own and what the public owes them. Also another example why a 'business first' orientation to looking at situations (as is commonplace and entirely unquestioned on/. as well as the corporate media/. repeats and points to) is costly and dangerous to one's civil liberties.
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I can't stress enough how much the parent poster's point matters: you're choosing to install a spy in your home/office.
People make the same choice when they take a tracker (aka "cell phone", "mobile phone") with them when they use the toilet or leave it next to their bed. Would it be okay if someone trailed you with a mic on a boom and hung it over the stall as you used the toilet or had sex in your bed? Ask people that and they'd probably object on the grounds of a loss of privacy. Yet if that mic (which is connected to the Internet, operated with proprietary software, and doesn't have an indicator light) also let you browse the web, check your email, and play games this becomes okay? Then the concept of privacy was never the issue.
We've learned most people apparently don't need voice control to order stuff from Internet-based distributors including amazon.com. You should not trade away your privacy, ever, and the low price some place on their privacy indicates they need more education.
This situation doesn't back up your point at all. Technical considerations about features and what's easy to learn versus hard to learn are remarkably subjective. What's objectively clear is that Sharepoint (a proprietary CMS) doesn't allow users to inspect what it's doing, alter the code, or share improved versions. Any problems with Sharepoint have to be fixed by the proprietor (Microsoft), and a backdoor in Sharepoint may well not be viewed as something that needs to be "fixed" from the proprietor's point of view.
WordPress, by contrast, respects a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify. Site owners can decide how much time and effort they want to put into keeping their WordPress install secure. If they find a problem, improvements can be vetted, shared, and completely understood. The limits of review and improvement are the site owner's to choose and site owners retain the freedom to fully control their site (so long as they host on free software systems). Even bad free software (for any definition of "bad") is better than nonfree software because users have software freedom. Writing one's own code would grant one the freedoms only Microsoft gets with Sharepoint.
It's not fair to WordPress to conflate a WordPress plugin with WordPress itself ("Wordpress is a joke") or being horribly vague about what is so bad about various free CMSes. WordPress can't take responsibility for what others put in their WordPress plugins. They can only delist the malware plugins and describe why users shouldn't run that plugin downloaded from another source.
Finally, your point fails to describe how this particular WordPress plugin is critical to useful WordPress sites. This matters to WordPress' main audience—nontechnical users—who might want to know why they should not want particular functionality the plugin ostensibly delivers, or how to get comparable functionality another way. Lots of users aren't technical and won't know why they shouldn't install a bunch of plugins, or how to vet the plugins they find provide genuinely necessary functionality (including not blindly accepting every upgrade but vetting the changes along the way). I don't like malware either, but it's not fair to conflate software freedom with non-freedom (as if nonfree software was inevitable or just as reasonable a choice, an alternative), or to blame one party (WordPress in this case) for another' choices, and objections are far more useful when they are specific.
Please re-read my post slowly and in its entirety, or consider reading virtually any other post I've written on /.. I clearly point out that proprietary software is the problem and software freedom is the fix. The points I linked to in the grandparent post refer to Microsoft specifically because that organization is relevant in this thread, not because Microsoft is somehow a more unacceptable proprietor than other software proprietors.
Among the copyright holders and distributors (Apple, Disney, NBC/Comcast, etc.) mutual greed assures that no single site will offer the convenience, freedom from digital restrictions management, and respect for watching in privacy that sharing sites like The Pirate Bay do.
Among customers (particularly those on /.) who should know better than to do business with Disney: Doing business with Disney means feeding the organization that treats you badly on copyright law (another retroactive copyright term extension, more power for software proprietors to implement more digital restrictions management, anyone?). Your shortsightedness and unwillingness to put your choices in the context of something more important will reinforce Disney's strong seat at the bargaining table. This will adversely affect you even for using services you're (foolishly) willing to trade your freedom to get: more DRM-riddled temporary access to movies with plenty of spying.
So despite knowing that Microsoft is an early NSA collaborator, forcing and tricking users into "upgrading" to Windows 10, distributes proprietary software (all of which is untrustworthy by default which prevents even technical users from fixing problems and distributing improved software to others), and Microsoft blatantly disregarded user choice and privacy, shipped with bad defaults for privacy, got caught lying to users about how Windows 10's euphemistically named "privacy controls" worked, you believe the headline that Microsoft "will soon give users more control over app permissions" and therefore want to talk about this in the context of the rose-colored vision of the past for Windows users? Microsoft has made so many choices against "giving users more control" over anything there's no reason to believe they'll ever make such choices, just like any other software proprietor.
Forget the past, history begins now.
Software proprietors, regardless of nationality, current employment, or current residence. Brad Kuhn said it well in his blog post, "Software Freedom Doesn't Kill People, Your Security Through Obscurity Kills People".
People should be trained in what software freedom means and why it matters. Instead they're trained in evaluating all options on the basis of price (and misstating the price, at that, because no price is placed on their privacy or their other rights), convenience (without regard to other values), and on fashion (functionally, there's very little that separates the older button-oriented look & feel UI from the modern swiping and OpenGL-effects-laden UIs but that the latter requires more expensive hardware which can mostly be operated only with nonfree software).
So people should determine how computers are used by critically examining ethical arguments they're never taught to value until it's too late. This puts most computer users at a severe disadvantage and software freedom activists are up against very wealthy adversaries. But we all know that software freedom treats people in a defensibly better way we can explain in detail. We should argue for improving public education along lines that matter—software freedom and the underlying ethics of that social movement—not price, fashion, and convenience in the moment.
From the article and blindly copied into the /. submission:
If you want to advocate for publicly specified formats without encumbrances, then have the spine to do that. That would be great work to do and should be celebrated for its own sake. But there's nothing about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which somehow grants any of the features being claimed above.
RSS is merely a feed format. What goes into that feed is up to the site that publishes the feed. Even if users are given control over their feed, that's merely a site function and this flexibility will differ from site to site. A site could publish an RSS feed which doesn't "catch everything a site publishes", a feed that contains "just the articles that have proved popular with other users [...] just the articles from today [or] just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter". There's nothing inherent in RSS that keeps you "in full control of what's in your feed". Users necessarily deal with a proper subset of what was ever published in a site's RSS feed. If most RSS feeds contain everything the site publishes and leave the user to decide what to include in their view of the feed, that's great, but that has nothing to do with the RSS XML vocabulary. The lack of clear distinction, conflating multiple issues, and giving credit to RSS for those benefits makes the benefit of RSS unclear and confusing to those who don't know what RSS is and read articles like this in hopes of learning.
First off, you're using the word "Linux" as though that were an operating system. Linux is not now and never was an OS, it was and remains an OS kernel. You can't run the software you use as examples if all you have is the Linux kernel. Secondly, democracy is messy. People start projects which other people don't like. But we're all free to start our own projects and include the free software we like. Nobody "forc[ed] systemd into Debian". Debian GNU/Linux decided to include systemd, and for a community that is still going strong you'd never know that Debian had been "tor[n] apart" as you claim.
Contrary to your way of putting it, the initial work behind GNOME was quite practical and, coming from the GNU Project, started in making free software more practical. GNOME was started because the K Desktop Environment (KDE) had nonfree dependencies, notably Qt which used a nonfree license until around mid-1999. Thus KDE was unsuitable for the GNU Project which aims to provide an OS which respects a user's software freedom (to run, share, modify, and distribute). A second project aiming to do roughly the same job as Qt was also started by the GNU Project (a Qt API-compatible project called "Harmony"). Qt ended up being relicensed as free software and GNOME ended up being useful. So we have both KDE and GNOME today. Thus a pragmatic pursuit of software freedom, which you apparently eschew, was quite effective at delivering a modern GUI look-and-feel for users who want that (which, I'm guessing, would be most computer users).
"Splintering the community" is a natural outcome of software freedom just as people use their freedom of speech to express different and sometimes conflicting views. People try to work together to meet their needs but sometimes that just isn't possible. This kind of thing happens in science all the time; people with different ideas on how something works set out to investigate their hypotheses in parallel and sometimes we end up with multiple divergent theories and, over time, some convergence. When it comes to software development we should celebrate, not minimize or disdain the software freedom to express ourselves in such a way.
Please do cite examples to back up your claims. Stallman doesn't talk about "closed source" because that's a reference to open source, a group founded on rejecting the ethics-based free software movement he founded over a decade before open source began. In fact, Stallman has been known to point out why open source misses the point of free software and open source is a right-wing reactionary counter to free software probably because open source proponents are ready to drop their development methodology if a sufficiently robust and powerful proprietary program comes along. That choice reveals a scam akin to "greenwashing" among polluters who want to look more environmentally-conscious than their behavior would deserve. Virtually every story on /. can be described as yet another story that wouldn't have adversely affected users if the users had software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software).
Despite your clear misunderstanding of what Stallman argues for, why, or what the relevant issues at hand are, it should be interesting to you defend "open source is being pushed down peoples throats with the exact same lockins and customisations on devices".
You mean people actually controlling the devices they own and deciding for themselves how that device should be maintained? Why that's completely unknown territory for automobiles, computer software, and so many other things. Oh, the horror of freeing oneself from corporate control.
For years Eben Moglen has been pointing out "Stallman was right" in his talks. Moglen regularly cites how Stallman got there years before the corporate-minded press (and thus repeater sites like /. don't promote that point of view). It's very much the problem we see with the open source advocacy for nonfree software (or, put differently, the open source enthusiasts' unwillingness to stand by their pitched development methodology). I understand it rankles to read someone pointing out that free software and open source aren't the same, but when it comes to endorsing proprietary software they certainly are not and this endorsement ought not be pushed aside. Red Hat has a cozy relationship with Microsoft which includes bundling .NET software despite patent claims that render such software nonfree particularly if one wants to do something with the software they can do with free software—adding covered code to another project.
You still see people here (even on this topic) posting something that demonstrates an unfounded belief they have more control over their nonfree OS-running computer than they have. "At least on PCs I could figure out what was crap, and delete it.", for example. Taking "PC" not to mean "personal computer" but computer running Microsoft Windows, there are plenty of examples of programs that either don't include working uninstallers or installers that purposefully leave something behind which can't be easily uninstalled (Sony's rootkit which also interfered with CD ripping, for example).
/.'s user-driven censorship scheme effectively increases the odds that freedom-talk goes unseen. If you want to see your post never get moderated up (and thus be less likely to show up for most /. readers using default settings), try pointing to any of the GNU Project's malware pages. These pages are highly informative lists which are helpfully divided into useful subcategories. They all explain how nonfree or proprietary software most computer users run deserve the alternative name "user-subjugating" and point to stories written by others, naming names and leaving no doubt as to their authenticity. /. wants clicks and like any click/like-oriented publication, adherence to established corporate norms is the heart of the effort. Stories like this come along once in a while but clearly the mainstay of tech press is convincing people to argue over minor technicalities while they narrow the allowable debate to which proprietary programs shall run on one's system.
You express the case for "Open Source" quite well, and that's where your entire post misses the points I raised and offers no response to them. Open source claims to support much the same thing as free software but you've inadvertantly put your finger right on where they differ, where it matters most: respect for software freedom. Open source was designed to throw away software freedom in a bid to speak to business interests (most notably software proprietors) and offer the reactionary right-wing response it has offered since its beginning.
Free software predates open source by over a decade and is at heart a social movement centered around the ethics of how to treat other people where computer software is concerned. Open source is a development methodology proprietors prefer because of the very tradeoff you expressed wherein robust proprietary software is adopted (thus showing how ready open source proponents are to throw away their meager development methodology). This difference is the night-and-day difference between free software and open source. The GNU Project covered this issue many years ago in their essays on the difference between free software and open source (old essay, newer essay). I recommend you read the newer one in particular, "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" because you've certainly missed the points I raised in my grandparent post. Calling proprietary software "more robust support" compels one to ask 'More robust than what?' as there is no other so-called "support" available for proprietary software; proprietary software so-called "support" is a monopoly. That's one of the points you completely missed: You can't know what else that proprietary software is doing without the inspections you aren't allowed to carry out on the proprietary software (irrespective of your will to do said inspection or to hire the job out to be done by someone more skilled than you). If that proprietary software ever doesn't do what you want (for any definition of "doesn't do what you want") you have no recourse to understand what all the software is doing or to change it in ways the proprietor doesn't allow. If you build promises on top of that software (such as running a business which keeps other people's sensitive data a secret) your promise is impossible to keep and you've made a bad choice in trusting a black box you're disallowed from inspecting, improving, (and sometimes even running) to keep those secrets for you. I hope you're contributing to the Samba team so that they can afford to spend more time developing the software to act as a full replacement for the directory service you point out.
The issue is not robustness of code; in fact, there's no argument that some proprietary software is more featureful and remarkably robust. The issue is also not whether you choose to learn enough programming and possess the curiosity to look into what the software is doing. The issue is what one is allowed to do with one's own computer, and recognition of the underlying ethics of this situation. The ethical way to treat other people where computer software is concerned requires respecting their software freedom. What you've said is what the newer of the two aforementioned essays describe, and I quote below:
You have the right conclusion—there is a scam going on—but the wrong cause.
Programs aren't trustworthy or untrustworthy because of who wrote them. They're trustworthy or not trustworthy because they respect a user's software freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify. Computers don't evaluate the nationality of the people who entered the source code or developed the algorithms, computers execute the instructions they're instructed to execute. The catch is whether those instructions are available to be run, inspected, modified, and shared by the computer's owner (respecting a user's software freedom) or not. Software freedom lets us work together to make sure the programs we run are reliable, safe, robust, and do what we want them to do (even if that means evaluating source code ourselves or taking source code to someone to do trusted evaluations on our behalf for a fee).
No one person can inspect all the free software out there, there's too much. But collectively we can look out for ourselves. This is also no guarantee against bugs; there is no such guarantee as all large programs have bugs. This is as close as we can come to making sure the computers we trust obey our instructions (and those of 3rd parties because we've first given the OK).
There's no defensible argument that concludes Microsoft's, Norton's, or McAfee's anti-malware software (to name a few examples) are trustworthy but Kaspersky's anti-malware is not trustworthy. All of those programs are proprietary (user-subjugating and nonfree), so you're right: they're all untrustworthy.
All proprietary software regardless of ostensible purpose is untrustworthy. Proprietary OSes being "defended" with proprietary anti-malware software is using one black box to guard another black box from inscrutable weaknesses. The fix is software freedom: run a free software OS, use and support (financially as well as in conversations) free software anti-malware software, and (since the public clearly has plenty of money to spend on these programs) pay for programmers to develop and maintain free software anti-malware programs and free software OSes. Since modern societies rely on computers more and more, this is also another opportunity for us to develop cross-platform, free software, anti-malware software funded with taxpayer money. We know what the proprietors offer: secrecy and untrustworthiness. I think we can do better and respect our software freedom while simultaneously offering living-wage paying jobs for long-term development and maintenance.
Nonfree software didn't recently "add spying/telemetry/etc". The malware was a part of nonfree OSes (such as Windows, iOS, MacOS) for a long time in both the OS and various apps. Here are a few examples concerning Windows: the backdoor in Windows by which Microsoft can impose any change it wants and when this was used, and who can forget Microsoft's choice to trick or force Windows 7 and Vista users into Windows 10 "upgrades". Since that software was nonfree even technical users and developers couldn't legally remove the malware and distribute the improved malware-free variant to help others.
When it came to spying, Windows 10 gave users a UI that apparently deceived them into believing that the user had a say in how much their OS ratted them out. Windows 10 shipped with bad defaults for preserving user's privacy and continued "talking to Microsoft" (as Condé Nast put it) "even if a user turn[ed] off its Bing search and Cortana features, and activate[ed] the privacy-protection settings" (quoting the GNU Project). So now Microsoft assures Windows users things are better, but one has to wonder for whom and what users are legally allowed to do if they discover the proprietor's words aren't how the software behaves.
So long as the software is proprietary, technical users have no idea what the proprietary program is programmed to do (what it's capable of). And when that software is changed (patched or updated) programmers who can figure out what that program does have to re-learn what the program does. That's a lot of work to do every time a program is changed. This is why proprietors don't respect a user's freedom to run, share, inspect, and modify; proprietors use their power against the user. The consequence of this is that claims to the contrary (such as your assertions above) are not believable because they're either beyond the claimant's knowledge or the claims come from the untrustworthy proprietor.
Not without the explicit consent of the user, preferably in a form non-technical users can grant and rescind without having to go through a licensing agreement.
More importantly for the public: the golden parachute and engineer's imprisonment does nothing to give affected cars (not just VWs) control of the cars they "own". The car's software should be published, sent to each registered owner in source and binary forms with complete build instructions and licensed under a free software license (I suggest the GPLv3 or later).
This means Brad Kuhn's warning still holds true: Software Freedom Doesn't Kill People, Your Security Through Obscurity Kills People and vehicle owners who want to keep their vehicle and make it abide by emissions laws without having to trust the parties that put them in danger in the first place can't do so. This is near to symbolic punishment in that it's very real for the individual engineer (nothing symbolic about that) but a way for the government and manufacturers say "Look! We're 'Doing Something'!" with no threat to their power to do this again. That power should be taken away from them and turned into freedom for the affected car owners so we can get cleaner air to breathe and verifiable operation out of what might otherwise be perfectly functional vehicles.
Do you have evidence of something he did that can compare with what was done to him and his family? Something that can compare to an armed raiding party invading the Dotcom family house at the behest of the US Government and the MPAA, and being lied about?
My suspicion is rooted in how flippant the mainstream media have been throughout this case and how ready the public is to believe what the mainstream media (repeating US Government lies) tell them without following up on the details. I've seen allegations (perhaps charges by now) of Kim Dotcom owning child pornography and an allegation of something to do with "terrorism propaganda" that have yet to be backed up by the prosecutors. After the raid, Kim Dotcom was said to be found holed up in his family house with a loaded gun in a locked "safe room", but the police later admitted he was actually found unarmed in an unlocked safe room. The raid was ostensibly justified because Kim Dotcom might set off some kind of "doomsday device that was in the [Dotcom] mansion somewhere that would, if activated, would destroy evidence of wrongdoing anywhere in the world" (David Fisher, around 57m into the documentary) according to yet there's no evidence such a device exists. Then there's the GCSB (New Zealand's NSA equivalent) illegally spying on Dotcom and Prime Minister Key alleging such illicit spying on New Zealanders is "this is really a matter of mistake and human error not one of conspiracy" (around 1h9m). These are a few examples from the "Kim Dotcom: Caught In The Web" documentary which shows the paperwork, names the names of who is involved (including members of the FBI and CIA which were apparently in on this case from the outset) and now we're seeing "The whole New Zealand-based spying operation against Kim Dotcom and his Megaupload co-defendants was illegal, the High Court has ruled". Given that background I see your post which (sans evidence to back up your strong claim of being surprised that "he's NOT the biggest asshole involved") reads more like character assassination or trying to graft an vaguely unpleasant feeling onto his very serious case which Americans ought to be far more concerned about.
While Rashid is right to challenge the Russophobic line inherent in this story (which draws from and is a repeat of the 'Russiagate' lies meant to distract the public from Hillary Clinton's 2nd presidential campaign loss and unwillingness to take sole credit for her choices which led to and explain that loss and stoke fear which could lead to war with Russia), Rashid misses the point that there is a great reason to reject Kaspersky's software: it's nonfree (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. This is the reason to reject any other nonfree software regardless of that software's purpose, certainly when said software purports to keep one safe from security threats such as malware.
Handing over Kaspersky source code to the US Government is no solution: regardless of whether Kaspersky is malicious this does nothing for the users of the program outside the US Government who deserve software freedom to be respected.
Malware is certainly worth looking out for and worth taking steps to avoid, but trusting one black box to keep one safe from the threats of another is no way to do this job. We should hire programmers to improve free software anti-malware solutions so computer users aren't put in a position of having to blindly trust one proprietor instead of another. Switching masters is not the course to freedom, liberating oneself from masters is.
Chrome is nonfree software (aka user-subjugating, proprietary software). Users are not free to run, share, modify, or inspect the complete corresponding source code and build instructions. Only Google, Chrome's copyright holder and proprietor, can do this.
Therefore the alleged "permanency" of any feature in Chrome is up to the proprietor, just as all other features are with any nonfree program. If Google decides to later take this feature away (possibly reframing the decision in a press release with some euphemism as a cover to distract users away from the user's lack of control over the program and thus their computers), so be it. What is pitched as permanent suddenly becomes revealed to be impermanent and up to the whim of the proprietor.
This and all the other problems (when viewed from a user's perspective) with nonfree software apply. You can't trust it will do what you want it to do and even if you find it useful, reliable, and robust against errors (as some nonfree software is) you can't take steps to maintain that or vet it in any serious way. Software freedom (a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify all published computer software for any purpose at any time) is a value unto itself. It's wise not to get lost in the shuffle of new features; even less technically featureful free software is a better choice than robust and featureful nonfree software because features can be added but freedom is usually not added.
If a data storage service advertises "unlimited" storage they're lying to you. Nobody has the capacity to store unlimited data and businesses aren't keen to purchase storage because users take the business at their word.
No, if a data storage business shuts down or sharply curtails a so-called "unlimited" storage plan, it's because they got caught being taken at their word and learned they were unwilling to make good on a promise of service they never should have made in the first place. It's not possible to abuse a data storage plan that claims to let one store as much data there as they like (as opposed to paying more for storing more and using technical means to limit how much one can store on the service).
Your Synology NAS probably has the Synology "Package Center" software. That proprietary software's license has an interesting clause which looks like it has the potential to do what Sonos is claiming:
So when the Package Center asks you to tick a box confirming that you agree to the software's terms of service (which apparently change over time), this could mean either tick the box or take the consequences which (depending on the software) could mean letting Synology render the software non-functional. And if that software is needed to make the NAS work, that could mean rendering the NAS non-functional. After all, didn't Synology recently change the software in the Package Center so that some of it can't be turned off, can't be uninstalled, and may provide functionality you don't want anyhow? What's to stop them from putting more functionality into packages managed via the Package Center?
Software freedom would help liberate users from the untrustworthy control of Sonos here. Even if Sonos backs down and doesn't follow through on this threat of effectively rendering a Sonos device non-functional, the principled objection is that they have the power to do that in the first place.
Free software for the Sonos devices could give users control over their own devices and put them in a position where they don't have to care about Sonos' spyware (data collected "includes email addresses, IP addresses, and account login information -- as well as device data, information about Wi-Fi antennas and other hardware information, room names, and error data") and other forms of malware that effectively constitute a threat to accept any new terms of service post-sale.
Corporate and proprietary software sycophants will no doubt claim to want that. Posters like you find right here on /.. But this is another situation where software freedom and fully-free software driven hardware could have saved people from experiencing the problems described. Users could be notified of an update, download the complete corresponding source code to that update (and the software already installed in their locks) and then do due diligence for their own locks: inspecting the complete corresponding source code and finding bugs, altering that software, and sharing their improved code with others (a job opportunity). Non-technical users (who, I imagine, make up the largest percentage of computer users and owners of these locks) could have hired people they trust to do this same inspection and improvement work on their behalf.
Instead users apparently get updates from the very organization they can't trust to render their locks inoperative ("bricked" locks) and angry customers await lock replacements.
I ask the same question you asked about many computer-driven things posters here claim to want:
On /. you'll find posters claiming to think highly of them all chiefly driven by either paid shills or convenience-seeking sycophants who don't foresee the obvious security and privacy implications of these horrible designs.
Reminds me of the "Happy Birthday" song scam Warner/Chappell Music pulled on so many artists who included that song in their work, collecting royalties from them based on a fraudulent copyright ownership claim that was later deemed invalid in court (the music and lyrics of "Good Morning and Happy Birthday" were published without a copyright notice which was required at the time so the song was already in the public domain). Jennifer Nelson sued based on her research showing the copyright claim was invalid. She paid $1500 in royalties and wanted her money back and monies returned to those who paid. Warner/Chappell had been earning $2M/year on licensing this song and ended up agreeing to pay back $14M to licensees since 2009 (which was quite generous to Warner/Chappell since Warner/Chappell had been collecting royalties well before 2009. She won and liberated the Happy Birthday song that Warner/Chappell Music never should have been able to collect any money from in the first place.
This is a good example of why people shouldn't be so quick to take a corporation's word for what they own and what the public owes them. Also another example why a 'business first' orientation to looking at situations (as is commonplace and entirely unquestioned on /. as well as the corporate media /. repeats and points to) is costly and dangerous to one's civil liberties.