Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
One should be have been assuming since Windows 7 and automated online updates that the Microsoft key used to sign OS updates is in the hands of at least the NSA (and hence probably the Israeli equivalent) and they can push whatever they want to your computer as an OS update, bypassing all protections.
In fact the same applies to Linux updates of certain distros - if they’re maintained by a company based in the US they can be forced by FISA courts to provide the signing keys to the US Government.
More in general, just go read about FISA courts and their secret court orders - companies based in the US or hosting things in the US can be secretly forced to just “give the keys of the Realm” to parts of the US Government.
Since things like the Patriot act one should be treating companies based in the US as just as untrustworthy as companies based in China.
(By the way, some other supposed Democratic countries have similar or worse systems - for example the equivalent of FISA courts in the UK have things like secret court sessions were the side which is not the State is not authorized to have a legal representation, see most of the evidence or even know the decision of the court).
Have people already forgot most of what came out in the Snowden Revelations?!
Would stuff like Fedora be in danger, in this case? I couldn’t find if Red Hat was US based
In theory yes since they’re essentially sponsored by RedHat. (RedHat is owned by IBM)
Which is funny because the Snowden leaks actually showed the NSA likes using Fedora for their fancy spy tech lol.
I guess a good alternative would be OpenSUSE.
Yep… Snowden, Charles Maning, Assange and an older whistleblower who died recently but I forgot his name… They also forgot what Cambridge Analytica was about. They just need to throw some bread and games at us and we go one living as nothing ever happend.
I mean, there’s not a whole lot of alternative. It seems like the only two “valid” avenues of resistance are retreating from society into a hermetically sealed bubble and starting a podcast.
Chelsea* Manning
But, yeah, most people just do not care if they are spied on because they don’t think it will be used for anything besides advertising. Trump is going to wake a lot of people up to the immense power we’ve handed over to our tech overlords.