Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.
There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.
Can we be honest about this, please?
Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.
He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.
What they’ve done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.
In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it’s 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We’ve seen this story play out too many times to assume there’s nothing to worry about.
So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That’s not irrational.
Yes they will. This tool would force users to always use the Play Store which would increase the download count on their app, which would help its ranking in the Play Store. Every last single developer is incentivized to use this.
Issue is that it is no secure.
Explain. I’m tired of hearing this boogeyman, tell me exactly how Lineage is “not secure” but Graphene is?
Then maybe give me some examples of cases where that difference has actually been a problem.
Because it feels like a lot of these “unsecure” things people hand-wring over are really just user freedoms they may use to hurt themselves, not actual vulnerabilities that can’t be avoided with common sense.
I mean, you can be as snotty about this as you like, but it doesn’t change the fact this “choice” is basically between participate in the same digital world as most people do with the most popular, most supported, and highest value apps, vs only what you can use in F Droid or something?
You’re calling them slaves but can you give them anything more appealing outside the walled garden than “privacy”? It’s not like everything on the play store has an F-Droid corollary. You’re basically telling them to dramatically reduce their own use case. Does that make them a slave?
Their reasons mean nothing. It’s my device. I shouldn’t have to worry about an application installed on my device being policed because the developer got a hair up their ass about people downgrading.
The phrase “more secure” is becoming meaningless as it keeps being used as a blanket excuse for literally every user hostile change.
Are they? Other comments in different PRs seem to indicate they have no intention of trying to subvert play integrity. Is there something more recent than this that indicates they’re trying?
For every single app where the developer tries this?
Yeah right. That’s unsustainable.
They’ll also just increase ways for the integrity to verify it hasn’t been patched. This announcement already says they’re checking the app’s binary for tampering.
Maybe throttled unless it passes some kind of check for being “authentic” or something. Feels like that’s the general pattern with Google now.
Hell, maybe it was related to implementing this feature. You can get parallel downloads from the store now because they changed how downloads are queued or something.
I’d 100% donate to them if they accepted donations.
If they accepted donations, you wouldn’t want to.
The reason uBlock Origins surpasses all the others is because of who the lead dev is, what they believe, and why they do it. They are absolute hardline and believe in what they made. It’s not a job.
You don’t need to be that kind of person to be a good developer, but when it comes to something like an adblocker and privacy protection, you want people like him who won’t falter or sell out. You want those true believers.
If he accepted donations, then he wouldn’t be the kind of person that made uBlock Origins what it is.
You’re lying, because uBlock Origins refuses donations. They are adamant about the purity of the project.
In fact, after the third ship sank, Sam would spend time on two other ships before eventually ending up in a sailor’s home in the UK. Those two other ships ended up being sunk as well after Sam had left them.
The Germans definitely sacrificed the Bismark to implant their saboteur among the enemy.
Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.