just want to add, it’s not the zoomer’s fault. they were intentionally raised in ignorance because its apparently profitable

fuck the corporations who’ve deliberately turned our living computers into soulless commercial brainwashing surveillance machines

Or they’re just adding improvements to the software they heavily rely on.

which they can do in private any time they wish, without any of the fanfare.

if they actually believe in opensource let them opensource windows 7 ¹, or idk the 1/4 of a century old windows 2k

instead we get the fanare as they pat themselves on the back for opensourcing MS-DOS 4.0 early last year (not even 8.0, which is 24 years old btw, 4.0 which came out in 1986).

38 years ago…

MS-fucking-DOS, from 38 years ago, THAT’S how much they give a shit about opensource mate.

all we get is a poor pantomime which actually only illustrates just how stupid they truly think we are to believe the charade.

does any of that mean they’re 100% have to be actively shipping “bad code” in this project, not by any means. does it mean microsoft will never make a useful contribution to linux, not by any means. what it does mean is they’re increasing their sphere of influence over the project. and they have absolutely no incentive to help anyone but themselves, in fact the opposite.

as everyone knows (it’s not some deep secret the tech heads on lemmy somehow didn’t hear about) microsoft is highly dependent on linux for major revenue streams. anything a monolith depends on which they don’t control represents a risk. they’d be negligent if they didn’t try to exert control over it. and that’s for any organisation in their position. then factor in their widespread outspoken agenda against opensource, embrace, extend, extinguish and the vastly lacking longterm evidence to match their claims of <3 opensource.

they’re welcome to prove us all wrong, but that isn’t even on the horizon currently.

¹ yes yes they claim they can’t because “licensing”, which is mostly but not entirely fucking flimsy, but ok devils advocate: release the rest, but nah.

yes they lost the battle, now they’re most likely aiming to win the war.

A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don’t understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago.

cool, sounds like you have most of the principles down.

what i didn’t yet see articulated with chat-e2ee is how the actual code itself verifies itself to the user in the browser? it sounds to me like it assumes the server which serves the code is ‘trusted’, while the theoretically different server(s) which transmits the messages can be ‘untrusted’.

out of interest, do you actually mean no login, or do you mean no email-verified login?

i’m trying to understand your exact scenario.

but in general, the problem is where do you get your original key, or original hash to verify from? if they are both coming from the server, along with the code which processes them, then if the server is compromised, so are you.

thankfully browsers give alot of crypto API lately (as discussed in your link)

but you still need at minimum a secure key, a hash and trusted code to verify the code the server serves you. there are ofc solutions to this problem, but if the server is unstrusted, you absolutely can’t get it from them, which means you have to get it from somewhere else (that you trust).

Thanks for the distinctions and links to the other good discussions you’ve started!

For the invasive bits that are included, it’s easy enough for GrapheneOS to look over the incremental updates in Android and remove the bits that they don’t like.

That’s my approximate take as well, but it wasn’t quite what I was getting at.

What I meant is, to ask ourselves why is that the case? A LOT of it is because google wills it to be so.

Not only in terms of keeping it open, but also in terms of making it easy or difficult - it’s almost entirely up to google how easy or hard it’s going to be. Right now we’re all reasonably assuming they have no current serious incentives to change their mind. After all, why would they? The miniscule % of users who go to the effort of installing privacy enhanced versions of chromium (or android based os), are a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the vast majority of users running vanilla and probably never even heard of privacy enhanced versions.

excellent writeup with some high quality referencing.

minor quibble

Firefox is insecure

i’m not sure many people would disagree with you that FF is less secure than Chromium (hardly a surprise given the disparity in their budgets and resources)

though i’m not sure it’s fair to say FF is insecure if we are by comparison inferring Chromium is secure? ofc Chromium is more secure than FF, as your reference shows.

another minor quibble

projects like linux-libre and Libreboot are worse for security than their counterparts (see coreboot)

does this read like coreboot is proprietary? isn’t it GPL2? i might’ve misunderstood something.

you make some great points about open vs closed source vs proprietary etc. again, it shouldn’t surprise us that many proprietary projects or Global500 funded opensource projects, with considerably greater access to resources, often arrive at more robust solutions.

i definitely agree you made a good case for the currently available community privacy enhanced versions based on open source projects from highly commercial entities (Chromium->Vanadium, Android/Pixel->GrapheneOS) etc. something i think to note here is that without these base projects actually being opensource, i’m not sure eg. the graphene team would’ve been able to achieve the technical goals in the time they have, and likely with even less success legally.

so in essence, in the current forms at least, we have to make some kind of compromise, choosing between something we know is technically more robust and then needing to blindly trust the organisation’s (likely malicious) incentives. therefore as you identify, obviously the best answer is to privacy enhance the project, which does then involve some semi-blind trusting the extent of the privacy enhancement process - assuming good faith in the organisation providing the privacy enhancement: there is still an implicit arms race where privacy corroding features might be implemented at various layers and degrees of opacity vs the inevitably less resourced team trying to counter them.

is there some additional semi-blind ‘faith’ we’re also employing where we are probably assuming the corporate entity currently has little financial incentive in undermining the opensource base project because they can simply bolt on whatever nastiness they want downstream? it’s probably not a bad assumption overall, though i’m often wondering how long that will remain the case.

and ofc on the other hand, we have organisations who’s motivation we supposedly trust (mostly…for now), but we know we have to make a compromise on the technical robustness. eg. while FF lags behind the latest hardening methods, it’s somewhat visible to the dedicated user where they stand from a technical perspective (it’s all documented, somewhere). so then the blind trust is in the purity of the organisation’s incentives, which is where i think the political-motivated wilfully-technically-ignorant mindset can sometimes step in. meanwhile mozilla’s credibility will likely continue to be gradually eroded, unless we as a community step up and fund them sufficiently. and even then, who knows.

there’s certainly no clear single answer for every person’s use-case, and i think you did a great job delineating the different camps. just wanted to add some discussion. i doubt i’m as up to date on these facets as OP, so welcome your thoughts.

I’m sick of privacy being at odds with security

fucking well said.