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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

> closed social networks

It’s not clear that governments would give the open social networks an easier ride either. It could be argued that distributed FOSS developers are easier to pressurise into adding back doors, unless we officially make EFF our HR/Legal department.

The other problem is workers have a right to be paid. The alternatives are FOSS and/or distributed social media. Who in good conscience would ask a tech worker to give away their labour for free, in the name of everyone else’s freedom?

In a world of $4k rent, who amongst us will do UX, frontend, backend, DevOps, UO, and Security for 7 billion people, for anything but the top market rate?

The real alternative is to attack the actual problem: state overreach. Don’t attack people for using SnapChat — get them to upend the government’s subservience to intrusive law enforcement.

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> … who amongst us will do UX…

imho, we have everything in the foss world working tightly except great UX/UI. in my experience in the open source world – which is not insignificant – great UX is the only thing stopping us from a paradigm shift to actual tech liberation.

even outside of corporate funded work/commits, we see an astounding number of people donating incredible amounts of their time towards great quality code. but we still thoroughly lack great UX/UI.

i’m not talking about “good”, we have some projects with “good” UX, but very very few with great.

there are many reasons and I’d be happy to share what some of them are, but in my mind great UX is unquestionably one of two primary things holding us back from actual truly viable software liberation.

There are tons of OSS projects with great UX... just not for "normies". That's the issue: Most OSS contributors write software primarily for themselves, and if their needs don't align with those of the general population, the end product will not be very attractive to the masses.

> It could be argued that distributed FOSS developers are easier to pressurise into adding back doors, unless we officially make EFF our HR/Legal department.

How could this be argued?

> It could be argued that distributed FOSS developers are easier to pressurise into adding back doors

All millions of them at the same time?

Of course not.

You'd only need a few important ones, and all you'd have to do is compromise them in one way or another. This can be done via coercion, via money, or by physically or virtually breaking into their system(s).

For example, if money can be an incentive, you can stimulate a FOSS dev to add a NOBUS vulnerability in code. Also, since all the code is public, organizations like NSA can do in-house fuzzing, keeping the findings to themselves.

And any other researcher can fuzz the code themselves too and make their findings public.

This is what happened with TrueCrypt. After that fork VeraCrypt was created, because you can never coerce everyone in the world.

Independent audits should help against backdoors. Again, the FLOSS nature of software and huge number of developers are essential here.

But the nature of FOSS software is such that if an undesirable feature is added it can be taken out by the user or the project can be forked.

UO?

>Who in good conscience would ask a tech worker to give away their labour for free, in the name of everyone else’s freedom?

Here's the hope: the tech workers doing it for 'free' because they're scratching their own itch. So it would not be an act of onerous charity. The techies make some free open source decentralised clone of Reddit, say, then some folks among knitting communities, origami enthusiasts, parents groups, etc. copy it for free and pay to run it on their own hardware.

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