Can you elaborate? What happened to your browser history? It seems odd that browsers would even let websites cause problems like this but maybe I'm misunderstanding because I'm not sure what the problems are.
57 karma · joined January 27, 2024
It's meaningful that the Windows 10 install method has no (official) way to disable it, but I don't think making something optional could make it not a back door, if it was one before.
Even when automatic updates are disabled, I'm not going to be reading every update so the effect seems mostly the same, regardless of whether updates are automatic or not.
The FSF's definition of "back door" (at the bottom of the linked page) is "any feature of a program that enables someone who is not supposed to be in control of the computer where it is installed to send it commands" which leaves a lot of ambiguity with the words "supposed to be". I am not sure how to interpret this definition.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-back-doors.html#...
There's a small number (~100?) of commercial games that also allow resale through Creative Commons licenses on itch.io. you can use filters like "assets-cc4-by-sa" plus "code-gpl3" to find games like that, but there's a lot of possible license combinations so it's difficult to see all games like that at once. I've also seen a couple of digital commercial games that allow resale but had some other restrictions (e.g. forbidding reverse engineering), from Humble Bundle, if I remember correctly, but in those cases I didn't know that was allowed until after I bought the game, so searching for games like that seems pretty difficult.
Maybe there are games on GOG that allow this too, but I don't know how I'd search for them.
Backdoors can be well-hidden, but this is the kind of software that people look for vulnerabilities in [1]. This gives a lot less flexibility to any potential backdoor.
Additionally, someone could decide to write a new Signal client from scratch, designed to be compatible with the original server. Such a client would probably be less secure overall, at least at first, but it couldn't have a backdoor inserted by Signal developers, since it wouldn't contain any Signal code. Since the original client also supports end-to-end encryption, a new client can be compatible with old clients.
[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-...
Maybe I am misunderstanding the summary, but it says: "If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL." <https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/>
Although copyright-infringing books may be illegal to redistribute in general, the difficulty in determining what counts as copyright infringement and what counts as fair use means you can't really tell for sure which books are illegal to distribute and which aren't, so I'm not sure that really counts as "banned". 60 Years Later had an actual court order which makes things a little more concrete.
For example, I would describe a method to do something in a video game as "tech" but in my mind I would expand it to "technology" if I thought about it. I didn't realize that the word "technique" would be a better fit in those contexts. Looking at Wikipedia [1], it looks like the words are pretty closely related so I haven't been using the word completely wrong.
I think a problem with this idea is that terms of service can be difficult to understand. For example a lot of licenses or terms of service forbid "reverse engineering" entirely. In my mind, "reverse engineering" is just trying to understand something based on observing what it does, and even though a legal agreement is probably using a more strict definition, how am I supposed to know where the boundary is? "Reverse engineering" isn't usually defined in the agreement itself. And if what I want to do is considered "reverse engineering", it might not be legally enforceable anyway.
Sometimes I buy a physical object, take it home, and then open it and find conditions that I would have disagreed with if I knew about them. I've noticed this with books, but the same could happen with software. I don't know if conditions like that would be legally enforceable, but I think the complexity of understanding this makes individual decisions about what conditions to accept a poor solution to what Stop Killing Games is trying to solve.
The Steam Subscriber Agreement [1] seems to prohibit reverse engineering games (referred to as "content" in the agreement), but I guess I'm misunderstanding it because some GPL games are on Steam (e.g. SuperTux [2]).
I agree that people shouldn't buy a product if they disagree with the conditions, but I think this is too complicated for most people to do for every product. Maybe some of these conditions should be illegal to even put in a terms of service, even if they already aren't enforceable.
There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml
That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).
If there has to be no way to change the radio's functionality, would that mean that simply using a binary blob wouldn't be enough. Wouldn't device vendors have to sign it as well?
Also, that makes me wonder about the one Wi-Fi chip I know of that does have free firmware: AR9271 [2]. I wonder what makes that situation different. Maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's firmware on a separate chip stored in ROM.
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/documents/compliance-guide [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/AR9271
It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
[1] https://www.practical-tips.com/games/play-minecraft-offline-...
People can reverse-engineer a server binary, but reverse-engineering a server that is no longer running is not guaranteed to be possible.
There are worse potential loopholes you didn't mention though.
If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Open-sourcing-video-games/ (See "What if I don’t completely own my game?")
[1] https://git.koszko.org/haketilo-packages/hacktcha/ [2] https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/src/branch...
1. Any given system has a finite number of findable vulnerabilities.
2. All findable vulnerabilities are fixable (if not in software then with a new hardware revision).
3. Fixing a vulnerability while keeping the same intended functionality introduces on average less than 1 other findable vulnerability.
4. It is possible to cease adding new features to a system and from that point forward only focus on fixing vulnerabilities.
If all 4 are true, then perfect security seems possible, in some sense. I think some vulnerabilities might not be fixable, if you include things like the idea that users can be tricked into revealing their passwords. If you restrict the definition of vulnerability to some narrower meaning that still captures most of what people mean when they say computer vulnerability, then I think those 4 statements are probably true.
Perfect security might be near impossible in practice because vulnerabilities will get more difficult to find and fix over time, but I think we should expect the discovery of vulnerabilities to eventually become arbitrarily slow in a hypothetical system that prioritized security above all else.
Would you be willing to license this code as GPL-3.0-or-later, or some other free license? I'd like to include a JavaScript derivative of this for Haketilo (a userscript manager). I would add it to a collection of scripts that aim to replace proprietary JavaScript here: https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/
I carry a laptop almost everywhere, and I even use JMP.chat for sending SMS messages, so it's functionally similar to a mobile phone, just bigger and heavier. It doesn't connect to the cell network but Wi-Fi works fine.
I think there's more to a mobile phone than SMS but I'm stuggling to think of what since I don't use it. I have GPS in my car, instead of using GPS in a mobile phone. I don't take pictures very often but when I really needed to I could use my laptop webcam (built-in or USB attached), and recently I bought a camera at a garage sale that seems higher-quality than the webcam and is much more convenient.
The ability to call 911 from anywhere is the main thing I think about that I'm missing, which is also one of the reasons I'd like to get a mobile phone working at some point, but it's difficult to gauge how important that is (since the need is rare). My friends might worry about this more than I do.
Before college, I did use a mobile phone (but mostly for gaming and taking pictures), and I am only recently out of college, so maybe I will feel more pressure to get a mobile phone in the future, and since I'm not opposed to getting one working at some point, I probably will. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I've never actually commented on Hacker News as far as I remember, but I'm the same JacobK as <https://codeberg.org/jacobk> and as jacobk on Libera.Chat. I'm not a bot.