1,065 karma · joined November 27, 2010
It's not whataboutism, I'm not trying to distract from the point, I'm saying there was _prior art_ in the industry where customers appeared to tolerate this.
There was another PM on the team who felt the same way I did and we basically both wagged our fingers and said "you should have asked people during install", but who cares, it was too late.
Zoom had, I will say, a very... Chinese culture around software security. If you're familiar, Chinese software is often much more interested in just getting the job done in a simple way, and security is... not the job? I've used a lot of Chinese software that just wants full admin everything so no one had to learn about permissions.
Zoom wasn't exactly run that way, but the pool they hired from had a lot of that mentality in it.
I thought Apple's tool was ridiculous though. It's like "oh, some trash blew into our yards from the neighbor's trashcan" so Apple replies "oh, don't worry, I destroyed it with my orbital ion cannon" and the tech community never stops to wonder if maybe it's a little strange that Apple has an orbital ion cannon and maybe we should ask some questions about the ion cannon.
Zoom used the same technique Cisco Webex did - they ran a webserver with an open port so that local "links" to a meeting could open on your own machine. It wasn't a backdoor. Apple flagged that as a potential security risk, so Zoom worked with Apple on how to safely remove only the webserver without affecting other functionality. We were happy that Apple worked with us on this.
However, I thought it was very interesting (and strange) that there was almost no reaction from the tech community that Apple had software running on every Mac that allowed them to remove any binary they wished. (Which sure sounds like a backdoor)
They could "just" make it not reveal its reasoning process, but they don't know how. But, they're pretty sure they can keep AI from doing anything bad, because... well, just because, ok?
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If edits carried all the semantic information of what they were doing to the source: "rename symbol <x> to <y> everywhere" "perform step <x> after step <y>", then we could probably build a zero-maintenance revision-control system.
I think a big myth people need dispelled is that cryonics is really expensive. It's not a very expensive gamble to take, and it's pretty easy to see that it's worthwhile for many people.
First episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bQW1fEUsbk
Most recent episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXyIriINVK0
I highly recommend them if you're interested in investing in Tesla (long or short)