The point is that it’s a loophole in privacy laws so they don’t have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it’s anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don’t actually look into it or understand the implications.
Ad firm money.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but my first instinct when I see stuff like this is they have a secret contract with an advertiser and are selling this information.
Like if you’re going to use Arch btw, go all the way and use actual Arch.
Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as “personal information” under privacy laws.
It’s not fucking over Microsoft, it’s prevent Microsoft from fucking us over. Microsoft is not the victim in this.
And as always, the majority response to this will absolutely be something along the lines of “I support writers but you can fuck right off if you expect me to inconvenience myself in the slightest most superficial way in solidarity with you because actually having to modify my behavior in the simplest way is where I draw the line.”
Trusting your security to Google is literally like trusting a fox to guard your hen house.
Especially ironic considering they were horribly unreliable for long term data storage
This video from a security researcher says that pretty much every software that uses WebP was affected though, and once the issue was discovered, Google made commits in their own codebase to “fix” it. Which suggests it’s an issue with the upstream source code that Google provided to everyone else.
Honestly it wouldn’t even be that hard to release full translated versions of existing programming languages. Like Python in Punjabi or Kotlin in Chinese or something (both of which already support unicode variable/class/function names). Just have a lookup table to redefine each keyword and standard library name to one in that language, it can literally just be an additional translation layer above the compiler/interpreter that converts the code to the original English version.
It’s honestly really surprising that non-English speakers have developed entirely new programming languages in their own language (unfortunately none of which are getting very widespread use even among speakers of that language), but the practice of simply translating a widely used and industry standard English programming language doesn’t seem to be much of a thing.
If I ever make my own programming language, I’m probably going to bake multi-language support into the compiler. Just supply it with a lookup table of translated terms and the code in that language.
Because it supports Unicode as variable/class/function names and Unicode includes all the characters humans have ever used, even dead languages (I assume for historians to digitize ancient texts?)
Can’t wait to have Google’s telemetry injected into my Linux apps
It’s something that literally every dev has done at some point before they knew better.
If you’re working for a multinational tech company handling sensitive user data and still make this mistake, then you are being malicious in your incompetence. This is something that would cause you to lose a significant amount of marks on a first year college programming project, let alone a production system used by literally billions of people.
that logged unencrypted password data
Why the fuck would you need to log a password ever? This is absolutely malice and not incompetence.
Hanlon’s Razor revised: Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, except where there is an established pattern of malice.
Does anyone remember an article/interview a while back where Mark Fuckerberg shamelessly admitted that he chose not to hash passwords in the original Facebook codebase specifically because he wanted to be able to log into his users’ other accounts that use the same password? I swear I remember reading something like this but now I can’t find it.
Same reason Siemens, Volkswagen, Bayer, and many more, including a ton of American ones were onboard with the Holocaust.
Genocide is good for business.
Anything that was designed be exploited was designed that way for a reason. You think Intel isn’t aware of the security issues with how they designed their CPUs?
“Bro full self driving is 5 years away bro trust me bro”