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obscur | 3 years ago

What are some things you have met where it seemed outright evil?

(I don’t have any work experience yet)

discuss

order

MaxBarraclough|3 years ago

To copy from an old comment on mine on the related topic of the indirect benefits of Free and Open Source software ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31071180 ) :

• Microsoft made it impossible to install Windows 11 Home Edition without a Microsoft online account. I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that.

• Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state

• Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed

• Mobile apps that sell your location data, and any other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security

• Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics

• Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox)

• Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption

• For more see [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html