His actual goal is in the final sentence of the article and has nothing to do with moral intent.

It’s more about scale. Small open source projects might get one PR a month. Your average tech company is dealing with dozens of PR every single day. Review fatigue is real in these environments

Great summary, but I want to point out that the reality of why they’re doing this is to pander to racist voters who were told their opinion by a highly effective villification campaign against this woman in tabloid newspapers.

Once these things gain traction, politicians always kowtow to the loudest public opinions

Which is also exactly how Signal works too; I migrated both two days ago. Process was virtually identical.

I much prefer Signal, but can’t judge WhatsApp to harshly on this tbh.

Mark Zuckerberg needs to tread carefully or he might have to spend another afternoon answering the nonsensical questions of a bunch of geriatric luddites.

“made”

my

fReE sPeEcH PuRiSt

The useful idiot certainly keeps himself busy doesn’t he

I mean, yeah, doesn’t everyone?

This is also slightly off. It was primarily to eliminate third party apps from the existing landscape. Reddit want money from users in one of two ways:

1. Use their app and pay with your data via invasive tracking and advertising.
2. Pay for a third party app that pays them for API access.

Due to the extortionate pricing, (2) was only ever hypothetical. In reality there was no sustainable model for this for any third party app, even as a non-profit.

The case around AI does exist, but it was smoke and mirrors for Reddit pulling the same nonsense that Twitter did once they realized they might get away with it, regardless of the short term damage it would do to their public image.

nothing purrsonal kit

I hope he takes this firing as a window of opportunity. With the right attitude he can really ground himself.

Great, now I have to worry about this every time I order a curry

Woah, where does the US have preclearance? I thought it was nonexistent

As a software user, you can either care about your privacy or not. Caring about your privacy and not either vetting what you’re planning to use or checking that someone else has before using it, is akin to sticking your hand in a fire to find out if it’s hot.

Taking that analogy further, malicious open source software is kind of like a burning building. It only takes one person to raise the flag for it to spread pretty quickly through social media or other means that it is malicious. The whole community doesn’t need to acknowledge the fire for something to be done about it.

That they leak information? I work in commercial software development and I have to do a lot of open source security reviews. The answer is: virtually none.

Private, closed-source software on the other hand… If it could sniff your farts and send the smell to advertisers, it would; in almost all cases.

The app is open source so you can review the not-leaking-your-information that it does yourself.

Windows on the other hand …

TIL

I tried to refuse pay for on call recently as it has tax implications that I didn’t want to do deal with, but my employer refused.

So, yeah, take it up with them you bunch of bankers.

That’s the one, and you’re right, it is currently a rebrand but ultimately the same product.

I think having separate apps is the wrong way to go for their “integrate everything in one place” philosophy, over the longer term. I’m eager to see what they do with it next.