Obligatory XKCD Reference
Having been informed by someone they’d heard a breathless report from someone else (who keeps abreast of these things, apparently) that Protonmail had been ‘hacked’, it transpired that the frantic concern is that Protonmail have ‘let slip’ that they hand over metadata to the Swiss authorities when
- legally required to and
- their own legal counsel advises that a specific request isn’t a meritless case of government overreach
(The supporting evidence for this spectacular revelation being Protonmail’s own, publicly accessible, warrant canary webpage, no less — the one that’s been there for the last umpteen years).
Oh, boy … scientists, engineers and developers at CERN opt to stay with their families (and keep their careers) in return for court-mandated metadata, rather than go to jail on behalf of Internet randoms!
Who’d’a’ thought!?
Much the same kind of nonsense came my way when I was informed that Gboard could undermine Signal’s privacy by logging keystrokes and I shouldn’t use it.
Really?
As it happens … thanks to the firewall settings on my phone that prevent Gboard from connecting to the network in any way at any time, ever … two days after an update, it’s still vainly trying to upload data to Google (to ‘improve my typing experience’ (or something))
… but, let me get this straight:
Bearing in mind that the idea of handing my keystrokes to a third-party that … (if they aren’t simply stolen from them by hackers who crack their decidedly less well provisioned home information security, because they don’t have the resources available to Google with which to secure them) … might, at any time, sell them to an entirely different entity is less appealing to me than excitable conspiracy theorists might want to convince you
… on a device running an OS on which there isn’t a key I can press, or a bit in a byte, Google can’t see … and it doesn’t matter what keyboard (or anything else) I use, unless I never connect to the Internet, if they want it, they’ve got it
… I’m supposed to disregard the fact that … in the event I use a different keyboard app and a government serves Google with a warrant to reveal my keystrokes, only for Google to say they can’t because I use a third-party keyboard … said government will return with a warrant to reveal the details of the suppler of my keyboard app and then serve the warrant upon them to reveal my keystrokes (which they will, because the owners of the one-to-four person business would rather hand over my keystrokes than go to jail for the sake of defending my privacy in return for the $2.95 I paid for their product)
… and (as Aura would remark) clutch my pearls about how Gboard poses a risk to my privacy?
Nobody who knows how technology works … or the legal procedures … or that real people in the real world (who don’t have the resources with which to fight a government) will give you up rather than their own lives … would suggest such nonsense — it’s laughably naive at best … adolescent posturing by wouldbe anarchists and libertarians who think blockchain is the panacea for all Society’s ills, because “it sticks it to the Man”.
*sigh*
I know I like to light-heartedly declare that the number of people who aren’t mentally retarded is so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering … that, in fact, all but 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (if not even more) of you are drooling morlocks incapable of even tying your own shoelaces, never mind more than that … but
… just because I’m lighthearted about it, E. Scott, don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m not deadly serious, when I say it.
Because … never mind the fact that, basically, I’m fantastic (and an intellectual colossus in comparison to the rest of you) … all the evidence points to the human race getting stupider by the day.
Stupider, ignoranter and droolinger.
Also …
Stephen M. Tomic is adopted and nobody loves him — there I said it ¹.
—
¹ He has the tradition of people remarking that Hot Shot City ² is particularly good to thank for the subtlety of this particular observation.
² By coincidence, track 6 — which (if you know track 6) is clearly a sign:
