this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Their business model and size obligates them to walk carefully - they want users and clients to forget or not know they even exist and have such a leverage over them - that really helps them selling their products. I think they have top of the shelf specialists, hardware, etc and that naturally upholds their frightening monopoly. Piracy shield goes against them masquarading as invisible non-actors and puts a lot of unpaid responsibility on them.
I get all that, and that's why I feel weird about it.
Some of the stuff they do only works well with scale, though. And I definitely think at least some other leadership groups would abuse their market position assuming that their critical mass would be very difficult to displace. If they had just agreed to piracy shield, do you really think corporate customers would be scared off?
If I was doing actual stuff state level actors care about, I might still assume they're not "safe", but as a normal person? The fact that pirates can use their services reasonably safely and reasonably effectively definitely gives me a level of confidence that they're unlikely to use their position in a way that harms me, maliciously or recklessly. I have a VPS as well and will eventually use that as a tunnel instead, so it's actually end to end encrypted and I control the keys, but their consistent pattern of behavior doesn't make me feel that much urgency about it.
Yep, and I don't disagree with you. We just somehow forgot about what bad, not shitty capitalists are. And that we can not trust them, but can somehow rely on their consistency.
'We'd look into your shit as it passes by' is a powerful statement that'd hurt their profits a lot, especially with corporates. That's why MS's Copilot is a risky gamble even with their leverage. They don't want it at all, and these customers overshadow any of us easily.
Their scale is also why they won't give a damn unless you violate something serious or really piss some nintendo. Small clients, millions of them, aren't overseen by people, just 'bots' that can flag you for a personal review if you leave the margins and patterns of their average userbase, or if they have someone's takedown demand. As we can't dismantle it just now, it's cool we can use it to further some anticap\anticenzorship goals.