| ▲ | fishstock25 6 months ago | |
It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story. It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost. The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging. | ||
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | |
In the absence of further information, I would totally choose to believe the story. Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them. Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software: https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas... Shipped a browser stealer to users and exfiltrated on an unencrypted channel the usernames and passwords of users they deemed to be "pirates". https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant... https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-... Screenshots your computer screen and exfiltrates the picture to their servers. https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter... https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124 https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable. As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device. | ||
| ▲ | tacet 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | |
>It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate I laughed. While there certainly are very smart people here, HN crowd is pretty diverse and large parts of crowd are startup/business/framework of the week/ai bros folks. Not someone who would know what spi is from the top of their head. | ||