It's interesting how many comments these days are like, "well of course".

Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance.

Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems. And lazy engineers build lazy key escrow the government can exploit.

> Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance.

Most of the comments are fire and resistance, but they commonly take ragebait and run with the assumptions built-in to clickbait headlines.

> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

I take it you've never worked at a company when law enforcement comes knocking for data?

The internet tough guy fantasy where you boldly refuse to provide the data doesn't last very long when you realize that it just means you're going to be crushed by the law and they're getting the data anyway.

> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

It has nothing to do with the state and has to do with getting the RSUs to pay the down payment for a house in a HCOL area in order to maybe have children before 40 and make the KPIs so you don't get stack-ranked into the bottom 30% and fired at big tech, or grinding 996 to make your investors richest and you rich-ish in the process if you're unlikely enough to exit in the upper decile with your idea. This doesn't include the contingent of people who fundamentally believe in the state, too.

Most people are activists only to the point of where it begins to impede on their comfort.

> This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems

False. You can design truly end-to-end encrypted secure system and then the state comes at you and says that this is not allowed, period. [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@tahirbalarabe2/the-encryption-dilemma-wh...

yeah, every time someone says 'good, government must protect us from terrorists', they need to remember that sometimes

  govt := new_govt
  terrorist := you

Unfortunately there's a loud contingent of incredibly proud idiots that post here as well that really like to pretend they know what they're doing.

The people going 'well of course' or 'this is for the user' drive me insane here because as said, there are secure ways you can build a key escrow system so that your data and systems are actually secure. From a secure design standpoint it feels more and more like we're living in Idiocracy as people argue insecure solutions are secure actually and perfectly acceptable.

> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government

s/workers/Corporations/

it the natural results this site catter not just to tech nerds but one chasing venture capital money. its an inudustry that has never seen a dark patern it didn't like. we have gone from "don't be evil" to "be evil if makes the stonks go up"

I actually understood that as in “of course . . . because Microsoft”

It's why tech loves young engineers who just do what their told, of old engineers only as long as they can't say no. Once you dig into the system and see how all the pieces fit together, you can't ethically or morally continue to participate any longer. Learned that the hard way. In the middle of an attempt at midlife career change because of it to maybe free myself to write software that needs to be written instead of having to have a retained lawyer on hand to wrangle employment contract clauses to keep my work belonging to me.

It’s not about engineers being lazy, it’s about money.

Trying to resist building ethically questionable software usually means quitting or being fired from a job.

Saying "of course" doesn't mean we agree with it or fail to try to resist it. It's simply not surprising that this happened.

When you get high up in an org, choosing Microsoft is the equivalent of the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You are off-loading responsibility. If you ever get high up at a fortune 500 company, good luck trying to get off of behemoths like Microsoft.

I don’t see that at all. Instead, I think tech workers, including the engineers and the product managers, are correctly prioritizing user convenience over resistance to government abuse. It’s honestly the right trade off to make. Most users worry about casual criminals, not governments. Say a criminal snatching your laptop and accessing your files that way. If you worry about governments you should already know what to do.