lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect

It's perfectly realistic.

E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you while manipulating you into doing whatever its creator wants by selectively showing you some things and not others.

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whacko_quacko 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Especially given that a popular open source project recently tried to do exactly that.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve

	▲	JoshTriplett a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		Not just "tried"; the current state is that they've done so and are ignoring people telling them they cannot. The "destroy as an example to others" phase hasn't finished yet, but hopefully they'll get sufficient backlash from the projects they supposedly did this to work with to deter future attempts. e.g. they supposedly did this in order to make it part of the Python standard library, so hopefully the response from Python is a massive WTF and "nope".

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JoshTriplett 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

In fairness to the original mythos that that particular family of awful companies has misused: the palantiri were in fact designed purely for far-seeing, and Sauron wasn't the creator of them, he just got his hands on one and corrupted it into a tool for manipulation.