• AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    if you run a thing then you get to decide things about it.

    That would be fine, IF he had been upfront about it. Instead of going the malware route

    • misk@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      Being upfront about some bans is detrimental to the effort because of ban evaders, which is most of this list supposedly. The toggle was still there there and the list was public.

      • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        The list was not public, what are you going on about? He was also not ‘running’ anything for most users, any more than Linus is ‘running’ my pc just because I’m using Linux.

        • misk@piefed.social
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          1 day ago

          The list was not public, what are you going on about?

          Tesseract is open source, no?

          He was also not ‘running’ anything for most users, any more than Linus is ‘running’ my pc just because I’m using Linux.

          He is running an opinionated client to the underlying ActivityPub network. He states that in user agreement and docs for admins that want to host it on their own.

          Do I agree with a design philosophy intended to decrease polarisation? Heck yeah. The amount of downvotes I’ve got shows what kind of people this thing attracts. Reeks of reddit.

          • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            Are you at all aware of the actual details of this incident?

            Tesseract is open source, no?

            It was an intentionally obfuscated line of code that pulled a file direct from his server. A file that was intentionally not in the repo so they nobody would know about it. In IT, we call that malware.

            • misk@piefed.social
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              1 day ago

              How else could such list work? New Tesseract release for every update to the filter? It wasn’t encrypted.

              • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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                1 day ago

                To begin with: Apps using such lists make it very clear upfront what they are doing. NOBODY OBFUSCATES THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE LIST.

                The list can also easily be a part of the repo that’s pulled at runtime. Or viewable and modifiable from within the app itself.

                It wasn’t encrypted.

                It’s a client side app, by definition there’s no easy way to encrypt it. Dude certainly gave it a shot by base-64 encoding it. There was no technical reason to encode a text file.

                • misk@piefed.social
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                  1 day ago

                  It was disclosed through user agreement and docs for admins hosting Tesseract. List wasn’t encrypted. We’re going in circles now.

                  People are allowed to have political opinions and they’re allowed to express them through software. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.