Security quotes of the week

As anyone who's tried to navigate things like F-Droid probably knows, phrases like "privacy", "ad-free", "open source", "consent", "we value your <xyz>" and so on, in spaces like these, have been boiled down into a tiresome information-negative buzzword sludge for a long time.

A *really* long time: it's well established internet culture that characters who go out of their way to announce how much of a PGP user they are at every opportunity tend to be completely insufferable. Most privacy wonks and their pet projects come across like this to normal people, which is partly why everyone on earth uses the same three exploitative websites nowadays. This all sounds unrelated, but it isn't.

The venture-capitalist/online-advertising corporation in question here is doing a whole lot of telling, to try and divert attention away from everything it's been showing, and failing miserably at it. They found a temple, drove the original occupants out, and are now smashing a wrecking ball through it, trying in increasing desperation to unearth the solid gold bricks and buried treasure they are absolutely convinced of the existence of — it is beyond their imagination that someone could build anything public, let alone of this size, without a motive of pure greed. They want the money. They are going to extract the money at any cost.

They *know* they can do this and get away with it, until nothing but dust remains, because realistically who are those tens of millions of users going to turn to once the brand's been strip mined to death - like AOL did to Netscape, and later had done to itself? A bunch of maladjusted shower-dodgers with inscrutable machine code alongside their names? The other browser, the one the family member who set up their computer told them never to use? Servo's not going to be a viable replacement in time. I don't know where we go from here, but it's a dark place.