it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis...
In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response).
Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
(Not defending it on the other counts, though. If I wanted a platform for anything controversial or privacy-sensitive, I wouldn't trust Discord or any other centralized, unencrypted service.)
I think it's reasonable to call it a RAT because it executes arbitrary remote code AND has those permissions.
I'm not sure how you come up with a good distinction.
No, because it's opt-in and it's explicitly needed for the purposes of a dev/nightly build. This is as opposed to a voip client which needs unrestricted access because... they want to be able to run A/B tests on uninformed subjects?
There's still room for problems... the auto-update could deliver a special version for special people or deliver a version that has special code targeted at run-time, but it's not as easy. And I'd love to see work on minimizing problematic updates as well.
We should avoid and shame the programs that do that. This is literally a backdoor.
Like shit, I have 3rd party mod managers for video games that are exclusively built to do such that
I have Discord installed, because unfortunately that's where my friends are. However, it cannot access arbitrary parts of the file system because it is installed via flatpak; it only has access to ~/Downloads and ~/Pictures.
No, a program with an 'update' feature built in is much less offensive than a program who's entire code is remote and new every time but still has local privs.
There are no alternatives. Bandwidth costs money, and P2P is deadly. That's why discord exists in the first place.
Pretty sure it has been /science for at least 2 years.
And that is why you encrypt your SSH keys with a passphrase, use a Keychain, etc. Discord isn’t unique in its ability to read file on the FS. Pretty much anything can do that.
Nah, pretty much anything except proprietary software has a higher chance of being written by people I trust and packaged by people I trust and probably audited by me and other people, and is not capable of loading executable code from any server after installation.
And a lot of projects have codes of conduct explicitly to prohibit participants from mocking and ridiculing others, in fact.
(As a note, I refuse to install the actual Discord client on my PC, because it's default behavior includes "detecting" accounts you can link on other software on your PC. Aka, it, by default, noses around in other apps on your PC for data.)
For software that works under wine, I guess it wouldn't be too hard to simply set a wineprefix and do it like that, but that is a bit of a hack, and wouldn't work with a lot of software.
However, I use Virtualbox and/or VMware Player a lot, and Hyper-V doesn't play well with others, so I can't use any features of Windows that depend on Hyper-V virtualization.
I personally use a UWP app that embeds Discord's web interface. It's surprisingly serviceable.
You can use it via tor, so it can’t access a persistent record of your location history, as Discord can. The public logget doesn’t log DMs. Likely, anyone can join without being forced to give up PII.
As for the CoCs, that’s a good thing! That’s the right way to do it. Demanding that your users enter into an absurd legal agreement with a third party to be able to participate is not.
"Phone numbers are bad and shouldn't be used but also you should use Signal!"
"The only thing I used my account for was DMing a link to a bunch of people and they banned me in a way I could contest because it looks like spamming!"
"For notifying people about stuff you should use electronic mail but don't notify them more than once every two months!"
> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops.
in a post about [checks notes] FOSS software development, puts things in a certain light.
FWIW I'm privacy-conscious myself. If the author had just made a general effort to point out the privacy implications of using Discord, that would be one thing. Instead he made a contrived effort to connect it to FOSS development - arguably one of the least-private activities one might be doing online - and then went on to call Discord altogether "unacceptable", instead of just saying "don't assume that what you say on Discord is private".
If you're referring to what I think you are, then no, his "crime" was publishing a product that was not allowed to be exported to the public (effectively exporting it). You're statement is equivalent to serving poisoned food and saying you were prosecuted for the crime of owning a restaurant.
No matter if you agree with the export ban or not, it was a law and Zimmerman broke it. That's what he was prosecuted for.
* - except for things like Signal, Tor..., which are illegal some places, but they probably wouldn't even consider Discord in the first place
Creating (or in this case distributing) anything that's against the law could get you in trouble with the law -- kind of how it works.
Taking your use of "secret" to mean "private," because no one was discussing "secret communication channels":
This isn't actually true; a lot of Free Software projects have private mailing lists.
I honestly have a hard time seeing eye to eye with the idea that private organizations have to let users of their platforms do whatever they want. It strikes me as representing a rather solipsistic concept of freedom. One could argue that the specific restrictions Discord is making are shitty. It certainly sounds to me like they are, and one could then mount an argument that people should steer clear of them because they are acting shitty. But doing shitty things is not necessarily the same thing as violating a moral obligation.
IOW, it's not necessarily because I think Discord is actually going to tell Joseph McCarthy how often I pick my nose. (You'd be amazed how rarely I manage to work that into group chat conversations about code style, anyway.) It's more the principle of the thing.
The part about ridicule/mocking is an example of why Discord’s legal agreement is unreasonable, not advocating for the ability to mock or ridicule people.
The tools should not enforce censorship.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-eb... [2] http://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-toda...
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
It's not without its criticisms:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-...
It has also been estimated that the above statement is poppycock (just now.)
I just feel like saying this here: I don't find that censorship itself is a problem. Self-censorship, for example, is generally not problematic, and everyone does it. A great example of voluntary self-censorship is with swearing -- it's not illegal to swear in public, but most people choose not to do it. That's not to say self-censorship is always problematic, but simply that it is not inherently oppressive. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do.
However, in larger group contexts, censorship earns legitimacy when it is agreed upon by those who are participating in that group. If a group of people agree to not swear in the context of their organization, then by all means it is fair for them to censor. In broader forms of censorship, such as the example of FOSS projects censoring toxic and illegal behaviors, as long as it is decided democratically, then it's absolutely a feature and not a bug.
Do you think that a 3rd party should be able to judge and ban you at will for something that you say in a group chat when everyone else in said group chat is fine with it? I presume that the author of the article is not fine with it, which is why they suggest to avoid discord. What would you do in their place?
Yes. If I were running Discord and learned that there was some Klan group advocating hate against black people, I'd shut it down – even if everyone in that chat was fine with the discussion.
It wouldn't be beneficial to me to have my platform be a host for that content, and it's not beneficial to society for me to facilitate hateful people easily connecting with each other.
The internet is not private by default; it's public by default.
I haven’t even had the ability to participate whilst maintaining my location privacy.
In retrospect, I should not have included that portion of the essay. It was used as an example of why demanding users agree to an unreasonable legal agreement that demands they give up basic rights is not a good hoop to make them jump through, not a defense of that sort of behavior. I thought that part was clear but I guess it wasn’t.
I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted.
Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well).
He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
>Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship.
I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.