this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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install random third party software that may be sniffing or leaking information to remove shady features from windows that sniff and leak information.
windows sucks.
The app is open source so you can review the not-leaking-your-information that it does yourself.
Windows on the other hand ...
I wonder how many apps this actually happens for, my guess is "way less than people think"
That they leak information? I work in commercial software development and I have to do a lot of open source security reviews. The answer is: virtually none.
Private, closed-source software on the other hand... If it could sniff your farts and send the smell to advertisers, it would; in almost all cases.
No, that people actually take the time to check the source code before installing them
I've seen enough crypto scams to know that even when the code is public, people don't bother... Heck, there are scanning tools for crypto that tell you how risky the shitcoins are and people still get scammed out of thousands of dollars!
Not everyone have to check something. But there are people that do routinely check popular stuff, either on their own or for their job. Sometimes this raises issues, which are usually handled appropriately. Of course if you download a little unknown piece of software made by a single person and never advertised anywhere, you'll have to do the job yourself. But anything semi-popular attracts enough attention to get some level of audit, at least because business uses a lot of open source. There are even businesses whose main product is auditing and developing open source, kind of like bounty hunters.
And of course there are counter-examples, too. TrueCrypt got pulled out quite dramatically, and I'm not sure we know why even now. But the more sensitive the stuff, the higher the chance of it getting some level of investigation.
As a software user, you can either care about your privacy or not. Caring about your privacy and not either vetting what you're planning to use or checking that someone else has before using it, is akin to sticking your hand in a fire to find out if it's hot.
Taking that analogy further, malicious open source software is kind of like a burning building. It only takes one person to raise the flag for it to spread pretty quickly through social media or other means that it is malicious. The whole community doesn't need to acknowledge the fire for something to be done about it.
Yeah, but it is virtually impossible to read all code running on your machine. At the very least it is an option. While I personally wouldn't search the code of random open source calculator app. I'll be damned if I ain't inspecting something like this.
My reason for not using them is that they tend to be overly aggressive in what they remove. I only need a few reg tweaks and denying permissions on a few files. These often go whole hog and remove whole components, almost all apps etc. I actually use one drive, I don't want its files also removed.