If I was the Frightful Five & I wanted to make sure that all the gov'ts in the world continue to pay me monopoly rents in perpetuity, what I'd do is to encourage some of my most evilly competent execs in each national office to resign & apply for influential decision making roles within all that country's gov't (I'd keep paying them, too, of course, but untracably) to ensure that the gov't *increased* its procurement of my megacorp's proprietary tech. I'm fairly certain this is common practice.
if you're not sure who the "Frightful Five" are: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/technology/techs-frightful-five-theyve-got-us.html
@lightweight It's disturbing that the #FrightfulFive excludes #Cloudflare. It's easy to give up Apple & Google compared to CF. A boycott on CF would mean giving up the right to vote for Americans in 10% of the country. How many other tech giants stand in the way of something as basic and essential as voting in elections?
@resist1984 I'm no fan of Cloudflare either... but how do they stand in the way of Americans voting? Are there states so mind numbingly stupid that they have online voting?
@lightweight there are US states where the state secretary collects voter reg. applications using a #Cloudflare site: AZ,GA,HI,ID,NY,OH,RI,WA (so 16% actually). If Cloudflare blocks them, they can still register on paper but the person doing the data entry likely does so on the very same website that's Cloudflared, so even your paper registration details would be shared with Cloudflare.
@resist1984 well, yes, that's messed up. It suggests the level of tech ignorance that I see throughout gov'ts world wide is at play there, too... which is why I characterise our current state of affairs as being in the midst of a Digital Dark Age: https://davelane.nz/darkage
@lightweight I think they are more commonly referred to as the "big 5" or #GAFAM, but I find it short-sighted because Cloudflare has a serious awareness problem. It has taken control of roughly 1/3rd of websites worldwide, and probably 99% of the world's population has no idea & have never heard the name. It's important to put CF in the mud with the others to increase awareness.
@lightweight I use #MACFANG to do that.. or even #MACFANGY if I need to include Verizon-Yahoo in some cases.
@resist1984 my main reason for using #FrightfulFive is that there's a handy article which explains it and why they're frightful in a (relatively) credible neatly packaged (if sorta-paywalled) form. It's an imperfect label for a despicable group.
@lightweight When I tell my banker or insurance agent "no, i will not email you because I can see that your email address is hosted by #Microsoft (or Google)", they are usually immediately understanding. Even if they don't hold that position themselves, most of the public has been made aware of the controversy & I often need not explain further.
@lightweight But when I tell a business or gov office "I cannot access your website because it's on Cloudflare", 100% of the time they are completely stumped, like I'm from another planet. There is zero awareness of that threat.
@resist1984 there are many fronts (so to speak) in this struggle for sensible use of tech. Thus my "Dark age" characterisation.
@lightweight Cloudflare is much more dangerous because the public has no grasp on it. This is exacerbated by the fact that so few use Tor. Cloudflare could destroy Tor simply by spreading itself, and the general public will lose a great privacy tool before they even know it exists. There are already people who try Tor, and remove it right away saying "there are too many CAPTCHAs"
@resist1984 they're all dangerous. None of them is excusable. We need to take pretty much all of them down.
@lightweight well i find it easy to boycott them, but some of us give up democracy (our voting rights & petition rights) in order to boycott Cloudflare, which means we can't elect officials that can take on the fight. No GAFAM boycott has caused me to lose public rights or access goverment services -- only Cloudflare imposes on the public sector
@resist1984 here in NZ, our electoral system is run by an open source company (who, incidentally acquired mine in 2012), so I'm pretty confident we're not afflicted by CloudFlare here.. however, many of our democratic processes are fully framed by Microsoft, Google, and Facebook... And that really pisses me off.
@resist1984 and, to clarify, I mean that the *technology* supporting our electoral system.
@lightweight So Cloudflare's detriment has already taken a toll by keeping the Tor community small. The millennials don't even have the experience of Tor "just working" because CF's damage is present for them from day one, while CF remains invisible. It's the most insideous of tech corps because their attack is stealthy enough that CF doesn't get the blame.
@resist1984 I completely support your efforts. It's just not my main focus at this stage :) I've got plenty of targets on my shit-list already.
@resist1984 that's good to hear. Not a common understanding here in NZ. I usually get looks of total confusion when I suggest similar.