197
FastCompany: E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance
(www.fastcompany.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
197 points (95.8% liked)
Technology
59298 readers
1818 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
Not just probably, they've literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.
They said "provably", not "probably", so the good news is we all already agree :)
Well politic'd, friend
You don't even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.
Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.
Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.
And not only that - it's not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?
Yeah that's spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?
I know there's also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.