
Prove you are not an evil corporate person - edward
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/prove_you_are_not_an_Evil_corporate_person/
======
princekolt
People in the comments here are obliviously missing the point of the article.
Yes, the captcha image is fake. Yes, that's on purpose, only a silly person
would think it is real.

The point of the article is that Google's previously "inoffensive" spam
prevention technology is being coaxed into a military tool. And this is evil
for several reasons.

One: A lot of people disagree with the current US military missions, and would
absolutely not collaborate with them if they were asked to.

Two: Google is a massive corporation with few or no competitors. They already
have overreaching powers over several aspects of society (they're not the only
one), and giving them reach over the military can only spell danger, doesn't
matter how you look at it.

Three: Google is already exploiting their users in several other ways, at no
benefit to them. No, convenience is not a benefit, whoever convinced people
that this is the case is a genius marketer. I stopped using gmail five years
ago and here I am.

The general point is: Do we really want to give ourselves always to Google,
Amazon, Facebook… like that? Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to
find something on the internet instead of 1 minute?

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Just because in exchange we take 5 seconds to find something on the internet
instead of 1 minute?_

There are people who won't be able to find it at all without the 5 second
option. There are people who use free services, like gmail, in part because
they can't afford a paid service.

Your moral outrage won't get you anywhere if you don't address practical
realities of that sort.

I'm quite poor. There are many factors that contribute to that. One is my
gender. Another is my current profession as I am a writer. I often find myself
on HN listening to well paid men dismiss my choices out of hand like only an
idiot would make such choices.

I am no idiot. I wish I had the kind of life where I could afford to act like
paying for email service is some minor detail not worth fretting over.

But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I
have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I
was one of the top students of my state.

It turns out none of that is insulation against poverty. And before this turns
into yet another pile on of people acting like I am just lazy or something, I
will note that we currently have worse income inequality than in the Gilded
Age. So let's just skip that BS means to avoid the issue today. This is a
quite widespread systemic problem. It isn't just a handful of idiots making
bad choices.

~~~
tombrossman
It's important to point out that thinking of free versus paid in financial
terms alone does not reveal the true scope of the issue. As you are probably
aware, you are 'paying' with personal data, which can be viewed as a more
durable asset than cash. When you can afford to pay for something, you can buy
it and it's a done deal. When you pay with data, the other party knows
something about you forever. They can sell it an unlimited number of times to
an unlimited number of buyers. It is quite different from a one-time monetary
purchase.

I'm not going to preach that one way is right and the other is wrong - I just
want to point out that they are two quite different schemes. Also, you sound
well educated and underemployed - I wish you good luck and hope you get paid
closer to what you are worth soon.

~~~
c22
On the other hand, since this data about you can be sold over and over its
value is likely to decrease over time. Perhaps those who "spent" their data on
a decade of free email got in on the ground floor and others will eventually
be forced to trade their data for much less, or perhaps nothing at all.

------
nothrabannosir
It warms my heart to hear Google despises the AGPL. I switched to licensing
everything I make under the AGPLv3 a few years back, let me tell you: every
passing day further enshrines my conviction that this is the only fair license
for Freedom Software in the new age. MIT and BSD were fun when e-mail was a
good protocol. When there were no bad actors and everything was jolly fair and
cooperations and bulltetin board rainbows and unicorns (it's before my time
but I imagine that's what it must have been like). GPL was fun when computers
were computers, not dumb terminals calling APIs on private clouds. But today,
the only weapon we have to protect our liberty in a digitising age, is the
AGPL. It is a breath of fresh air, and my second favourite four-letter acronym
of the decade, just after GDPR.

I would like to take a moment to urge anyone starting new software projects:
please use the AGPLv3. The proof is in the pudding: this very article.
Corporations will suddenly have to do the unthinkable: pay you for your
software if they want to limit their users' freedom! Remember, you can always
license AGPLv3 by default, and offer less freedom licenses for payment. The Qt
model. Win win.

Richard Stallman was right. A prophet. Like Snowden, much maligned. Unlike
Snowden, oft maligned by the very people who should know better :( but that's
the life of a radical.

Less flippantly: with every wave of freedom erosion, through cloud computing,
DRM, etc, I am surprised at how, yet again, RMS turned out to be less and less
ridiculous. I remember thinking him so obscene and extreme, but no: on bloody
point. Much respect, and I thank him dearly for the weapons he gave us, for a
fight we didn't even know we were about to have.

------
ilovetux
I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty
for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming
their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to
train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Not
only that but training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing
seems like they just made almost everyone into accessories of mass killings. I
have to come to terms with this and I don't know how I will do it but
something will have to be done because this is unconscionable.

~~~
imglorp
> won't see a dime of it

It's a business relationship. They provide you with search, entertainment,
mail, maps, docs. You provide them with samples of human behavior and with
supervised training data.

Is it worth 5 seconds of your time to help them train their neural net, in
exchange for access to their services?

Should our answers change if instead of Google or FB, it was Lockheed Martin
or General Dynamics?

~~~
kennywinker
Depends on if that nueral net is being used to digitize old books to make them
searchable, or to help a government’s military automate killing other humans.

------
infinity0
Having been inside Google I can say I did not see any reasonable justification
of the crazy hysterical anti-GPL and anti-AGPL position of the lawyers.

~~~
mav3r1ck
You don’t see why forcing the open sourcing of the entire Google codebase
would be a problem? That’s essentially what GPL does, if you use even a tiny
portion of it for your code and they prove it, you have to GPL _ALL_ the
source code from the same for base.

~~~
infinity0
Nobody is going to seriously argue that google3/ is a single piece of
software.

~~~
UncleMeat
When it is worth billions of dollars and judges often barely understand tech
somebody will.

------
joshuamorton
See this[1] article from 2011 that explains Google's "allergy" to the AGPL. (I
work at Google)

[1]:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sour...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/)

------
quantummkv
Disclaimer: what I am going to say might be offensive to some, but it has to
be said. Apologies in advance to any offended hippie.

So google uses the technology it developed to help the military. So what? How
is this different from what has happened throughout history?

If you hipsters will take the trouble to pull you heads out of the sand, you
will find that everything you use is either used by the military or reuses of
military technologies.

Linux is used by the military in machines that help in killing people. Will
you stop using Linux? The Internet protocols?

Microwaves began their lives as military radar components. Will you throw
yours out of the window? The satellites that power all you TV, GPS, Uber, etc.
Delivered to space based on the work of actual Nazi scientists. The food you
eat? The main reason you have it because of Fritz Haber.

[https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-
th...](https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-the-monster-
who-fed-the-world-ec19a9834f74).

The man who incidentally used the same technology to start the era of chemical
warfare. And this is just the last century. This same pattern has been present
throughout history.

The only way to live a morally pure life untainted by things used to kill
people is to live like a neanderthal. Not in a silicon valley house typing
away on the internet on a MacBook. An impossible task, right?

And am I missing the sarcasm in this or people actually believe that putting
everything under AGPL will solve the problem? You think google will decline a
lucrative military contract just because a piece of code is unavailable. No,
they will write their own implementation, while you sulk in a corner in the
bubble of your victory.

We cannot stop technological progress. If you won't do it, someone else will.
Not everyone in the world is high enough on Maslow's Need Hierarchy to think
about self actualization. Basic Needs will always come first. A hungry man
won't think about the world. He will think about food.

Our job as responsible people is to ensure that the people in power do not
point this technology at us. Not living in some sort of a matrix of out own
creation while ignoring the reality.

~~~
mistursinistur
Hey, no need to make this about "self-actualization" or "a matrix" (?). The
point here (and the moral imperative IMO) is to exert any influence you have
over bad actors. Open source contributors have demonstrated that licensing and
negative PR can be used to influence tech companies. That's all this article
is calling for.

------
gagege
Google and Re-Captcha reminds me of the TechnoCore and farcast technology in
the Hyperion series. An AI conglomerate gives humanity a free gift,
farcasters, instantaneous teleportation to pretty much anywhere in the galaxy.
But, SPOILER, it is discovered that the TechnoCore has been using the human
minds traveling through these farcaster portals as processing power.

------
simula67
> Google is known to be deathly allergic to the AGPL license. Not only on
> servers; they don't even allow employees to use AGPL software on
> workstations. If you write free software, and you'd prefer that Google not
> use it, a good way to ensure that is to license it under the AGPL.

Man, the open source/free software community should have taken AGPL seriously

~~~
kec
Licensing software to make it antagonistic to business is a good way to ensure
no one is ever paid to improve it, which is a good way to see it stagnate. Do
you really think Linux would have gone anywhere had it been licensed under
those terms? There’s a reason it never moved to GPLv3.

~~~
jbboehr
Looks like it's possible to have a "Lesser" AGPL. libbitcoin[1] uses such a
license.

Also licensing things under a dual AGPL/commercial license seems perfect for
things like databases. Mongo uses it IIRC.

[1]
[https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING](https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blob/master/COPYING)

------
tboyd47
That's a picture worth a thousand words right there.

~~~
chrisbennet
It's a _fake_ picture designed to generate outrage.

~~~
tboyd47
Excuse me, I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought it was a real
CAPTCHA. Of course it's fake. Still pretty thought-provoking, though.

------
mnm1
Recaptcha is shit regardless of whether they use it to train military drones.
It serves no purpose other than to infuriate legitimate web users who might or
might not be using a VPN or browsing with JS off. It's a test of patience and
sanity that doesn't need to exist. There's no fucking way in hell I need to
pick out dozens and dozens of buildings or cars or street signs just so google
can verify I'm a human. I've given up using multiple sites because sometimes,
it never stops even after ten or fifteen minutes. If anything, it goes to show
how shitty google's tech is. If this is what they have to resort to, a test a
significant portion of humanity cannot pass, to detect humans, they are
clearly not at the forefront of anything technologically. Of course, if this
technology is used to train military drones, it explains the torture google
has been inflicting on humanity with this garbage. While wasting millions,
probably billions of human viewing hours is not as big an atrocity as helping
military organizations commit war crimes with drones, it's still an ugly,
disgusting activity that google forces upon so many, often through thoughtless
intermediaries like cloudflare. At least now, I have an even better reason for
refusing to fill in these stupid captchas.

------
Chardok
Funny we just saw Eric a few weeks ago rambling on about China overtaking us
in AI ([https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-
ai-...](https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-alphabet-
chairman/?partner=YahooSA&yptr=yahoo))

Seems like he might be trying to prime the US into accepting Google's
participation in warfare.

------
imranq
This reminds me of Enders Game, especially the ending. Don’t want to spoil it
for anyone but distributed military intelligence is scary

------
to3m
I only ever see the same car-related CAPTCHA:
[https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483...](https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tv/image/1505/57/1505576983483.png)
(random link via google image search)

I wonder if it's actually subtly altered each time, possibly with some
adversarial image manipulation that people can't spot...

------
jellicle
Regardless of what you think about the current state of Google's evilness,
becoming a military defense contractor is not going to do anything good for
their corporate morality. Both in the broad, "killing people is bad mmkay"
sense and in the narrower sense of occasionally standing up to the US
government for its users, becoming a defense contractor is bad.

------
SA500
Christ, this is silly (disclosure - I work at Google)

~~~
EtDybNuvCu
This sounds hilarious and awesome. Disclosure: I once worked at Google.

------
henvic
Cool that Google understands that AGPL is evil and has policies against its
use! :)

------
rossdavidh
So, either: 1) that's a real CAPTCHA which Google is serving up, in which case
that's outrageous, or 2) that's not a real CAPTCHA which Google served up, in
which case using it as the visual for this article is itself pretty
outrageous. I have plenty of reservations about Google's power, but putting
that visual on your blog article if it's not a real CAPTCHA Google used, is
different from lying to your audience in only a technical sense. It's clearly
intended to stoke outrage, and outrage is not a state which results in careful
reading of the article. The author must have (or at least should have) known
that putting that visual on their blog post would result in many people
thinking that Google served up such a visual.

~~~
dsr_
I'm pretty sure the author thinks more highly of his audience than that.

It gets your attention, then you think "oh, that can't be real", and then,
hopefully, "but it's the same sort of thing that they really use, and training
to spot cars and signs is probably useful in a military context."

~~~
tedunangst
Lots of things are useful in a military context. Detecting irregular
heartbeats is useful in a military context.

------
oh_sigh
I'd be much happier if I was a googler knowing that my efforts didn't make
targeting systems more effective and less likely to result in collateral
damage.

~~~
Bartweiss
In _unexpected_ collateral damage, at any rate. US drone programs target the
occasional wedding, yes, but the bulk of the civilian casualties seem to be
either invented targets ("they're moving tactically") or civilians in the
blast area of actual targets.

I, for one, would spend a lot of time wondering whether raising confidence
about targets would help justify firing with civilians present.

~~~
wnkrshm
It's statistics, if the probability of zero bystanders killed gets higher,
it's easier to justify a strike to oneself and to others without being held
responsible. It gets easier to justify to the public and the world. "It was an
unpredictable accident, our weapons are precise"

But even if one could identify time frames when a target is far enough from
bystanders to be hit with a hellfire.. the trivial counter is to always be
among bystanders.

------
LifeLiverTransp
I wish there was something like a kharma linkedin- every company who develops
such technology, drags the kharma of all employes who spend time at the
company during this project down- and it does not go up until a equal kharma
positiv project is completed.

Darkdeving discouraged at self-interest rate.

