this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
66 points (91.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36180 readers
875 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm note a programmer. I Don't Understand Codes. How do I Know If An Open Source Application is not Stealing My Data Or Passwords? Google play store is scanning apps. It says it blocks spyware. Unfortunately, we know that it was not very successful. So, can we trust open source software? Can't someone integrate their own virus just because the code is open?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Tl;Dr: you shouldn't trust anyone or anything blindly or unconditionally. However, open source software and its community offer compelling reasons to trust it over proprietary software.

Technically, if you do not read all of the source code of an application and all its dependencies, you can never be 100% sure that it isn't doing nefarious things. For things that require a connection to the internet, you could monitor all connections to and from the application and its dependencies and see if it is making objectionable connections.

However, in my view, open-source software is in general safer than closed-source software. Open-source software can be audited by any who knows the languages the program is coded in, whereas closed-source software can only be audited by the developer or the few parties they might authorize to see it. Closed-source apps can easily hide spyware because the source code is completely unavailable. Spyware could possibly be missed by the community, but it's still a whole hell of a lot less likely to occur with so many eyes on the program.

And practically, whenever an open-source software gets even close to including nefarious stuff, the community generates a huge hoopla about it.

Also, Google Play Store is not open source! A better example would be F-Droid, which is an app store that is open-source. While I am not aware of F-Droid delivering spyware ala Google, it is still theoretically possible that they could screw up or be corrupted in the distant future. Therefore, we must stay vigilant, even with groups and people we trust. Practically, this just means... check their work once in a while. It wouldn't kill you to learn a programming language; try Python for quick results. What I do is whenever an open-source software is written in a language I understand, I'll pick a few files that look the most important and skim them to see that the program "does what it says on the tin". Otherwise, I'll check through the issues on GitHub for any weirdness.

I haven't even mentioned free and open-source software (free as in speech). I genuinely do not know how to convince people who are disinterested in their own freedom to consider FOSS options, or to do very nearly anything at all. For everyone else...FOSS software respects your freedom to compute as you please. We can quibble about different licenses and if and how effective they are at safeguarding user freedom, but at the end of the day, FOSS licenses are at least intended to give users back your freedom. In my view, it is mightily refreshing to finally take some freedom back!