Slate compiled a list of the 30 most evil companies in tech, starting with Mspy (#30) all the way up to Amazon (#1). I weighed in on Oracle (#17, "It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully, but Oracle managed it") and Apple (#6, "Apple won’t spy on you for ads, but they’ll help the Chinese government spy on its citizens to keep its supply chain intact").

As a companion piece, I wrote "Against the Cult of Apple" for Slate, where I discuss how the intangible asset of a customer base that believes that buying products from a trillion-dollar monopolist makes them members of an oppressed religious minority allows the company to escape criticism for a wide range of deeply unethical conduct, from its sabotage of the repair and recycling movement to its overseas labor practices to its tax-dodging to its monopolistic strong-arming of software authors.

In 2017, the Chinese government banned the distribution of virtual private networks—which are supposed to keep web browsing private and secure—insisting that they be replaced with VPNs with known back doors to allow the Chinese state to capture and analyze VPN traffic. That summer, Apple removed all working VPNs from its App Store in China. Concerned about this move, Senators Ted Cruz and Patrick Leahy sent a letter to Apple saying the company “may be enabling the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance of the Internet.” A year later, we learned that consequences of Chinese state surveillance was anything but abstract.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/fJeF4fKgF0Y/sell-sugar-water.html