Extracted from The next best thing

Sigh, deep breath. So, this is the real kicker.

Developers have long since been looking the other way as their creations were used for whatever purpose. From attacking power plants to affecting elections and everything in between, what we built has been used to damage the lives and wellbeings of others for profit.

Do you know about the dark web sub-cult of voyeur webcam watching, using RAT software? Well now you do. You think they’re bad? They were disgusted at how arab governments used their tools to survey protesters during the Arab spring leading some prominent RAT creators to quit. No, I’m not gonna link that because the whole topic is overall kinda nauseating, feel free to do your own research if you’d like. But hey, I gotta hand it to those folks who quit — at least they had some form of ethics. Have you seen what’s going on with Chinese surveillance over Hong Kong?

What are the rest of us doing? Slowly catching up to Bob Martin’s saying that we should start feeling responsible if our fun project neural network for undressing people gets abused.

“Despite the safety measures adopted (watermark)”

Are you fucking shitting me? And this is still more effort than what the average developer putting out something would have done. Do we even care, really?

In Ancient Greek mythos, this would be the moment of “hubris”. We are far too arrogant with our power and the audience keeps waiting for our eventual punishment. And this is exactly the sentiment that has been manifesting in the States starting from the hesitant calls against glassholes to what has been evolving into a full grown anti-tech sentiment.