Open another terminal killall vim

I didn’t think that kind of joke would ever :q

I can’t comment on the general trend, but this specific one seems a bit too circumstantial to be of use for a serious spying effort. You’d have to have the spyware running parallel to the apps usong passwords you want to steal in a specific way.

The risk exists, which is bad enough for stochastic reasons (eventually, someone will get lucky and manage to grab something sensitive, and since the potential damage from that is incalculable, the impact axis alone drives this into firm "you need to get that fix out asap), but probably irrelevant in terms of consistency, which would be what you’d need to actually monitor anyone.

If you manage to grab enough info to crack some financial access data, you can steal money. If you can take over some legit online account or obtain some email-password combo, you can sell it. But if you want to monitor what people are doing in otherwise private systems, you need some way to either check on demand or log their actions and periodically send them to your server.

It would be far more reliable to have injection backdoors to allow you access by virtue of forcing a credential check to come up valid than to hope for the lucky grab of credentials the user might change at an arbitrary moment in time.

I sorta do? My employer has been making commitments to improving things, and I’m involved in one of those projects, but they’re a very slow ship to turn and I can’t say I 100% stand behind what they’re generally doing.

I joined out of a mix of necessity, opportunism and the chance to develop new skills, and grew to like the specific job I’m doing. I didn’t have many choices for private reasons, but needed the money when I signed up, so in a way the money was good enough to compromise on ethics.

I got a permanent position now, and again, I stuck for personal reasons, to improve my future prospects and because I like the job, but for all the security a permanent position offers, I’m still planning to start looking for different opportunities when circumstances allow, unless the internal culture makes some masive progress in the next two years.

In the medium run? Not sure. I’d like to think I’d compromise money over ideology, but I also know that I tend to be selfish and really good at mental gymnastics to justify decisions. I would probably not sign on with Exxon, so there’s definitely the severity of opposition to account for, but there isn’t any clear line that I’d swear my life on. On the other hand, if the money was enough to support political causes that I feel (or tell myself) would weigh up the toll on my conscience, I might fold.

In the long run, I hope to get to a point where I can answer that with a firm “No”. Maybe once life stabilises, I’ll grow firmer in my convictions. Maybe once the question of pay shifts from covering necessities to the amount of luxury I can afford, the exact number will lose meaning. Maybe I’ll find a place that I both support fully and earn enough at that any more would feel obscene anyway.

So basically, it comes down to the factors of

1. How strongly do I oppose the company?
2. How much money, compared to what I need to live, and compared to what I need to support a pleasant lifestyle?
3. Where am I on the scale from nihilism to idealism at the given point in time?

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/720/

Image for hotlinking https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/recipes.png

If we divide, we’ll be conquered. That wisom is at least two thousand years old by now. Better to unite and defy.

but but but but you’d get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it? Come on, I’m sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don’t actually need is good!

(That was sarcasm, if it wasn’t clear enough.)