True. But I like to reinforce my trust with open and verifiable information.
Meaning, I would prefer the can of baked beans from a company that is open about where their beans come from and in what conditions. That would be possible today, and is already done to some extend but in early stages.
But getting your food from the local farmer, where you can actually visit the farm, it is much more easy to trust that it is good.
And regarding software, well - open source, preferably with a open community (or company) around it, where you can at least look through the actual dev logs and git submits to see if they sound solid and if you have the time and skills, jump into it to verify that they do as promised.
Then I can have trust. Otherwise the trust would have to be blind. And society has spoiled that for me, for various reasons.
Huh? That's why we have regulations. Every country has one, in the US it is the FDA.
Please don't try to shoehorn open source principles everywhere in life. It becomes a chore and a burden for a common citizen to verify the hazards of Baked Beans. Citizens offload this to a regulatory agency. You don't have the time to verify a fucking can of baked beans like a million other things in life.
If you buy a measuring tape, do you ask for a NIST certificate? Where does the chain of trust end? Somewhere at the measurement standards in the pyramid of trust. Your personal role in this chain ends at the brand name "STANLEY", because you trust them to make a measuring tape that measures within specified tolerance.
The whole movement around "I don't trust unless the information is freely available" is a pipe dream. It grinds the society to a halt.
I urge you to look around 99% things in life that you just blindly trust. We need better mechanisms for building trust than "Don't trust unless verified". It is applicable in high risk situations, but the society pays a huge price for such an inefficient way to live.
I think one common theme we both can agree is that open available data only helps. It doesn't take away from anything. For those who want to verify, they can. They can look up FDA reports and inspection results.
I come from east germany, a former post sowjet state. A state which was build on blind trust on the state and no way for the common person to verify anything (or even dare to question anything openly). And big surprise: lots of dark things happened regulary.
Now things are still far from perfect in my opinion, but much, much better. And I think they can still improve a lot with even more transparency, because there are still lots of dark things happening behind closed doors. We probably just disagree on the degree of those things.
> A state which was build on blind trust on the state
The former Soviet states and other USSR satellites were not built on trust, they were built on force. You had to act like you trusted the state to avoid the repressive force of the state.
But people did not trust the state at all, much more so than in today's world. Everyone assumed their telephones were listened to. Everyone assumed that the walls had ears. The lies of the state were often obvious, and often discussed with very close friends and close family, and anything that wasn't an obvious lie was thus considered a likely lie anyway.
Yeah well, sure. Thats one ofmthe reasons, why I am highly sceptical when I have to trust authority blindly.
Which goes back to the main point. I cannot really trust a closed encryption source, when I assume they are infiltrated by (western) intelligence agencies. And those agencies I do not trust. And I believe with the open information about them, rightfully so, even if they are not (yet) on par with the Stasi or KGB.
Meaning, I would prefer the can of baked beans from a company that is open about where their beans come from and in what conditions. That would be possible today, and is already done to some extend but in early stages.
But getting your food from the local farmer, where you can actually visit the farm, it is much more easy to trust that it is good.
And regarding software, well - open source, preferably with a open community (or company) around it, where you can at least look through the actual dev logs and git submits to see if they sound solid and if you have the time and skills, jump into it to verify that they do as promised.
Then I can have trust. Otherwise the trust would have to be blind. And society has spoiled that for me, for various reasons.