Correct, as it has to. In addition to behavior, CheckUsers use IP addresses to help identify sockpuppets. If you could bypass the exemption by just saying “here’s a new account; pls exempt”, it would quickly become common knowledge among sockmasters that all they need is to quickly ask and be accepted days later.

At that point, the block on proxy editing near-completely fails at one of its main functions.

I don’t know what you mean by “identify yourself”. You need an account with a trustworthy history of editing, at which point you can request the exemption.

You can get an exception.

True. Facebook from its inception as Facemash was a way for creepy, misogynist slimeballs to ogle and “rank” women they went to school with against their consent by harvesting public databases. “It was just a prank bro.” —Mark ‘Real Human’ Zuckerberg

The discoverers themselves refer to it as a backdoor, so frankly I don’t know what you’re on about accusing this article of misrepresenting their findings.

No evidence this is anyone in the RustDesk team + shitty/possibly LLM-generated response leads me to believe this is a troll.

Yeah, I’m siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that’s not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a “necessary evil” toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you’re complicit in its distribution.

I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.

“some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is what we in mathematical logic call a vacuous truth.