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Malware in Proprietary Software - Latest Additions

Item posted by Rob Musial <robmusial> on Wed 17 Sep 2025 03:56:55 PM UTC.

The initial injustice of proprietary software often leads to further injustices: malicious functionalities.

The introduction of unjust techniques in nonfree software, such as back doors, DRM, tethering, and others, has become ever more frequent. Nowadays, it is standard practice.

We at the GNU Project show examples of malware that has been introduced in a wide variety of products and dis-services people use everyday, and of companies that make use of these techniques.

Here are our latest additions

August 2025

Google's Software is Malware


The problem here is not that there's a system that provides trust on the origin of the software. A system like that might be useful, but the end user should still be able to select which organization provides that service, or maybe set up such an organization or renounce the service altogether.

Making this verification exclusive to Google makes us question which is the threat here. Is it a user installing malware inadvertently? Or is it the user installing software that makes Google lose money?


Giving Google control of your devices, or control of your own computing that you do on their servers, inevitably makes you vulnerable to Google.

This announcement shows that the vulnerability includes third-party crackers [**] too.

The article says that the crack discoverers worked with Google to “mitigate“ the danger. What, concretely, does “mitigate“ mean here? Probably in this case it is a weasel word to suggest fixing a problem without claiming to have fixed it.

[*] Let's not call these systems “artificial intelligence.” Intelligence is something they do not have.

[**] Please note that the article wrongly refers to crackers as “hackers.”

July 2025

Malware in Mobile Devices


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