[HN Gopher] Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computin...
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Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)
Author : jlpcsl
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-07-25 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (memex.craphound.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (memex.craphound.com)
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| "It's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the
| problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or
| possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to
| go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests
| that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and
| evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they
| will never be solved."
|
| Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.
| permo-w wrote:
| the EU just passed the digital markets act, which will likely
| rectify some of this. I would imagine that's why this has been
| posted
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we
| don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that
| doesn't run every program, just a program that does this
| specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or
| playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I
| haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."
|
| Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store
| business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot
| more insidious than Apple's.
|
| This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's
| a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of
| which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA
| failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans
| have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally
| mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone
| _buyers_ are clutching their pearls about it.
|
| That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security
| landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was
| back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to
| hack the average user, and now it does. _Regular users_ - or at
| least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on
| General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists
| are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being
| able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait
| apps, after all.
|
| The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might
| think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier
| for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way
| to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization _everywhere_.
| In fact, it 's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had
| the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly
| misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let
| them sell music the way _they_ wanted to. And now we have Epic
| Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying
| to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so
| they can sell more Fortnite skins.
|
| I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally
| _boring_ still holds water. But it 's _less_ boring than it used
| to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A
| large portion of today 's media consumption is on platforms that
| don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the
| copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-
| purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the
| ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to
| constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it.
|
| This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were
| able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out
| of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going
| back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept
| and hilariously _bad_ legal argumentation[1], the public took
| _their side_ - not the law 's. When the public _does_ care about
| copyright, it 's almost always to weaken it or keep it from
| getting stronger.
|
| Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV:
| The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the
| international treaties that were designed to make copyright
| untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing
| populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade
| system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's
| genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year
| copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney.
|
| [0] There have been several notable instances in which really
| scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App
| Review for whatever reason.
|
| [1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally
| treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and
| complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they
| _might_ go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they
| don 't care about.
| tzs wrote:
| > Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App
| Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for
| reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's.
|
| I don't think Nintendo had any online consoles in the '80s. Are
| you referring to the NES refusing to run cartridges that were
| not authorized by Nintendo?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes. It's the exact same business model, even though Nintendo
| did have to contend with retail partners instead of an online
| store.
| tzs wrote:
| The usual explanation is that locking down the NES was to
| avoid the issues that caused the massive collapse of the
| home video game market starting in 1983 and ending with the
| NES [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
| collegeburner wrote:
| just curious, i always remember seeing this article on
| boingboing: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
|
| and always saw it linked there. which is original?
| kencausey wrote:
| I'm not quite sure what you mean by your question. Craphound is
| Cory Doctorow's website but he has long been a contributor to
| Boing Boing. Are you asking which website it appeared on first?
| I don't know, it is at least possible it was nearly
| simultaneous.
| well_actulily wrote:
| Or at least he _was_ a contributor to Boing Boing.
| https://www.metafilter.com/186302/In-the-blog-world-this-
| is-...
| [deleted]
| 6510 wrote:
| We might simplify the topic: Copyright is also a network - "all
| in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and
| Ashton Kutcher movies."
|
| Computers are a network even without internet. (you can carry
| floppies) This network does everything. It touches everything. We
| all want to pay for it. Our money goes towards making the network
| more useful.
|
| The copyright network really has very few players interested in
| preserving and expanding it but we all pay for it.
|
| > when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to
| Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send
| health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture
| experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as
| important.
|
| But it consumes the same budget. We have finite resources, finite
| expertise and finite moving hands. It means people are dying,
| health is declining, agriculture is hindered, water is polluted
| etc
|
| Meanwhile youtube is deleting just about everything. 3 strikes
| and everything you've ever published there is gone. Knowledge is
| lost. We don't know what impact it has but it is safe to assume
| stuff wont be what it should have been if the maker cant see
| videos important to his task.
|
| More obvious it gets with scientific publications that cite lists
| of papers and books that are no longer available.
|
| We need a new network to make sure people get paid for the useful
| things they make. It can simply be paid for in advance. It's not
| a challenge.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| coming up with the network is not the challenge. hasn't been
| since www. the challenge is making the right incentives and
| popular adoption of the network.
| 6510 wrote:
| Just shut it down. As the monstrosity won so many small
| fights it counts many components that we can remove one by
| one until the entire chain of parasitic entities is gone. If
| anything of value is lost we create solutions for those few
| things specifically. Since many depend on the income we will
| have to gradually tune it down.
|
| We can make donations, one can do crowd sourcing and we can
| create funds that assign budgets by committee. That profits
| wont randomly grow madly out of proportion with the work is
| not a bug but a feature.
|
| Roberts space industry suggests we are missing out in a huge
| way. First people were willing to fold over large sums of
| money for a game that was not made(!?) Then people were
| willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was
| incredibly delayed(!???) And now people are actually enjoying
| being part of the development process(!????) Things are
| progressing towards a finished product but its so overly
| ambitious that complex works add up to very little progress.
| I never would have imagined people would put up with that but
| in hindsight it seems to make sense.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| (2011)
|
| Maybe 2012?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| So now it's no longer "coming". It's here.
| [deleted]
| NHQ wrote:
| Battlefield smart phones and app stores.
| onethought wrote:
| General purpose computing seems to be going fine... ?
|
| Copyright also seems to be going fine.
|
| This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually
| eventuated
| masswerk wrote:
| Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much
| harder...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Copyright also seems to be going fine._
|
| Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even
| the _status quo_ is not "fine".
|
| Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
|
| If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years,
| they are bad at business side of things and should get out of
| the way to allow other creative people to build on their work.
|
| The novel _Nightmare Alley_ was published in 1946, and the
| author died in 1962:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel)
|
| There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under
| copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it
| into a movie:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)
| randombits0 wrote:
| Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn't really
| apply well to software to begin with. Consider this:
|
| Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely
| functional expressions are not copyrightable.
|
| That means that software is the embodiment of both creative
| and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so
| mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no
| simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength
| of copyright over the whole.
|
| It also misleads folks into believing everything about
| software is protected, even silly things like header files or
| trivial functions. Because these purely functional
| expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks
| just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even
| judges get this wrong!
|
| So software isn't inherently copyrightable except for it any
| creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative
| expression?
|
| Traditionally, it didn't take very much creative expression
| to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A
| color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file
| after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT
| copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression.
|
| But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes
| and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire
| world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should
| be able to protect my work, right?
|
| No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but
| purely functional expressions. It doesn't matter how long it
| took to create or how the algorithm was discovered.
|
| But what about the code to implement the expression? The code
| is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of
| creativity in the code, but we are back to functional
| expression as opposed to creative expression. Where's the
| line? It's fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but
| impossible to consider given only the executable software
| itself.
|
| Personally, I think software should have it's own copyright
| protections, unique from other written works. What that
| should look like and how it should work is an open question
| that should be discussed.
|
| Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the
| author. The purpose is to "promote the progress of science
| and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and
| inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
| and discoveries." If any copyright scheme fails to "promote
| the progress of science and useful arts", it is not serving
| the public as intended.
| izacus wrote:
| > If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty
| years, they are bad at business side of things and should get
| out of the way to allow other creative people to build on
| their work.
|
| Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's
| the massive content industry corporations that are doing the
| cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get
| tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to
| fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher.
|
| "Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message
| from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _In vast majority of cases it 's the massive content
| industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping
| here, not the artists themselves._
|
| If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making
| _Terminator 2_ by now...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film
|
| Or:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| you aren't paying attention
| andy81 wrote:
| Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single
| source owned by the operating system developer, and adware
| impossible to remove without defating the device's security.
|
| Where downloading apps from another source is possible,
| multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages
| optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates.
|
| Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard.
|
| General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken
| serious hits.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I would argue otherwise.
|
| 15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly
| using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down,
| but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and
| could never serve as a primary device.
|
| Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked
| down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down
| content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default
| 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or
| CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn't subject to disappearing because a
| company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements
| (stuff that happens now even for "bought" items).
|
| We've also abstracted away everything from files, for long
| enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing
| it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for
| applications, which have gone more and more to web based
| subscription models.
|
| Default is closed, now.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Yup. I taught a basic HTML course for grade school age kids
| this winter.
|
| I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what
| the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their
| computing experience was all platform based. Everything for
| them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-
| classroom gardens, etc.
| causi wrote:
| When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-
| savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to
| computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the
| future young people would be tech geniuses from growing
| up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| It's insane, really. Many of my friends have no idea what
| to do when I send them an .mp3 or an .mp4 file if it
| doesn't instantly embed as a media player in their chat
| application of choice. For them, the only way to share
| images or videos is by uploading it to a commercial, ad-
| infested, sharing site.
|
| By catering to the lowest common denominator we are
| creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us
| who dumb down our features to make sure the users can
| understand.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Dumbing down or intentionally making it hard.
|
| Apple is intentionally hostile to sharing files and makes
| it very hard. Improved slightly in recent IOS versions,
| but still super hard. You can't just email yourself mp3s
| and Play them like normal music on your phone, you have
| to use a third party app or a PC or something to transfer
| them to iTunes.
| Arrath wrote:
| Which is endlessly infuriating to me. Whether its dumbing
| down or making it hard, the decrease in usability is a
| consistent hinderance.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 15 years ago the default was to consume content from TVs,
| which at the time typically had minimal computing power,
| although many people used them along with locked-down devices
| such as TiVo. I don't have any idea what kind of poll you
| could build to answer this question, but my bet would be that
| people spend about as much time on a general-purpose computer
| as they did in 2007, and the increase in phone and tablet
| usage reflects a computerization of previously free time.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This exactly. Mobiles are now the standard general purpose
| computers and they're all locked down. We don't really own
| our devices anymore nor our data :(
| foobarian wrote:
| Speak for yourself there buddy. :-)
|
| More seriously, I wonder if we should look at the raw
| numbers. Before, perhaps all the people who use a mobile as
| a general purpose computer did not even have a computer.
| And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than
| before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take
| heart in this.
|
| Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device
| than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I
| take heart in this.
|
| I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly
| use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any
| numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong.
|
| > Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
|
| Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the
| numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-
| datacenter in their house - and therefore there being
| more computers out there - doesn't mean that there are
| more distinct people whose main computing device is a
| general-purpose computer.
|
| To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are
| those who already were interested in doing "more" with
| computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended
| content".
|
| I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are
| cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the
| numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-
| datacenter in their house - and therefore there being
| more computers out there - doesn't mean that there are
| more distinct people whose main computing device is a
| general-purpose computer.
|
| I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of
| money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most
| of its audience won't even think about buying it
| secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr
| support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because
| literally nobody wants them and companies throw out
| perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a
| joke.
|
| In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an
| HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a
| ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs.
|
| A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find
| it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was
| always cheap.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Maybe I didn't know where to look in the early 2000s, but
| I do find it much easier now. Basically all of my home
| lab is what my work was going to throw away - so free.
|
| However, the biggest issue to me, up until very recently,
| was noise. I have a ~4-year-old Lenovo Think Server that
| is quieter than some laptops. I also have my eye on a
| somewhat older HP rack-mount server that is also
| extremely quiet and should be decommissioned soon.
|
| But up until around 2010, a rack-mount server would have
| driven me insane. Ditto for switches. Around 2012 I first
| saw a then-new HP model that was fanless. But it only did
| 100 Mbps, all the gigabit models came with a jet-engine
| attached. Now I managed to find a fanless Gigabit Ruckus
| with a few 10G ports, since they start to be old enough.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Throwaways from work were one major source of my home lab
| too. However for me this has become a _lot_ harder in
| recent years, because our company scrapped its own
| datacenters and moved to the cloud. A hallway full of
| decommissioned servers is now extremely rare. We have
| some "computer rooms" left (not allowed to call them
| "datacenters" anymore) but it's just for the stuff that
| really must be on-site.
|
| Other than that, online marketplaces. _Not_ eBay
| generally, because its auction system and international
| reach drives prices up, even for items which normally
| gather low interest. I tend to use local buy & sell
| websites where people usually offer lower prices than
| advertised and these kinds of items are not very popular
| so they tend to go cheap.
|
| I've never seen fanless servers, but my home lab is not
| something I keep running 24/7 anyway. And it sits in a
| dedicated room with my 3D printers and electronics
| workbench so it's not the kind of place I hang out for
| peace and quiet anyway :) It's my mancave really (though,
| for lack of a partner, right now my whole apartment is a
| mancave :) ).
|
| My 24/7 stuff I do pick for energy-efficiency and to a
| much smaller extent, noise. I have 4 NUCs for this stuff.
| 2 nice ones with 4/6 cores and 64GB RAM, and 2 ancient
| ones (one atom and one skylake IIRC) which are very low
| power though. They're the ones that keep running when
| everything switches to UPS.
|
| I'm not really big into networking so I have some semi-
| managed TP-Links that bought new for 35 bucks. They're
| gigabit, 8 ports and can do basic stuff like vlans and
| mirroring which is all I need. I'm not doing any CCNA
| stuff or anything.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I really didn't know anyone that didn't have a computer
| in the years 2000-2010. Even old people with hardly any
| PC knowledge. I fixed enough old crappy PC's for them :)
|
| And yeah I know you can unlock Android but it's really
| really fringey. Most people don't. And that's like 95%
| most.
| corrral wrote:
| > Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked
| down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down
| content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default
| 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
|
| I _love_ having the choice. Most of the time I want the
| locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not
| actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I
| wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or
| whatever.
|
| Now we have that option, and then _also_ general-purpose
| computers are so cheap and widely available that you can
| easily score decent ones _for free_.
|
| Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now
| is _excellent_. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-
| failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options
| that don 't suck for normal people wanting to do normal
| things. _And_ general-purpose computing is more accessible
| than ever.
|
| Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not
| happened yet, and things have only gotten _better_ so far.
|
| IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the
| handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning
| has mostly enabled systems working _against us_ rather than
| creating _agents working entirely on our behalf_.
| a4isms wrote:
| > The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default
| closed.
|
| Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with
| computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if,
| for example, I made this argument:
|
| "In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to
| both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading
| email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to
| just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV."
|
| That would be true, but not because of locking devices down.
| It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the
| industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases
| by orders of magnitude.
|
| The people who sent and received emails are still sending and
| receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading
| documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and
| YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue
| televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents
| and emails.
|
| And there are many, many people who just want to consume
| content for every "maker" generating content of any type,
| whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever.
|
| How many people are involved in the construction and
| operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to
| see pictures of what it sees?
|
| Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for
| makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for
| tech.
| a4isms wrote:
| The next thing then becomes, "Why can't we use GP computers
| for consuming all this content?"
|
| And the tongue-in-cheek answer is, "Because Linux."
| Optimizing a device for makers often makes it sub-optimal
| for consumers.
|
| I am a bassist. But I listen to music far more than I play
| music, and I have no interest in constructing a player-bass
| like a player-piano. For when I listen to music, closed-
| source "information appliance" ecosystems beat open-source
| general-purpose ecosystems.
|
| I maintain quite a bit of general-purpose computing ways to
| manage music, but honestly, it's more because I have an
| aversion to corporate control than any thought that it's
| easier to be in complete control.
|
| Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't
| that music was free, it was that you could type the name of
| a song and listen to it right away. The challenge for us as
| technologists pursuing a free future is that information
| appliances do this better than general-purpose ecosystems.
| int_19h wrote:
| The challenge that you describe is primarily political,
| not technological. It wouldn't matter one bit if Linux
| became the perfectly polished consumer OS today if its
| users are still locked out of DRM'd video services by
| their owners, for example.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster
| wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type
| the name of a song and listen to it right away.
|
| If that paraphrase is true then Joel Spolsky has no idea
| what he's talking about on this subject.
|
| Without a doubt the key feature of Napster was that
| students could download-- not stream-- music. _For free_.
| Students would consequently fill their harddrives with
| everything they thought they 'd want to listen to in
| their lifetime, often buying 2nd harddrives to populate
| with more mp3s. (Well, that and pron.) Keep in mind many
| dorms were still using dialup connections during this
| period-- thus there was a pattern of students running to
| the library computer lab to download a few mp3 albums to
| zip disk (yes, zip disks) then bring them back to the
| dorms.
|
| What facilitated _immediate_ listening /viewing was
| sharing directories in Windows with the rest of the LAN
| on college campuses.
|
| Quick digression to argue against the Gell-Mann Amnesia
| effect-- while your paraphrase of Joel Spolsky expresses
| an idea that is indeed false, I reserve judgement on
| anything else Spolsky has ever written (and frankly on
| whatever his verbatim words were on this same topic). I
| mean what kind of pathetic, impulsive nimrod would I
| become if I simply through out an entire body of
| someone's work on a single passing impression?
|
| Edit: Just to cover my bases-- in every case I can
| remember, students who were playing music in their dorms
| or a shared space had winamp or some other such player
| loaded up with a playlist selected from thousands from
| their own collection. Napster was the place to download
| songs for your collection, not the place to build an ad-
| hoc playlist in realtime. Maybe there are cases where
| people were doing this. But the overwhelming
| supermajority of Napster users were using it because they
| could replicate a subset of the whole to build their own
| lifetime library of music. For free.
|
| 2nd edit: I almost forgot-- nearly everyone in the dorms
| would share a directory when they hooked up to the LAN.
| The process of finding _immediately playable content_ was
| to browse the various shared directories in windows, or
| use Windows search on them which IIRC worked incredibly
| slow or not at all. This was a common practice because
| again, most people were still on dial-up and couldn 't
| download anything from Napster nearly as fast as you
| could on the computer lab networks.
|
| Later, Youtube made both music and video files
| immediately playable. Around that same time, torrent tech
| started to improve to the point where you could stream
| while downloading as well as do keyword searches with
| vastly improved results. This is all to say that Napster
| kicked off a pattern of college kids grabbing _free_
| content, and this proliferation of content caused the
| development of realtime playback of discoverable content.
|
| So what you paraphrased above isn't exactly "wet streets
| caused rain." It's more like "the issue isn't the rain--
| it's the wet streets." I'm honestly not sure which is
| worse. :)
| pca006132 wrote:
| Sadly a lot of people prefer this over an open environment,
| as locked down environments usually work out of the box,
| consuming recommended information is easier than searching by
| yourself. Centralization brings convenience at the expense of
| freedom, but it is much easier for us to feel convenience (or
| being frustrated by something inconvenient) than to
| understand the importance of freedom.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I'm not sure if people prefer it, or that they are strongly
| steered towards that environment.
|
| My apple watch is super cool from a hardware perspective,
| but so locked down that I can't use it in the ways that I
| would like to. For example, it has a barometric pressure
| sensor, but I/my apps can't directly read the sensor data,
| instead a filtered update is pushed to the app
| approximately every 1.5 seconds. Why? I know the sensor is
| capable of reading at 20+ hz.
| pca006132 wrote:
| Well, some of my friends prefer Apple's walled garden
| because they think the applications there are better than
| open source ones, and consider policies requiring Apple
| to allow third-party app store as dangerous to users...
| drewcoo wrote:
| I think the parent's point was that they might think that
| way because of Apple marketing, not any kind of innate
| preference.
| oneplane wrote:
| There can be many 'why'-answers for such a context. While
| we can see 'a sensor' with some properties like data
| format, refresh rate etc. that sensor is a mere
| 'implementation' of a desired functionality of a product
| design.
|
| It used to be that the designed feature or function would
| be very close to the implementation, but that really
| hasn't been the case for a very long time. People aren't
| buying "a large bank of memory addresses" but rather "a
| device that contains pictures", for lack of a better
| example.
|
| With the watch a customer isn't actually buying a package
| of sensors, ARM-cores, BMS, Lithium-Ion battery, and
| display, but they are buying the experience of having a
| device that tells the time, notifies them if something
| happens and can track some aspects of their life so they
| have an overview of it later (be it for turning their
| life into a game or simply tracking their energy
| use/consumption). And then all of that for at least an
| entire day.
|
| Why would the implementation of the feature result in a
| sensor that can be polled at a high frequency but is
| actually only pushed at a lower frequency? It's anyone's
| guess but here is my guess:
|
| The sensor has its own specs but those are set in
| isolation and might differ based on implementation inside
| a casing, so they only way to get true data would be to
| have some form of calibration or offset where a low-power
| CPU core for sensor tasks just gets the raw values and
| applies the offset/calibration. Next, there is power
| consumption where they might have found the perfect
| balanced duty-cycle between data that has had enough time
| to cool down and be useful as well as power requirements
| for the sensor core and the sensor itself. So they have
| some sort of RT OS doing reading, processing etc. on a
| low-power core at a lower interval to get a 1% battery
| life increase. Do that for 10 sensors and suddenly it's
| worth it. It's quite an investment to have a team of
| people dive into the hardware, firmware and application
| development to do all that, so it's likely not a matter
| of "how can we spend a multi-million R&D chunk on making
| the hardware less useful", but rather some "how do we
| make millions of mass produced devices use a little bit
| less power" concept.
|
| This is also where the push vs. pull comes from, instead
| of having every application do some interrupt or
| scheduling, you just ask to be part of a list of
| observers and when the data changes you get notified.
| Much more efficient, and if everyone has to do that,
| there is a much smaller chance of the user experience
| suddenly changing and support personnel (phone, in-store)
| getting complaints about something they can't fix because
| some third party app did it.
| oigursh wrote:
| The hardware data being sent to a centralised service
| which dishes it out when it feels like it is almost
| always for battery saving.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| So that someone doesn't write an app that polls at 20+ hz
| and burn the battery. Apple is optimized for user
| experience and simplicity, that includes precluding bad
| behavior. If you want a real time weather station, a
| smart watch is not the right tool.
|
| My hot water kettle heats water, why can't I wire it up
| to be my whole house heater?
| brundolf wrote:
| General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be
| gotten rid of. Those who might otherwise want all machines to be
| locked down have no choice but to acknowledge this. The FUD has
| been going around for a decade and a half, and we've only ever
| seen it play out in small corners of the industry, not in the big
| picture.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable
| to be gotten rid of.
|
| It's already gone.
|
| If you don't believe me, just try and read all the files on
| your very own {android, iphone} device (without desoldering
| chips) and see what happens.
| permo-w wrote:
| that's it gone in one sector of the market that never really
| had it in the first place
| linspace wrote:
| > General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable
| to be gotten rid of.
|
| General-purpose computing is a just a local optimum for profit
| extraction. Nevertheless it feels like guessing the correct
| answer for the wrong reasons. I welcome and embrace the FUD.
| sliken wrote:
| Dunno. Apple and Microsoft seem to be heading towards forcing
| users to install things only from their app store. Apple checks
| every binary you run against a black list, which pretty much
| flew under the radar ... till the service broken.
|
| Do you really think there would be a big backlash if Apple and
| Microsoft prevented "sideloading" and required all application
| installs to be from their official app stores? It's already
| pretty much the default for phones, and tablets.
|
| We aren't there yet, but it does seem to be the direction we
| are going.
| ssalka wrote:
| If this precluded the ability to eg install a program via
| curl or brew, or even just a .dmg you download from your
| browser, you bet there is gonna be hell to pay.
|
| > It's already pretty much the default for phones, and
| tablets.
|
| It's unfortunate they made it that far with smartphones, but
| there is much less precendent for thinking of a phone as a
| "general purpose computer" in comparison to a laptop/desktop.
| sliken wrote:
| I'm sure the complaints will be loud, especially on this
| site. Will it be a large enough fraction of users to make
| apple care? Not so sure.
|
| Increasing security/limitations now means that you can't
| install things in your /home any more (at least without
| root). I used to be able to install opensc for using a
| badge with ssh. Now I have to install cask ... which
| requires root/admin privs. Similarly if I say brew install
| iterm2, when I run it it just says "iTerm.app can't be
| opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious
| software"
|
| Certainly seems like the screws are tightening.
| ssalka wrote:
| In the case of Apple in particular, I think the bigger
| cry will be from tech companies shipping paid apps who
| see this as a first step towards expanding Apple's 30%
| cut in the app store to all native applications.
| gopher_space wrote:
| This would all be fine if there was a toggle to turn it
| off somewhere.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| You might get lucky at first, while they're still slowly
| turning up the heat on the proverbial frog's bath.
| However, the way UI/UX design is moving, options of any
| sort are being eroded away. Just so things can be "easy".
|
| Take media sharing / device discovery for example. It has
| gotten to the point that just about any consumer product
| either has to communicate with some external server to
| find devices in your home, or use one of the multitude of
| zeroconf / airplay / mDNS / etc type protocols. It's
| gotten to the point that you can't even build a home
| network with more than one subnet in it. If I want my
| (most like fully of security holes) IP cameras to not
| exist on the same VLAN as my servers, well, good luck
| getting to two to talk to each other. Same for printers,
| media players, speakers, TVs, receivers, etc. If it isn't
| on the same subnet, it might as well not exist. Could
| this be easily solved with an option of typing an IP
| address into a config page? Yes. Does any product offer
| this? None that I've seen.
|
| Sorry for the ranty example; I've been fighting that
| issue recently.
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Depends on how they would do it. If Apple were to replace
| brew with an official package manager which just works,
| most people wouldn't bat an eye.
|
| The way Apple could do it is by introducing the said
| package manager for iPadOS. iPadOS could soon grow to do
| everything what MacOS does but only with certain
| restrictions. If it's faster but cheaper, most people would
| then just buy it over a general purpose laptops.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > If this precluded the ability to eg install a program via
| curl or brew, or even just a .dmg you download from your
| browser
|
| I expect that governments will offer a "compromise" which
| is that you can run these "unapproved" apps, but they must
| be signed by a developer key which is tied to a domain
| name, and that domain name must be checked (by the OS)
| against a blacklist of banned
| applications/developers/websites.
|
| That should be enough to block any encrypted messaging apps
| without backdoors, or apps like Tor, or bittorrent clients.
|
| There could be a cat-and-mouse game as developers try to
| rename their apps, generate new keys, and register new
| domains, but when governments notice that their ability to
| censor is at stake, they will spare no expense on whichever
| intelligence agency or defence contractor is tasked with
| keeping the blacklists updated faster than any banned
| applications can reach mass adoption.
|
| In parallel to this, governments will require that ISPs
| only let devices access the internet if they pass a "secure
| boot" check, which confirms that the device is running an
| operating system which enforces this blacklist.
|
| We're probably less than 5 years away from some G7/EU
| country mandating this system, with the timeline only
| limited by the rate of adoption of technology like Windows
| 11 and Pluton. Older devices (and those running
| "unapproved" OSes) will be limited to specific ports and IP
| ranges, for "cyber-security" reasons.
| teddyh wrote:
| See also: _The Digital Imprimatur_ (2003):
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
| resfirestar wrote:
| Clearly an attack on general purpose computing materialized, but
| it came about in a very different way from what was predicted
| here. If I had to summarize the overall thesis of the article it
| would be this: sectors of the economy other than the tech
| industry want computers to stop running programs that lose them
| money, and the government wants computers to stop running
| programs that break the law. In the future, with Hollywood as the
| vanguard, laws and regulations will stamp out general purpose
| computing and replace that model with more easily regulated
| computing appliances with a clearly defined purpose. To quote the
| article on how computers and an open internet would be stopped:
|
| >Regardless of whether you think [things like 3D printed guns]
| are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless,
| the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more
| influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them
| will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-
| purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that
| scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that
| transmits any message over any protocol between any two points,
| unless it upsets us?"
|
| I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10
| years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked
| down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right
| apps, often available from the official app store. SOPA failed,
| and to this day the US is free from IP and domain blocking
| (though many other democratic countries are now under court
| ordered blocking regimes). UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run
| any OS on your PC. User-modifiable device firmware wasn't banned,
| and thanks to the right to repair movement the law is actually
| being used to open up devices.
|
| Instead, the threat to general purpose computing came from the
| tech industry itself: Apple, Google, and (to a lesser extent)
| Microsoft, the same companies that used their influence to kill
| SOPA, locked down devices and operating systems to protect their
| own profits, not to protect non-tech sectors or to appease
| regulators.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > the government wants computers to stop running programs that
| break the law
|
| I thought the government was more concerned with surveillance
| than law-breaking programs. Or were you saying that they want
| us to stop running things like VPNs?
| resfirestar wrote:
| In the article Doctorow talks about both surveillance and
| regulatory concerns, like vehicle safety and the ability to
| create weapons with 3D printers. If there was a law requiring
| surveillance backdoors in operating systems (as he speculated
| repressive governments would enforce with UEFI) then both are
| about law-breaking programs.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The guns are really easily tackled though. Instead of
| restricting guns (and parts thereof), just restrict
| ammunition.
|
| I know some people can create ammo but they need the
| casings which could also be restricted. And really, whoever
| wants to can create a weapon from a few pipes and other
| easily fabricated parts. Shinzo Abe's murderer did just
| that.
|
| 3D printers are not gamechangers here. They just make
| things a little easier.
| blep_ wrote:
| (I know almost nothing about guns and this comment is not
| advocating for any specific policy)
|
| > they need the casings which could also be restricted
|
| Are casings particularly hard to make? It seems like
| anyone with the tools and skills to make a gun from parts
| could also make little cylinders that fit in that gun. Or
| just do the cannon thing, have a vaguely spherical ball
| and some explosive stuff packed behind it.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| The part that is challenging to fabricate at home is the
| primer.
| bombcar wrote:
| Casings can be reused and reloaded to make new bullets.
|
| And you could build a black-powder gun that might be a
| bit less accurate but would involve nothing really
| traceable.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah perhaps in the US this might not work. I was
| thinking more of europe where even ammunition isn't
| readily available to buy already (and people don't have
| stockpiles except highly regulated sportshooters).
|
| But I thought the part where the firing pin hits the
| cartridge gets damaged and the primer there isn't easily
| replaced. I'm probably wrong, I never even held a real
| gun.
| resfirestar wrote:
| Well, in the US there's currently a lot of effort going
| into attempts to tackle "ghost guns". Restricting
| ammunition may be better from a practical perspective (I
| don't know for sure) but it's harder from a 2A
| perspective. But none of it is targeting the 3D printers
| as Doctorow feared. I don't know if this is because the
| impact of 3D printing on homemade guns and other
| potentially lawbreaking activities has been limited or
| something else. I do think there's a general suspicion of
| having devices try to do something about lawbreaking
| activity they might enable, think of the backlash against
| Apple's CSAM scanning proposal. This might be Hollywood's
| fault, the idea of devices playing cop immediately makes
| people think of their computer ratting them out for
| watching a pirated movie.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > The guns are really easily tackled though.
|
| If you can do that, you can ban guns too. Easy right?
| What's more, ammunition is easier to make than a gun.
|
| https://www.quora.com/If-the-US-banned-sales-of-gun-
| ammuniti...
|
| The hobbyist? describing making 400 rounds an hour by
| hand in his garage is a good rule of thumb.
| int_19h wrote:
| Ammunition is easy to make when all components are
| readily available. Each round of modern ammo requires a
| bullet, a case, a load of gunpowder, and a primer.
| Bullets are relatively easy to cast. Gunpowder can be
| manufactured, but making smokeless from scratch is not
| easy, while the traditional black gunpowder gums up semi-
| auto action very fast. Cases and especially primers are
| very hard to make right.
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