[HN Gopher] The boiling frog of digital freedom
___________________________________________________________________
The boiling frog of digital freedom
Author : Gazoche
Score : 598 points
Date : 2023-09-03 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gazoche.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (gazoche.xyz)
| pacifika wrote:
| It's similar on the console gaming market. The first initial of
| PC stands for Corporate.
|
| Luckily the single point of failure is the store, so it requires
| one law to fix.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| It's an urban myth that the frog will stay in the water to be
| boiled, it actually jumps out. Unless of course there's a lid on
| the pot.
|
| Humans have a lot to learn from the frog. And it's not about
| putting lids on pots.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Even though it is a myth, the message of it is still good!
| Towaway69 wrote:
| The irony is that we invent a myth to explain our own
| fallacies, pointing to the frog and claiming we're not alone.
| Yet the truth is that we are alone!
| brightlancer wrote:
| The "boiling pot" is rubbish as a literal claim but quite apt
| as a metaphorical one: the Overton Window moves over time,
| particularly as people misremember history ("rose colored
| glasses") and as folks are born or grow up after major shifts.
|
| There are folks on HN today who weren't alive on Sept 11th, or
| were in the US but were too young to remember it -- their idea
| of "normal" is very different from folks who were 20 or 40 or
| 60 years old on the day of the attacks. That's an example of
| the "boiling pot".
|
| I remember talking with a college student in the mid 2000s
| about music and he was excited that he didn't own physical
| media, and instead had DRM copies and subscriber access to
| more. He was a "tech savvy" exception then, but the window has
| shifted and college students don't buy physical copies of
| music. In another decade, I doubt they'll buy physical copies
| of movies.
|
| Not all changes are good.
| tomp wrote:
| _> Youtube, Gmail, Spotify, banks and a few other major websites
| start using Google 's WEI API for internal user reputation
| scoring, forcing non-compliant browsers through more captchas._
|
| You forgot the biggest threat: CloudFlare
| stavros wrote:
| I have a much easier time getting my sites off of Cloudflare
| than my content off YouTube.
| superkuh wrote:
| I can't even read scientific journal articles (on their
| journal sites) anymore because the big publishers are putting
| themselves behind cloudflare walls that just don't work in
| any browser I try. Pretty much my only access these days is
| waiting years for it to get on sci-hub or in some of the
| sciences, finding it on arxiv.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| It's ironic: four years ago, everyone was cheering and wooing
| for CloudFlare. And now four years later we have rebuttal.
|
| Strange that. Well, not really. But still. I dislike being the
| "told you so" guy.
| grishka wrote:
| One factor this ignores is that there already exist tens of
| billions of general-purpose computing devices capable of running
| arbitrary code. They aren't going to magically disappear. They've
| already been made and they can't be unmade.
|
| Given enough nuisance, people would just stop upgrading. We've
| already seen this with Windows itself -- I know people who are
| still, in 2023, using Windows 7 daily for the simple reason of
| hating everything that came after it.
| no_time wrote:
| The requirement of a TPM in w11 will make companies throw
| millions PCs into shredders in 2025 with the EOL of w10.
|
| Of course there will be enough PCs to go around for practically
| forever, but the march of time is not going in a direction that
| you and me will probably like.
| grishka wrote:
| That TPM requirement is artificial and is easily bypassed
| though. But then big corporations would probably not do that
| for the fear of angering Microsoft.
|
| It just makes me angry that Microsoft seems to have no clue
| what they're doing now. They seem to put their own agenda
| above all else. They base their system requirements on their
| misguided vision, not on the actual technical requirements of
| their software.
|
| And ReactOS is still unfortunately as far from being usable
| as it's ever been.
| layer8 wrote:
| Mozilla has ended support for Firefox on Windows 7 (and 8). In
| a couple of years, less and less websites will work on that
| last-supported Firefox version. Other cloud-related software
| like Dropbox will also remove support sooner or later. The more
| difficult it gets to use online services and the web on Windows
| 7, the more people will switch. It will end up in a small
| hobbyist niche like people who run Haiku or Serenity.
| grishka wrote:
| Unlike between XP and Vista, there isn't that much win32 API
| difference between Windows 7 and later versions. I'm sure in
| due time people will come up with DLLs to shim the few
| missing functions.
| dsign wrote:
| Good as this is, it's missing the parts which lie outside
| browsers and it doesn't have much regarding mobile devices.
|
| In a matter of decades or shorter, I expect the following to
| happen as well:
|
| * Governments will give themselves new, expanded legal rights for
| mass-surveillance on their citizens through their electronic
| devices.
|
| * AIs will be plugged to surveillance data-streams to search for
| "criminal behavior," whatever that be for each country.
|
| * As part of the above, a signal-processing mechanism similar to
| the Chinese social score, but way more sophisticated and
| comprehensive, will be implemented, by almost every nation with
| the resources to do so. One nation, China, already started. In
| the decades to come, other major nations will lean on threat of
| XYZ to follow suit. (In case you need some examples of XYZ:
| ordinary terrorism, bioterrorism, avoidance of laws limiting AI,
| child pornography, access by children to pornography, minor
| solicitation, parent abuse, sexual harassment of nature X, lax
| morals regarding Y, information warfare by foreign powers).
|
| Even if those things seem unimaginable to us now, it is a slow
| slope to roll down through a year at a time. Public perception
| will gradually change enough to tolerate the privacy invasions.
| And who knows, for certain category of threats, it may be that
| the general public of the time enthusiastically supports the
| surveillance. (For example, I would love to see a study where
| people with children are asked if they believe that the
| government should have access to the telephones of people who are
| statistically likely to engage in CP, like men who are single and
| under a certain age, in order to prevent CP).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by
| "freedom"?
|
| We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting
| openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom.
|
| The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated
| legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open
| dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.
|
| If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us,
| without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our
| freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy,
| voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours.
|
| " Let governments be governments"
| fnord123 wrote:
| There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another
| organization is using data to persecute them and the
| definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast
| the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't!
|
| Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler
| to enforce and covers future eventualities.
|
| >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated
| legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open
| dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.
|
| The real offline life where people can be punished in the US
| for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many
| countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder
| (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse)
| (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's
| acceptable).
|
| >and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting,
| making a noise, agitating our neighbours.
|
| This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and
| no change. Or the million people who marched against the
| Invasion of Iraq.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or
| less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting.
| You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't.
| Democracy will.
|
| Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy.
| But there are no silver bullets.
| midasuni wrote:
| Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what
| drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like
| Facebook.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| No. Just No.
|
| Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20
| million people did not get tricked by their Facebook
| feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled
| by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach.
|
| 20 million people were asked "the country is run by
| thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising,
| articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best
| for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended
| consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not
| everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy
| you? vote now"
|
| Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for
| economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't
| sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not
| because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to
| accept the model of how the world works thet you are
| operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version
| of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my
| own"
|
| The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute
| everyone put in their favourite untested political world
| view.
| graemep wrote:
| Those of us who voted for Brexit think it beneficial, not
| "self harm". I agrred with your view of the consequnces I
| would have voted remain.
| midasuni wrote:
| Yes you are immune to the efforts of a trillion dollar
| industry that has spent the best pet of a century working
| out exactly how to manipulate you without you even
| knowing.
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| It's an important question because "digital freedom" tends to
| be code for "I want the Internet like how it was when I was
| younger", and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking
| iPhones or whatever for good measure.
| concordDance wrote:
| I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from
| now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored
| person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a
| whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if
| they don't want to just shut down half their IT.
| orwin wrote:
| I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I
| want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my
| bank and my government websites.
|
| As banks and governments move critical parts of their working
| online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If
| I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms
| were infringed.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by
| "freedom"?
|
| Freedom is what 'the bad guys' want, so good people must do
| everything they can to destroy it.
| verisimi wrote:
| > We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom -
| acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is
| freedom.
|
| So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government
| (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now
| free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc?
|
| So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any
| answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and
| justifies acting with force against others, _has_ to be wrong
| (immoral).
|
| Far better to follow the golden rule:
|
| Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be
| treated
|
| I think that does it.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all
| be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what
| it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian
| utopia.
|
| Yes we need government. And these days we need government to
| roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot
| arrange the bread delivery for London through one department
| but you can force privatised water companies to invest before
| dividends over periods of decades.
| verisimi wrote:
| You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that
| basic morality means that you cannot force others to do
| what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a
| way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral -
| you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill.
| And you want to use other people to force your opinions via
| police, legal system, etc on others.
|
| Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy.
| Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free
| association with others - ie no force.
|
| The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force
| others to do what you would like them to do, if they are
| not harming you. You wouldn't force your
| neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are
| not harming you. But you consent to government using
| immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal
| money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you
| think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even
| more force even more overtly. I think you will get your
| desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far
| rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with
| everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead
| of me.
|
| And I believe in actual government - government that
| builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees
| ways to make researchers to discover medicines and
| hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that
| force companies to label their food with their
| ingredients (or their ISP adverts with their fees). I
| call this real government. not the arguing fools on TV.
| We can argue how much much of it is too much. We are. But
| I refuse utterly that "doing real government" is immoral,
| that any attempt to agree common standards is tyranny.
|
| I believe that the real moral failing is to chip away at
| real government so much that services collapse and harm
| is done to real people. We can look at failed states like
| Niger or Haiti in horror, but we can also look at the
| mismatched life expectancy across our own rich countries
| and ask why?
|
| I reject the idea that we can roll back government so
| much we can lose driving licenses and just be more
| careful out there, that we can ignore food safety
| standards and just look at the restaurant kitchen
| carefully. I reject libertarianism because it knows as
| much about the real world as central command economics.
|
| I want government run on empirical data with justice and
| equality at its heart.
|
| I am happy to accept the grey areas, will stand up for
| democracy will argue we can always do better. But
| buggered if it's because I secretly yearn to control your
| life.
| verisimi wrote:
| > I want government run on empirical data with justice
| and equality at its heart.
|
| You're asking for technocracy, and this is what is lined
| up already - you might wonder whether you are being
| engineered. All those cameras, smart phones, smart
| meters, legislation, facial recognition, etc - this is to
| allow micro-management at the most granular level. It's
| all quite far from freedom indeed, which is where this
| conversation started. The global governance structure is
| already fascistic (corporation and the state work
| together). I'm not a fan of the forced tyranny that's in
| store for us - once we've got it, I suspect you'll change
| your mind too.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am asking for science. That before we decide if we want
| to teach phonics at school we guinea pig a few thousand
| to see if it meets some p-value.
|
| Is that technocracy? Maybe. Is it something easy to
| explain - yes. Is it something for some reason is not
| explained fully and at length? Yes oddly it's not.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > And I believe in actual government
|
| No, you believe in _utopian_ government, which is not
| actual government. Actual government is what we have
| right now, in reality.
|
| > I call this real government.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Oh for heavens sake. There are 192 different governments
| (at least) on this globe and they lie along a spectrum.
| what we have now (I kinda assume USA) is up and to the
| right on this spectrum (ie some definition of good, free,
| whatever is up and right). my utopian government is
| further up and right but anyone living in any of those
| 192 places will benefit from their government going more
| up and right, freer, better, more open whatever.
|
| So yeah i think there are things a real government does
| and does not do. That is not utopian, it's not naive.
| it's here and now and rooted in practical real world
| examples.
|
| Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live
| under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in
| democracies- where we can force the buggers up and to the
| right. Make them more utopian more free more open.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force
| others to do what you would like them to do,
|
| Plainly, most people disagree with you. They find it
| perfectly acceptable to force others to (not) do things.
|
| > if they are not harming you.
|
| The fact is that people do not agree what "harm" is.
|
| To pick an obvious argument, many people oppose abortion
| under _all_ circumstances because they claim it harms the
| offspring and the mother, while many people support
| abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim
| forcing a woman to carry to term harms the woman.
|
| How do we handle situations where people disagree on the
| definition of "harm"?
| mindslight wrote:
| No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of
| digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that
| it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting _anyone_ ,
| including individuals, treating you differently for anything
| you've said. Which is clearly impossible.
|
| Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard
| authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something
| that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away
| at down the line.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Wait what?
|
| Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive
| you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner
| how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone
| sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an
| effect on how your neighbours talk to you.
|
| That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have
| been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It
| can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think
| we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome
| them.
|
| But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and
| act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world -
| i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
| mindslight wrote:
| Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my
| subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible.
|
| From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to
| be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is
| privy to that communication, including limiting what can be
| attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying
| that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a
| baseless assertion. While this may _appear_ similar to how
| social strictures have been managed for thousands of years
| - that 's thousands of years of oppression of individuality
| and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has
| overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call
| progress.
|
| Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut
| traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the
| concept of _hearsay_ - where party B claims that party A
| has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge
| party A for it, but modulo B 's reputation. Digital
| communications render hearsay _moot_ - the default result
| of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A
| said something, is that party B can also prove to _anyone_
| that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the
| cryptographic property of _repudiation_ , as the physics of
| digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.
| dools wrote:
| > This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by
| "freedom"?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
| [deleted]
| attah_ wrote:
| To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline
| life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority
| goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around
| with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.
| landemva wrote:
| I see plenty of people enthusiastically volunteering for the
| TSA facial recognition roll-out. People seem to love easy
| access government surveillance.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The thing is, we will. And do.
|
| I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my
| username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot
| longer than 'lifeisstillgood'.
|
| my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow
| the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes
| "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see
| what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has
| cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far
| away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper
| is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around
| naked, it just was harder to see.
|
| We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural
| consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good
| (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but
| otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have
| to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity,
| no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you.
|
| We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less
| publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to
| persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of
| legislation.
|
| We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will
| probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook
| deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick
| Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at
| Facebook than if he became PM.
|
| But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The
| law, the application of the law - these matter online and
| offline.
|
| So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so
| much.
|
| (Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes
| reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party
| membership so that parties and primaries reflected the
| population ...)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| While I share the author's fear, the timeline they created
| doesn't really work.
|
| 1. Windows 10 S has mostly been a failure.
|
| 2. Web Environment Integrity, while horrifying, has _not_ been
| rolled into Chrome! It 's an early proposal. We should work to
| ensure it goes nowhere.
|
| 3. The above greatly pushes out the plausible timeline for events
| currently listed next to 2024, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2031, and 2032.
|
| An aside, I don't find "Apple enforces notarization" to be
| significant, since it only applies to code-signed applications.
| It would be better to list "2012 - Apple blocks unsigned apps by
| default on Mac" and "2016 - Apple hides option to allow unsigned
| apps from the Mac GUI." The rollout of System Integrity
| Protection should be in there too. I'm personally not against any
| of these changes in isolation, but they are absolutely part of
| the slippery slope the author is trying to highlight.
|
| Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I think the article would be more
| powerful if the content was more plausible. If you already agree
| this is a problem, the specifics don't matter, but if you're
| trying to show the pattern to someone new, the facts you present
| are important.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| > Apple hides option to allow unsigned apps from the Mac GUI
|
| How so? Isn't this still an option in settings? Or are you
| referring to something else?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > How so? Isn't this still an option in settings?
|
| No, it's not. Starting in macOS Sierra, hid the "Allow from
| Anywhere" option in System Preferences.
|
| You can still allow unsigned apps, but you need to use a
| Terminal command: sudo spctl --master-
| disable
|
| Or you can whitelist individual apps by option-clicking them
| and selecting "open", but that's purposefully obtuse.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't think Windows 10 S was a failure, but it was never
| aimed at the average consumer, rather than institutions who
| operate extremely locked down devices, like information kiosks,
| or school or library computers. These organizations need very
| efficient fleet management tools that can be operated by a
| small (even part-time) IT professionals.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I don't get the impression that this was written with everyman
| in mind. The "someone new" won't understand the plausibility
| therein; better to appeal to the influencers that do.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply the author should have written for a
| general audience. There are plenty of techies who think this
| isn't a legitimate problem.
|
| I mean, if you're only writing for people who already agree
| with you, why bother at all?
| lapcat wrote:
| Agreed. (Except for the part where you're not actually against
| of these changes in isolation. I was against all of them.)
| Notarization is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Mac
| lockdown. It was just another annoying layer atop the
| preexisting system of Gatekeeper and Developer ID.
|
| Also missing on the Apple side are crucial dates such as 2007,
| the introduction of the locked down iPhone, and 2008, the
| introduction of the crApp Store.
|
| Apple did a bait and switch with iPhone lockdown. Many people
| seem to forget that it wasn't initially justified in terms of
| protecting the end user. Rather, it was justified in terms of
| protecting the cell phone carriers, i.e., "Cingular doesn't
| want to see their West Coast network go down because some
| application messed up." Which we knew was total B.S. at the
| time, but that was the initial story. The Orwellian move was
| later made to change the story, and now it has always been
| about protecting the end user (from themselves).
| cachvico wrote:
| > Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell
| phone carriers
|
| I don't remember that at all. I do remember Jobs resisting
| the app store because he wanted everything to be a web app
| though (despite resisting the move to responsive web design).
|
| Can you provide a source for your claim?
| lapcat wrote:
| > Can you provide a source for your claim?
|
| "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go
| down because some application messed up" is literally a
| quote from Steve Jobs.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/01/steve-jobs-knows-
| bes...
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2007-01-11-jobs-confirms-iphone-
| is-...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-jobs-the-iphone-and-
| open...
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/
| 0...
|
| https://www.wired.com/2007/01/why-i-want-a-locked-iphone-2/
|
| Of course this just proves another thing I said, which was
| "Many people seem to forget".
| Macha wrote:
| One of the big Windows 10 S problems is back in Windows 11,
| though.
|
| 1. You buy a device with Windows 11
|
| 2. The out of box experience demands you add a Microsoft
| account to proceed past it. There are workarounds for this, but
| mostly they are getting shut down.
|
| 3. You can't even get into the UEFI to install another OS
| without signing up to a MS account, because the UEFI is
| accessed via an OS level advanced startup option rather than
| the "press delete at bios screen" of the past
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> One of the big Windows 10 S problems is back in Windows
| 11, though. >> 1. You buy a device with Windows 11
|
| I realize i'm techy an have techy friends, but I dont know
| anyone who has purchased a Windows machine in a decade. No
| one in my household, none of my friends, no office i've been
| at since 2017.
|
| The only interaction I have with windows is an old laptop
| used for MS Visio, which immediately dual-boots to Ubuntu
| when visio use is over.
|
| I rarely see anyone at conferences with anything but a
| macbook.
|
| My assumption was that the 30% market share windows has
| (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share) is from old-
| school corporations, government, city hall, etc. Am I missing
| something?
| Macha wrote:
| You're missing two things:
|
| 1. You're in a tech bubble. For a counter anecdote, the
| only Macs I encounter are those provided by my US employers
| in the technology sector. The US is particularly high in
| Mac market share, California more so, and the bay area may
| be the one Mac OS majority desktop/laptop share region on
| the planet.
|
| 2. Windows laptops don't get replaced that often. I know
| it's hard to believe from a tech/heavy user perspective,
| where it may feel like a 4 year old Windows laptop is so
| outdated and you need to replace it, especially if it was
| not one of the models that rival the Mac in price, but for
| the average user a Windows machine reached the point of
| being good enough for their uses in the Windows 7 era. This
| is because their uses (a) are not that strenuous (typing up
| office documents, posting on social media) and (b)
| unexciting, so they don't feel the need to upgrade the way
| they might with their smartphones. Notably, these users are
| also _not_ going to computing conferences to be spotted by
| you, or bringing their laptops to coffee shops (they have
| smartphones for that), etc.
|
| Note that despite that, Windows still has the majority of
| new sales in the US, steady for the last 3 years at 55% to
| Mac's 30%, and the decline in the years prior to that were
| mostly driven by iPads and Chromebooks, not Macs - the big
| jump in Mac market share in 2019 seems to be iPads being
| merged into the mac category, as iOS's share in this space
| disappears at the same time:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/272667/market-share-
| held...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I can't read the source without an account, but 55% + 30%
| = 85%. Is the last 15% Chromebooks? (I guess there's also
| traditional desktop Linux but I can't imagine that's more
| than 2% at most.)
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, Chromebooks, Android (tablets presumably, or it
| would be first), Linux, and unknown.
|
| I guess they're either rate limiting by IP or checking
| referrer, since I can't open it again either. Chromebooks
| were at 7% as the next largest segment, but I don't
| remember the relative shared of android tablets, linux or
| unknown.
| dvdkon wrote:
| That's 30% among _all devices_ , the percentage among
| desktops/laptops is much higher.
|
| You are living in a bubble. I don't know how large it is,
| but especially in non-web, non-multimedia offices, Windows
| is the default. Most serious CAD software is Windows-only,
| some outliers also support macOS. That old ugly accounting
| software the company uses only runs on Windows and nobody
| bats an eye.
| jiofj wrote:
| I understand the thermometer analogy but it would read much
| better if the post was reversed.
|
| >2030: The market share of ARM-based Windows machines overtakes
| x86_64.
|
| Yeah, they wish...
| Gazoche wrote:
| That's how I wrote it originally, but thought an upside-down
| thermometer would look strange. Oh well.
| tartrate wrote:
| I like the order of starting with preposterous things and
| finally arriving at present day just to realize it's just as
| bad.
| M95D wrote:
| Why do so many people care about banking apps and that "pay with
| the phone" thing?
| MC68328 wrote:
| It needs to go back further:
|
| 2002: Microsoft proposes Palladium, everyone loses their minds.
|
| 2007: Apple effectively implements Palladium, nobody panics,
| because it's all 'part of the plan'.
| sunbum wrote:
| > 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from
| outside the Play store, citing security concerns.
|
| Yeah no, would be a direct violation of DMA at that point[1]
|
| [1] - https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
| dijit wrote:
| I mean, all you need to do is make it so that it violates some
| kind of "integrity" protection on the device, after which
| banking apps, android wallet etc stop functioning.
|
| Its enough incentive to kill third party app stores for the
| vast majority of people.
|
| Staying within the letter of the law is pretty easy.
| jsnell wrote:
| Have you read the text of the DMA? It addresses this exact
| point in section 50, and is nowhere near as easy to wiggle
| around as you suggest.
| nullifidian wrote:
| Knowing EU it could be altered to "Google removes the ability
| to install non-sanctioned alternative stores which don't have
| strict content filtering and anti-piracy policies, as per the
| EU directive" while preserving the (high) level of
| plausibility.
| tempodox wrote:
| And yet you can only install through the AppStore on iOS.
| Vogtinator wrote:
| Not much longer.
| imiric wrote:
| Not in the EU soon, thankfully:
| https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-17-app-sideloading-
| might-...
| mildmotive wrote:
| And it will keep getting worse as long as the majority of the
| population lack proper core values to oppose it.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| It's not enough for the majority of people to oppose a trend.
| There are plenty of issues where trends continue despite
| scattered opposition from the majority.
|
| Widespread activism could make a difference. If it becomes a
| major point of contention in elections, that could make a
| difference. These don't happen 'by default' though.
| mordae wrote:
| I believe that the values are mostly present. They just don't
| have many easily understood and widely known ideals to compare
| to.
| M95D wrote:
| The majority of the population lives in poverty. It's very-very
| difficult to have any values other than survival while poor.
| There's also very slim chance poor people to be educated. They
| work 12h/day at jobs where they can't even go to toilet. When
| would they have the time to read about a bootloader?
| KirillPanov wrote:
| I don't think it's a values problem. The technical issues here
| are complex. Can you explain bootloader locking or remote
| attestation to your grandmother?
|
| Personally I think a better approach is to push the phrase _"
| right to recycle and repurpose"_ as much as possible. People
| get that. Everybody personally has seen the unsettling amount
| of e-waste that passes through their ownership and into a
| landfill somewhere.
|
| Right to repair isn't enough, because these restrictions don't
| block you from keeping things working the way they did when you
| bought the device. Recycling and repurposing is something
| everybody can understand. It answers the question of "wait
| don't only evil hackers care about that?"
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote
| attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even
| repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an
| unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes
| as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to
| in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one
| day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun
| for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end
| users.
| flangola7 wrote:
| >Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you
| recycling devices or even repurposing them.
|
| Not even close to true.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-
| thousands...
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Anti-theft features aren't anything to do with remote
| attestation, and this feature does _not_ stop recycling
| the devices, it just means that only Apple can recycle
| them. Which would likely be true anyway due to how
| integrated the components are.
| landemva wrote:
| I wonder if you travel by plane, and if you voluntarily consent
| to the full body scans in European and USA airports? Or do you
| oppose it by opting out?
| poisonborz wrote:
| This is the core problem. A person should be able to refuse
| attempts once he understands the goal. The problem is not
| technology, but the obfuscation through it (and privacy
| policies, lobbying).
| mkoubaa wrote:
| True, but at the same time, if your grandma's identity was
| stolen you'd be more likely to be willing to discard some
| freedom for the sake of security.
|
| There's a general willingness to trade incremental freedom for
| security in many arenas but ascending that gradient is a hard
| sell
| unstuck3958 wrote:
| False dichotomy. Security does not have to come at the price
| of freedom.
| brightlancer wrote:
| What security can be obtained without sacrificing _any_
| freedom?
| geniium wrote:
| 2036: Virtual Reality Social Distancing becomes a thing, where
| people attend virtual parties by sending holographic avatars,
| ensuring they're "virtually" present without the need to
| physically mingle. Emoji dance-offs are all the rage!
|
| 2037: The "Mind-Meets-Code" era begins, allowing developers to
| write code directly with their thoughts. Unfortunately, this
| leads to a surge in "accidental" code commits when programmers
| have random thoughts about pizza while coding.
|
| 2040: The "Everything-as-a-Service" (EaaS) model reaches its
| peak, where even physical activities like jogging or cooking are
| offered as subscription services. People realize they miss the
| old days of doing things for free and embark on a global "DIY
| Renaissance."
| 0dayz wrote:
| There are I think certain issues with this timeline, for starters
| I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists
| work (the real issue is not even usually piracy but instead
| parasitic piracy and forgery, hence why copyright exist
| originally).
|
| Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an
| artist have to gamble with getting money for their work.
|
| Similarly there are most likely valid reasons for certain other
| implementations on this list, to combat spam or bots.
|
| In other words it's the unscrupulous and lazy uses of these tools
| that is I think the issue and also the fact that the passion and
| energy we project so often gets caught up in an absolutist
| crusades agenda instead of using said energy and passion to learn
| and listen to understand why these things develop so we can
| either politically change or create better alternatives.
|
| Look at FSF as an example, it has lost a lot of relevance because
| it's been pushed and guided to only hiss and screech at anything
| that moves that isn't pure free software based on its own
| definition, what FSF could instead use to fund gnu projects that
| are better alternatives to the proprietary one (like gcc) or they
| could create a new middle of the road license that better
| competes with permissive licenses.
|
| Another example is the right to repair lobbying, this is an
| excellent case of how you make actual change happen.
|
| So I'm personally is not a fan of these actions and tools on the
| list but you have to understand the nuances of why they exist to
| properly work against it.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the
| artists work
|
| > Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why
| an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work.
|
| This is the current state for nearly every single artist even
| _with_ DRM, because things like DRM seem to almost exclusively
| benefit a handful of people at the rest of the world's expense.
| 0dayz wrote:
| Yes, but those are factors that does not involve
| piracy/forgery.
|
| My point is that no drm doesn't give any advantage to the
| artist from a monetary pov.
|
| Drm at least makes it less likely an artist will lose out on
| potential sales.
|
| Hence why I make the point that if we want a drm free world,
| we should focus on coming up with better alternatives to what
| we have.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > we should focus on coming up with better alternatives to
| what we have
|
| Agree.
|
| But the best alternative might actually be one where
| artists (Disney included) can't "own" their art and where
| you can't make money selling copies of digital files.
| 0dayz wrote:
| I don't think so, it's too idealistic in todays world,
| even if we eliminate all form of material capital - art I
| think will only increase in value as it will become more
| valuable and competitive for us.
|
| I think a better solution as of right now is a
| redefinition of copyright, that copyright is handled
| primary by a agency like the Copyright Office that deals
| with registration and licensing of said copyright work.
|
| And copyright itself would be granted to the individuals
| who created said creative work (we would probably need to
| make clear distinctions between say creative art and more
| "logical" things like code) and they would be payed
| loyalty for each type of license the copyright office
| would issue (license for private use, in a 1 time
| production, continuous and lifetime license).
|
| Companies could sponsor said creative work and get a free
| lifetime license.
|
| Obviously I'm not a lawyer but I believe something like
| this, where copyright is as rigid in protection towards
| the original creators and allows for a much more fluid
| exchange of information depending on circumstance is at
| least a step in the right direction.
| ftxbro wrote:
| lol it starts only as far back as 2011
| berniedurfee wrote:
| 2007 - Apple releases the iPhone and begins the age of the gilded
| cage of mobile devices.
| perihelions wrote:
| The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy
| consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your
| property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience
| I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so
| immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not
| to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to
| exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics
| of civilization, like, what are ownership rights?
|
| In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller
| relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle
| (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever
| the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would
| step into your home and tell you "no"?
|
| Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your
| own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort
| of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing
| hardware means.
| mhb wrote:
| Wickard v. Filburn
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37370108) should fuel a
| similar sense of outrage.
| salawat wrote:
| But how else will the enlightened Federal Government use it's
| reach to micromanage everyone's lives?
|
| (I completely agree with you however.)
| drewcoo wrote:
| In the before times there were phones owned by AT&T attached to
| landlines in every home and business. Attaching your own phone
| and repairing the phone company's were not allowed.
|
| This seems a lot like the same business model you're saying
| didn't exist before.
|
| In fact, AT&T was more draconian. People can pay off their cell
| phones today. The old wall-tethered units had a monthly rental
| fee in perpituity.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| At least they were up front about the fact you were renting
| it. If it broke they replaced/repaired it.
| kjrose wrote:
| So many folks don't seem to have remember this. IBM was also
| the same with the giant mainframes. Even now, if you have a
| power system, it's pretty much mandatory to pay an ongoing
| "service agreement" or very quickly you'll discover you have
| major issues.
|
| I hate that the system has it where you don't own anything
| and you are supposed to be happy with it. But from a market
| perspective what else can they do? They need to make a
| regular income to pay for the development and such, but they
| also need to deal with the fact that a competitor who offers
| a freemium or product at a loss but where they can at some
| point in the future hide future costs will just naturally
| win.
| jjav wrote:
| > In the before times there were phones owned by AT&T
| attached to landlines in every home and business. Attaching
| your own phone and repairing the phone company's were not
| allowed.
|
| The difference is, culturally that didn't go too well with
| people so hating in MaBell was a thing. Enough so that it
| forced politicians to enforce anti-trust laws and break it
| up, eliminating all these restrictions.
|
| I fear there is no political backbone today to do anything to
| the monopolists that own the hardware we "buy" from them.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Also, you didnt use to own your mobile phone number.
|
| In the US, at least, it literally took an act of Congress for
| customers to be allowed to port their numbers between
| wireless providers.
| baq wrote:
| Nobody would willingly give up their moat.
| salawat wrote:
| See California and the Colorado River.
| RunSet wrote:
| > So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're
| forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership
| rights?
|
| ...
|
| > Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control
| your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is
| sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of
| computing hardware means.
|
| The teeming masses praising Steam for cutting out the middleman
| seem unacquainted with the first-sale doctrine.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Consumer PC hardware is the exception though. Android and iOS
| are more or less exactly that: computers that you may have paid
| for but that you do not actually own. Ditto Chromebooks.
| EGreg wrote:
| Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing
| that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation
| takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle
| buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB).
|
| If you don't have access to the source code, you can't fork it.
| And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our
| public forums) won't give you their back-end software. Not even
| HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even
| Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism
| system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or
| sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the
| corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem
| forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with
| wall street ownership.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
|
| If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly
| saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004
| may remember the tagline: "One Man Saw it Coming". I feel like
| Will Smith's character. Except that I have been doing something
| about it.
|
| 1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market
|
| We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have
| very little say. And all of this is because we don't have a
| viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this
| software be available to everyone.
|
| https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
|
| There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been
| the most successful. We've quietly been building something far,
| far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over
| 100+ countries. But you probably haven't heard of it. It's a
| web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating
| System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on
| Linux or Wordpress.
|
| While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned
| from app stores by governments, something like this is much
| harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some
| may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and
| corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a
| backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people
| would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front
| end). But until then, it's a way for We the People to continue
| building an innovating in the face of corporate and government
| crackdowns.
|
| Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-
| a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
|
| Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the
| difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-
| healthy-communities/
|
| 2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks
|
| In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will
| host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a
| landlord.
|
| This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I'm going to
| extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they're the
| most benign "Landlords", who can be trusted to uphold the rules
| and never change them (if enough of the community doesn't like
| the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules).
|
| Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR
| VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other
| architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more
| generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables /
| Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety,
| safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer,
| see https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they
| have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that's
| dedication!!)
|
| I don't just build things, but I seek out and connect with
| people who design, administer and build all these open source
| platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim
| Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years.
| In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar
| Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with
| Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn't keep in touch
| w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and
| publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my
| discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the _first_
| decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
|
| If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least
| the type of distributed software it represents, here is my
| rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive
| critique of it:
|
| https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
|
| 3. Economics
|
| Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a
| private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist
| system. "I built it, I own it". You end up with Zuck
| controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon
| controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean "Meta" and "X". And if they
| want to, they'll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend
| their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com's
| "everything app".
|
| On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift
| economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people
| collectively own the means of production and eliminate the
| shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives,
| credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn't end
| up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE
|
| To me, utility tokens represent a "libertarian socialist"
| alternative to the "capitalist" system in which our current
| infrastructure has been developed. Stallman's Free Software
| Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps "distributism"
| (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually
| really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we
| need an accounting system, and that's utility tokens.
|
| Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that
| happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian
| socialism: "collective ownership of the means of production."
| Note that it doesn't require a central government, but
| collective ownership.
|
| When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the
| buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your
| eventual network. They don't start to demand that your company
| extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that
| goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant
| socialist cooperative (like eg a driver's cooperative, or
| FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don't
| exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck
| and Elon do.
|
| When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an
| ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and
| more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps
| will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they
| can profit.
|
| It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying "competition
| is for losers, build a monopoly" and together with Sean Parker
| killing all Mark Zuckerberg's open source tendencies (such as
| when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of
| giving it to Microsoft for $1 million
| https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-
| artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software:
| (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always
| retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded
| diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you
| should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is
| literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and
| other AI which his company spends a ton of money training.
| Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong
| to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do
| today.
|
| When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power,
| then they can boil any frog. And if they don't want to, they'll
| be replaced by those who will. That's how the system works.
|
| Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a
| few hours a week. It's out there, it's free to try. Contribute,
| get certified, serve your local communities, and make money
| doing it!
| carapace wrote:
| Thank you, for this comment and for the work you've done, all
| this time.
|
| - - - -
|
| THe thing that gets me is that people seem pretty much
| content with things. E.g. they'll complain about Amazon and
| then in the next breath admit that they still shop there.
| Etc.
|
| Some of it is complacency. (A friend of mine, an academic,
| was talking about "the pain" of switching from Twitter to
| Mastodon. I had to stop him. You just click some buttons? You
| don't even have to get out of your chair.)
|
| A lot of it seems to be apathy.
|
| And then there's contentment with ignorance.
|
| People say that this is just "human nature" but I feel that's
| a cop out.
|
| - - - -
|
| FWIW I think of Capitalism as a kind of economic API. It's
| very useful, but you have to run it within certain resource
| limits and policies. (E.g. don't "eat the rich", just tax
| them at the rate that we did fifty years ago, eh?)
|
| Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth,
| we won history. We just haven't really noticed yet.
|
| We have to stop fighting each other and take care of each
| other.
| Aleklart wrote:
| Amazing, not a single mention of FLOSS.
| EGreg wrote:
| You may have missed this part further down in the economics
| section: _Stallman's Free Software Movement is more like a
| gift economy, or perhaps "distributism" (a 19th-century
| Christian economic system). Those are actually really good,
| but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an
| accounting system, and that's utility tokens._
|
| I believe that decentralized movements need to be named
| properly. If Stallman named it "Liberating Software"
| instead of "Free Software", his movement could have
| attracted a lot more devotees from the wider open source
| movement.
|
| Similarly, I believe (my personal viewe) thay if BLM had
| simply called themselves BLAM (Black Lives Also Matter)
| their message would have been crystal clear and would have
| attracted far less controversy and much more support across
| the political spectrum, avoiding such rejoinders as "All
| Lives Matter." In fact it rolls off the tongue better and
| stronger: BLAM!
|
| When starting a decentralized movement, the naming is
| crucial as it affects positioning long after it has become
| bigger than those who began it.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > When starting a decentralized movement, the naming is
| crucial as it affects positioning long after it has
| become bigger than those who began it.
|
| Like your Qbix? https://qbix.com
| EGreg wrote:
| Agreed, the movement itself may need a different name.
| Any suggestions?
|
| I started Intercoin and Intercloud later. Our apps are
| named Groups and Calendars.
| ballenf wrote:
| What's the alternative to "I built it, I own it"? Seems like
| forced open sourcing under threat of government force would
| be worse than what we have now.
|
| Also Meta these days is open sourcing more ML tools than any
| other corp, so I'm not sure the claim that "killing ... all
| open-source tendencies" is supportable.
| EGreg wrote:
| Who said anything about _forced_ open sourcing?
|
| People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy
| when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink
| explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
|
| Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific
| disciplines to publish one's discoveries openly for
| everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma
| departments -- there, the intellectual property system has
| made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made
| drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces
| this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12
| years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93
|
| Newton said, "if I saw further, it's because I stood on the
| shoulders of giants". He didn't pay rent to the giants for
| those shoulders.
|
| Thomas Jefferson said, "He who receives an idea from me,
| receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he
| who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
| darkening me."
|
| Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture
| capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here
| in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire
| book called World After Capital about this very thing, and
| is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org
|
| Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility
| Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network,
| and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without
| government force:
|
| https://avc.com/category/blockchain/
|
| I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should
| be thankful to Zuck's tendencies, which he can exercise in
| an area that _isn't a core business proposition of
| facebook_. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z's
| tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents
| and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have
| easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type
| been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like
| Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see
| FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?
| traverseda wrote:
| I'm imagining something like a "software choice" act which
| requires all network connected devices to be able to, in
| principle, have their bootloader unlocked and an
| alternative operating system loaded in with relative ease.
| No specialized tools, you can't say "well just unsolder
| this chip" but you can display a prominent warning that the
| bootloader is unlocked. Basically do it like android does
| it, but by law.
|
| There are obviously some specifics there, like if the
| camera on my phone has a firmware blob, does that need to
| be able to have the firmware updated? A lot of little
| caveats like that make such a law difficult, but I think
| with hardware access the open source community can flourish
| on devices like smart TVs, etc.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| This reads like you're taking their post in bad faith or
| otherwise didn't read all of it. They go on to mention:
|
| > ... you should be thanking [Zuckerberg's] open source
| sympathies as he is literally having his company give away
| open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a
| ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and
| doing this, the AI [would] belong to only a select few ...
|
| You're right that such sympathies weren't exactly "killed"
| (instead "discouraged") by advisors but pressing this
| mistake in phrasing is certainly a bit of a straw man
| argument.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Reddit used to be open source:
|
| 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_upda
| te... 2. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
| jongjong wrote:
| As a software engineer, I don't think capitalism is the only
| factor preventing big companies like Facebook, Twitter and
| Reddit from releasing their back end code... You'll find that
| their back end code is a real mess with millions of lines
| scattered all over the place, with various parts tightly
| coupled to specific hardware and software vendors; I can
| almost guarantee that if Facebook made their back end code
| fully open source, you'd probably need a team of 100 full
| time engineers working round the clock for 1 year or 2 to
| launch a Facebook clone... These platforms are way over-
| engineered; the technology essentially cannot exist without
| the people. Facebook as a platform is not merely code; it's
| an insanely complex amalgamation of both people and code. It
| would be useless to make their back end code open source as
| essentially nobody else would be able to run it.
|
| That's why Twitter software engineers were making fun of
| people wanting to release the Twitter algorithm... They were
| well aware of what a complex mess it was and how unrealistic
| that was. People have the right intuition though; it doesn't
| need to be so complex. It is complex by design.
| pierat wrote:
| That's a long diatribe for what can be reduced down to
| "another techbro excuse why climate-destroying pre-mined (for
| shareholders!) shitcoin is better".
|
| The only thing shitcoin made "better" was how to pay the
| ransomware industry.
| EGreg wrote:
| Pretty sure you're reading your own biases into this
|
| Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work?
| Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy --
| every other decentralized system does not.
|
| Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every _other_ coin so
| your own diatribe is incoherent.
|
| Most people on HN are techbros
|
| Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems
| architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do
| it!
|
| For instance, I am. I think we can do better than
| BlockChain. That's why I designed InterCloud, and putting
| together a team to build it.
|
| I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore.
| IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of
| them fit anything you're bitching about.
|
| In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the
| frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any
| open, free, permissionless alternatives. You'd do better by
| doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation
| happen. You seem to have no solution.
| pierat wrote:
| > Pretty sure you're reading your own biases into this
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
| -Upton Sinclair
|
| > Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-
| work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of
| energy -- every other decentralized system does not.
|
| All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and
| resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.
| Bitcoin chews through massive amounts of power. Ethereum
| chews through GPUs and lowers expected lifetimes. CHIA
| chews through SSDs in weeks of massive amounts of writes.
| Even running IPFS client chews through CPU/RAM/network
| like there's no tomorrow. Filecoin is 10x worse.
|
| > Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin
| so your own diatribe is incoherent.
|
| I include all of them. But how quaint that you invalidate
| me as some round-about defense of your own shitcoin.
|
| > Most people on HN are techbros
|
| Most != all. Some of us are actual socialists. You know,
| "know thy enemy" and all that.
|
| > Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed
| systems architecture. But if you think you can do better,
| please do it!
|
| Its already been made. Its called Hawala (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala ). And its an easy
| way to send money across areas and even currency changes.
| And its based on reputation, not some silly climate-
| destroying math, so you shitcoiners cant make money pre-
| mining the chain before opening it up to the public.
|
| Again, thats really the problem with all this
| decentralized "currency". Its a terrible merge between
| money transmitter and money printer. And you posit "But
| if you think you can do better, please do it!"... and you
| refuse the counter-question of 'Do we even need this?'
|
| > For instance, I am. I think we can do better than
| BlockChain. That's why I designed InterCloud, and putting
| together a team to build it.
|
| I repeat: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
|
| Basically, I'm saying this for others who read this now,
| and not for you. This is a tacit admittance that you
| cannot look at other perspectives in this realm, and must
| see your path as the "only and true path", because
| otherwise you would be rejecting your own idea and
| business plan. (And I know very few who can
| dispassionately look at their own passions.)
|
| > I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore.
| IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of
| them fit anything you're bitching about....In every case,
| people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being
| boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free,
| permissionless alternatives. You'd do better by doing
| nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation
| happen. You seem to have no solution.
|
| And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a
| quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of
| "decentralized" arent even defensible. And the other scam
| here is that all these with shitcoins attached have been
| heavily pre-mined to "pay the upfront investment cost".
| But again, with you being a shitcoin founder, you're well
| aware how this grift works.
|
| I used to run the blockchain meetup here locally. Some of
| my contributions are still used by a lot of folks. But
| after a hard deep dive into dozens of blockchain systems,
| the only real benefit is to the ransomware industry.
| Well, that, and a whole bunch more decomissioned power
| plants being spun back up for shitcoin of various types.
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoi
| n-m...
|
| But again, I know what I'm arguing against. And frankly,
| you're wrong and deluded that anti-government hyper-
| capitalism money is the way to accomplish this. It aint.
| EGreg wrote:
| I don't refuse to counter-question "do we even need it?"
| I have written articles at length why we need smart
| contracts, and I linked to it in the original comment
| (answer to Moxie). You just ignored it in your rush to
| ascend your soapbox!
|
| I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?
|
| I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the
| salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The
| venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at
| the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that
| bank kicked off by Peter "build a monopoly" Thiel. You
| support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any
| decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and
| precrime as well?
|
| Perhaps the above doesn't describe you, only a bunch of
| tech bros _like_ you in the very shareholder-based
| ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is
| the subject of "boiling the frog" we are talking about.
| But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming
| things based on whatever "Web3" means to you.
|
| First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of
| work and _shitcoins_. Then, when I point out the issues
| with what you say, you do an adhominem.
|
| You continue to be deluded. I just got through
| criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel's that would make
| many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate
| alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of
| "libertarian socialism". You turn around and call that
| hyper-capitalism.
|
| Well, how about this... in your system, you have
| monopolies and hardly any competition. It's digital
| Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system
| because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the
| system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide
| better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc)
| and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single
| point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.
|
| > _All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and
| resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing._
|
| Sigh. You sound like you're in 2013. Are you talking
| about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it
| since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in
| ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc
| back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing
| people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps,
| and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we
| removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the
| incentives publicly 5 years ago:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2018/03/there...
|
| You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin
| and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the
| other distributed systems...
|
| _> And in every case, the whole network is actually run
| by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of
| "decentralized" arent even defensible._
|
| Really? "The whole network" of Dat/Hypercore and
| Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run "by a quorum"?
| You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash
| tables are before spouting such nonsense.
|
| Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without
| engaging in anything approaching substantive,
| intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I
| say with myriad examples that illustrate general
| patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-
| testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are
| you?
|
| Saying "you're wrong and deluded" and declaring "it aint"
| unilaterally isn't actual substantive argument. It's just
| asserting bias.
| goku12 wrote:
| General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still
| available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will
| be gone soon.
|
| The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs
| that doesn't do anything more than just display the video
| signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs
| out there take too long to start and they almost always phone
| home to their overlords. The really worrying part is how
| normalized it is. I remember someone here on HN contemptuously
| dismissing my concern, saying that dumb-TVs are called
| 'computer monitors'. How many affordable 'computer monitors'
| above 30 inch do you know? And give it enough time - even
| computer monitors will become 'smart monitors', unless
| something is done now.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| If you are big TV brand player, the way it works is you go to
| a contract manufacturer and say you want to do a TV. They
| will tell you what options you have - what sizes, features,
| quality levels etc (configuration) and at what price they
| will sell to _you_ at different order volumes and the
| timelines for them to deliver to you. The offer you get will
| not be same as the offer they make to a bigger player who is
| a more favored partner to them. They will tell you if you
| become big, you will get better deals. You come back home.
| Then, you do your market research and decide where in the
| market's price/feature/quality curve is an opportunity for
| you today and what is your 10 year strategy to become big.
| Then, you also find out someone is doing a higher quality
| product but somehow pricing it lower - they are cross-
| subsidizing it. In the recent decade that has been through
| data/ads deals. Then, you study what happened to those
| players who didn't do data/ads deals and launched the product
| at actual the price with some decent margin built-in. They
| didn't do so well. Consumers cared more about feature spec
| and price deals than about data/ads fine-print. A lot of the
| features are to do with software OS. Then you discover that
| the software OS vendor has lock-in contracts with the
| contract manufacturer. You want to use that manufacturer who
| has great quality TV hardware components, you don't really
| have a choice but to use that software vendor's OS that comes
| baked into the TV by the manufacturer and let them take your
| customer's data forever. That's the current world we are in.
| [deleted]
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I mean, any smart TV is a dumb tv once you don't connect it
| to the internet?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Unless it refuses to turn on without the internet
| connection.
| maccard wrote:
| What TV doesn't start without an internet connection?
| goku12 wrote:
| TV has no purpose connecting to internet in the first
| place. But that's the reality now. It's more or less
| guaranteed that this slippery slope will lead to TVs that
| won't start without an internet connection - and only
| such TVs soon afterwards.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Just wait. With time this will happen, sooner than later
| I'm sure.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| wait until a technology like sidewalk(or heck, IOT-scale 5g
| with sim-less connection to data-herding servers)
| baq wrote:
| Still takes too long to boot to display.
| goku12 wrote:
| TVs long ago used to take up to 10 seconds to startup
| because the electron gun at the back of the CRT needed
| time to heat up. The advent of TFT panels gave us the
| hope that that wait would be a thing of the past. Now
| instead we wait minutes for its spyware, adware and
| bloatware ridden OS to boot up and phone home. We're
| living is a world that's the opposite of what technology
| promised us.
| eps wrote:
| For now.
| baq wrote:
| You misunderstood the intent. That's exactly how to get a
| small dumb TV.
|
| A large dumb TV is called a digital signage display. Those
| even come with remotes!
| goku12 wrote:
| The question really is, is it affordable? And how long
| before even that option disappears?
| bonzini wrote:
| It won't disappear because it's a different market. A
| digital signage display is a large computer monitor. It
| has a remote, and typically also an RS232 interface to
| communicate what is pressed on the remote (as an
| alternative to HDMI CEC).
| WorldPeas wrote:
| but not everyone wants/is capable of buying a 150lb NEC tv
| made to resist vandalism and such, they just want a flimsy
| plastic panel that takes hdmi from their laptop and pushes
| it to an appreciably large 1080p panel
| maccard wrote:
| I just had look on Amazon and there are 42 inch dumb TVs
| available for about $220. A 32" one is $175
| 20after4 wrote:
| I just looked at amazon and a 42" monitor is about $500
| (for a decent quality one). Where do you find these "dumb
| TVs"?
| maccard wrote:
| https://amzn.eu/d/7A6vnjn - if I search for "non smart
| TV" on Amazon it's the second link. The first is
| ironically a PS1000 smart OLED.
| switch007 wrote:
| This made me think of schools.
|
| Do kids even own their school work done on Chromebooks / Apple
| Tablets / online learning platforms?
|
| Have their parents assigned the rights to the IP?
|
| I wonder how much kids feel ownership of their work done
| electronically
| ben_w wrote:
| I remember, aged 10 or so, my fellow schoolkids thought we
| should get paid for going to school because it was "work".
|
| Around this point, same school but not necessarily the same
| year, someone else in the class thought I'd ripped off their
| idea in the classroom and that this was a copyright
| violation.
|
| Now?
|
| Now I understand that the work done at school is not a
| product, it's at most an extended pre-interview test much
| like a code challenge (not that literal code challenges were
| really possible when I was 10, given a decent C compiler
| would've cost something like 2 week's pre-tax income).
| safety1st wrote:
| All I can say is that in the modern era you have to lead by
| example. Run Linux and Firefox. Use the services from the tech
| giants as little as possible, you won't be able to eliminate
| them, but you can minimize the amount of money and attention
| you give them.
|
| Tell other people.
|
| Contribute. If you work long hours, give a little money to
| FOSS. If you have spare time, spend a bit of it contributing,
| doesn't need to be a lot.
|
| The timeline in the link is not set. The tech world has been
| disrupted many times, if it hadn't been, we'd all be on IBM
| mainframes and typewriters or something. There is no fate but
| what we make. Very few people are aware enough to show up on
| this website and read this thread, so it's on you to do
| something. If you're reading this you are the resistance.
| walteweiss wrote:
| This is the Way!
| [deleted]
| mypastself wrote:
| Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they
| didn't previously? I'm not familiar with any ToS that permits a
| company to repossess your PC or parts of it.
|
| If you're talking about manufacturers making their devices more
| difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor
| modifications, that doesn't mean you can't do what you want
| with the item. It just means you can't force the company to fix
| or replace it free of charge when you do.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I'm not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to
| repossess your PC or parts of it.
|
| Google just decreed that, starting 2 days ago, nobody may
| distribute software for my phone...
| paulluuk wrote:
| The only example I can think of is beer bottles. I know it's
| not related to computer hardware, but I'm just trying to
| think of examples where you purchase a consumer item and it's
| still not legally yours.
|
| The reason why it remains property of the brewery, is so that
| they can re-use it when you recycle it. It might be something
| that's specific for my country, though.
| mpsprd wrote:
| here in Canada with returnable bottles, you actually buy
| the bottle container with a cover, but if you return it
| they buy it back from you.
| schemathings wrote:
| Germany?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not that the PCs come with more strings attached than
| they did before - it's that many people, especially younger
| generation, are so used to those strings controlling their
| lives through their mobile devices and everything being a
| service, that they _don 't realize_ the same isn't true with
| a regular PC. At least isn't yet.
| perihelions wrote:
| They don't. I think the commenter was guessing by
| generalizing from software/subscription service ToS's, which
| are ubiquitous; plus the fusion of hardware/software in
| inseparable packages, like the iPhone hardware, which is a
| brick without an ongoing Apple subscription.
| aficionado87 wrote:
| > a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription
|
| This just isn't true. You don't have to give Apple another
| dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple
| subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Agreed its optional. But Apple will do their best
| (worst?) to get you to use it. Defaults to the free 5g,
| resetting preferences after OS upgrades, nagging prompts,
| etc.
| perihelions wrote:
| It may be a _free_ subscription, but it 's still an
| ongoing, no-opt-out commercial software service
| relationship with Apple, Inc. That's why it has a Terms
| of Service [0] - which is effectively a ToS for the
| iPhone hardware itself, as there is no way to use it
| without Apple's OS.
|
| [0]
| https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf
| (the iOS ToS)
|
| (And I think it's noteworthy how that ToS' language
| bounces freely between "hardware" and "software"; how it
| fluctuates between " _software_ license agreement " and
| "by using your iPhone (" _device_ "), you are agreeing
| to...". Apple hardware and software are fused together:
| there is no practical difference).
| ballenf wrote:
| > I'm not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to
| repossess your PC or parts of it.
|
| I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this. It's
| probably an unpopular example because people seem to broadly
| like it, but it does demonstrate the principal that the
| seller retains full control of the hardware and can
| "repossess" the device. The original purchaser does not
| receive a master unlock code.
|
| Even if locking yourself out of your device is "your fault",
| it doesn't alter the fact that at that point only Apple
| retains control of the device.
|
| Same with bios locks and management engines on PCs.
|
| The idea that possession = ownership is gone. And we're
| almost all ok with that especially since it makes us a little
| safer and more "secure". At least until we can't trust Apple,
| Intel, etc. anymore.
|
| One could argue that the black market value for your locked
| phone compared to unlocked phone is a proxy for how much you
| actually own the phone.
| swayvil wrote:
| Now there's a product. "Universal safety and security".
|
| Universal safety and security is pushed almost
| ubiquitously. Like it's a holy truth. Trumping all other
| concerns. And anybody who argues for anything else is just
| selfish or whatever.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this.
|
| Activation locks were required by law to deter armed theft.
|
| > A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped
| by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25
| percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as
| measured during the 12 months following Apple's
| introduction of the remote locking feature in September
| 2013 as part of iOS 7.
|
| With iOS 8, Apple made its so-called said "kill switch"
| active by default, in accordance with California
| regulation, and that should help the rates of theft
| continue to trend downwards.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-
| lea...
| yenwodyah wrote:
| Well, it wouldn't be the first time that a law with good
| intentions has prefaced a loss of freedom
| jfengel wrote:
| Laws pretty much always mean a loss of freedom, with the
| intent of promoting some other positive goal (often, some
| other freedom). That's why we make them.
|
| Balancing these goals is not easy, but we don't get to
| avoid it just because we want "freedom" as an
| abstraction. It's an important consideration but only one
| when you put a lot of people with conflicting goals
| together.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It's ironic that property rights have been eroded in the
| name of protecting property.
| baq wrote:
| It isn't ironic, it's precisely how it's supposed to
| work.
|
| Laws take freedom (as in do whatever you want) from
| people and give it to other people so the total expected
| gains are bigger than without the law, pretending that
| dishonest lawmakers don't exist (false obviously). Also,
| all laws are bets on their outcomes and sometimes they go
| south.
| naillo wrote:
| A lot of people were just born into this too. People under 27
| or so have never known anything other than this pretty much.
| iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote:
| > In the before-times, [...]
|
| You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you
| bought.
|
| And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them.
|
| They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal
| part of your purchase, just like the manual.
| protomolecule wrote:
| In Russia it was the case even in the 90s, but all locally
| produced consumer electronics in ex-USSR quickly got replaced
| by Japanese and Western devices.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| My first computer was a BBC B. The schematics were IN the
| manual!
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have that thing etched into my memory to the point that I
| probably could still fix a beeb without resorting to
| looking at the schematic.
| perihelions wrote:
| Indeed they seem to be:
|
| https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manu
| a... ( _" BBC Microcomputer Model B +"_)
|
| There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with
| all the components' part numbers that I guess you can
| replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power
| supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97)
| Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has
| access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering
| iron.
| ume wrote:
| I still have the circuit diagram (paper copy) that shipped
| with my Acorn Atom in, ahem, 1981. Didn't ask for it!
|
| (Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a
| simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)
| guy4261 wrote:
| Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a
| though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy
| things that would last. So naturally, the companies that
| made them could not sell new products.
|
| Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended
| up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how
| designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively
| easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only
| 5 years from now, but not earlier.
|
| I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path.
| Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also
| being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems
| like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _I wonder if there was a way we could take the other
| path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but
| also being financially sound._
|
| Regulation.
|
| Fun fact: this is still possible! It's a _little_ harder
| - it 'll have to be steadily introduced, in multiple
| countries at once (so we don't break international
| trade), starting in the areas where it's cheapest to
| produce lasting equipment (so enforcement doesn't take
| out entire sectors), and I don't yet know what the
| regulations would _look_ like, but if it 's possible to
| make lasting things, it's possible to require
| manufacturers to make things last.
|
| We need to do this, sooner or later, anyway: we simply
| don't have the raw resources to continue as we are.
| echelon wrote:
| > we simply don't have the raw resources to continue as
| we are
|
| What runs out, and when does it run out? Are there
| alternatives? And can we source it from asteroids?
| jkestner wrote:
| I'm in favor of regulation, but that's not happening now
| for the same reason that we have the problem in the first
| place. We're all tied up together in capitalism, and
| anything that slows the acceleration of growth that our
| retirement funds require is not going to fly. If it's
| going to happen, it's because enough people have been
| excluded from the rewards of the system (we're getting
| there).
|
| Easy to nay-say, though. To me, a solution starts with
| spreading those values that make it possible for
| _consumers_ to stop sliding down the growth-over-
| everything slope. Mittelstands, shinise, Patagonia, yada
| yada. Can you as an entrepreneur make a sustainable
| business that isn't just for well-off conscious
| consumers? What's the product where longevity is
| inextricable from the core feature set, not just a trade-
| off with cost?
|
| Right-to-repair is a decent example of where regulation
| has enough support across the ideological spectrum to get
| a foot in the door. It would be cool if a company who
| made profit on service now decides it doesn't want to
| compete on service and instead takes more profit upfront
| with a higher-quality product. Forcing USB-C on phones
| feels like a small thing to me, but if it sets a
| precedent where interfaces are standardized for
| sustainability, that could be amazing. (No, I'm not
| worried about governments slowing progress. Locked
| ecosystems are doing just fine at that.)
| grishka wrote:
| Not only schematics, but what amounts to a complete service
| manual. You were expected to troubleshoot and fix things
| yourself back then.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Including nice and handy little drawings of what your scope
| (if you had access to one) should show you if you put a
| probe to a particular test point.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| And source code for the customizations (essentially drivers)
| that the OS needed for your particular hardware!
|
| #1 reason I hack on vintage computers: top to bottom
| documentation and source, and still small enough to fit in
| one human's head.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| I had an old IBM luggable at one point that had the BIOS
| source listed in manual.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Well things are so complex now that if they provide you
| with source code, it would be so easy to make 0days.
| ben_w wrote:
| The relative security of open and closed source operating
| systems implies not much of a difference in that regard.
| wincy wrote:
| Don't you think in the long term this would result in
| better source code and hardened software, similar to
| what's happened with the Linux source code?
|
| Right now the NSA just has all the 0days instead.
| passion__desire wrote:
| I agree with you, I am just highlighting companies'
| thinking why they would wanna protect their source code.
| security by obscurity. Also having a copy of source could
| also mean the companies might have cut corners. Many
| leaks of future products are now guessed from source
| code. Also it is so easy to copy as well by other
| companies.
| naruhodo wrote:
| I remember my father opened up a TV set to fix it in the
| early 80s. The circuit diagram was affixed to the inside back
| cover of the set.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I bought a vintage printer (juki 6100) to tinker with
| recently, I was pretty shocked how the manual included
| circuit and timing diagrams, and gave instructions on how to
| construct adapter cables for various machines.
|
| Also the "driver" installation for IBM PC is just
| instructions on how to manually patch wordstar to work with
| it.
| smitty1e wrote:
| That just has to return to being a market differentiator and
| sales feature for gear.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I took apart an old bakelite phone to replace the cord with
| an RJ11 one (connected two old phones together with a Cisco
| SPA adapter, the kids love calling each other) and was
| surprised when there was a little bit of paper wedged between
| two components with the full schematic!
|
| edit: went to the trouble of uploading some photos
| https://kalleboo.com/microblog/posts/111001749605994561.html
| 0xEF wrote:
| This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest in
| repairing tube radios from the 30's & 40's. One of the first
| things I realized was how generally easy it was to find
| schematics of popular brands and models. Some were even
| pasted right inside the radio shell!
|
| I also hack and repair modern stuff, and it is so common to
| open up a product just to end up staring at an epoxy blob.
| User manuals hold no mention of service tips, but instead are
| near-useless "quick start" guides that might review
| functionality, if the manufacturer is feeling generous.
|
| Modern tech seems so remarkably spiteful toward the consumer
| and consumers themselves just seem to roll with it. Sometimes
| I hear them use arguments like "Company X doesn't want
| Company Z making knock-offs" as though these knock-off
| manufacturers aren't already expert reverse engineers. I feel
| the locking down of consumer tech is more about forcing the
| consumer into a state of dependancy on the manufacturer than
| it is about protecting any intellectual properties. They
| conflate "repeate business" with customers being forced to
| return for repairs or replacements instead of willfully
| returning because they trust the quality and brand.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I wouldn't say they are intentionally spiteful, just that
| modern electronics are complex enough, especially highly
| integrated stuff like smartphones, that the OEM's suppliers
| would be unhappy if detailed schematics were released.
| Since they would not be willing to guarantee on the record
| that they are correct, nor would they want stuff impinging
| on actual trade secrets to be revealed.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| That wasn't less true for any other appliance that's ever
| existed, largely because of the availability of the
| schematics.
|
| People have a right to know what they're buying.
| Companies are testing legal and cultural boundaries,
| silently changing functionality and usability by altering
| software or access to required services after sale.
|
| It's not "too complex", it'd just be a hassle if people
| knew.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _It 's not "too complex"_"
|
| A valve radio had ~50 discrete components[1]. The first
| semiconductors had triple that number of components in a
| square millimeter in 1971[2], a modern CPU is in the tens
| or hundreds of millions of transistors per square
| millimetre. That's more components than the Encyclopedia
| Britannica had words in 29 volumes[3]. How are you going
| to 'know what you're buying' if you don't know anything
| about the bit which makes up most of the complexity and
| does most of the work? How are 'people' going to know
| anything about the CPU by getting lumbered a dozen
| bookshelves worth of schematics?
|
| [1] One 1960s valve radio schematic found from Google: ht
| tps://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Is9qxCCu2S8/VmZ44qHP1nI/AAAAAAAB
| Q...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transi
| stor_co...
|
| [3] https://patricktreardon.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/06/Encyc...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yes the practical aspect of schematics logistics would
| prevent this even if everything else was in an ideal
| world.
|
| Even a fairly old ARM based CPU such as in the Pi 4, has
| billions of transistors. And miles of wiring.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| All this means is that you move one level up on what it
| is you are diagramming and replacing. I don't expect to
| replace the integrated circuit on my instant pot, but I
| _do_ expect to be able to replace the control board or
| the thermal fuse. And instructions on how to do these
| things would be great! A simple diagram showing how the
| larger things are connected is all that 's necessary. I
| don't need a map of all the traces, or a list of the
| surface mount components.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Speaking of access, if you own minecraft with a mojang
| account you need to migrate it to a Microsoft account by
| September 19th.
|
| If you don't Microsoft, one of the wealthiest
| corporations in existence, will steal your copy of
| minecraft that you purchased elsewhere.
|
| Sorry if this isn't on topic, I'm very salty over the
| migration.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Microsoft showing it's totalitarian real character again.
| So happy that Minetest[1] exists and gives that warm Open
| Source glow, just knowing that your using Microsoft free
| software and it works fine on Linux too.
|
| [1] https://www.minetest.net/
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Both can be true. It may be a happy side effect that you
| can't easily repair your device and it's hard to give
| schematics
| Hizonner wrote:
| Fuck their trade secrets.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Trade secrets are not secret once in the wild, and are
| immediately invalidated as a result.
|
| Schematics for things sold, are never trade secrets.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This is false, there are thousands of examples of
| products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are
| difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering
| that they are effectively considered such, even by
| industry experts.
|
| e.g. Apple's fixed glass trackpads
|
| Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since
| trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place,
| unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _This is false, there are thousands of examples of
| products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are
| difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering
| that they are effectively considered such, even by
| industry experts._
|
| That's not how trade secrets work. If you give me a
| device, and I figure out how that part of it goes
| together, the trade secret dies. There is no protection
| except an attempt at secrecy, and once someone is retail
| sold hardware, they may do anything they choose with it,
| thus the idea of trying to maintain a secret, when it is
| in someone else's hands, is silly.
|
| _Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since
| trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place,
| unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks._
|
| Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are.
| Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation
| either, they're merely valid upon creation.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There is no validator for the 'validity' of trade
| secrets, it's simply nonsense to say that they can be
| 'validated' or 'invalidated'.
|
| You can't dodge this point, which you appear to be doing
| as I never claimed copyright law is uniform in all
| jurisdictions worldwide, nor was that implied.
|
| If you don't understand how these things work, it's
| better to not make bizarre claims.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _I never claimed copyright law is uniform in all
| jurisdictions worldwide, nor was that implied._
|
| What on earth are you even talking about?
|
| Regardless, you can invalidate anything. EG, one can make
| a claim "Hey, that manufacturing process is my trade
| secret!", and that claim can most certainly be invalided.
| It can also be validated.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > What on earth are you even talking about?
|
| This:
|
| > Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are.
| Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation
| either, they're merely valid upon creation.
|
| Some types of copyright requires approval via some
| organized entity in many jurisdictions, that is easily
| discoverable via a quick Google search by any passing
| reader. The prior comment appears like a deflection from
| the main point, since the fact that some jurisdictions
| operate differently is simply irrelevant as I never
| claimed otherwise, nor was that implied anywhere in the
| preceding comment chain.
|
| Like I said you can't avoid the fact that 'invalidating'
| trade secrets makes no sense. They can be revealed, they
| can become so widely known that the label no longer
| applies, and so on.
|
| But 'validity' whether legal, logical, etc., can not
| apply to them.
|
| And in any case there are many real world products which
| so far have not been reverse engineered to a sufficient
| degree to recreate, such as the fixed glass trackpad
| previously mentioned. If you can prove otherwise then I
| would welcome a link.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Michael, my simple point was that copyright, like trade
| secrets, requires no validation _in some jurisdictions_
| by default. For some reason you view this as a
| distraction, instead, it was merely illustrative.
|
| In terms of validation, I have no idea why you think one
| cannot invalidate someone claiming to have a trade
| secret. You can literally invalidate anything, someone is
| trying to assert as valid.
|
| A bottle blonde could claim that is their original hair
| colour, and one could invalidate that claim too.
|
| You seem stuck on an internal definition of 'validate'.
| Your internal definition seems wrong.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The entire economic system was different. Even something as
| basic as a radio, fridge or TV cost serious money, so very
| few people had them in the first place, they expected it to
| last and be easily repairable, particularly as shipping
| took a lot of time and was expensive just as well. Farmers
| living out in the country had it even worse, for them the
| ability to repair devices literally in the field can be a
| question that makes their entire business viable or not.
|
| Today? Everything is cheap, you can fedex something across
| continents in a matter of a few days. When the TV is
| broken, fuck it, a new one is a click and a day of waiting
| time away, free delivery included. Computers? Phones? Just
| the same.
|
| Building products that last or are repairable just isn't
| competitive enough any more. Yes, there are niches like
| Fairphone, Framework and Pine, but that's the point: they
| are niches for nerds who care and are able and willing to
| spend the money.
|
| On top of that, technology has gotten ever smaller and
| smaller. Up until a decade or two ago, most electronics was
| through-hole stuff that even a complete dunderhead could
| repair with a soldering iron, a bit of solder and some
| tweezers. Modern SMT? That needs highly specialized
| machines and an awful lot of knowledge about stuff like
| temperature ramps, not to mention passive components being
| as small as a tiny piece of sand. And if you want to verify
| signal integrity, some random scope won't cut it either at
| modern high speed buses.
| bbarn wrote:
| How many people cared about those schematics? Most people
| would say "Gee, instead of this paper of things I don't
| understand, having a list of the radio stations in this
| spot would be more useful"
|
| As someone who found computing in general through the joy
| of taking broken electronic things apart and trying to fix
| them, it does sadden me too when I see a black blob over a
| circuit board but most people are just happy they're cheap
| and easy to replace and toss em away. Most developers I
| know today can't understand basic electrical circuits, even
| though they are the very foundation of everything we do.
| But like my previous analogy, most would rather just see
| the magic happen when they install something, write a
| little bit of code, and see results.
|
| Some of us do value privacy, security, and even the
| underlying things that make stuff work. We're in the
| minority. The vast majority of people simply don't even
| care. I've tried explaining it to my wife, or my mother,
| that some piece of software might track them, know about
| them, restrict them, whatever, and the opinion I usually
| get back is "Oh, it doesn't already do that?" People joke
| about Facebook ads being something they just talked about
| all the time and it doesn't even phase them that the
| reality is very near to that.
|
| People simply don't care enough to make a change in the
| laws that would prevent things like this.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| > How many people cared about those schematics?
|
| That's the neat thing! For most people, you don't! Until
| it breaks and you need to fix it, and the manufacturer is
| out-of-business. But then you can present that strange
| schematic to your local electronics repairer who can fix
| it up with a few spare commodity components.
| api wrote:
| Privacy loss is like climate change. People don't care
| because the really bad things haven't happened yet.
| People who keep telling them about the bad stuff that is
| likely to happen are alarmists, and like with climate
| change there's an industry with a vested interest in
| downplaying the issue.
|
| A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are
| doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm
| think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now
| be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime
| because you are driving someone one state over. Even if
| you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to
| prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling
| particularly self righteous today.
|
| People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian
| politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are
| one populist demagogue away.
|
| When that happens all that surveillance and remote
| control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica's
| Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.
|
| (Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are
| possible too. I'm just picking on the right wing sort
| because it's the kind that has traction most recently.
| But that too can change.)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| People don't care because privacy is invisible.
|
| I'm turning to the opinion that if we really want to fix
| this, we need to have government mandates that "takeout"
| style exports are provided by every company/service, in a
| standard machine-readable format.
|
| If you collect and store _any_ personal data about a
| user, there needs to be a _standard_ way for them to
| request a _usable_ copy.
|
| Then allow third parties to build tools that work with
| those to educate users, which is why standard and usable
| format are key criteria. E.g. "visualize what X knows
| about you"
|
| It's the _details_ that would motivate people, but the
| details are precisely what 's invisible right now.
|
| (Disclaimer: talking from a US-centric viewpoint, for the
| majority of states that don't have digital privacy
| rights)
| bbarnett wrote:
| _This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest
| in repairing tube radios from the 30 's & 40's._
|
| My Commodore64 had full motherboard schematics in the
| manual, and I had a 90s tube TV with schematics inside the
| back of the case.
|
| This change, lack of docs/schematics has happened over a
| mere 20 years.
| pwg wrote:
| The Atari (400/800, from the Warner Brothers ownership
| era) also had full schematics /available/ (you had to buy
| the 'technical reference manual') but they were
| available. And part of that tech. manual was a printout
| of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS.
|
| And if I remember correctly, the tech. manual was
| something like $20.00 (in circa 1984 dollars, roughly $58
| today, and you got about 400 pages of paper, printed on
| both sides.
|
| So while schematics did not "come with the product in the
| retail packaging" one could obtain them with only the
| trouble of ordering a ~$20 (at the time) "book".
| bboygravity wrote:
| It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed.
|
| Every device/vehicle/system now needs to be connected to
| the internet and needs you to download an app.
|
| Is that for the consumer? No. That's for the manufacturer.
|
| For milking be reselling your data and/or spying on you
| and/or charging extra because they can and/or the
| capability to turn any device into literal trash by not
| providing updates or bug fixes to a half-baked alpha
| software that it shipped with.
|
| Blame your government. There could and should be laws
| against that or at the very least incentives to prevent it.
| amelius wrote:
| > It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed.
|
| And greed starts to become an issue when managers think
| they need a raise.
|
| But to be fair, if you're not an engineer is there much
| else you can take pride in other than driving up profits
| by whatever means?
| tstrimple wrote:
| It's weird how people in tech think they are superior to
| their less-technical colleagues. Everyone outside of
| software development is a moron and the entire world
| would be better if programmers ran everything with no
| oversight. Somehow only engineers are moral and everyone
| else is purely motivated by profit. But engineers are
| above that! It's so ridiculous.
| [deleted]
| Roark66 wrote:
| >Blame your government. There could and should be laws
| against that or at the very least incentives to prevent
| it.
|
| In a democracy the government is a proxy for the people.
| I blame the people. If the majority was conscious of
| their rights (or at least what these rights should be)
| the governments would have no choice and they'd bring
| laws that protect these rights. Yes, no democracy is
| perfect, there are lobbyists, corruption etc, but if the
| large majority of the population wants something all
| these lobbying and corruption can only delay it.
|
| The issue with the government(s) is a symptom, not a
| cause. The cause is that the majority of people have no
| spine. They'll sell their privacy and rights gladly for a
| tiny bit of perceived convenience, entertainment or
| status. It's like this famous saying "people that are
| willing to sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither".
| Substitute privacy/ownership for freedom and
| convenience/entertainment for safety and it will still be
| true.
|
| Neither me nor my partner own a smartwatch/health band.
| Why? Because we literally found no brand that could be
| used without setting up silly "online accounts" and
| having our personal details (including health) harvested.
| The pine watch is an exception, but last time I checked
| the software was not ready for daily use.
|
| Personally, despite the above, I'm a "long term
| optimist". I think people eventually will learn to value
| their privacy, their right to ownership/repair and they
| will stop buying and using devices and software that
| infringe on these rights. But not before a generation or
| two come and go.
|
| Consider other revolutions in human condition. For
| example the industrial revolution. It brought magnificent
| benefits, but also (especially initially) it was horrible
| for many people including children. Eventually the masses
| started paying attention and worker rights were
| established, but not a second before the majority was
| ready to sacrifice a lot to fight for it. It will. Be
| like this with our "digital revolution".
| 2devnull wrote:
| "I blame the people."
|
| Psychology is a science that studies human behavior, and
| like all sciences it works mostly. As a result, human
| minds can be easily hacked by those with the motivation
| to do so. Psychological science can be employed, things
| like A/B testing are very effective with enough data,
| which our digital systems easily provide. Ads are the
| wholesome version of that, because they are overt. We
| know the ads are trying to change the way we think and
| act. Corporate news is an example of the less wholesome
| side of using psychological science against humans. The
| humans aren't to blame. Humans are animals and easy to
| hack, and our economy is largely, mostly I'd say, based
| on people hacking/behavioral engineering.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| My takeaway from social psych was that it was _far_
| easier and cheaper to convince 2 ignorant people than it
| was to change 1 educated person 's mind.
|
| Which boils majority democracy down to the median level
| of education.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| considering technology is evolving faster than humans,
| using technology to exploit the unchangeable stupidity of
| humans seems like the winning move
| hakre wrote:
| The only question that remains then perhaps is, whether
| this statement was from the inside or the outside.
| jrowen wrote:
| > They'll sell their privacy and rights gladly for a tiny
| bit of perceived convenience, entertainment or status.
|
| How does that mean they have no spine? It sounds like
| they made a decision on what was more valuable to them.
| You could argue that they might not have been fully
| informed. But I think the reality is that they just don't
| care that much because they don't feel harmed by it. The
| segment of people that are going to even consider trying
| to repair a digital device rather than paying to get it
| fixed or getting a new one is probably vanishingly small
| (and very over-represented on this site).
|
| I could easily see things going the other way, where the
| lack of digital privacy becomes even more of an
| unquestioned norm. These things can hold in a kind of
| equilibrium as long as the entities that hold the power
| don't use it to cause perceived harm above a threshold.
| We have the technology to do a lot more scanning of
| license plates, facial recognition, automated speeding
| tickets, etc. I'm kind of an optimist in that I think
| people will generally maintain this balance (or maybe a
| pragmatist - it's not really in their interest to upset
| the apple cart, but they will test the limits sometimes).
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| That's a lot of time ago in the before times ;)
|
| I've seen a product like this, yes, but I wasn't the one
| buying it
|
| (got the schematic for some later products, for a fee)
| MarketingJason wrote:
| I wonder if gaming consoles had a big hand in this? Going
| back to Atari pong in the early/mid 70's and I don't recall
| if any of the major players (Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, Sears)
| included anything close to schematics.
| api wrote:
| It was mostly the mobile revolution. Consoles were always
| considered something separate from computers. It was phones
| that normalized not only locked down OSes but surveillance
| as a normal thing.
|
| I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the
| mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was
| mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech
| groupthink back then was the literal phrase "mobile is the
| future" repeated like something out of a political talking
| points memo.
|
| What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media
| would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be
| made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would
| help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The
| addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit
| with mobile too, so it's not unrelated. Something about
| that little screen that is always there and swiping to
| scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or
| laptop screen.
| andai wrote:
| Agree with everything you said, but what bugs me most is
| that I like computers, and phones are computers but
| they're designed for people who don't like computers, so
| they pretend not to be computers. Worse, those same ideas
| have infected the desktop too.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| > Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of
| creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions
| or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI
| began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide
| Semiconductor) chips were developed and then widely
| adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and
| telecommunication technologies. The microprocessor and
| memory chips are VLSI devices.
|
| > Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had
| a limited set of functions they could perform. An
| electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and
| other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of
| these into one chip.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI
| pwg wrote:
| The Atari 400/800 computers had available as an extra cost
| purchase (IIRC about $20 in 1984 dollars) a "technical
| reference manual" that included full schematics for the
| computers, a printout of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS,
| and a lot of narrative describing technical aspects of the
| computers.
|
| So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800
| computers, they did release the information. For an extra
| cost, but it was released.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are
| ownership rights?
|
| Most people always had poor memories, George Orwell make that
| observation. It's unfortunately one of the human conditions.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I'm hugely thankful someone highlighted this conflict - that
| our property law has largely been eroded by contract law - in a
| nice pull quoting from _Web scraping for me but not for thee_.
|
| The seller/person getting money gets to set whatever terms they
| want. It cited Mark Lemley as having made the connection two
| decades ago. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-
| scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970
|
| It's abhorrent in extreme to strip away the rights of the
| citizens like so. Our ability to experiment with the world &
| explore the things about is fundamental to maintaining the
| human spirit, to keeping us _homo sapiens_.
| amelius wrote:
| There should be a law that says that if you buy something and
| still don't fully own it, then it is a service, not a product.
|
| Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with
| the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as
| advertised.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Then companies will make everything a service. You need to
| make a downside for dearing that.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If something is a service then there should not be a "buy"
| button, but a _" lease"_ button.
| Frost1x wrote:
| In theory, markets should regulate and competitors should
| be able to rise and provide products over never ending
| services and be successful. That doesn't seem to happen
| though. Is it because service designs expose real business
| costs of continued investment in R&D sort of deal, is it
| because such reliable products are bad for business (you
| provide something so good, reliable, and cheap you kill
| your own revenue stream) or what?
|
| Similar to the concept in medicine that it's bad for
| business to cure vs good for business to treat something.
| From the consumer side, clearly you want cures but markets
| don't seem to function that way. Treating kidney disease is
| far less lucrative than providing a cure (if possible).
| Your only option as a business to find this appealing is to
| somehow look at the treatment option, roll all expected
| profit and revenue up, and tuck that into a "cure" option.
| If altruism in medicine isn't there, I don't know why we'd
| hope for it in something as artificial as electronics and
| software. I don't know what the solution is here if we want
| to continue to pretend markets self regulate in a healthy
| way for the general population and not for businesses.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I mean ... the market _has_ spoken on this. It just isn
| 't something that enough people value enough for it to
| have a positive return on investment. Like pretty much
| everyone else here, I think that sucks, but I also
| struggle to begrudge the preferences of people who just
| don't care about this.
|
| So the question is just, is this a market _failure_ in
| the sense that the market outcome is undesirable to
| society such that there 's a strong case for regulation?
| Or is it a market success in that most people are getting
| what they prefer (cheaper products)?
|
| If we were to get regulation passed on this, and prices
| for digital products and services were to rise, would
| people broadly cheer or jeer us? I think it's pretty
| clear that most people would be unhappy with this, at
| least above some level of price increase (which may be
| zero).
|
| So to me the question is (like with all regulation)
| whether this can be regulated without increasing costs to
| people beyond the value of the regulation to society.
| Maybe so, but unfortunately I'm pretty skeptical that's
| the case.
| amelius wrote:
| If companies released just the hardware without the
| services, then we could have open source jumping in to
| provide those services, and things would be cheaper.
|
| Unless of course you want to argue that without financial
| incentive nobody would ever do such a thing, and open
| source is a fairy tale that can't really exist ...
| notatoad wrote:
| >In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller
| relinquished all claims to it
|
| and also, all responsibility for it. in the more recent "before
| times" that you're probably talking about, most things you
| bought came with a warranty, and if you did unapproved things
| with that product you would void your warranty. that's what the
| "warranty void if removed" stickers mean. and yes, when you buy
| consumer PC hardware there's all kinds of stuff that you can't
| do with it if you want to keep your warranty.
|
| This hasn't really changed, we just expect more continuing
| service from our products now, so the list of conditions to
| recieve those ongoing services from the seller has increased.
| if you want to buy something and receive no warranty, no
| software updates, no bugfixes, no cloud sync, no remote access,
| or all the other modern conveniences, then yeah, you get to do
| whatever the fuck you want with it.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Sorry, no.
|
| If there were even a modicum of actual investigative journalism,
| this might be HN worthy, but all there is here is a bunch of
| conjectured hysteria.
|
| Flagged.
| totetsu wrote:
| Which begs the question, what would a good investigation look
| like here? Why is this important? Who are the actors? How can
| we know their end goals and strategies? What things have
| happened in the past that we can predict will be attempted
| again in the future?
| kstenerud wrote:
| It would look like the familiar investigative journalism,
| studies, surveys, and actual source materials from the
| companies involved.
|
| And it's important because without due diligence, you get
| snake oil, Rush Limbaugh, anti-vaxx, and other such bullshit
| from some rando's wild ravings that people just latch onto
| out of laziness and familiarity. Could you imagine if court
| cases were held by such standards? Or if elections could be
| overturned simply by a president's unsubstantiated
| assertions?
| [deleted]
| debesyla wrote:
| I agree. This website seems like a campaign to show that
| "apocalypse" is coming.
| roenxi wrote:
| I think it is notable that all the stuff that happened is fairly
| minor and all the stuff that is going to happen is going to
| economically devastate anyone who brings it in. Freedom does
| amazing things for an economy.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| "VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide." Lol yeah. Good luck with
| that.
| heisenbit wrote:
| I wonder why the gauge is closed at the top. There is no reason
| you can't fry the frog after reaching boiling temperator.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > Chrome drops official support for Linux, citing the
| impossibility to satisfy Web Environment Integrity (WEI) checks
|
| Nah, the whole point of kernel_lockdown and uefi attestation is
| so they can roll out WEI without having to do this.
|
| Of course compiling your own kernel, or doing anything else
| interesting, will break the WEI checks as well as break most of
| the web...
| tjpnz wrote:
| Needs a prediction on when censorship of legal content by network
| infrastructure companies like Hurricane Electric becomes normal.
| night-rider wrote:
| > 2034: VPNs are mostly outlawed worldwide
|
| We're veering towards Chinaesque authoritative regimes if that's
| the case. A social credit score could be down the line for the
| West, unless we fight for the future we want. And by fight, I
| don't mean lurking on Internet chat-rooms complaining, I mean
| literal protests in the streets and donating half your income to
| the EFF and other freedom fighting initiatives.
| abwizz wrote:
| certainly not that far fetched.
|
| > other freedom fighting initiatives
|
| "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist"
| salawat wrote:
| ...call me what you will, but I know what I am, and why I do
| what I do. What you call me changes not what I fight for.
|
| If behaving is defined as kowtowing to authoritarian control
| mechanisms, and furthering the goals and reach of tyrants,
| then I unabashedly aim to misbehave.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| VPNs wont be outlawed. But they will be KYC and backdoored
| encryption - so like an typical internet service provider. VPNs
| are used all the time in the cloud for legitimate reasons so
| outlawing is impractical (like outlawing a kitchen knife)
| sneak wrote:
| VPNs requiring KYC is the same as outlawing non-KYC VPNs.
| developer93 wrote:
| Dunno UK seems to be pretty far through outlawing e2e
| encryption... Dumb gets through sometimes, they only need to be
| lucky once
| noduerme wrote:
| VPNs will never disappear, they'll just get more expensive.
| Privacy isn't for the masses, you see. But it'll always be
| necessary for senators who drop trou in the men's room with their
| underlings.
|
| In shifts toward totalitarianism, it's normal for slime to rise
| to the top and to enjoy all the freedoms they stole or killed to
| deprive from others.
|
| Which, of course, leaves the opportunity for hackers to use the
| holes that they _have_ to leave in their systems.
|
| Then just give it a generation or so for the dictators and their
| spawn to fully decay.
|
| 2056: Revolution
| 0xDEF wrote:
| That is a very Western-centric timeline. No mention of Russia,
| China and Iran.
| [deleted]
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This isn't a boiling frog situation, because people lack a sense
| of temperature for technical freedom.
|
| The whole tech universe is opaque & unobservable. Free software
| exists, but a user using kde desktop isn't really that much more
| likely (beyond their higher likelihood to self selecting in &
| find out) to get good at computing over time.
|
| There's been so few efforts to make computing visible, to make it
| real. HyperCard is still nearly the only famous example of a
| technical environment where you could "turn the object over" and
| see what it did. I adore open source, but its not enough. Live
| code environments, with strong modularization sandboxing and
| snapshotting are required baselines for users to exercise
| freedom. Making computing accessible - making it easy to see
| what's happening - and making it safe/fun to muck around in are
| the frontier past opening the source that we - the citizens of
| planet earth - need to begin to experience digital freedom.
|
| We need a bolder way for the computing environment to be
| Augmenting (computer) Intellect. Freedom expands itself if folks
| can exercise it, and the barrier to really using your will is -
| even with open source - too high, too many barriers. Those
| positive cycles are missing today, so we don't notice a lack of
| freedom. The best base I know of today for this realization & the
| effort to open up computing to the rest of the world is
| https://malleable.systems .
|
| > _The user wants open software, software that can be modified,
| and that can participate in a progressive improvement process._ -
| J.C.R. Licklider
| smitty1e wrote:
| The more tightly the control freaks seek to grip public
| communication, the more likely a rebirth of hard-copy
| pamphleteering, codes, and physical post amongst those not
| interested in living in "1984".
|
| Mankind is not meant for some ersatz technocratic utopia.
| graemep wrote:
| The UK is putting bar codes on stamps, which will make physical
| post a lot more yraceable.
| tim333 wrote:
| This misses a wider context of increasing freedom:
|
| Prehistory: We lived is small groups. No privacy. About 1/3 or
| males die by being killed by their own species. Say something
| against the alphas and risk death.
|
| 1600s. trials for heresy etc. Brits sail for the new world to get
| free speech and freedom of religion. Their colonies do ok.
|
| 1960s computers coming but things still pretty locked down in
| much of the world, secret police, much of the world like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
|
| 2020s mobile computing everywhere. Free exchange of information
| largely possible everywhere even if you have to use VPNs in
| China, Russia etc.
|
| 2030s - optimistically totalitarianism crumbles a bit more
| (https://ourworldindata.org/democracy) especially if Russia
| collapses some after it's recent adventure - it's been one of the
| strongest forces on the Big Brother side of things.
|
| So even if our devices get a bit locked down against malware I
| think the trend's positive. Our instincts evolved in the
| prehistory stage and so are perhaps a bit out of adjustment for
| the present day.
| [deleted]
| m2f2 wrote:
| Sad but true. Same thing as millennial/genZ authored websites who
| check for Chrome, and throw a tantrum/refuse to work otherwise.
|
| I'm looking at you, vivaticket, booking, and many others I can't
| keep count of
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The freedom is already dead when something goes from a hobby to
| an industry and to the most important strategy.
| Daril wrote:
| There is hope:
|
| - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a
| laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers:
| System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few.
|
| - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is
| perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS
| will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other
| options. For office suites we have: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice,
| FreeOffice
|
| - FreeBSD has come a long way as a desktop too,in the long run
| will be usable as Linux
|
| - There are now many alternatives (free or paid) to all the
| Google services. What Google decides to do with its own services
| is irrelevant to me, there are alternatives: ProtonMail,
| Tutanota, Infomaniak, OpenStreetmap, MagicEarth, OrganicMaps, ...
|
| - There are several open source alternatives to Google Android,
| solid, complete and usable: Iode, e/OS, to name a few, and we
| already have an open source app store: F-Droid.
|
| - Linux is also making huge improvements on mobile phones (see
| PinePhone). It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a
| viable alternative to Android in the near future.
|
| - There are many messaging apps and protocols that are
| decentralised and resistant to censorship.
|
| What is really in danger, in my opinion, is net neutrality and
| the clamps that Google and other big tech companies and
| governments will try to impose, but in the recent years we have
| seen a rise of decentralised protocols and services.
|
| My humble suggestions:
|
| - don't use the services of the big tech companies : look for and
| use only open source alternatives, if possible
|
| - use an open source version of Android on your phone, without
| the Google services
|
| - prefer decentralised solutions whenever possible
| rocho wrote:
| The options might exist, but that doesn't mean that they are
| viable/usable. I agree with many of your points, but regarding
| document processing, LibreOffice really does not compare with
| any of the best alternatives (Google Documents, Office Word).
| It lacks options, if the options exists they are hidden in
| obscure menus, it doesn't display many things correctly (at
| least on my Linux computer), etc. For document processing, I'm
| still stuck on Google Docs, which is quite a sad state of
| affairs.
| Eduard wrote:
| I prefer LibreOffice so much more over Microsoft Word and
| Google Documents.
|
| yes, with LibreOffice, often options are hidden somewhere
| that I wish there was just an autocomplete box to type in
| what I'm looking for (e. g. "Page numbering", "page break
| l");
|
| BUT: finding those options in Word is complicated as well,
| and on top of it it reshuffles with every new version
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| Would be nice to have a Linux phone where one could run ios and
| google android in a vm. Same way I run my computer. Level 1
| hypervisor and all flavors on top. Max control, max options,
| max nerd.
| phs wrote:
| postmarketOS and waydroid are almost there, though I still
| went back to lineage. No answers for iOS.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| just like living the hermit life, leaving all of these services
| behind is surprisingly alienating.
|
| I say this as somebody who has done several of these and is
| trying to continue to expand. but damn, the is a lot of stuff
| that you miss out on and I'm starting to be squeezed by the
| losses to move back.
|
| I guess I'm saying, even though I feel driven by a massive
| moral imperative to engage with technology in that fashion, I
| find it absurdly difficult to the point of failure. I'm not
| ready to be a hermit.
| salawat wrote:
| Just rebuild what you're missing, and share. In the journey
| to do so you will discover some of the most interesting
| primitives out there, and everyone gains, instead of a few
| unrepentant Gatekeepers.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| i would prefer not to
| vinceguidry wrote:
| You can, of course, pick your level of engagement, and
| make adjustments over time. An Android phone can provide
| all the engagement you need, and there are lots of
| distributions that focus on providing different
| experience. I'm using a stock Android phone and Linux
| everywhere else. My current phone isn't rootable, (I
| bought it to replace a lost iPhone and didn't have time
| to do research) so I'm stuck with stock, but my next
| phone will be. I'm still way happier on Android than I
| ever was on iOS.
|
| If you really want to have your foot in both worlds, you
| can always live the two-phone lifestyle. Might go that
| way myself eventually.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| I've been happily living on android for maybe 5 years now
| after iOS for maybe 10 before that. I don't really miss
| it at all, but the tier system is hard to ignore. besides
| the infamous "green text" phenomenon, iOS tends to get
| the apps for applications that only support one, or in my
| car, android auto only takes up the top half of the
| screen whereas car play uses the full display. and of
| course, the software ecosystem for the Subaru
| infotainment is completely proprietary and non-user-
| serviceable so I can do nothing about it.
|
| but that's just how it is, choosing free, ethical
| software is choosing a life of austerity and alienation.
| npteljes wrote:
| This is missing a very important part of how certain
| software became de facto standards: by achieving dominating
| market share, which, in turn, was achieved by shipping
| working software with passable UX, ruthless business
| practices, making governments use the software, and making
| schools teach the software.
|
| I'm writing this because the software is already there.
| There are decent alternatives to most things, sometimes
| multiple. What isn't there is government adoption, and
| commercial adoption.
| Daril wrote:
| I agree and the fact the governments prefer commercial
| and costly software instead of adopting open source
| solutions and hire local companies for support and custom
| development is very disturbing : they spend the taxpayers
| money to make rich a bunch of already disgusting rich
| companies. And when this company is a foreign company the
| damage for the state money balance (and citizens of
| course) is double.
| npteljes wrote:
| That's exactly right and I think it's no much
| "preferring", rather than getting different deals from
| these companies like Microsoft. MS has already been
| caught specifically, but also I think that this
| phenomenon is hardly exclusive to software, it's just
| part of how the government, or rather the individuals in
| government, go about their business. In the third world
| it's practically an open secret, and I don't have doubt
| that basically every government works like this.
|
| Also, large companies offer quite robust support, deals
| to implement specific features, compliance with different
| regulations, etc. I know from experience that one thing I
| like about dealing with large entities is that they have
| many corner cases already figured out.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I predict you will never feel like you "win" .. Instead, find
| what else exists and use that ALSO not instead of.. paper
| exchange has some positive sides to it, expect much less
| volume and currency of course.. radio is not dead, etc
| bjornsing wrote:
| I'm more concerned with the EUs assault on private communication
| than I am with this WEI stuff.
| mordae wrote:
| Private comms will stay private as long as you can install an
| illegal decentralized chat app that won't spy on you. Once you
| can't do that without losing bank account access on the device,
| most people simply won't install it and stick to monitored
| comms.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Hardly realistic. You dont need to outlaw anything to make it
| steer in one direction. All you need is friction and incentives.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| >Chrome drops official support for Linux and then all the world's
| E2E testing pipelines break
| teddyh wrote:
| Google could keep supporting a headless-only version of Chrome
| for Linux. And maybe slowly start charging for it.
| attah_ wrote:
| There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it
| would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that
| most people that are competent enough to actually implement these
| things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most
| part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what
| are "they" going to do?
|
| And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. The Chrome
| clones are only stalling; not counteracting the impending
| monoculture even one bit. It doesn't matter how fancy their
| marketing is.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| What about Safari too?
| simon1573 wrote:
| Safari is WebKit based too since a few years back
| attah_ wrote:
| It always has been.
| isametry wrote:
| What does this mean, "WebKit based too"? WebKit is
| primarily developed by Apple, Safari is the canonical
| browser that uses it.
|
| It is actually Google's Blink that split off of WebKit, not
| the other way around.
| midasuni wrote:
| It all came out of Konqueror
| attah_ wrote:
| It is the one Chrome fork that sees some development. (Yes,
| of course the forkage was the other way). So while they do
| have a seat at the standards table, i can't say i see much
| potential (or results). They also don't offer it outside
| their own locked-down platform by the looks of it. I.e. they
| have permanently kneecapped their market-share to near-
| pointless levels.
| kmlx wrote:
| > they have permanently kneecapped their market-share to
| near-pointless levels.
|
| they have 25% of the mobile browser market share.
| svantana wrote:
| It seems like Apple is intentionally dragging its feet in
| implementing new web standards in Safari (webusb, webgpu,
| webmidi, bluetooth, filesystem, etc) in order to keep native
| apps relevant (which is a big cash cow for Apple).
| kmlx wrote:
| if they implement them then the criticism morphs into "more
| tech for others to use when spying on us".
| isametry wrote:
| Good. Native apps should stay relevant.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Disagree. Money is a hell of a motivator. I know multiple
| people who say "yes my employer XYZ is doing horrible things.
| I'm at peace with it because they pay so well."
| gavinhoward wrote:
| > It is the simple fact that most people that are competent
| enough to actually implement these things also understand the
| problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could
| just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do?
|
| Which is why we should shame every one of us that _does_ do it.
| attah_ wrote:
| Yes. A thousand times yes.
| sneak wrote:
| I think the ship has sailed for the web. Many apps don't even
| bother with making functional webapps any longer; the go to
| market are mobile apps for the censorship platforms.
|
| The web lost. Now it's just a transport layer for mobile app
| API requests.
| layer8 wrote:
| Apps shouldn't be web apps anyway. Local-first apps should be
| the default, in the context of digital freedom. The only
| exception being self-hostable web apps.
| dTal wrote:
| I see your point, in the sense that local software is in
| theory more permanent, more reliable. But the issue is more
| subtle that you are describing. Is the local-first program*
| free software, or proprietary adware? Is its sole function
| to communicate with some particular company's API? What is
| better for digital freedom, the Reddit website or the
| official "Reddit app"?
|
| If a company is going to be gating their API behind some
| proprietary shovelware anyway, I would rather they write it
| in a plaintext scripting language (JavaScript) that runs
| inside a free software virtual machine (Firefox) which lets
| me intercept and control it.
|
| *Yes, "program". How I hate "apps". Perverse term.
| layer8 wrote:
| You are right, we also need open protocols. With Usenet
| or IRC or email (or even Reddit and Twitter until
| recently), local apps are perfectly fine, because
| everyone can write their own client if they want. That
| gives you more freedom than being stuck with a
| proprietary web app.
| salawat wrote:
| How about the common person being able to host without
| having to sign up for a "business" plan. Lookin' at you
| Spectrum for not providing the capability to manage PTR
| records in DNS without an artificial barrier and rent-
| seek.
|
| Companies continue to encroach on what should be basic
| freedom to do network management. It's entirely
| intentional; to the point that I've about accepted
| there's a high-level of society push to enact as many
| barriers to reasonable liberty as humanly possible, all
| in the name of "Public safety" or some other transparent
| on further examination excuse.
| attah_ wrote:
| You misunderstand. The point is that _online_ services now
| come with apps for no reason. Very few things are so local
| that what you say applies. Though those few definitely
| should be!
|
| And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud.
| What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.
| attah_ wrote:
| > Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps
| any longer
|
| It seems they have gotten inside your head. If services are
| no longer that, but "apps", then of course people lose sight
| of the problem.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > _And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox._
|
| Mozilla is hanging tightly on the Google's tit though. It won't
| be shocking to see Firefox deteriorate rapidly should it start
| gaining ground on Chrome. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
| generic92034 wrote:
| On the other hand Firefox development could be paid with a
| small fraction of Mozilla's current budget. They are doing
| all kinds of un-/semi-related stuff. But of course, it
| remains to be seen if the organization could survive such a
| financial drought.
| attah_ wrote:
| Sigh. Another of the long line of defeatist non-arguments.
| What is your point? Should we all just roll over and die?
| Writing just to be contrarian?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| The point is that for the Firefox to gain more foothold
| Mozilla first needs to break the dependency on Google's
| money. And this won't happen without deep restructuring of
| the Mozilla corp, starting from the top and shedding all
| the blubber all the way down. The chances of that happening
| are next to zero. You can label that as "defeatist non-
| arguments" all you want, but that's a very unfortunate
| reality. Saying this as a die-hard Firefox user of almost
| 20 years.
| thriftwy wrote:
| This never stopped Facebook from being Facebook.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to
| cause problems.
|
| There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can
| switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with
| browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a
| different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your
| newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and
| hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking
| apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a
| phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's
| "not on the list".
|
| So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet"
| and te world happily follows... sadly.
| EGreg wrote:
| If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the
| community will fork it like it always does when someone tries
| to control it.
|
| You'll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn't have
| WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the
| official browser from Google would be used to access sites
| that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America
| app would.
|
| Corporate power in pushing Chrome for everything can be
| limited if we have open source alternatives. Look at Firefox
| and what it did to M$IE, which had the full power of
| Micro$oft behind it. That only happened because Netscape
| chose to OPEN SOURCE their code base. They couldn't beat IE
| on their own, but the open source community could.
|
| Well, that and WebKit, which was basically adopted by Apple
| (Microsoft's competitor) from another open source browser,
| Konqueror! And that led to Chrome, Chromium and Blink etc.
|
| In short -- open source is the best way we can check
| corporate power on the software side.
|
| On the hardware side, it's far more difficult, and if the
| vendors choose to ban any "unapproved" apps (eg requiring
| Safari WebView rendering engine in all apps on non-jailbroken
| iPhones) then the best tool we have is government antitrust
| laws. Maybe one day, in that area too, open source hardware
| will be the people's best weapon. But not today :-/
| attah_ wrote:
| The problem is Blink might just be too big for what little
| community exists to feasibly maintain it. If it is just a
| Chrome that doesn't work an select asinine sites, it isn't
| in a great position to catch on. And perhaps most
| important; the point is to have something viable _before_
| that even needs to happen.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water
| service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are
| only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already
| require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps
| and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone
| and workarounds are painful.
|
| I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not
| chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.
| attah_ wrote:
| And just doing nothing is somehow a better solution?
| EGreg wrote:
| You should use them with Chrome
|
| And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of
| Chrome
|
| What's the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time
| to view movies that they couldn't access, and so on.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I used to think this way and even made a browser
| extension to facilitate it (Browser Routr). Yet
| increasingly one must use Chrome or deal with random
| breakage and failed purchases because web devs cannot be
| bothered to try anything not Chrome. Sometimes even
| Safari is broken.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Not true, there's also Huawei, who is definitely not
| 'following' anymore.
|
| Which means that every service in countries where Huawei has
| major market share definitely can't require Google anything.
| attah_ wrote:
| Then switch from these services while they are still only a
| few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never
| understood why anyone would even want a banking app though;
| there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser
| war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are
| a lost cause outside the legal arena.
|
| Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil
| grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I did, i use firefox for example, but with mobile phones,
| what's the alternative? Apple and its walled garden? And
| when filing my taxes only works via chrome, how do i switch
| countries easily? Move because of a browser limitation and
| leave everything behind?
| attah_ wrote:
| Not that it is for everyone; but i have used Sailfish OS
| for just about 10 years, and it has been quite fine. Any
| country that isn't a total sh*tshow will have
| accessibility regulations around that. Let the
| accessibility folks fight for you.
| developer93 wrote:
| Or support them...
| bombolo wrote:
| My bank's webserver recently decided to drop connections
| when a firefox user agent is received.
|
| No message, no nothing, just close the socket.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If you're in the US, write to the FTC and complain that
| this is discriminatory toward the disabled who may need
| special user agent accessibility features unavailable in
| Chrome.
| theK wrote:
| I think the problem with the revenue rhetoric is that these
| services are consumed by the general consumer and the
| people that read this discussion generally are only a
| neglibile size of that market segment. So, even if all HN
| readers affected and all wired reader, etc changed service
| due to this discussionit would still be a rounding error on
| that company's report sheet in the end.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > I never understood why anyone would even want a banking
| app though; there is nothing int can do that a website
| can't.
|
| Some banks are phasing out code cards or SMS verification
| for 2FA, and the only way to get the second factor for
| logging into the online banking website on your computer,
| is to use the bank's app on your phone.
| anonym29 wrote:
| > the only way to get the second factor for logging into
| the online banking website on your computer, is to use
| the bank's app on your phone.
|
| This is utterly false. Yubikey, TOTP-based solutions,
| there are options. It is a choice by the businesses to
| not implement those options.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Obviously other solutions could be implemented if the
| bank chose. But if the bank does not choose to implement
| those other options, and instead requires the use of
| their app, then that explains for the OP's sake some of
| the interest in running the bank's app instead of solely
| using the website.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I never understood why anyone would even want a banking
| app though; there is nothing int can do that a website
| can't._
|
| A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from
| home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a
| photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I
| looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check
| deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean _technically_
| not possible. I meant that the banks deliberately chose not
| to have the websites utilize desktop /laptop webcams as an
| alternative to smartphone apps.)
|
| Smartphone bank apps also have "push notifications" to
| immediately alert you of suspicious activity on your
| account.
|
| But if one never uses the extra features that smartphones
| bank apps enable, then yes, desktop bank websites can be
| seen as perfectly equivalent.
| seangrogg wrote:
| My credit union let me deposit checks via uploaded
| picture on browsers back around 2008ish. Don't get me
| wrong, I did this by taking a picture from my phone and
| emailing it to myself to upload - the smartphone UX
| simplifies that. But this is a trail long since blazed.
| couchand wrote:
| Yes, this is one of those things that banks will sell as
| an add-on because capitalism. Credit unions will either
| just not have their act together on it (i.e. they
| contract with a bad service provider) or will have all
| kinds of useful stuff like this for free.
|
| I really want a general-membership credit union with
| stellar technology, but I haven't found one yet. Does
| your credit union by chance offer open membership?
| seangrogg wrote:
| Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge it does not.
| attah_ wrote:
| Meanwhile most of the world hasn't used checks in 20+
| years. Thank god for that. But for completeness; browsers
| have been able to use cameras since before smartphones.
| So of course it can work just the same there.
|
| "Suspicious activity" is such a bad strawman argument,
| i'm not sure how to address it. "Just thought you'd want
| to know your money is gone, lol." Either you do N+1
| factor authentication for real, or you just shouldn't
| bother. Browsers have had push notifications for quite
| some time now too... so even if it was a worthwhile
| feature, it doesn't need an app.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Meanwhile most of the world hasn't used checks in 20+
| years. _
|
| True, but the key word you used is _" most"_. E.g. My
| home insurance refunds an annual dividend back to me and
| their method to pay me is _paper check_. Not an
| electronic direct deposit, nor a VISA giftcard, nor even
| a "credit" that can be applied as a discount off year's
| premium. It's a paper check.
|
| _> So of course it _can_ work just the same there._
|
| Sure but that's talking in hypotheticals. _Today, I have
| the reality_ of a paper check to deal with and Bank of
| America and Chase _websites_ do not have options to
| upload images of checks for deposit. (Chase does have a
| paper check scanner option that doesn 't require mobile
| phones but that's only for commercial accounts:
| https://www.chase.com/business/banking/services/quick-
| deposi...)
|
| _> "Suspicious activity" is such a bad strawman
| argument, i'm not sure how to address it. "Just thought
| you'd want to know your money is gone, lol."_
|
| No, you misunderstand. The better banking smartphone apps
| _will require interactive approval from you_ to allow a
| particular suspicious transaction to happen. This
| _prevents_ your money from being gone. (Example
| screenshot: https://www2.bac-assets.com/online-
| banking/spa-assets/images...)
|
| _> Browsers have had push notifications for quite some
| time now too... _
|
| No, web push finally came to Safari in iOS 16.4 which was
| just a few months ago in April 2023.
|
| From the tone of your reply, it seems like you'd rather
| be argumentative instead of acknowledging that bank apps
| have some extra features that's convenient for _some
| users_.
| djbusby wrote:
| The paper check scanner from Chase also (last I looked)
| cost a few bucks and needs an app on the Windows PC to
| process the data. That hardware is only useful when you
| process 100s of checks (eg: grocery store).
| jcelerier wrote:
| ? Suspicious activity isn't about this. For instance my
| bank reports me when I get a double debit (e.g. go to a
| restaurant and get charged twice), when a regular expense
| increases (e.g. some monthly payment that suddenly goes
| up)...
| ajb wrote:
| The real use for notifications is to sell things or get
| paid for services in-person without cash. The
| notification provides certainty that you've been paid, so
| you can hand over the item/stop hanging around after the
| service waiting to be paid.
|
| Of course, a bank _should_ be able to send you a text on
| the service of your choice. But they won 't.
| dTal wrote:
| > Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't
| enable check deposits with a webcam.
|
| Why not?
| djbusby wrote:
| Management decision.
| anonym29 wrote:
| > I never understood why anyone would even want a banking
| app though; there is nothing int can do that a website
| can't.
|
| My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money
| transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| The banking system does not care.
|
| The banks don't need your money.
| attah_ wrote:
| That same logic says you should not vote either. If even
| some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match)
| up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will
| care.
| tsss wrote:
| No, that logic says you can vote or you can not, it makes
| effectively zero difference.
| landemva wrote:
| I always vote the local issues. For the national bozos I
| can leave it blank, which is "none of the above".
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| You assume there is a "less shit bank". Not everywhere is
| like the USA with a wide choice of banks. In some
| countries the banking landscape has, through mergers,
| become limited to just a few choices, and they all
| require SafetyNet attestation for their phone apps.
| est31 wrote:
| "voting makes no difference" is one of those rules which
| apply really well to the individual, but if you apply
| them to a larger group of people, they become wrong.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _That same logic says you should not vote either._
|
| Indeed.
|
| > _If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries
| to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me,
| they will care._
|
| That's an impossible number of people to coordinate on
| something like this, and _even if_ , I doubt banks would
| care. There exist _no_ less shit banks, and retail is a
| rounding error anyway.
|
| Banks aren't shit because of incompetence or a not-give-
| a-damb attitude. They're shit because _it makes them more
| money_ , both directly and by reducing risks.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| You would be trading one kind of "shit" for a much more
| real and serious kind of shit - at the new bank, you'd
| either be more likely to get your account drained in ways
| that are hard to reverse, or you'd be forced back to
| using dedicated hardware smartcard readers of the type
| that were common before mobile apps became widely used
| (at least were common in Europe).
|
| If your bank account gets drained and you'd made a big
| song and dance about how you selected that bank
| specifically because it had less security on its mobile
| app, well, nobody will have any sympathy for you.
|
| If your bank is equally secure but uses dedicated
| hardware devices instead of smartcard readers, then all
| you did is swap one bit of secured hardware for another,
| making your life less convenient and in return for what?
|
| A bank has to know it's communicating with the real human
| who owns the account and not a hacker. It's going to
| achieve that one way or another. You'd be much better off
| accepting the tech and finding ways to achieve your goals
| within it, like by setting up a project to maintain
| whitelists of known good/secure OS builds. You can then
| make libs that wrap SafetyNet and eliminate the false
| positives. Even if banks don't start using it anytime
| soon, other smaller companies might and it's a place to
| start. Of course the fact that virtually nobody cares
| about custom operating systems to begin with is the
| biggest hurdle you'd face, not the tech or business
| requirements, but that is partly on the OS developers.
| You can't complain nobody cares about if you're not
| giving anyone a reason to care.
| midasuni wrote:
| You use the word "forced" like it's a problem? I hated it
| when my bank got rid of a nice secure card reader (which
| required my physical card and pin).
|
| If my phone breaks or is stolen, I can't actually buy a
| replacement phone now, as that requires spending money,
| which requires 2FA which requires my phone.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| You don't have a contactless credit card from your bank?
| landemva wrote:
| Keep a few dozen $100s on hand for when payment networks
| glitch out.
| npteljes wrote:
| >If we could just agree to not do that
|
| Just forget about that. If you don't, I'll take the google
| software engineer salary and build it.
|
| The issue is not technological, it's a natural outcome of how
| people work on and individual, and on a societal level.
| Regulation is the closest that can affect this situation, but
| as it turns out, no large entity has the same goals as "the
| people" - hence, I'm not holding my breath. I am using Firefox
| and other FOSS software though, and contribute back what I can,
| donations, bug reports. It's a nice privilege.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| "My poverty, but not my will, consents." -Apothecary
| max_ wrote:
| We need a new philosophical movement for computer technology.
|
| The Stallman movement failed because it was not practical for
| business applications. At the end of the day, coders & hardware
| manufacturers need to eat just like accountants, plumbers and
| doctors. Technology can't rely 100% on altruism.
|
| What we need is something close to the Ethical standards of the
| Stallman movement, but also compatable with business owners.
|
| These philosophical ethical standards should also be ingrained
| into VC culture & corporate culture.
|
| The reason why Apple can propose to have something like CSAM, or
| Google banning someone account forever (Gmail, YouTube et al)
| because they had images of their naked daughter suffering from a
| skin disease (to be sent to the doctor).
|
| The reason is that there is no ethical-philosophical compass
| guiding computer technology.
|
| Tech Corporate MBAs only care about "playing it safe". I find
| them disgustingly spinless.
|
| Until we have this ethical-philosophy developed, I only expect
| technology to used as a tool for manipulation and control.
| mordae wrote:
| I am sorry, but you basically say that we need more altruistic
| capitalists. Won't happen.
|
| > These philosophical ethical standards should also be
| ingrained into VC culture & corporate culture.
|
| Won't happen. Money always wins and exploiting people on the
| side of selling (or giving for free) them some stuff is always
| going to bring in more cash than respecting their privacy.
| max_ wrote:
| Their are business like Source Hut that are built on the
| basis that they will not do some of the things people like
| Github do.
|
| And I am glad that they are profitable.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| They are profitable up to a point.
|
| Once that point is crossed, they will have to compensate
| and adapt or risk losing their entire business.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The Stallman movement failed
|
| The stuff you read on hn...
|
| Seriously, you think it failed? I think it succeeded _wildly_
| beyond anything anybody imagined at the time, to the point that
| very large entities threw everything and the kitchensink at it
| to _try_ to make it fail. Which exposed them for the criminals
| they were.
|
| We don't need anything that is more compatible with 'business
| owners' than what we've got. What we need is education, so that
| people stop telling each other that the free software movement
| failed, but instead point out that without that free software
| movement the operating system, the browser and the applications
| on the computer that I'm writing this on would not exist.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I think it succeeded wildly beyond anything anybody
| imagined at the time..._ "
|
| Somebody needs their memory refreshed. What was imagined at
| the time is that nearly all proprietary software companies,
| particularly Microsoft, would have gone bankrupt or bowed to
| the inevitable necessity to release all their source code to
| the community under capital-F Free licenses and nearly all
| businesses that use software would be voluntarily
| contributing any code developed for their own use to the
| community also under Free licenses so that their code would
| help others and others' code would help them.
|
| Needless to say, this has not happened. Instead, FOSS turned
| out to be an enormous free handout to businesses with very
| little contribution back to the community compared to the
| value received. (Yes, even the Linux kernel. If there were
| contributions to Linux by all businesses that use it that
| were even a tenth of what Microsoft charges for Windows,
| there would be a thousand full time kernel developers.) That
| is failure and developers are recognizing that by turning
| away from Free licenses to fake FOSS licenses like open core
| or shared source.
| rapnie wrote:
| Given your last paragraph, what is the net trend in society
| of that happening with enough speed to outpace other negative
| developments?
|
| Would it be more accurate to say that the Free Software
| movement is in need for an update, or making next steps, to
| provide a better outlook in this regard?
|
| Edit: Changed "Stallman movement" to "Free Software
| movement". I am a FOSS advocate myself, but not interested in
| deeply engrained notions around Stallman himself.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think it's doing fine as it is within the limits of the
| law. If you want more you're going to have to either
| operate outside of the law or you're going to have to have
| the laws changed. But within the law the Free Software
| Movement used all of the available space, to the point that
| almost every other license out there is _less_ strict than
| theirs.
|
| What needs to be updated is the the knowledge of the users
| and of the programmers. But we've been co-opted as an
| industry for the most part by very large bags of money and
| a service oriented eco-system is the capitalist response to
| the free software movement.
|
| Doing an end run around that is hard to enforce (see the
| various licenses that address this loophole directly)
| without having the backing of a regulator. I see this as a
| simple swing of the pendulum, which it has done several
| times in the past regarding centralization and
| decentralization of computers: single machines -> single
| machines with terminals and time sharing -> mini computers
| with terminals -> microcomputers -> networked micro
| computers -> networked micro computers using peer-to-peer
| services -> networked micro computers with access to
| services -> special purpose computers (terminals!) with
| access to services. So if we want to do away with these
| we'd need to focus on the technical implementation of
| federated services that do not require central services at
| all. One thing you could advocate for is to restore peer-
| to-peer capabilities of residential internet but the fear
| of the hacker card will be played to counter that one. But
| there is also still pressure to push the pendulum one more
| step to the right: identified access to the internet and
| without that no service. This may well happen, I would
| expect a country like the UK or Australia to be first to
| implement this.
|
| Also note that there is no actual technical driving force
| behind the pendulum, it doesn't _have_ to swing at all, it
| could just as easily get stuck. The important common factor
| between all of the above was that someone (or lots of
| someones) made a lot of money by driving the swing.
| louthy wrote:
| Businesses don't do free. It is not what they exist for: The
| 'Stallman movement' isn't compatible with the the tech-
| company, the employed software-engineer, etc.
|
| I think what the OP is getting at is that the for-profit tech
| industry needs something akin to the Hippocratic Oath [1]. As
| software engineers swearing to a set of 'do no harm' ethical
| codes could well be a first step to becoming a recognised
| professional.
|
| I can certainly see a future with a framework like that. If a
| doctor does something unethical it could affect the life of a
| few people. If a programmer does it, it could affect the
| lives of billions - it's not a hard sell that something like
| an ethical code is probably well overdue.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
| wizofaus wrote:
| > As software engineers swearing to a set of 'do no harm'
| ethical codes could well be a first step
|
| Just like "don't be evil"? Which was actually enshrined in
| Google's corporate code of conduct for some time, and could
| even believed if you squinted the right way...
| louthy wrote:
| You can choose to interpret my comment as being about
| corporations if you like; however, I was talking about
| individual engineers. It is perfectly feasible for a
| professional oath/code-of-ethics to work, as it does in
| other industries. It doesn't mean you will never get a
| bad actor, but it adds a layer of protection to any
| engineer.
|
| For example, you could imagine that once the code-of-
| ethics is standardised:
|
| * Organisations that employ software engineers will feel
| obliged to publicly follow it (like they all have to have
| public policies around things like modern slavery, etc.)
|
| * They would also be pressured to display it on job ads.
| Because why would an engineer want to work somewhere that
| doesn't follow the industry code-of-ethics.
|
| * Engineers have something to point at as a reference to
| what is, and what is not, ethical. Allowing them to not
| appear be the only voice in an organisation who can see
| harm being done.
|
| * It could well enable a union of software engineers take
| industrial action if the code of ethics is being broken.
| Which would be a PR disaster for any corporation.
|
| At the extreme end, you could possibly see a future where
| engineers are 'struck off' of the professional body
| representing us (for unethical practice).
|
| The only downside I see is that ethics and morals are
| mutable, so it'd be pretty hard to nail down a concrete
| set of ethics that are effective without overstepping.
| There are however plenty of smart people in this
| industry, so it shouldn't be beyond us to work it out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The for profit industry has been _very happy_ to integrate
| the fruits of the FOSS labor.
|
| And yes, we need an ethics framework for the IT industry,
| but we need liability more than that and I don't think
| either is going to happen in the next 10 years. Maybe if
| there is a mass death (> 10K people at once or so, a few
| 100 doesn't seem to have made a difference so far) on
| account of a software issue we will finally wake up.
| louthy wrote:
| > The for profit industry has been very happy to
| integrate the fruits of the FOSS labor.
|
| Of course they are. They get free labour and their
| profits are therefore higher. which is the entire purpose
| of any corporation, to maximise profits. Being upset
| about this is futile, it's the artefact of living in a
| capitalist world. The free-software movement just isn't
| going to move the needle on that. They can either come up
| with a licensing model that pays, or get over it.
|
| But really, this isn't about FOSS, it's about engineers
| everywhere (whether in FOSS or working 9-5 in a software
| company) making ethical decisions and understanding the
| impact of their work, on potentially billions of people.
| Critically, I think having something to point at, "this
| is the oath I swore to", when talking to a boss, could be
| just the thing we need.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| I think this is one of the areas where software being
| treated as "not real engineering" caused some trouble. I
| went to school for electrical engineering and in my senior
| year they really pushed the idea of engineering ethics [1]
| and the personal responsibilities we had to whistle-blow.
|
| There is this Order of the Engineer [2] that has their own
| oath akin to the Hippocratic Oath. I went down the software
| path so I never really looked into it, but my professors
| were very in favor of it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_ethics
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site
| guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's
| rules with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| torginus wrote:
| I feel like we already have a battle-tested answer to that
| question - which is dual licensing. It worked great on software
| like Qt - just have an open source GPL(ish) licensed version
| for free as in speech users, and a proprietary do-whatever-you-
| want for cash money, so that developers can keep the lights on.
|
| What needs to change is the open-source community's perception
| of this coexistence as something mutually beneficial as opposed
| to betraying their own principles.
|
| This hostility manifests in two ways - one is the belief that
| not fully open software is somehow evil, and shouldn't be
| supported, and one should always use (often janky) alternatives
| that are fully open. The second is the constant churn without
| any thought given to API or ABI compatibility (never mind
| making the same binary run across versions, even source-level
| breakage is extremely common), leading to people wishing to
| ship commercial applications having to package half of the
| userland with them.
| verisimi wrote:
| > The reason is that there is no ethical-philosophical compass
| guiding computer technology.
|
| The reason is that there is no ethical-philosophical compass
| guiding people in the greater part, computer technologists
| included.
| dools wrote:
| > The Stallman movement failed
|
| Citation needed
| jongjong wrote:
| As a Kubuntu user, I have to disagree. From my perspective as
| a developer, the Linux PC experience has surpassed both
| Windows and Mac. I really couldn't care less what the other
| 95% of people are using. In that case, it's even more
| remarkable that even with just 5% market share, Linux can
| deliver such a cohesive, compatible experience.
|
| 10 years ago, I couldn't have done my job without Windows.
| Now I can do absolutely everything using Linux. IMO, people
| who are still on Windows or Mac don't know what they're
| doing. They've probably just been drifting through life, not
| really thinking.
| max_ wrote:
| How many applications, phones, computers do people use that
| are Stallman compliant?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The Linux Kernel.
|
| But answering the "it failed". Not really. It exists and is
| a choice on most license dropdowns and is a famous one.
|
| People should really default to GPL rather than more
| permissive licenses and hot take... should also default to
| closed source. And make open source or non GPL a conscious
| choice.
|
| The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise
| since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge
| over let's say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your
| license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it.
| They are obliged to release their source code to their
| customers.
|
| That Ballmer called it a cancer is a great accolade.
|
| Close source as a default because it is a one way door
| publishing the code on the open web. So you are protecting
| your own interests. You owe the "open source community"
| nothing and should exploit your IP as much as anyone else,
| and use GPL to allow people to "fix the printer" if they
| need to.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > The reason is GPL gives you more ability to
| commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder
| more of an edge over let's say Amazon Inc who has decided
| to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service
| and extend it. They are obliged to release their source
| code to their customers.
|
| Not if it's GPLv2 or non-AGPL - and even then what you're
| describing is the opposite of the underdog-moral-problem
| a lot of smaller cloud services or
| database/infrastructure providers are facing whereby
| Amazon (et al.) simply offers your product or service as
| their service, which is allowed by all versions of the
| GPL because Amazon doesn't care about the source-code:
| they care about charging a premium for access to a hot
| open-source project without contributing anything back to
| the actual project maintainers. That's (unfortunately) an
| argument for going closed-source, or at least having to
| reserve copyrights/licenses for operating the software as
| a service for another company.
|
| I imagine it's like being Sherlocked by Apple, except
| Apple was using your work all-along.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| More than none:
|
| https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/systems
|
| https://ryf.fsf.org/
| abwizz wrote:
| not much, but most build upon foss and some would not be
| viable without it.
| version_five wrote:
| Ideological(ish) movements don't succeed by converting
| everyone absolutely, they do it by changing the narrative
| in their direction. Stallman has absolutely done that.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| It failed, yes. If you want to go wide you could argue that
| all open source is "the Stallman movement" but given
| Stallman's noted hostility to other approaches than his own,
| that seems too much.
|
| The peak of GPLd software was in the late 90s/early 2000s and
| since then the base of GPLd code has shrivelled. I can't
| remember the last time I encountered a library or program in
| my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone GPLd, with the
| exception of some very old programs like the Linux kernel and
| a few bits of the userspace (plus Java's weird GPL+exceptions
| thing). These days almost everything new is Apache licensed
| or similar. Just browse around GitHub for a while and see
| what I mean.
|
| Also:
|
| 1. The Linux kernel, the last bastion of Stallmanist
| philosophy, in reality has succeeded by not actually
| enforcing the GPL thus treating it more like LGPL or Apache2
| in practice. GPL violations are rampant and rarely does
| anything happen. They also very publicly refused to switch to
| GPL3.
|
| 2. The most popular Linux based OS is Android where Google
| rewrote the entire userspace specifically to avoid the GPL,
| and then also created their own driver layer, again, to avoid
| the GPL and the Linux approach to technical "enforcement"
| (constant API churn).
|
| 3. The most popular UNIX based desktop OS is built on FreeBSD
| despite losing technical features, specifically because Apple
| refused to countenance anything GPL or FSF connected. The few
| dependencies they started with (like gcc) were rewritten into
| new BSD-style licensed codebases like LLVM at vast expense.
|
| In other words the people who actually build operating
| systems for a living avoid like the plague anything connected
| to Stallman's vision or strategy.
|
| It seems likely that eventually the Linux kernel would also
| be replaced, certainly Google attempted this with Zircon, but
| whilst enforcement is so lax and technical workarounds so
| numerous there isn't much reason for doing so.
| dTal wrote:
| > I can't remember the last time I encountered a library or
| program in my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone
| GPLd
|
| I don't know what line of work you're in but this seems
| quite unlikely. GTK and Qt are both LGPL (and GNOME and
| Plasma are GPL). WebKit's JavaScript engine is LGPL. MySQL
| is GPL. Blender is GPL. Arduino is AGPL. GCC is GPL. Bash
| is GPLv3. It's hard for me to believe you use the Linux
| kernel without touching any of these.
|
| GPL is wildly popular. It's losing ground, yes, and you
| correctly identify a primary reason why: commercial
| software companies correctly see it as a threat, and are
| fighting it in earnest now. It _is_ a threat. It was
| designed to be a threat. The purpose of the GPL is to
| create a self-reinforcing free ecosystem that outcompetes
| the balkanized proprietary hellscape that preceded the free
| software movement. At this, it succeeded beyond any
| reasonable imagining.
|
| A lot of the revolutionary spirit has left the free
| software movement. We are currently in the "good times
| create weak men" stage of the cycle. People who grew up in
| the garden of Eden created by the free software movement,
| who take it for granted that the popular web browsers are
| open source and Microsoft releases cross-platform IDEs that
| run on Linux, don't appreciate that the current state of
| affairs was wrought over decades by the kind of people who
| spelled it Micro$oft and were willing to tolerate their
| computers only half working in order to avoid proprietary
| software of any kind, on principle.
|
| But make no mistake, we are still at war. The big corpos
| know it, even if they've managed to fling enough bread and
| circuses to fool some into thinking we're all one big happy
| family now. Giving up on the GPL is how they win, and we
| lose.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| I don't use GTK, Qt because macOS provides its own UI
| toolkit (+electron etc). I don't use MySQL, I use
| Postgres (not copyleft). I don't use Blender. I use the
| default compiler of the OS, so I don't use gcc. macOS
| switched to zsh (not copyleft) so I don't use bash
| either.
|
| GPL isn't wildly popular by any possible definition of
| the term. It was more popular in the past which is why
| there's a base of software that still uses it, but find
| me new projects written in the past 10 years that are
| GPLd. Especially if you look at language ecosystems like
| JS, Python modules, whatever. Very little GPL there.
|
| _The purpose of the GPL is to create a self-reinforcing
| free ecosystem that outcompetes the balkanized
| proprietary hellscape that preceded the free software
| movement._
|
| Well in that case no, it utterly failed. Most popular
| client operating systems today: Windows, macOS, iOS,
| Android. Only Android uses GPL components, only the
| kernel, and the hardware is typically proprietary with no
| portability anyway.
|
| Most popular server operating systems: AWS, Azure, etc.
| They use the Linux kernel to provide your software with
| basic services like TCP/IP and timeslicing, but otherwise
| these are fully proprietary platforms with their own
| APIs, own filing systems, and which you can't even run
| locally at all regardless of how much you're willing to
| pay.
|
| GPL's influence had its heyday and peaked a long time
| ago. It isn't a threat to anyone because it has been
| universally rejected by the current generation of
| developers. Hobbyist hackers use Apache/BSD licenses,
| just as corporate hackers do. Neither support the
| principles of copyleft, and even when code is released
| under those licenses Cathedral-developed operating
| systems with no development community to speak of
| dominate.
|
| BTW, Microsoft release their IDE for Linux because it
| costs very little to do so and Linux is no threat to them
| anymore. The world moved on, Azure is the new Windows and
| people struggling with Wayland are fighting yesterday's
| war.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I don't feel the need to fight the "new and shiny" war,
| because yesteryear's problems are far from gone. Windows'
| dominance affects end users, people like me who had no
| hand in creating it and now have to deal with a near-
| monopoly. Companies tied to Azure are where they are due
| to their own business decisions, and I feel no need to
| bail them out. If my _competitors_ waste money, let them,
| it makes me more likely to succeed. They could change
| everything if they cared anyway. Users, actual people
| screwed over by proprietary vendors, can 't.
| no_time wrote:
| >We need a new philosophical movement for computer technology.
|
| I'm hoping for Cory Doctorow's new book[0] to ignite this
| discussion.
|
| This is the first thing I've preordered in my life. And despite
| his marketing being a bit cheesy, I think he might be the right
| guy at the right time to plant the seeds for this movement.
|
| [0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-
| internet-c...
| dalbasal wrote:
| I like timelines and other formalisations as of
| thinking/discussing about digital freedom... and I agree that
| this is a key freedom battleground in the coming decades (maybe
| centuries).
|
| Alongside this, I think it's worth keeping in mind gradual
| changes without discreet dates.
|
| For example, online copyright enforcement/existence has been on a
| complex, but directional journey over the 20 years. Same for
| "safety" and other "content policies," both euphemistic and
| literal. For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a
| major musical genre. Years later, walking by a speaker playing
| music triggers automatic "demonetisation" on youtube. Meanwhile,
| social media became much more centralised and inoffensive.
| Nudity, politics and such are strongly discouraged unless
| explicitly encouraged.
|
| There are landmarks in the China-touching part of this timeline
| that are critical to understanding where we are. At one point,
| the great firewall was derided. Violating digital freedom with
| comprehensive censorship meant opting out the digital revolution.
|
| Google "walked away" from China when they got too insistent about
| "getting the message" and independently censoring search in line
| with unwritten, but well understood censorship rules. Google
| regretted this and their subsequents did not repeat the error.
| Since then, most major tech companies have learned the lesson.
| Telsa, Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc.
|
| In June 2021, a bug on Bing accidentally applied a chinese
| censorship setting worldwide. "Tank Man" no longer existed on
| Bing. A demonstration of what flipping a switch in local content
| settings can do.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| > For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major
| musical genre
|
| I listen to remixes all the time. Not sure what you listen to
| but they're massive in electronic music.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Sure. Hiphop also still exists.
|
| However, both genres have origin stories that's deeply
| intertwined with copyright litigation, enforcement and their
| development.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Spot on!
|
| It's missing the classic "EU bans cryptography to save us from CP
| and terrorists"
| jacooper wrote:
| > 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from
| outside the Play store, citing security concerns.
|
| This is not happening for sure. Look how apple is being sued from
| everywhere because of it.
| pelorat wrote:
| Not a single one of those points will come true.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| There are huge economic interests driving the tremendous
| advancements in mobile computing hardware and software. The same
| economic interests are leading to creation of things like
| private-access-tokens and web env integrity as a way to
| differentiate themselves and to protect their business models
| from external existential attacks on them.
|
| The alternative economic business models have been applied to
| build open-source hardware and software stacks that preserve this
| sense of digital freedom. But the result is a stack with vastly
| inferior capabilities and experiences.
|
| Now, someone can demand I want the capabilities and experience of
| the former with my notion of digital freedom. But unfortunately
| there's no economic model that would make that work and there
| aren't enough users who care deeply enough about this to create
| the economic motivation needed to force the change.
|
| Most voluminous usage of Internet by most number of humans is not
| via web browser anymore. It is via mobile apps. This means more
| restrictive and intrusive things than WEI have already happened
| and they haven't noticed or didn't care.
|
| In the late 2000s, we built a strong cryptography based privacy
| preserving secure mesh network and node software for organizing
| and sharing your personal digital collections (photos, videos,
| emails, documents, messages etc) and got no traction in the
| market. Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects. A
| few years later unencrypted cloud backups and cloud hosted
| personal data services became not only normal and accepted but
| actually preferred and so we gave up on our vision. (We also got
| a nice and tidy exit via acquisition). Many years later, after
| many data breaches, Snowden revelations etc, some of us thought
| people would care now, but alas no, they still don't. Without
| this basic economic motive force, any such attempt to fight
| against this will miserably fail.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects
|
| Do people care about the privacy and security of their homes?
|
| They obviously do.
|
| Now why would the same people not care about the digital
| privacy and security of their homes?
|
| Maybe they are incoherent idiots. That is certainly part of the
| explanation.
|
| But maybe, just maybe, nobody credible and on a high enough
| podium _ever_ warned them their _digital homes_ are being
| pilfered with gusto. That, indeed, all sorts of valuables _are_
| taken from them, except they are intangible.
|
| Your arguments about economic model viability are right, except
| they are not. Economic models follow laws and regulations. If
| you mandate that digital privacy is a right and its violation
| is theft, then there will be a viable industry built around
| that.
|
| The shape of the tech industry is increasingly determined by
| political views rather than economic or technical constraints.
| b3orn wrote:
| > 2027: Non-WEI compliant websites are marked as "insecure" by
| Chrome and Safari. Accessing them requires confirmation through a
| "yes, I accept the risk" dialog box.
|
| Did I misunderstand WEI? It's an API a website can use to confirm
| that a client is "authentic", so shouldn't this rather be
| "Goodle/Apple/Facebook/... drops support for Non-WEI compliant
| browsers".
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| You are correct, the author doesn't understand that which he
| attacks.
| msm_ wrote:
| You could argue for "Websites that don't validate client's WEI
| compliance are marked as insecure by Chrome". But that's a
| stretch, your version makes much more sense. The real fear is
| that if WEI happens, in 10 years banks and major websites will
| reject non-blessed browsers and OSes. All for the user benefit,
| of course.
| devsda wrote:
| Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into
| implementing WEI.
|
| Any site can be marked as insecure if it doesn't block non wei
| compliant devices.
|
| You may ask why does that make a website insecure? They can
| give any number of reasons that can be silly, made up or
| outright lies as long as they are able to convince larger
| public.
|
| For example, they can claim that a site that allows shady(read
| wei non-compliant) clients is more susceptible to hacking and
| can be a threat to your data and your devices as well.
| Therefore it is insecure.
|
| This may come across as silly to techies, but it can sound
| reasonable to people who don't understand the web in general.
| jsnell wrote:
| > Think of it as a way for Google coercing websites into
| implementing WEI.
|
| And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that? What do
| they gain from it? What do you even think the WEI _is_ that
| you think this motivation makes the tiniest bit of sense?
| devsda wrote:
| > What do you even think the WEI is that you think this
| motivation makes the tiniest bit of sense?
|
| First let me add some snippets on what the authors of WEI
| think can be gained from it:
|
| * This is beneficial for anti-fraud measures. Websites
| commonly use fingerprinting techniques to try to verify
| that a real human is using a real device _[1]
|
| One of the proposed use cases: _Detect non-human traffic in
| advertising to improve user experience and access to web
| content* [2]
|
| Another snippet :
|
| _we could standardize the set of signals that browsers
| will receive from attesters, and have one of those signals
| be whether the attester recommends the browser for sites to
| trust (based on a well-defined acceptance criteria). As new
| browsers are introduced, they would need to demonstrate to
| attesters (a relatively small group) that they pass the
| bar, but they wouldn 't need to convince all the websites
| in the world_ [2]
|
| This is clearly an attempt at gatekeeping both web client
| software and the clients themselves.
|
| > What do they gain from it?
|
| I think we can agree that Google is primarily an
| advertising and search company. One of the threats to
| Google's revenue as an advertising company is ad-fraud and
| this 'anti-fraud' measures protect their bottom-line.
| Another threat is ad-blocking and though they don't
| explicitly mention it, the WEI "bar" mentioned above can
| potentially be used to prevent ad-blocking by denying
| attestation to clients capable of ad-blocking (either
| directly or by allowing plugins).
|
| Client attestation also prevents bots(both good & bad bots
| of all types including new search indexing bots) from
| accessing websites. This has a nice side-effect for Google
| that it restricts building a new search engine(a
| competitor) without its blessing. Search is a gateway to
| Google's advertising.
|
| > And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that?
|
| Like any product that any company introduces, it is to
| drive adoption? The more websites use it, the more
| normalized and legitimate WEI becomes. Once it becomes a
| standard and an integral part of web, it is easier to
| dictate terms that keep their position entrenched.
|
| We can argue whether ad-blocking or bots are good or not
| and whether these concerns are all pure speculation or
| hyperbole. But once the technical capability is there and
| it is only the ethical/moral belief of corporate
| executives( and probability of government intervention)
| that prevent it, I wouldn't trust them to do the right
| thing especially when money is involved.
|
| [1] - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-
| dev/c/Ux5h_...
|
| [2] - https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-
| Integrity/...
| jsnell wrote:
| Ok, so I think below are the only parts of your reply
| relevant to the "force every website to implement it"
| idea:
|
| > Client attestation also prevents bots(both good & bad
| bots of all types including new search indexing bots)
| from accessing websites. This has a nice side-effect for
| Google that it restricts building a new search engine(a
| competitor) without its blessing. Search is a gateway to
| Google's advertising.
|
| Um, no. Let's imagine a world where Chrome starts warning
| about "websites that don't support WEI". What does that
| actually mean? At most it'd mean warning about websites
| that don't request an attestation. It cannot possibly be
| a warning about how the website uses the attestation, or
| whether it even uses it. So in this world where you
| imagine that Google Search can attest that a request is
| coming from their crawler, and every site in the world
| has been strongarmed into requesting an attestation by
| the mustache-twirling villains at Chrome, nothing about
| crawlability by smaller search engines has changed. Other
| search engines can provide their own attestations, and
| the sites can choose whether to trust them. Websites can
| choose to ignore the attestations entirely.
|
| > Like any product that any company introduces, it is to
| drive adoption? The more websites use it, the more
| normalized and legitimate WEI becomes.
|
| Normalized and legitimate in whose view? Why do they need
| that legitimacy? It's normally an invisible feature to
| the users. If it ships in Chrome and is available for
| Google to use for protecting their own properties against
| abuse, that's all they really need. They want to make the
| mechanism available for other sites and other browsers,
| but not because that third-party adoption is particularly
| important.
|
| The reality is, anyone with an anti-abuse problem will be
| delighted to have this signal available, especially as
| the browser fingerprinting surface will keep shrinking
| over the next few years. There will be no need to coerce
| sites to use the API.
|
| It's just a really stupid idea. High visiblity, absurdily
| high risk of a backlash (having it be a security warning
| would be obviously untrue), and all for literally no
| rewards. I will happily take a bet at 100:1 odds that
| this prediction will not become true. It will not happen
| by 2027 like the author thinks. It will not happen by
| 2033. And if that's really the most realistic threat to
| digital freedom that you can envision, we're in a pretty
| good shape.
| b3orn wrote:
| Any random website can implement WEI, using it as a means to
| deem a website "safe" doesn't make much sense. You could use
| a list of "trusted" domains for that to mark websites as
| "safe". WEI's intention/threat is to kill smaller browsers
| that refuse to implement it.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Important topic, absolute garbage article. It's more fiction than
| facts and 1. on hn ofc because the headline sounded nice. I get
| the intention of exaggerated fiction and landing on what is
| happening now or before but that's propaganda 101...FUD at its
| best. Disgusting.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Obviously everything that's in the future is not a fact - or
| "wildly speculative and hypothetical" as the article itself
| puts it. See it as a call to action to ensure that it remains
| fiction.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Call to action? The author did nothing to encourage
| engagement on the topics only on his article. No information
| about how you could get active yourself or how you could
| approach the topic politically just FUD.
| Vinnl wrote:
| They were calling attention to the problem, not proposing a
| solution. But calling out a problem is a call to action for
| people to try to come up with a (or multiple) solution.
|
| Just because there isn't certainty that it would happen
| like this, doesn't mean there's not a possible future that
| looks somewhat like this. Nothing that was listed here
| seems particularly far-fetched to me, I don't think.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Think about your last two sentences in regards to the
| discussion we are having.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Done. So they're calling out things that could happen,
| driving the point home by placing them in a timeline.
| That makes the issue top of mind again for people,
| potentially spurring them into action - even if just by
| e.g. making it one of people's considerations in their
| next election.
| mtnygard wrote:
| I don't think the main point is that these are exactly the
| increments. Rather, that it _is_ a series of increments where
| each step builds on the ones before and enables the next ones.
| It's also illustrating the iterative loop from tech vendor to
| government and the increase from "recommended" to "mandatory."
|
| We are well along this process already.
|
| Larry Lessig wrote "Code and other laws of cyberspace" back in
| the 90s (I think). It's scary how much of what he wrote now looks
| _optimistic_.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Why isnt the frog jumping out of boiling water?
|
| For that to happen you need just two things: 1) somewhere to land
| where it is not boiling and 2) a trigger.
|
| Today there is nowhere to land where it is not boiling. So
| triggers do nothing but further desensitise the frog.
|
| People have tried with FOSS in its various strands but its not
| working.
|
| You cant built a platform for society to land while ignoring how
| that society works. Principally the money it uses to keep count
| and the organizational patterns it uses to mobilize resources.
|
| There is nothing predetermimed about the architecture of digital
| society and it certainly not axiomatic that it must be a
| dystopia.
|
| Excessive focus on personal freedoms misses the fact that society
| is not organized around individuals, but rather around
| coalitions, clans, corporations, collectives etc.
|
| An alternative digital philosophy or platform needs to educate
| and entice these bigger 'frogs' to act in their own best
| interest. The rest will be history.
| jongjong wrote:
| So glad I started using Linux years ago. Last time I logged into
| Windows 1 year ago, I found it completely unusable (as a
| developer). I also don't like Apple through it is more usable
| than Windows.
| dzogchen wrote:
| > 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from
| outside the Play store, citing security concerns.
|
| Ehm... This will be illegal in the EU very soon. A bit alarmist.
| Also not very fair to only include anti-piracy and anti-freedom
| legislation while ignoring milestones such as GDPR.
| pard68 wrote:
| Interesting aside, looking forwards, slipper slopes are a
| fallacy. Looking backwards, slippery slopes are a no-brainer.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| The headline can be rewritten/generalized as : "The boiling frog
| of freedom"
| nforgerit wrote:
| Takes a lot these days to keep this timeline from popping up in
| one's head and follow some conspiracy theories about total
| governmental control through perverted usage of language and
| weird (incompetent?) regulations on things digital (speaking as a
| German here, pointing at EU regulations).
|
| I mean, the only thing we (as "the informed people") can do about
| it, is to keep open and working alternatives for "the masses" to
| step in on an instant when things are going south with commercial
| or governmental controlled products.
|
| An example that comes up is Mastodon. It's weird, not necessarily
| bug-free and has a steep learning curve, compared with commercial
| alternatives. Still, it manages to attract those people that you
| want to talk with and every time I'm skimming through the
| timeline, I'm seeing something remarkable.
|
| We do already (Fairphone, Firefox, etc.) but should work more on
| keeping up the good tradition of providing free alternatives.
| When we're too powerful, we'll be getting criminalized but that
| would just add some more fun to it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-03 23:01 UTC)