He's absolutely right and it is a very bad place to end up, despite the supposed convenience for consumers. There are a number of problems that create a bit of rock-and-hard place.
We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. We want convenience and constant new features. We want things to work smoothly. We sorta care about security, as long as its not inconvenient. And we don't want to pay up front for any of it. Better still for it to be free with some ads.
Governments are legitimately concerned with terrorism, nation-state influence campaigns, industrial espionage, and law enforcement. They have to solve these problems, with constrained resources, in a technology environment that moves far faster than they can. They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.
There are almost zero short-term consumer/voter/elected-offical incentives for free, open, secure, interoperable systems. In fact consumer, political, and financial incentives are all aligned, currently, towards centralization of power and walled gardens. And the Silicon Valley model really is eating the world.
This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.
Agreed. I don't want either (in general, there might be exception s). I obviously want to hold people (the people that actually have the kiddie porn, that are actually posting the hate speech) accountably for kiddie porn, inciting terrorism and even hate speech, but I don't generally want vendors to be accountable.
Throughout history vendors have generally not been responsible for the actions of their users. Nobody blames Sharpie if someone uses their markers to make a giant poster with hate speech. Nobody blames the USPS if someone mails a letter with a death threat. Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid. Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.
One of the key differences, though, is that there is no biased amplification algorithm sitting on top of the Sharpie-generated hate speech posters. If vendors don’t want to be in the business of policing content then they should stop differentially amplifying content. You can’t manipulate the visibility of content and then claim no responsibility over what end-users see.
Also if you run a platform that ends up being used to say live-stream mass murders, it seems pretty reasonable that you would want to ban that. Ultimately companies are run by people. No one wants to work for a company that becomes a platform for that kind of horror.
Depending on the location of the poster the host of that poster would be amplifying the hate speech. For instance, let's say it was on a billboard on a busy highway. Are they now responsible for it if they don't take it down quickly?
What if every time you used a sharpie and poster board to write hate speech, it was automatically uploaded to the internet and shared with anyone who followed the Sanford company?
> Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.
Not to diminish the issue, but this is mostly an American problem as far as I see it. I realise these are also American companies, but conflating the entire world to be in danger is a bit disingenuous imo.
MANY European countries (speaking from a Scandinavian perspective) don’t suffer from this, and while there’s a danger of American policies trickling down, that has been severely diminished in the past decade as there’s a movement of all of us (that I’ve seen) sort of re-evaluating our admiration of the US that was built in the 90’s - 00’s.
From the outside this isn’t a direction the world seems to be moving in. Just more crazy US spiralling.
In Germany you can get your house searched for a tweet. Not for terrorism or any egregious crime, a viral example was because a politician has been called a penis. I believe the UK has similar issues. This is far worse than the situatuation in the US.
Not the smartest choice to make yourself identifiable, but such legislative blunders still need to be corrected.
I don't believe a house search is some trivial policing. I think the state failed again to protect reasonable rights. And yes, the hate speech legislation of Germany should be adapted to the 21st century. This won't happen politically, because society currently loves pointing fingers at small missteps. A wrong joke and you get a shit storm.
It is the usual suspects, you hate women or are a racist are the most common accusation. People really start forgetting what these qualifiers really mean. And I believe they get far too much political support and that this isn't a healthy development.
Eh I mean, there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe. It's not quite accurate to say it's an exclusively American thing. Hate speech is rising and there's a case to be made that it's because extremists find each other on the internet (Doctorow calls it a "jihadi recruitment tool" in the article).
...what if the rise in so-called "extremism" is a direct result of government policy leading to poorer outcomes for the average person. If you study history people tend to become tribal not long after life gets hard. If I was a government think tank I'd surely blame the internet long before I blamed my rent seeking laws that inordinately effect the average worker.
Unemployment is artificial! That's the mistake everyone makes here! Unemployment in the US over the last decade has been a function of ZIRP and nearly limitless fed money. It's not real. This is the same econometric snake oil they sell the country when they talk about the inflation rate. No one mentions it's a rate. For example, if we go through the next year with 8-10% real inflation they will report the inflation rate somewhere between 0 and 2%. Wow, stunning! Despite evaporating wealth they've somehow made everything look great. This doesn't even consider the unemployment number is doctored. It only includes people actively looking for work. If you got tired of looking and took 3 months off (as is custom among developers) you are no longer "unemployed" according to the fed definition.
So why doesn't that matter? Because the "employed" are not gainfully employed. They work longer hours for less wages. Longer hours because the competition pool is larger, and less wages for the same reason PLUS inflation.
The average joe may not understand this. But he certainly understands that he can't take vacations, he can't get sick, his electric, gas, and food bills have all doubled or even tripled (in some regions). Despite working, objectively, harder than ever he seems to only get further behind. This makes Joe angry. When Joe can no longer blame the government either due to perceived incompetence or manipulation by think tanks, he is soon to blame his neighbor.
This is the secret of the majority of "extremism" that makes the news. They will certainly sell it as racism, or sexism, or fascism though.
Having a job that doesn't pay enough to afford to pay rent & utilities, buy food, pay off college loans. I could go on. Just saying unemployment is low doesn't capture the nature of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed covers this well. People who work in software and make six figures tend not to be squeezed to afford the basics, except perhaps if they have to live in one of the highest COL cities in the US, but there are millions in the developed world that hold 2-3 jobs and still barely afford living.
Fuel prices are at an all-time high, and fuel companies are posting record profits. Rent is at an all-time high. Mortgages are getting insane because we have double-digit inflation and insanely high interest rates. Saving are worthless because of double-digit inflation and insanely high interest rates not actually being passed on except where it benefits banks. Food prices are at an all-time high and farms are going to the wall because they're being paid scrap prices for everything they sell.
Unemployment is at an all-time low? That's great, but people are working their backsides off and cannot afford to eat or heat their homes.
In the UK we have had twelve years of the right-wing extremist Conservative government and their "economic austerity" to "right the ship". What this has meant in practical terms is that wages have not risen in twelve years, taxes have gone up and up and up, and public spending has gone down and down and down. We had the woefully inept Kwasi Kwarteng who blew £60 billion off the UK's economy by raising taxes on the poorest and cutting them for the richest, collapsing most people's private pension pots. We went from roughly 40,000 people in the UK using food banks in 2010 when the Tories took power to 2.5 million people using food banks in 2022 - and these are not just "poor people" who the tabloid trash papers sneer at "well somehow they can afford mobile phones and TVs, why can't they afford food" - no, there are people on £30-£40k per year, who simply cannot afford to feed their families because they have to choose whether they keep the lights on, buy food, or pay their mortgage.
The political right have over the past 20 years done incalculable damage to the world.
I can't speak intelligently about UK centre-right, but here in Aus our Liberal party (as in classical liberal, centre-right) are almost indistinguishable for our Labor (centre-left). Big spending, big government and so we are seeing many of the same problems you mentioned.
I wonder why only the "populists" speak out about these problems, and then why most populists movements are led by extremists. It's not like fascists or communists ever had or have real economical solutions for healthcare or housing or environment, yet they constantly gain votes claiming exactly that (without detailing, of course). Why are all the big traditional parties only paying lip service to the real problems of the little man, even while pretending they represent them? And no I'm not sarcastic, this is a real question which bothers me extremely.
Parties don't really represent interest of their voters. They fish for votes to obtain political power, but they represent the interests of the people who run them (and their friends and patrons) - who are, generally speaking, not their voters.
Thus, traditional parties represent the interest of some subset of the established elites. Which means that the current socioeconomic arrangement is broadly in their advantage. They know that those problems are real, but they can be only solved by giving up some part of the pie. And organizations are much more selfish than individuals, so they never give up unless they believe that the alternative is to lose even more (hence why a messy revolution somewhere else can often do wonders).
Definitely. Might have been unclear but I was trying to speak specifically about the “blame the platform not the people” mentality I was responding to.
Fully in agreement extremism is on the rise and the internet aids this.
A counterpoint is that if the companies running these platforms are run by American companies, then their efforts to combat hate speech will be disproportionately focused on English language and American hate speech. This can allow it to flourish elsewhere.
> Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech.
Probably because Twitter has already demonstrated an ability and desire to curate what people see in their feeds (all in the name of increasing engagement and pleasing their advertisers). So, naturally, people see this, and tell Twitter that if they're going to interfere to the degree they already are, then they must also help ensure the safety of their users, and deal with bad actors directly. In a way, this is Twitter's own fault.
No one expects that Sharpie even has the ability to police the use of their markers, let alone the desire or resources to do so. Most people don't want the USPS reading their mail (and it's a federal crime to do so!). I think the Verizon example is where we're starting to get in a grey area, with telcos getting pushed to implement tools and protocols so people can verify calls are legitimate. That's more about the spam/scam problems with the phone system, not about stopping bullies, but it's a bit closer to that. A further issue is that most people hate phone calls, but love posting stuff online, so naturally they're going to focus on the thing they actually willingly spend their time doing.
I think a further issue is that most people can't really opt out of USPS or the phone system, realistically. But if Twitter passes some threshold of toxicity for them, they'll just stop using it. Twitter (the company) doesn't want that, obviously, so it's in their interest police their platform.
It's not about who makes the tools, it's about what users want to see. Users don't want to see giant posters of hate speech on Twitter. If they do, they'll stop using Twitter. It just so happens that Twitter is the only tool that can make things users see on Twitter.
People still don't blame Sharpie or USPS or Verizon. People have tried to blame WhatsApp, it doesn't stick because WhatsApp is private. The culture hasn't magically changed. Companies like Twitter know that when advertisers and users complain about hate speech, they're not just asking for Twitter to be held "responsible" or whatever that means, they're telling Twitter that they will leave.
Users don't see that stuff unless they want to. Advertisers don't care unless their ads appear next to it. And these platforms have pretty much solved this. E.g. Google search results contain the full cesspit of the internet, yet everyone advertises with Google.
The issue came when the news media decided that it was newsworthy that undesirables we're saying undesirable things on social media and blamed the platform as a whole. Now it's a pr issue for advertisers to be on the platform at all whether or not they are adjacent to undesirable content.
I think the people who get harassed on Twitter, and have to spend a significant amount of their Twitter-using time dealing with that, would disagree with you.
Just plain wrong. Twitter is a broadcast distribution platform, like newspapers, radio, and tv before them. You sure as hell blame the companies who broadcast content on their pulpits.
You're welcome to hold that opinion for closed 1-1 messaging platforms that don't have amplification features, but it's just plain wrong to assume that any platform that can amplify ones voice into the unwilling or ignorant and somehow be immune to this level of scrutiny. It's a farce and will certainly never end well for those that try.
It's interesting that we usually look at the amplification problem with a very different eye than the "censorship" problem. They are really two sides of the same coin. Maybe we'd need less moderation if the platform wouldn't boost controversy? Not thought through at all. Just a thought I had while reading the discussion.
Edit: I also think no discussion of censorship/moderation is meaningful without addressing the cannon of falsehood and stochastic terrorism. Those are massive, very real problems that must be addressed.
A lot of these analogies are...bad. Does Sharpie know everything you write with one of their pens and store detailed metrics on the popularity of all your previous scribbles? Is Verizon operating a 1-1 calling service, or a global audio broadcasting platform? People absolutely do blame telcos for their failure to filter spam calls effectively.
I feel that the massive scale of social media created a monster of social impact that human don't fully understand yet. The tremendous broadcasting effect that human had not experienced before needs further scrutiny for its impact positive and negative.
We have been practicing and advocating freedom of expression in the paradigm of news papers and TV, where the publishers are held accountable for editorial accountability. Or in the form of self-expression on the streets, or town square, where the impact of info/rumor/attach is much smaller than the current social media. One entity (a person or a bot) with millions of followers can spread info/rumor/attack.
It seems absurd that such huge scale of spreading information can be without accountability.
It's like that a society has to regulate automobile for its traffic accountability due to its much greater dangers to the society, but few or none for the horse-drawn carriage and the pedestrians.
I think that Twitter or other social media may have tiered censorship based the number of followers to limit it to be the appropriate human-scale of influence
We need to exam these issues in the context of social impact.
Public airwaves (TV, radio) have have fines for breaking various rules even when it’s a member of the public speaking live. Thus the classic tape delay and bleeps on all life content.
Further back Newspapers, advertising, and letters to the editor etc where limited for so long that it was a constitutional issue in 1776.
So having platforms is hardly a new thing. We have been debating such freedoms for so long it’s part of various countries cultural identity.
> Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid.
The mid-20th century USA ended up developing extensive case law about the phone system. Once upon a time, quite a few people did think it was the phone company's responsibility to prevent such calls, within reason. And they litigated the question.
Does the phone company have the right to disconnect abusive and profane callers? Does the phone company have an obligation to disconnect such users? If the phone company fails to do so, are they civilly liable? Given the government-regulated quasi-monopoly status of the Bell system, was there a First Amendment or due process angle, if the phone company disconnects users for placing obscene or offensive calls?
The answers to such questions were not particularly obvious and it just sort of evolved organically to the status quo today. New laws were passed to deal with the situation, such as one that makes it a federal offence to knowingly place an obscene and unwanted phone call. And there are a number of regulations that impose an obligation on the carriers to try to reduce spam, unwanted solicitation, maintain calling logs, etc.
I certainly blame AT&T for connecting robocalls with spoofed caller ID (most frequently masquerading as a local number, but sometimes spoofing well-known numbers like Apple's.)
I can imagine that "problems with your Apple ID/Apple Card" scams are more convincing if they appear to come from an Apple number. I figured it was a scam but I called Apple up anyway to confirm.
>Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.
I don't think Twitter gives a shit on what people think, but if advertisers complain then Twitter/YouTube will make sure to be very careful with what is allowed. I am not convinced by the arguments this advertisers have about not appearing on some "legal but bad" content" but is their money so they have the right to ask on what kind of content the stuff should appear.
You are correct if we treat social media companies as content curators. If we treat them as speech platforms you are wrong.
Regardless of your belief a "speech platform" (email, etc) can and honestly should allow these things in the spirit of actual free speech. If it is a content curator, then yes, one can infer that by curating so-called hate speech they are indirectly promoting it.
This difference is lost on people. Personally, with the amount of censorship and ads I am fine treating social media companies as curators and treating them appropriately. There are billions currently flowing into congress to stop this. Primarily from those social media companies that want to censor but still be called a "speech platform".
People often conflate their feelings with law. There is no law stopping you from going into a park with a megaphone and spewing what some people may consider hate speech. Consider even how vague the term "hate speech" even is. If I "believe" in two biological genders this, according to some, is the same as denying the holocaust. To some, criticizing the effect asylum seekers from certain countries has had on my country is consider not only racism but "hate speech". We have to be extremely careful what we consider "hate speech". Because the current definition of "hate speech", "disinformation", "misinformation", etc all center around one idea: "things I don't like should be banned, and things I do like should be promoted". This is party-neutral. Both sides of the coin want the other side to be considered hate speech mongers.
Magazines have full editorial control, though. Think of it like a fully-moderated platform. Nothing gets through without positive approval of the magazine editors. With a platform like Twitter, it's default-allow, and people have to see (and block/report) much of the bad content to get rid of it.
No, it's not. csam is illegal and so is revenge porn, the platform could even be in favor of csam and revenge porn and they'd still need to follow the law.
Ok, I suppose if the takedown was only ever used to enforce the law, then there’s no editorial oversight. But that isn’t any major platform, past or present. Even 4chan is moderated.
The precedent was set when gun manufacturers started getting sued for the actions of their customers. It was all well and good then. Few bothered to express any concerns about where that kind of thinking would inevitably lead. Anyone who did was accused of being antisocial or worse.
> Anyone who did was accused of being antisocial or worse.
To be clear they were not accused to of being anti-social. People who don't want gun manufacturers sued for what is done with their guns were called child killers, "sandy hook hoaxers", etc. The Bloomberg (yes, it was Bloomberg) money machine paired with the noise machine that is Mom's Demand Action has absolutely dominated the narrative around this.
I personally don't think gun manufacturers should be held responsible for gun deaths, unless they are specifically marketing their guns to people who will use them to commit crimes. (And for the record, I am also super pro-gun-control, and would not be sad in the least if the second amendment were repealed, and states were allowed to make whatever gun regulation they wanted.)
But I think the real reason gun manufacturers are getting targeted is because the people who have been victims of gun violence see no other recourse. Gun control in the US is mostly laughable, and it's politically difficult (if not impossible) to fix these sorts of problems. So the next natural step is to probe the system to see if there are any creative ways to change things. Targeting gun manufacturers with lawsuits is one of those possibilities.
so is your point that suing gun manufacturers was a slippery slope to people being mad at twitter, because if so that's the lamest slippery slope i've ever heard of.
It's not about blame. The reason why Twitter cares about hate speech is because they are a commercial service and they want people to enjoy their product. You can get infinite amounts of hate speech on 8chan, yet those services aren't that popular.
People blame airports for letting people board with bombs, we blame pharmaceutical companies when someone switches the bottles with poison, we blame gun manufacturers for public shootings
It's in Twitters best financial interest to moderate their service. If they let it be a free for all with zero moderation beyond illegal content then they will lose all their advertisers and the userbase would leave. It doesn't even matter if they are responsible or not. They made it is a necessity in order for the company to no go bankrupt.
Someone has to hold those people accountable though. Either platforms, or a centralized government entity.
That’s without getting into the issue of allowing that type of stuff to continue to exist on platforms if the ideal scenario is for Meta/Twitter/etc. To just not police their platforms at all.
> Someone has to hold those people accountable though. Either platforms, or a centralized government entity.
Or we could just say people on the internet are assholes and you need thicker skin. Would you be okay with government ID required to sign up to any website? If so, I can see why you have a vengeance complex.
We're talking about holding people accountable for child porn, and inciting terrorism. What the actual fuck are you talking about "need a thicker skin"?
Why is this all-or-nothing for you? Surely, if someone posts CSAM on YouTube, or even Google Photos, they should remain accountable unto themselves to remove content that is both illegal and morally reprehensible? Or should someone's Google Photos be allowed to hold any amount of CSAM to the point where it's a de-facto private hard drive?
I wish the minority were larger, or large enough to have some market impact. Although it is perhaps growing in recent years to due fairly blatant abuses of power to push agendas.
There is hope to grow that market impact! Imagine a service where the user could explicitly modify the algorithm to encourage different emotions in themselves, including hate if they want it.
Such a service would make plain a simple truth we don't want to acknowledge: screens hold powerful sway over people, and algorithms hold sway over screens. That power (mood manipulation) can be used for good or evil. Maybe if people are given control over their own tools in this way, they can better appreciate the control that is exerted on them by others, and so better resist it.
I have come to the conclusion that this can only be achieved by separate platforms. I don't believe this is a dangerous split in society, it is just about the people you want to interact with directly. I do no believe there is a common solution to satisfy both types of users.
I guess we will shortly see AI empowered moderation, where AI analyses text and gives it a hate score. I would prefer platforms that make no content suggestion at all.
That's ludicrous grouping the first (free speech) with the other two violent things. Quite a bit of effort goes into blurring these lines. It's not good.
Note that assault (which could be words, threats to life for example) is already against the law, it's psychological warfare to make up a new term "speech I don't like" and parade it around (write long wiki articles, mfg consent etc) like it has meaning. It's a term in the same class as "conspiracy theory" and designed by the same class of social engineering experts.
I wonder how large that minority is, versus how loud it is. I've been to forums that had no moderation. Normal people do not talk that way and do not want to be around people that talk that way. Kiddie porn? FFS, get out of here, we do not want to see that.
Apparently we do have some kiddie porn fans on HN, who knew?
I did. Because I've been running discussion forums on and off for 40 years. If you let them, a tiny tiny number of foul people will take over your site by driving away all the normal people who don't want to be exposed to that garbage. Free speech absolutists have trouble understanding that such bad faith actors exist, and in sufficient quantity to crush what could otherwise by a robust, diverse discussion.
I the the way forward on this is to pass a national hate speech law and have it work kinda like the DMCA where platforms and people can submit complaints, and the people taken down can dispute in a public government process that has some accountability to the citizenry.
Build up some case law about what is and isn’t so it’s applied uniformly and take stronger measures against repeat offenders.
Governments all over (including our own) have already gotten caught removing things that are directly relevant to transparency for modern systems. Crazy to think they can be relied upon to exercise these types of powers wisely.
If your argument is that nobody can be trusted then that’s fine, but I’m throwing my hat in with government over Facebook or Twitter if I have to choose. Because “everyone just drop it” doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen.
"I think the calculus has changed a bit since then because we either have unaccountable megacorporations doing it or government. So let's give them even MORE power."
On other, less-enlightened forums, this would earn you a .jpg of a dog cocking its head to the side quizzically.
I was thinking the opposite, if they’re gonna ban you for hate speech there has to be a formal complaint, with a reason and citing exactly the content, there is a formal dispute process and the final decision is made by someone not part of the corporation.
This is an extremly bad idea, there is nothing even closely redeeming about it.
This will end up with masses flagging the current not popular thing. This is precisely why you need laws that ensure freedom of expression, self-determination and other human rights.
This is exactly what happens right now except the content moderators are employees of the platform. The world hasn’t ended. I want the process that every platform already implements but it works the same across the internet with public complaints, a formal dispute and restoration process, and the decision not depend on the temperature of the particular platform’s moderators.
HN’s flagging system is more aggressive than what I want with less oversight. If you feel like you have freedom of expression here then surely HN but with a looser grip ought to be even more, ya?
It was a pretty bad situations since some moderators have been instrumentalized for political purposes. And there is nobody that really called them out for it. This should have been the press and their silence is pretty loudly screaming about how you can depend on them. I don't care which political party was worse here.
We had content manipulation for political purposes. There is no guarantee that this will stop now, but changes were certainly needed. It isn't too great that it is now in the hands of Musk perhaps, but he at leaset has a different goal. Even if that is just a pretense it would still be an improvement. And no, some alleged bots are no excuse to just editorialize topics.
This inhibits people forming their own opinion if they will be fed with preapproved messages. So yes, it was a severe problem. Even European leaders called out Twitter when they banned Trump. And it was certainly not because they liked him.
I do believe that flagging is abused on HN from time to time. It just doesn't happen too often and HN isn't too relevant for public discourse. Twitter sadly is since a large part of journalism is about the latest Tweets people can be enraged about. Overall HN is tolerant of diverging opinions as far as I have seen.
How does one achieve that without KYC-type laws or mechanisms for platforms? In that sense I agree with GP that it's a rock and a hard place situation.
One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. People are reluctant / unable to pay for the hundreds of daily services they use, given the death by a thousand cuts nature of subscriptions, and the failure of microtransactions to ever become a reality. So we tolerate ads (to a point). But no one actively wants ads. This isn't a social contract that was agreed to. In fact, enormous numbers of people go out of their way to avoid them, online and off - using ad blockers, arriving late to the cinema, 'pirating' media they already have 'legal' add riddled access to. Completely agree with you in relation to the bad incentives at work, but adverts are not a desires outcome either.
Yes, in 2022. I have ad fatigue. PTSD, even, from the onslaught and effort to avoid them.
But I recall a time when I enjoyed ads and actually looked forward to them and paid good money for magazines, and to a lesser degree TV, full of ads that somehow seemed informative and civilized and entertaining. Byte Magazine, The Computer Shopper (all ads! yet I paid for it!), Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, you name it. I don't think this is nostalgia; I was informed and entertained. Never again, I suppose...
When ads are hyper-targeted to niche products offered by small businesses that I am a fan of, they are actually not bad. I like the ads on Facebook, but not as much on other platforms like TV since TV ads are just random pray and spray ads, usually by megacorps for things I'd never buy.
Look at Dollar Shave Club. A tiny little company that was able to get to an insane valuation chipping away at the consumer mega corps because of targeted advertising and some good ads. I've heard that small consumer packaged goods vendors are having a tough time now that Facebook got their tracking shut down. The only people who can effectively market mass market stuff like that now are the megacorps like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble who can do multi-million dollar poorly targeted campaigns.
Disagree - even if 'dollar shave club' happen to be the ideal razor company for you, once you purchase their product you are still subjected to their advertisements ad nauseam. Frankly I have zero sympathy for companies who can no longer track my data without my explicit consent.
I agree with you almost entirely with one tiny caveat. The only time I am receptive to advertisements is when I am actively and intentionally looking for a product, service, or solution. But I share your assessment that the vast majority of the time advertisements and the tracking infrastructure around them are unwelcome.
That's a terrible time to be receptive to advertisements! The ads are trying to get you to pick their particular product over their competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or suitability for your needs.
I want ads to a certain extent. Particularly when they are informing me of something that I likely want but wasn't aware of and which I wouldn't have stumbled upon without the ad.
I agree, but also ads which are repetitive and which I can clearly communicate why I am not a potential customer, can be quite annoying.
It would be nice, I think, if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive.
For example, I do not watch horror movies, and I don’t think this will ever change. I find video ads for horror movies a little stressful (not like, in a way that is an actual problem for me, just unpleasant), and I think it would be to the advertiser’s benefit and my own for their ads to be shown to someone else instead of me.
Similarly with ads for fashion, or at the very least for women’s fashion. I can imagine the possibility that there could be some kind of clothing item where I’d be interested in buying due to an ad, though probably not anything advertised using the word “fashion”.
If ads are supposed to have the benefit of introducing potential consumers to goods/services that they might be interested in buying, why don’t they allow users to provide more information about what they aren’t interested in? It seems like it would be beneficial to all parties.
> if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive.
I’ve seen this, or at least parts of it, yes, but it doesn’t resolve my issue. The thing it lets you tell it “don’t show me these” is limited to a list of 5 things, none of which are “this is for a horror movie” or “this is horny”.
The other section about interests and brands, uh, well they seem to just not work for me? Like it keeps saying “we will populate this section once you’ve been shown more brands/ads”. I don’t have an ad blocker installed. This is both on my phone and on my laptop, and is the case for all my google accounts?
I know it at least used to have an “interests” section that I could update, but that didn’t really solve my problem either.
The reason I specified a viewer-tagged system is because it would, I would think, avoid the problem of [the categories that one can mark oneself as dis/interested in] being largely useless?
I have a personal holy war against internet ads and its industry, as a reprisal the destruction of the better internet of the bygone era. I use everything in my power to remove internet ads from my attention - ublock origin, sponsorblock for youtube. Adaway for Android phones. Now I rarely ever see ads on my computer/phone. Real life ads, while also occasionally annoying, is not nearly as harmful as it does not track you or gatekeep information.
> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims.
Autres temps, autres moeurs. We live in a culture today where if you are not active in the fight against X, then you condone X, ipso facto. Back in the day, companies could legitimately claim that they were in the business of delivering a product, and others had the responsibility of policing against social ills. In today's era of corporate responsibility and ESG, that is no longer the case. Open source will be affected too, as open source cannot be sustained in a vacuum; it needs institutions, foundations, and corporate backers, all of which will be pressured to comply with "ethical source" guidelines.
This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.
Open source is nowhere near as important as the right and ability to read and modify. The most popular browser is (mostly) open-source, and so is the most widely-used operating system. The megacorps are really happy to advertise the fact that they're contributing to and using OSS. Yet the situation is such that while you can see the source, it doesn't necessarily mean you have any power to do anything other than read it. What good is having the source if you're prevented from actually using it, due to various "security" features?
Contrast that with the rise of the PC in the 80s and 90s through the early 2000s and the slowly-dying culture that came with it. The majority of software was closed source, but it didn't stop people with a disassembler and a hex editor from analysing and modifying it.
Thus I think focusing on OSS is merely a distraction.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse with the consumer-vendor relationship.
Consumers don't want vendors to police content, vendors want to be a hub of content and policing content is the only way they can appease the diverse group of people they want to continue to grow. Consumers are perfectly happy to self-police content, the problem is that the models that allow for that make it a lot harder to discover content.
With your comment of incentives I think youre placing the blame wrong again. The reason there's no incentives to create free, open, secure, interoperable systems is becausese capitalism places importance on prior ownership. There's a lot more money in being the standard that everyone has to pay a royalty to in the future than there is in giving out the standard for free and just being a user of it(see: meta and the metaverse).
> They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.
And after the party you don't like is elected, they will use that same power you gave them for going after say... women who underwent abortions. Be careful what you wish for.
The end goal should be open-source everything. Imagine a world where, for example, the schematics for farming tools are open-source and anyone can improve them and download them. Everything becomes a global collaborative effort.
This is fundamentally a political issue and any organized effort to counter the establishment's chosen path can and likely will meet with a political/legal response. The issue is central enough.
I was musing to a friend the other day (in context of AI actually, not general access to computing) that Marx apparently missed a fork in the road in his linear idea of 'historic necessity' regarding the deterministic nature of social system transitions. Since technology, now cognitive technology, is such a huge amplifier of wealth, it now seems the Capitalist class can chart a way in the future that decouples from labor and assumes control over advanced technology. This path of the fork in the road will not end in a workers paradise ..
I did not view the video, but I believe "General Purpose Computing" is coming to an end. With everyone moving to Cell Phones plus the boot lockdown (Secure Boot) and things like Intel ME, TPM, future is not looking too bright. And I heard Microsoft is requiring some new addition to Chips that Windows will need which seems to be a kind of backdoor (I forgot what it is called).
I am sure many people here have seen this, looks to me this is the direction society is slowly heading towards:
> And I heard Microsoft is requiring some new addition to Chips that Windows will need which seems to be a kind of backdoor (I forgot what it is called).
It's called Pluton, and (scarily) there is not much public technical information about it.
Intel should be figuring how to fix sleep on their chipset, the company is managed by idiots and we just injected them with billions of tax payer dollars so they can continue this b.s.
I heard this before, with another name... around the 00s so "back in the day" some 20 years ago
I think that ended up as some sort of trusted computing project; we were worried back then that linux was gonna be impossible to run in our PCs... well then PCs turned into smart-phones and even though they run linux (or iOS), we ain't choosing what they run
the name was something with a P? like palladium or something that has no P but sounds somewhat like that?... I'm saying I don't remember.
Note that none of this is technical information; it's just broad descriptions of the sort that you could've written in 2005. It's not clear in your links, but I think Pluton updates work like microcode updates.
There's a nice quotation from the end of the How-To Geek article:
> As long as these measures don’t prevent us from running software we actually want to use, Pluton is a welcome development.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to editorialize on this. I honestly didn't know about Pluton, so I just included a couple of links to newcomers like myself.
Indeed, Pluton could be beneficial, assuming you are on the side of fully trusting the Microsoft ecosystem front-to-back. Or scary if you don't trust the old 'Softy.
That being said, Apple's M1 architecture has a similar security chip installed as well. Some people legitimately want these walled gardens. We here at HN are probably more on the fringe side than the majority.
It's an eternal trade-off explored in much fiction. The Browncoats v Alliance in Firefly or the Rebel Alliance v the Empire in Star Wars, or the Vickies v anarchists in The Diamond Age, and many more. We want both the stability and humanity and safety of a cultured, controlled civilization, and the creative, exuberant culture that can be born out of periods of chaos. On a personal level, this implies we all want to live on the right side of the tracks, but have the option to party on the wrong side of the tracks.
I think the rebels have to do better, to wit, they (we?) have to work smarter to make software that's just as functional but with far less code, so that it can be audited by an actual human being. Software engineers take a blase attitude about dependency bloat, but that must change. We also need to be ready to run on open hardware when it is released. Last but not least, we need to invent a way for the best hackers and geeks to sift through the software we run, people we trust to find flaws and exploits and not use them. I, for one, would gladly pay for this service, and I think thousands of others would, too.
and (scarily) there is not much public technical information about it
What little there is, and even articles that are occasionally posted here about the dystopia it'll bring, seem to have vanished and/or be taken over by corporate mouthpieces spreading FUD in the comments. I can only see that as being the industry trying very, very hard to stop any dissent.
> looks to me this is the direction society is slowly heading towards
It's not, notice how easily it was circumvented in the story. In reality, it would not be possible to lend Lissa the computer with books, because there would be continuous FaceID checking who is the real person staring at the screen.
Also, in the story, "ten percent of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers", that would be a great upgrade for the current world.
You're going to fight an uphill battle on that one.
In my experience the general public's notion of "general purpose computing" is "Well, my phone can do everything I need, isn't that general purpose computing?"
Is something that's being said only in advertisements, or by people conditioned by modern mass market tech to feel helpless, and define their needs as subset of what they know how to do on their device. In my meatspace circles, the people who say "oh my phone does everything that I need" tend to regularly ask me to help them with stuff they need, but their phone (or their knowledge of it) is, in fact, insufficient for.
I think it is the contrary. All our industry relies on general purpose computing. I don't believe the walled gardens will ever grow beyond the most trivial usages of these devices. I believe that a lot of people won't interact with computing aside from their smartphones.
Lots of people i think would happily accept a global authoritarian regime as long as it told the right stories about how it was Making The World Better For Everyone <3
I oddly disagree. I mean the trend is definitely there, but last time I checked unRaid can deal with TPM ( so clearly there is an interest from motivated individuals to defeat that trend ), cell phones are actually even more interesting as they were kinda locked in to begin with and we are slowly seeing competition from non-duopology sources ( purism, pine ) and degoogled OSs..
The war is there, but it seems not all is lost just yet.
TPM and secure boot will certainly create a caste system of devices. You will only be able to run your banking app on approved devices, just like we can see on smartphone.
There are defensible arguments for secure boot, but they all thoroughly miss the larger picture in my opinion.
That said, I do believe that Windows will loose some endusers finally. Not the masses perhaps, but as long as there is an alternative, I am happy. If some apps forces me to use a specific machine or OS, I will not use it.
I think it’s important to understand why these trends are happening if you want any hope of reversing them. It’s not just some incipient evil spreading its shadow over computing that we need to address. These technologies represent an advancement in the field, but the control of them is out of our hands.
The components you are referring to confer a clear and important benefit to devices – a secure boot chain. This is the most foolproof way we know to prevent tampering or hacking a device.
The problem is that some of these secure boot chains don’t allow being overridden by users. Many do – the Pixel series of phones, the M-series of Apple laptops, and Windows S devices all allow “turning off” or “hijacking” their secure boot chains. The further problem if you can turn off secure boot is that these pieces of hardware often can’t then be turned back on with a different secure boot chain – say, one based on open source software. Debian and NixOS and other OSes already have zero-trust ways of verifying the integrity of their software using reproducible builds, but they can’t go the step further and have the hardware it is installed on do the same verification with some sort of signature.
GrapheneOS has figured out how to do this, and it leverages the secure boot chain of the Pixel device. It is very cool and I think a nice symbiosis between the hardware and open source software: https://grapheneos.org/build#generating-release-signing-keys
The next and more problematic part of what these technologies provide is integrity, which is the guarantee that on top of the boot being secure, the software being run is from the manufacturer and it behaves as the manufacturer intends. A lot of functionality currently relies on this guarantee of integrity: anti-cheat software, DRM software (Widevine, HDCP), transit cards, credit cards, driver’s licenses, etc. The technology manufacturers aren’t building this software because they want to, but because they have to. The Original Sin for the iPhone was carriers: at the time in 2008 they were really worried about unlocking and tethering, and the prank of the day was to put a flashlight app into the App Store that allowed tethering via a proxy. Rights holders, carriers, game manufacturers, etc all pressure tech companies to use integrity to solve their problems.
Many of these solutions have alternatives that don’t require OS integrity: if the government issues signed digital IDs, for example, then it wouldn’t matter what software is running on the phone. Some are tough and don’t have alternatives, like anti-cheat and DRM. DRM in particular is a complex US legal issue: anti-circumvention is straight up breaking the law. No solution would be comprehensive without changing the law.
Progress has been made, though! The fact that we have figured out ways of unlocking boot chains in a way that is acceptable to all of the large companies is awesome. Apple does it by being able to guarantee other secure boot chains on the device remain intact, and Google does it by ensuring the device is wiped. This took real engineering effort to do.
It’s important to push these companies to go further. An M1 iPad is almost identical to an M1 MacBook in hardware, and yet Apple only allows the latter to run Linux.
The comment is already a blog post, but another big problem is that these tools are great for anti-competitive purposes… which the government is increasingly taking a look at.
> I think it’s important to understand why these trends are happening if you want any hope of reversing them.
Why? Because we let it happen. We keep buying these things that have this function as a feature. The answer is simple but it demands dedication and resilience.
Simply stop buying them and using them. Yes, a boycott. There is no other answer because they are making ton of money doing things this way and the one;y way they will stop is if we stop making it profitable for them.
You need across-the-board regulation, things like right-to-inspect-and-repair rules written into law, enforceable by independent parties via civil lawsuits in law courts - and that's because the entities involved have monopoly/monopsony power in the markets.
At some point, it's like telling people who don't want to drink dirty water that they should boycott their one and only water provider.
Boycotting doesn't work. It never does, it never did. Neither in tech nor anywhere else.
Maybe there would've been a chance if it was easy to prove that for every TPM chip they have to manufacture, they need to kill a small kitten. Or, if computing hardware was a commodity like a laundry detergent, so you could just choose an alternative that has near-identical specs, near-identical design and near-identical price, but comes without that one feature you don't want.
The companies don't care what you think, because this is a supplier-driven market. As a consumer, you can only choose out of what's available on the market. There's only so many players; barriers to entry are high, and they corrupt those who scale them[0]. They're going to keep making money and keep telling you what to buy, because they know you have no other choice.
----
[0] - You need a lot of up-front capital to start a hardware or software business. You're not going to pay for it out of your own pocket. The kind of people that will happily lend you money? They're the ones that will make sure your product fucks end-users over in every way possible, because they want to maximize returns on their investment. So even if you started wanting to do good, you're unlikely to be still doing it if you succeed.
Boycotting is not a practical solution for so many reasons for so much of the technology we use every day.
It represents a black-and-white way of thinking about the problem when the entire point I am trying to make is that everything is gray and if you work in technology you need to understand the different shades of gray better.
> The further problem if you can turn off secure boot is that these pieces of hardware often can’t then be turned back on with a different secure boot chain – say, one based on open source software.
Is your statement meant to be inclusive of, say, all laptops? I was under the impression that one can setup a machine to boot using personal keys rather than Microsoft keys: https://www.dannyvanheumen.nl/post/secure-boot-in-fedora/
I don't consider UEFI Secure Boot to be on the same level as these other secure boot technologies because it doesn't help in the face of physical access to the machine.
The process of being able to use your own keys is certainly cool, but it is less impressive if anyone with physical access to the machine can also do that
A QA friend of mine remarked that he was amazed that the loss of general purpose computing capability would be accomplished simply by a change in form factor.
Smartphone OSes have propogated their own curated walled-garden app stores, and then the desktop OS vendors follow suit. Soon it will simply not be possible to install unsigned, uncertified software on your computer, and that will be the end of GPC.
And yet with the EU taking a first stab at (smartphone) OS lockdowns, it’s guaranteed most of the top comments here on HN are just buckets of vitriol being poured on it. As happened with the EU forcing a universal charging standard. Or privacy protections.
It such regulation comes, it will be taking away freedom to take away freedom from the free market. Interesting concept, and interesting mental gymnastics will be done.
I cannot fathom how Americans can point at the EU successfully forcing phone manufacturers to switch from 40 different types of proprietary chargers (we used to have different chargers for different models within a phone series ffs) to 1 and say “wow fuck the EU for taking away the freedom that obligated me to have a dedicated charging drawer”. That is the true mental gymnastics.
Same with privacy. What sane human thinks “yes please, farm, process and store into perpetuity all the intimate data points of my life”..
The issue is we were already down to 3 different plugs - micro-usb, usb-c and lightning. Most android phones are already usb-c, so it's a pretty blatantly targeted measure.
I'm mostly concerned about it locking out the development of new standards that aren't USB, even if that was an unlikely development anyway.
Which is why I desperately want someone to build a board using a Yosys/nextpnr-supported FPGA and having loads of RAM. Half a gig is a typical maximum for such boards - with access to more generous amount of RAM building an entirely self-hosting RISC-V based computer becomes plausible.
OK it won't be fast, but it will be Free.
(Of course that might not help much if the wider internet - or particular critical services - starts to require remote attestation...)
I think such solution is not needed now -- even if all the vendors started selling only locked-down computers tomorrow (realistically I think the fastest transition may take 10 years, you not only need to implement this at motherboard/CPU vendors, but also within all these corporations that have their own servers and thus depend on running custom OSes), you still have loads of current hardware that you can use until it breaks, let's say another 10 years. Should the problem arise in 2035, you will have completely different FPGA/ASIC possibilities available by then, and current FPGAs are no longer manufactured.
I hope it's never needed - but I'm also alarmed by how quickly certain transitions are happening (perhaps I'm just feeling especially pessimistic about the rate at which we're sleepwalking into a tech dystopia because a fortnight after the local supermarket installed a bunch of self-checkout terminals, HSBC announced the closure of over 100 UK branches, including the one I use!) We already have Pluton-equipped laptops with the 3rd-party signing key disabled by default - it's not a huge step further to remove it entirely. So yeah, I hope it's never needed, but "hope for the best, prepare for the worst", and all that!
I would love to see that come true in the future but sadly nowadays the best way to have a fully free system is to use older hardware and stock up in spare parts to keep it running until an alternative pops up. Or one of those workstations with an IBM POWER CPU, but the price point is out of reach for most consumers.
> nobody really seems to care about locking you out of your own (non-mobile) device
The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices.
> I ask that you care about republicans banning actual physical books from schools as least as much
This seems like a total non-sequitur. Why do you bring this up? In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. There are also some at-least-as-severe "bans" from the left, like removing Huckleberry Finn due to racial designators that are considered offensive. The pressure to ban these books does not come from republicans.
> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices.
Sure. But I don’t feel robbed of the ability to do general purpose computing so long as my device for general purpose computing allows me to do general purpose computing. Even if my locked down phone stays locked down. I want my phone to be a locked down appliance and I bought it because it’s a locked down appliance, not despite that it was.
The question is perhaps: is it a problem that we have 2 classes of devices (mostly open like PCs, and mostly closed like everything else from consoles to phones cars), and that we need the first kind less and less?
That’s certainly happening. But for me to consider something a war on general purpose computing I’d need to see actual attacks on my ability to use my general purpose computing devices. Not merely that I’m given more options to use other devices.
The vast majority of people do not buy devices because they are locked down. In fact the idea that someone buys a phone because it is locked down and not because it fits in their pockets and has a radio on it is so disingenuous as to defy the intelligence of the reader. You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions.
On the contrary--and I can say this with some air of authority--normal people bristle at restrictions they run into and when given the opportunity to escape those restrictions do so in large numbers. Despite the ridiculous amount of complication and even risk involved with jailbreaking one's phone, we had something like 12% of people with an iPhone jailbreaking them at some point (and, no: it had little to do with piracy, and even the United States Copyright Office agreed with that: people wanted functionality that wasn't being provided).
The reality is: people at best buy these devices without understanding that they are locked down or at worst despite them being locked down. The business model of selling a locked down device is just so enticing that it has become hard to find devices that maintain high quality that aren't locked down, particularly at low price points. The only reason there seem to exist any anymore is because there are a handful of people at Google--and specifically Google--who have decided to defend the world from this fate.
And even they aren't perfect. Virtually the entire category of ultrabooks seems to have fallen to Chromebooks, and I seriously had to sit around for an hour soldering to create a special magic USB debugging serial bypass cable that I use to essentially jailbreak these things so I can run actual-Linux on them.
And that's really what is going to be your fate: the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch.
The mere existence that "sure, I can still spend a small fortune to obtain a general purpose computer" doesn't somehow prevent our fate, particularly given that these arguments tend to come from anti-DRM "nut jobs" like Cory and I who will point out that your general purpose computer is cool and all but if it isn't allowed to connect to the same networks or busses (think HDMCP) as the locked down devices then we are still losing something important: we aren't claiming you won't be able to build a computer, only that it won't be useful anymore :(.
> You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions.
Outside of places like HN and similar you get blank stares if you ask the question of what people think about the closedneas or openness of their device. If you clarify that (say) they would perhaps like to use an app from a different source, it’s again blank stares.
I of course wouldn’t actively mind if it was much easier to sideload an app on iOS, but if there was e.g some openness push that required multiple app stores to not just be available but also that all be equally prominent (like the browser or media player thing in Windows) then I’m completely convinced that it would be a disaster for users. More freedom, cheaper, but fractured and insecure. I’m not sure it’s a net positive. And I’m sure my dad would be more confused.
> the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch.
I believe this too. And while I don’t much like this future, I don’t really have a good answer. I don’t think the answer is to somehow require any appliance to be more open. It seems misdirected.
That PCs will be expensive and niche is probably true. They’ll go back to where they started before the home computing revolution, to be professional tools for content creators, developers, scientists and similar. It’s not the PC that’s threatened, it’s the cheap home PC that’s threatened. Not the workstation or video editing rig.
But the thing about the cheap home PC for web browsing, photo organization and light word processing is that it was never really a good tool for the job. It was a malware ridden crash prone slow machine that we (the HN people who now tell our relatives to get iPads or ChromeBooks for browsing) had to fix around the holidays.
Normal people bristle at restrictions they run into -- but also apps that take advantage of the freedoms granted them. The early value of browsers and AJAX was precisely that the browser was locked down. "Nothing to install" is valuable because of this. So I think both of you can be right. "Buying devices because it's locked down" only seems disingenuous if the locking down is for oneself.
If the user can choose to unlock their devices, it's the users themselves locking down the device and it makes sense to say "Buying devices because it's locked down / can be locked down".
Otherwise, it's not "Buying devices because it's locked down", it's "I have no other choice but buying locked down devices".
The browser is something running on top of an open general purpose computing device. In this case, it's the user (who decided to run a browser instead of native apps) decided to lock themselves down and it's totally different.
People want control and people want safety without having to think about it all the time. I think we haven't found the best technical solution to this tension, and we're stuck on a local optimum of "ignorance is bliss." Ideal would be something people can learn at their own pace over time -- and still not think about most of the time. You know, what the word "abstraction" is supposed to mean.
This trend towards simpler and simpler abstractions is everywhere.
We see it in the development world as well, with languages provide ever higher abstractions, and frameworks providing ever more opinionated approaches to solving things.
This happens not because of some war against writing ultra high performance code in assembly, but because developers don't want to deal with assembly on a daily basis.
My phone is a device that needs to just work. My desktop/laptop are devices that needs to let me do whatever I want them to.
Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
This isn't to say that we should not be vigilant, but I agree with what you're saying here - these trends are not by themselves evidence of a war on general purpose computing.
> Too often, people in our community conflate the two and conclude nefarious intent, when what we're seeing are market forces at work and the creation of products that the market demands.
I find it hard to ascribe it all to "market forces" when it's also aided by legislation like the DMCA. Anyway if the EU Digital Markets act someday opens up App stores, we'll see _more_ market forces at play and can see exactly what consumers truly want.
These aren’t mutually exclusive though. There absolutely are forces that we should be worried about.
My point is that despite these concerns, there are completely natural and understandable reasons for many of the trends we’re seeing that are unrelated to those concerns and don’t necessarily imply progression towards an environment hostile to general purpose computing.
But >90% of that time is used for consumption and communication, in which case an appliance that prioritizes security over hackability is the right answer for non-technical people. In the relatively few cases where a mobile general-purpose computer is necessary, there are many suitable mobile devices — laptops, rooted tablets, Linux phones, etc.
this comment was about Pluton. Mobile is an entirely different beast.
But that aside, the extent of the "lockdown" outside of recent Huawei shenanigans always seems to be limited to which corporations can put their services on a device under which rules. Not which books you can read.
Why would desktop vendors not follow the same pathway? To me, it looks like it is only a "tradition" (desktop computers are from an era when it was deemed normal to tinker with your OS) and the paradigm can shift.
They're very different markets with very different needs. The market share of PCs will fall, relative to phones, but never vanish, and as it falls the casual users will leave, leaving an even greater concentration of tinkerers.
There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility, including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires. Abandoning them would be like automakers abandoning the transport truck market because it's not as big as the family car market. They would lose a bunch of money, and money is the bottom line.
You are right that the business depending on the "tradition" is way bigger than I anticipated.
> There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility
I think there would be lots of hobbyists tinkering with smartphones…
> including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires
This is something I sometimes worry about: I think most of current developers/sysadmins/hackers started by tinkering with their computer, playing with snippets of HTML/Python/shell, and therefore we will get much less coders in the near future, as kids are moving to devices which do not allow such easy tinkering? (yes, I know there are smartphone apps that provide some functionality, but I think it's generally less accessible)
Because it is extremely disruptive to the entire platform? Windows has been keeping decades old APIs on life support for the sake of business customers. This would quite literally be the opposite move.
These two ecosystems have not converged in the past 20+ years, why would they now?
Also, somehow most Android vendors still provide bootloader unlock keys.
One, because it is a much more immediate issue than hypothetical digital access restrictions to the "wrong" books. These books are being made unavailable right now.
Two, because the FSF/GNU, as usual, has a huge blind spot for who they should advocate for. They always seem less concerned with a wide range of people having access to books or code (i.e. the supposed 90% of smartphone users) and more with _them_ (on a decade old libreboot laptop running linux-libre - something only a very dedicated individual will build or comission and accept the inconveniences of) having access to books. The book bans in, for instance, Texas are much more easy to circumvent, but affect many more people. Suppressing access to queer literature (for instance) for 80% of the population right now is much more dangerous than a hypothetical technology that could censor 99% tomorrow. Those 19% are probably not even worth chasing, because you already convinced a majority that this material doesn't exist.
> In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum.
"especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied"
As an aside, there’s a very big world outside American politics, and many of us outside the US don’t really care for it being brought into discussions where it’s not otherwise relevant. Just my 2 cents.
I wish it was that easy to keep separate. I'm not actually in the US either, but current attacks against queer people in the US have still inspired similar tactics and movements to form here[1]. I guess it's no surprised if Russian Oligarchs (like CitizenGo) are involved.
> This anxiety of an imminent all-encompassing wave of DRM where you can only run approved software on all your Windows/Linux devices has been going for more than 10 years.
So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
>So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
Can you say for certain that his writings didn't contribute to those predictions not coming true?
I mean, yeah, I get it. I worry about general purpose computing going away too. I remember Stallman and Doctorow talking about this in the early 2000s and saw many iterations of this same thread pop up on Slashdot, HN, Digg, Reddit, etc. over the years.
I dunno man, I guess I’m just skeptical over the dooming at this point. I think a bigger issue is less about whether we will be able to run whatever we want on our computer, and more that the internet has just become a cesspool of ads, clickbait, ragebait, and app sandboxed content that’s not discoverable by search engines. I think you’ll always have a fairly reasonable choice of computers to run whatever software you want on. But todays internet just isn’t very fun anymore.
I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
>I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
Your hyperbolic and insulting annotations degrade your assertion.
It's pretty easy to go buy a completely unlocked computer, so the war is definitely not lost. Maybe if you only want to run Windows or MacOS. But even then, my MacBook hasn't yet refused to let me do something I wanted to do.
My point was that if one feels the need to restrict the statement "non-mobile", then the war is already lost. Mobile phones are the most common computers used today.
That said I'm glad that you personally have always been able to do what you want to do with your MacBook.
The problem is that you will need software/services that only run on the "trusted" platform. An early example of this are services that require "apps" that require Google Services on Android, detect rooting or even require remote attestation.
Last I checked it was still possible to get up to 1080p through a FireFox addon; but you're right that anything higher (or officially supported) is locked to Windows.
In that case we would need to use services (assuming they are actually needed) that respect freedom, or create them or find alternative ways to meet the same need.
> In that case we would need to use services (assuming they are actually needed)
We're talking about things like banking. Yes, some of this already affects services that are needed in practical sense to function in modern society, and it'll affect more of them over time.
> or create them [services that respect freedom]
Impossible, because the market is highly competitive, so services respecting freedom have no chance to survive for long, which also means almost no one is willing to try making them - and more importantly - funding them.
> or find alternative ways to meet the same need.
Increasingly close to impossible in a practical sense. Observe how many things are increasingly becoming mobile-first or mobile-only.
Banks, again, are a litmus test: there are plenty of new ones that don't have a web interface or physical presence, and the more traditional ones all strongly push users towards being dependent on the phone app (even if used only as an auth tool, it's still a hard dependency), which of course will happily use hardware and remote attestation to ensure you're not using a device that isn't a pristine, unmodded version of what the corporate world wants you to use.
It may be difficult, for example it may require starting a new bank, or outright impossible, when most people you need to communicate with (e.g. for business, or hobbies - but of course you can go living in the woods) are on some proprietary communication platform (think of WhatsApp/Facebook). Other times it may be "just" wildly inconvenient, e.g. when all taxi services, bikesharing and public transport in a given city will be available only through an "app". As another anecdote from real life, the 2022 AMS meeting (https://annual.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/2022/about-the-meeting/...) required "daily health survey" through a "CLEAR app" to attend.
Last time I checked, we couldn't even fab something approaching the complexity of a 4004 or 6502. Until we can do that, we are not truly independent as hobbyists.
Why do you care if other people are using cell phones? You can still build your own general purpose computer, and even if Wintel no longer suits your needs, there are many other options.
We need a civic cybersecurity bill. Nor for corporate interests but
one written by the people to explicitly protect us from corporations
and governments.
A digital rights bill. No, you can't label that button "buy" and then turn around 6 months later and delete it from my account. No, you can't go out of business and just turn off the DRM servers without removing the restrictions. No, you can't just add DRM to physical crap so you can get a monopoly, etc. Yes, users have the right to format shift your crap. If you want them to rebuy to use on X device add something worthwhile.
My cybersecurity class dubbed it a "Bill of Bytes".
The things you mention off the top of your head are just some of
possibly 50 or 60 pressing issues relating to "consumer rights", trade
and manufacture, intellectual property, information rights and
privacy, digital sustainability, security and resilience.
The time has come to collect them all into a coherent analysis and set
out limits, principles and safeguards.
Those most interested/invested in this will not be random Joe in the
street (about whom most readers here will proclaim: "they don't care
and therefore deserve no protection") - but developers. Us. Because
without some guidance to protect our industry from ourselves it will
spiral down over the next decade until "technology" becomes the second
common rallying point, after environment, against which people
organise.
Like climate, I think we are at a potential turning point, with a
window of opportunity, to decide whether digital technology will be
part of the solution, or another part of the problem.
I am glad you're interested ssivark. These vibrant discussions we once
had in classes for ethical hacking and security engineering, had a big
influence on a book I wrote called Digital Vegan. They continue to
inspire me with a new book "Ethics for Hackers". However, the world is
changing so rapidly. Much of Digital Vegan feels quaint already (or
perhaps I have matured).
But, in all sincerity, do you really think that the readers of HN
would positively discuss a "Bill of Bytes"? So far I have found the
pervading cynicism and stuckness to be discouraging. It's very
different when you are in a room, face-to-face with people who are
themselves exasperated with digital technology and open to creative
thinking about how to fix it. But on the internet, everyone is their
own urbane expert, "too cool to care". Or, increasingly, they're an AI
troll-bot cleverly designed to derail any reflective exchanges.
Working on a personal level is more where I'm at. Every year another
of my classes pass out into the world, get jobs in cybersecurity or
development. I hope they take the deeper lessons with them, and try to
make the world a better place for everyone who uses technology.
Meanwhile writers like Cory Doctorow are doing a great job of bringing
issues to non-technical readers
> But, in all sincerity, do you really think that the readers of HN would positively discuss a "Bill of Bytes"?
I think there will definitely be an interesting discussion. But that's only the tip of the iceberg, and the more important discussion is to be had with a larger cross-section of society -- like in those classes and books.
I believe it is important for us (technologists, power users, etc) to do the ground work and prepare a forward-looking framework for when the time is ripe (just like remote work/interaction technology languished for years before Covid suddenly drove up adoption).
It is a topic I care about deeply (and have been toying with the idea of a curriculum to "compute better"). I would love to engage further on this (offline) if you're interested.
Thanks for the pointers; I'll definitely look up the books :-)
Defining, enforcing, and reinforcing property rights absolutely is within a government's purpose. So I agree that governments need to step up and modernize the law within the digital world.
Obviously the originator of the data should have original rights to it. It shouldn’t be something that can be given away in a EULA without outright compensation and consideration.
We just need to sign an open letter that says what we, as developers, will and will not build, and what kinds of ostracism will result from not signing or not adhering.
I hope this is sarcasm, otherwise it's rather naive. This may shock you, but lots of devs are not on reddit or HN, and do not participate in OSS development. They won't even know such a letter exists unless someone higher up the nerd tiers told them. For such a letter to have any teeth we'd need a nationwide developers union to enforce it, otherwise it would be just more impotent righteous noise on the internet
I so wish this would be a viable thing, but it's not, especially right now. In a way, you can blame "STEM", right? So many people in here, someone would likely sell out.
Law/Policy/Liability and whatever other methods one can get skin in the game are the only answer. Harmful software has to be punished.
> Because it's the nervous system of the 21st century. We've got to stop treating it like a political football.
Remember this, when anyone brings up mindless arguments against encryption or promotes other policies eroding the internet.
The internet is invaluable to modern society, in the same way that the wheel is... politicians don't fuck with wheels, even though they are invaluable tools for criminals and terrorists, no one would be stupid enough to risk breaking wheels. Politicians need to wake up and realise that the internet is not a toy.
I'd say it's more like, they don't understand this thoroughly enough, as it's not their wheelhouse (sorry), so when someone will come to them and tell, "we can make wheels unusable for terrorists and child traffickers while not breaking them for law-abiding citizens, using the magic of our TECH", they will listen and believe it.
And, of course, the TECH will be bullshit, but the laws will be changed to support it, and it'll make wheels less useful for people while not affecting terrorists at all, but hey, you should be happy your wheel subscription comes with so many colors this season! And have some patriotic pride, after all, our wheels-as-a-service companies account for a third of our GDP!
There is no “war” on general purpose computing. There is a clear realization that the vast majority of people cannot securely run and maintain an open computer.
Perhaps more importantly, they just don’t want to.
People want appliances like smartphones. That’s it.
The more computers there are the more dangerous bad actors becomes and the higher the cost of negligence. Botnets, DDOS attacks, etc. the only real way to combat these is at the source and that’s by taking away management of those devices from most users.
Your assertion would be worth considering if any alternative had been given even 1/1000th the effort the prevailing corporate-run paradigm has been given. Confident assertions we are where we are because this is what people want, when no alternative has been presented or tried, is ridiculous.
Then you go on to assert that authoritarian control is the only viable option. Here we have counter examples! Systems like Pop!_OS are parallel efforts to desktop systems like mac or windows, not designed for masterful smart supernerds but just to ne viable desktops for all, without fiddling, with safe-enough defaults. It didnt take suborning users under corporate whip to get here. Windows & Mac also show general purpose computing is in the broad possible- would that phones have at least this much freedom. But they dont.
Right - you can't make conclusions that people's choices are the result of some revealed preference when there aren't viable alternatives readily available.
I'm reminded also of our car-dominated cities in the US. In our current built environment, cycling isn't considered as an option by most because it doesn't feel safe. But cities around the world have shown that if you change the infrastructure such that it does, people will start cycling. The high car usage isn't a revealed preference, it's the result of a lack of other options.
So too with tech. The only options typically available for smartphones are Android with Play Services and iOS, and while it's possible to have Android without Play Services, you won't find phones sold that way unless you're technical enough to know what to look for, in which case you can probably install it yourself. (And things break in weird and wonderful ways without Play Services, because much of what we now consider core functionality for a phone has been moved into it.) Effectively, for the typical user, it's not an option.
Likewise with Linux desktops; they're more available than the phones mentioned above, but they're still not likely to be found where people typically buy laptops and desktops. You have to specifically go seeking them out, meaning the typical shopper doesn't even see them as an option.
Oh please, general purpose computing used to be all that was available, it used to be the mainstream. Mac, Windows, Linux, all of them are losing marketshare (or didn't have marketshare to begin with) and are locking down to match the UX of the newly favored mobile platforms.
Even on mobile, you have locked down iOS vs open Android and what do consumers choose? Android used to be incredibly open and was badly losing to iOS (outside consumers who just couldn't afford it) as it was open to viruses and fragmentation. Google has since learned from that mistake.
But there's always some other excuse. It's like communism, it's just never been tried, all those tries don't count because some aspect of reality got in the way. So what will it be this time? You don't like Google? Linux too hard to maintain? Say all the reasons that you consider way more important than general purpose computing and you'll have proved their point: users just don't want to.
You know why companies put so much effort into locked down platforms? Because users pay them for it. Anyone, including you, is free to dump their effort into making general purpose computing great again, so why don't you do it? Say why you're not doing it back to yourself, it's the reason why no one else is.
The notion that corporations would turn down a lucrative profit opportunity in order to 'give people what they want' is rather naive. For example, the talk discusses the farmer who wasn't given root access to their John Deere tractor, to disable a faulty sensor - because that sensor was collecting data, sending it back to the tractor manufacturer, who was using that data as part of their crop futures trading strategy. If the farmer wanted that data themselves, they had to buy seeds from Monsanto!
I can't imagine any farmer not wanting the option of shutting off remote updates and remote access, and just having complete control over the equipment they bought. This is particularly true for older hardware... i.e. many old computers will run Linux just fine even if Windows support was ended years ago.
Farmers also want free money, they want blackjack and hookers too. Can you give it to them?
What farmers want means nothing if they don't pay for it. If there is some hidden wellspring of farmers who really want those options then any manufacturer who makes tractors with those options will easily steal lots of customers and profits from John Deere. That's what you might call a "lucrative profit opportunity".
But it won't happen, because farmers don't actually prioritize it when buying tractors, they prioritize tool efficiency and are content to idly complain about this issue without putting any money where their mouth is. Go ahead, start a root-access tractor business, then customers will suddenly tell you 99 reasons why John Deere's tractor is still better than yours because these telemetry options are some of the least important things when buying a tractor and practically no farmer will actually reward you for it.
But sure, they want it. They'll even go as far as writing an internet comment complaining about it!
As a Brit this is one of the things I find so strange about US culture, there seems to be a real fear of government and authority. It seems (to me) that people in the US fear their government will do things that damage their freedom and rights through malicious intent.
I feel that here in he UK most people don't fear the government, they just think they are a bunch of useless muppets who have no idea what they are doing.
And yet you can be jailed for a mean tweet and can't own firearms more or less. You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service, though you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms.
It is the tyrants favor to be seen as useless and weak.
No you can't. It's far more complex than that, you have to be a very bad person (or very VERY stupid repeatedly ignoring warnings) for that to happen.
> can't own firearms
Good! We don't want people to have them. (Only somewhere between 1-4% want weaker firearms regulations)
> You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service
True, and it was quite right for the intelligence services to lobby for that, that's their job. But our democratic system worked and it was prevented by the multiple levels of government. They will try again, but I trust the system will prevent it.
> you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms
And I wouldn't be surprised if there is general support for this in the UK.
The US at least has provable history that it's intelligence organizations aren't completely incompetent and have already setup mass surveillance on it's citizens.
I used to be someone who was happy to maintain multiple open computers. But as computers proliferate in our lives, it became ridiculous. I have between 10-15 full fledged computers I personally operate on a daily basis. I no longer have any interest in carefully tending to the needs of each one twice a week.
> Personal Application Omnipresence, PAO. It's a theoretical computing model where your applications are available to you from any device.
> My ideal for computing consists of applications that run on a central application server that I own. I want each application to be a single running instance to which I can connect and then interact with, from anywhere, from any device.
The worrisome thing is that a remarkable number of smug, self righteous elitists share your disgusting views of how certain self-appointed betters should herd the rest of humanity along "correct" lines. It's been a disgusting bane of our species for millennia under different guises and it only shifts its talking points over time. Never mind that this minority is no less prone to all the human shittiness and stupidity that anyone else suffers, only more damaging because they apportion power for themselves over many more things.
I'm sorry, I didn't think I needed a /s at the end of this. I assumed it would be clearly understood to be a criticism of the parent's argument and not an endorsement of it.
Do another one, this time about free exchange of money and how people can't learn how to spend it only on approved things. Add something implying an equivalence between porn and terrorism.
Which is why the HN crowd buys Apple trinkets, and claims to use Brave, because it makes them feel good about their stance on privacy. Yet that same crowd abhors cryptocurrency, but doesn't seem to mind increasingly strict US reporting requirements of practically any meaningful monetary transaction.
Perhaps if all that tracking was instead sold to users as way of preventing countries from bypassing embargoes or to ensure nobody is learning how to order drugs online that we'd all abhor Brave for the energy that it wastes or bad behaviour it allows.
Unless someone waves their magic wand and makes it to where manufacturing microprocessors requires nothing but sand and electricity, things will go whichever way those with capital want them to go.
I think we're continuing to march down that road in various ways, if you look at smartphones, iPads, even arguably MacBooks now, (I know enthusiasts have hacked their own Linux onto M1 but still ... Not open)
Hardware is still totally not open, period. Try buying a PC with an open source BIOS or CPU, you can't!
The "open firmware" marketing term is a bit of a misnomer here as there is probably plenty of closed source firmware in those devices in various components, but at least the BIOS is open source.
Linux on M1 wasn't a hack, apple allowed it to happen. There is certainly a lack of hardware docs (which is unfortunate), but apple did nothing to prevent users from being able to execute their own kernels, which I'm happy to see.
I believe there are some technical root causes that must be addressed, as well as those political and other issues. Unfortunately, the non-technical problems highly discourage proper technical solutions to these issues. I'll enumerate them here anyway.
1 -It's practically impossible to secure the hardware. Even CPUs have embedded control systems that form "management" layers hidden from everyone. Nothing built on top of this traitorous layer can ever be safe. It's possible to build something completely open and reasonably secure, but the market discourages it.
2 - RAM is unacceptably bad, most systems lack ECC as well. If we had properly tested and validated RAM, RowHammer wouldn't work, ever.
3 - The Operating systems themselves are usually modeled on Unix/Linux in some fashion, where there is no capability based security[1]. We're using a security model that was fine for the relatively low threat environment of small network of computers all serving one employer. It's entirely unfit for purpose in 2022.
Note: If you assume I'm talking about "allow this app to access X", you really need to read the Wikipedia page.
So, with the current Tower of Babel that is the software world, everyone blaming everything but these root technical causes, because there are fortunes to be made selling what are effectively band-aids in the field of CyberSecurity.
I firmly believe it's possible to fix this, all the way up and down the stack, but I'm having doubts about my own ability to survive until that day happens.
Isn't security through compartmentalization a better security model?
> I firmly believe it's possible to fix this, all the way up and down the stack, but I'm having doubts about my own ability to survive until that day happens.
Did you consider Qubes OS, a security-oriented OS?
While Qubes is close to virtualization, etc. in terms of separating environments, it doesn't provide capability based security. Nor does it address the underlying insecurity in hardware.
On Qubes, you compartmentalize your workflows and data into security domains. All programs in one domain have only access to the same security level (in the edge case, it's one app per compartment).
Unintended targets are simply not accessible from a wrong domain, i.e., by wrong programs.
> ...UK's David Cameron, who've joined in with the NSA and GCHQ...
What year is the article from? David Cameron resigned as British PM in June 2016 and as MP in September. He since seems to have held a number of positions on charity and corporation boards, I couldn't find anything that would tie him to current political decisions.
the outcome of that war depends, imho, largely on whether digital computing will continue evolving at breakneck speed or whether it will become commoditized, generic and (dare I say it), open source
in the former case the current pattern of abusive oligopolies will persist as society continues being dazed and confused about the new toys and suspends critical judgement
but we might be erroneously projecting the rapid developments of past decades (and the idiosyncratic events and actors that shaped them) into a future that is increasingly driven by other dynamics
for one thing, the pace of innovation/adoption seems definitely to be slowing down facing a combination of technical and behavioral limits. a few more years without self-driving cars and regular space travel tourism and we might start having a second look at what has been the quid-pro-quo of all the tech hoopla. awareness of the dangers and pitfalls of surveillance capitalism (which is now the de-facto economic model through which computing is deployed) is diffusing, slowly but surely. finally, the ability of a tiny crowd of severely under-resourced hackers to maintain fully functional alternatives, whether that is the linux desktop, its huge collection of applications or the fediverse, shows to anybody that cares to look that there IS an alternative.
Once/if the TINA spell is broken revisiting the role of computing in society may get us into completely different directions and the suffocating status-quo may forever be a thing of the past
And a bunch of these predictions never materialized. Subscription models are more widespread, but there's also more and better choices for opting out, and a much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in.
I didn't think it before, but I think it now: this is what kills general-purpose computing - subscriptions, and everything-as-a-Service in general. They make the actually important part of the offering gated and completely outside of your control. You're left holding an interface to a remote thing that can refuse to operate for any reason, including you trying to use a general-purpose computer to access it. This is not a hypothetical anymore.
> there's also more and better choices for opting out, and a much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in.
Mess around in, yes. Use in practice? Not quite. I think the most clear and worrying trend is remote/hardware attestation on mobile, in combination with subscription model / SaaS as mentioned above. The litmus test here is banking apps[0]. Banking is very much critical to life in the modern world, and banks are strongly pushing for having a mobile app as hard dependency[1] - and those apps make use of remote/hardware attestation. Ostensibly it's for your own safety, but as a side effect, you lose control over your own device. The use of those attestation APIs is accelerating[2].
In short: yes, you have a "much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in", but if you don't sign the right contracts and the platforms aren't properly locked down, "mess around" is all you're going to be able to do with it.
----
[0] - Though I suppose the first real warning was gaming. DRM on media or games alone wasn't considered as worrying, because you could always find alternative source. But anti-cheat measures on multiplayer games are the first well-known DRM applied to an activity whose entire value sits in the network that's out of your control, and therefore not substitutable. You can't torrent a CoD or DotA multiplayer match.
[1] - Even if you use the web interface for everything, which many banks don't provide, there's a push for using the app as the auth tool - if you do, then the app becomes a hard dependency for you anyway.
[2] - The APIs are increasingly easy to use, increasingly promoted (at least in the Android world), and increasingly hard to hack - from what I read as an outsider, they've completely gutted the custom ROM scene for Android, as whatever cosmetics/QoL improvements you gain are not worth the functionality loss.
I've made it a personal rule that I would not pay to buy something I cannot own. Barring government regulations, if something does not give me full (theoretical) control of its functionality. Though, this is subject to some practical considerations, such as cost. If I can sufficiently limit the damage some unowned device can do (such as by not connecting to internet), and it is cheap enough second-hand, then I can still consider using it.
I think that general purpose computing is simply changing.
It's not going to be "A man and his Linux in a basement" anymore but rather "Let's run some code in a remote distributed serverless runtime". Cloud Excell for the masses.
One part where we can already see this is how cloud environments like colab, hugging face, repl.it, etc remove some parts of maintaining a full installation of an OS. If you just want to write some python and run it on a GPU you don't have to buy a GPU, install drivers, etc anymore.
We should be happy that we won't have to care about the bare metal (unless we want to).
The downside to this future is that it, being the shift from applications to services, means instead of your data living on your computer it is instead fragmented across a bunch of other random places.
While most consumers don't really care and actually prefer the switch to everything being cloud-first, the stagnation it can cause for other developers is substantial.
E.g. If I want to make a cool email client, I don't have to ask the user's permission to send and receive emails, I have to have Google's permission to access their machine and to make this compelling as Gmail, I have to then store all of my user's data on my own servers. This compared to me just writing a client-side application that has no server requirements is a huge bust IMO.
My preferred future is where every user has their own server that can run general purpose applications. It would have all the benefits of the cloud (data available across all of your devices) and would grant developers more freedoms to create compelling experiences.
The future, I want is that some high schooler could create the next Google Docs without having to compete with Google on large scale data infrastructure and security but instead on user experience.
The only difference is that I think that the OS/Server/Filesystem is a big hinderance for many applications. I just want an environment where I can to execute arbitrary code.
My version would be
*> Every user has their own remote code execution environment.
One good candidate for the near future would be serverless WASM runtimes backed by serverless databases. (But you'll still have to store your codebase in a file system.)
GCP is like (at least in the US) our right to free speech or privacy. It’s amazing but people either don’t want it, don’t care, or in any case aren’t willing to fight for it, while on the other side, world-dominating govts/megacorps benefit from it disappearing - so it will.
Ultimately I’ve accepted that if the People aren’t willing to fight for these things, they don’t deserve them.
The idea that free speech is disappearing in the US is patently absurd. Check out the Sedition Act of 1918 if you'd like to be informed on the progress we've made. The speech clause of the first amendment is stronger than it was for about 75% of the existence of our country. There's been a somewhat weird trend lately of the free speech of corporations being prioritized over that of individuals, but people care deeply about that on both the left (opposition to the Citizens United ruling) and the right (opposition to content-aware acceptable use policies). Take a slightly longer view and it seems insignificant, next to literal prosecutions for handing out pamphlets opposing the draft.
Same with general purpose computing: it's more accessible than at any time in history. Most people who use only a computing-based appliance like a smartphone today, simply would not have had a computer twenty years ago. Meanwhile I can buy a new Raspberry Pi 4 (definitely a general purpose computer) for less than 25 hours' minimum wage -- try doing that in 2002. The problem is not availability, or that someone is trying to quash it. The problem is that most people just are not interested. Those who are interested have at least as much access as they ever have.
> What percentage of HN parents have tracking on their kids phone?
>
> All of them.
All phones have "tracking" in that they're on a cellular network, so they can be tracked by a cell phone company. My son's phone was stolen at his school recently, but we had no way to recover it. What tracking software do people use on their kids phone? Perhaps I can use it to recover the phone if the next one gets stolen. Apparently since I'm the only parent here who doesn't have tracking for his kids, I want to make your claim true.
We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. We want convenience and constant new features. We want things to work smoothly. We sorta care about security, as long as its not inconvenient. And we don't want to pay up front for any of it. Better still for it to be free with some ads.
Governments are legitimately concerned with terrorism, nation-state influence campaigns, industrial espionage, and law enforcement. They have to solve these problems, with constrained resources, in a technology environment that moves far faster than they can. They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.
There are almost zero short-term consumer/voter/elected-offical incentives for free, open, secure, interoperable systems. In fact consumer, political, and financial incentives are all aligned, currently, towards centralization of power and walled gardens. And the Silicon Valley model really is eating the world.
This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.