"If I only had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won." [0]
I do have trouble not feeing apathetic. I want to cover my laptop camera, but I don't want duct tape on my equipment! (Nor one branded "Rand Paul.")
I know planned obsolescence is maddening (my iPad 1 is as good a paper-weight as anything) but I love crunchy new technology!
I would love a decentralized Internet, but the one we have right now took a long time to get to where it is. Am I really ready to start from scratch? (Probably not, in the end...)
Snowden made this stuff scary for sure, but I'd rather learn to properly encrypt the Internet we have.
The evolution of iPads over multiple generations is not 'planned obsolescence' (PO), and this article is wrong to characterise this progress as PO.[1] PO denotes 'artificially limited useful life', whereas products like iPads and iPhones are replaced because of actual obsolescence or wear on consumable components. Most capacitors have a limited life in terms of time and charge/discharge cycles, and will degrade in performance over time; batteries are the same. Since no one wants their iPads to be overbuilt, (i.e. heavier and more expensive), they wear out over the course of just a few years. In addition to that, everyone will want higher resolution and more powerful tablets than are currently available; these consumers would rather buy a modern tablet now and another later than wait for the second to come out.
"actual obsolescence" The iPad? Really? I'm typing this on a netbook that cost 280 dollars five years ago. Everything sill works. It does all the same jobs it did years ago. There is absolutely no reason a device as expensive as an iPad shouldn't work for a decade or more.
PO can include external factors. Does apple continue to manufacture spare parts? If no, have they released the designs so that others can produce them? If not, then this is a case of PO even if the devices themselves have not been built to fail.
I am currently on my third (or maybe fourth) iPhone, and every one was replaced for multiple reasons. The headphone jacks are only good for a few thousand insertions, the batteries get worn out, the internal components start to fail, and the buttons get mushy/broken. In addition to this, sometimes people drop them, and the screen cracks. The processors, ram, and solid state memory get out-of date, and make the product feel 'slower' and less pleasant to use than newer devices. In this environment, is it worth it to make spare parts and replaceable components? Which components would you make re-usable?
On one corner of the desk that I am currently using, there sits an old aluminum 13.3" Macbook with a replaceable battery. I never replaced the battery because the laptop got dinged up, old, and slow, so the effort and resources that went into making the battery replaceable were wasted. Getting rid of 'serviceability' is often worth it.
No, you are wrong here. All machines get old and wear out; digital machines wear out faster than mechanical ones. The OP you are replying to had a good point - capacitors in particular have a limited lifespan, and electronics are fragile. When the physical lifespan of 99% of the internals is 2-3 years before attrition in whatever it's form claims at least one component, why engineer something that cost 4x more but is only twice as rugged?
You seem to be hung up on Moore's law as well. And while Moore's law has lost some of its teeth in recent years(and tricks like cluster computing and specialized designs are staving off some of its effects), hardware still grows old quickly. (And bitching about your 5 year old $1k hardware is hilarious to those of us who remember paying $5-8k or more for "all the computer you will ever need" only to see it become almost entirely obsolete in less than a year.
But the fact is this: your 5 year old etch-a-sketch only has 256mb ram on which to run its OS and apps. Considering what people expect out of a tablet these days by way of web browsing, multitasking, etc, your iPad 1.0 actually IS obsolete, or quickly will be.
As to open sourcing the design - why in the world would Apple open source the trade secret that literally makes it Apple? The fact that Apple built it and no one else does is literally what makes Apple all of those earnings.
My 5yo netbook is no etchasketch. Without getting into OS debates, this "old" machine boots up and gets my presentation to the projector faster than any off-the-shelf apple/MS machine. 5years is nothing for a digital machine. Capacitors can and do last far longer. They cost pennies, not even, fractions of pennies. If iPads are failing because of such fundamental components then apple has questions to answer.
256mb belongs in the 90s, not 2010. This machine came with 1gb and upgraded a couple years ago with a ssd and 4gb of memory. And anyone who travels will tell you that having an oldschool VGA output is very useful. The average conference-hall projector is far older than the average portable. One less adapter is one less thing to loose.
You don't have to "open source" designs. Look at what car companies do. They maintain a supply of spares and they license out designs they don't want to build themselves. That's what people expect from car companies.
Throwing working machines in the trash simply because they are scratched or fail to keep pace with fashion is wasteful vanity.
The iphone 4s is 5 years old and runs the latest OS and takes a few seconds and $40 to replace the battery. My ipad2 is still working perfectly. Battery lasts days and runs all the things it used to and then some. Fragility is not the same as planned obsolescence.
I owned an iPhone 4 up until a couple months ago. It worked fine for most of its life but near the last months most apps on it became unusable. Everything just ran so slowly. I remember google maps being particularly bad, the app would run incredibly slow and eventually crash about 30 seconds into using it basically every time I opened it up. You could still use the phone I suppose, but it would require a good amount of patience.
Would not surprise me that this happens because the apps expect more RAM to be on hand, and so are not as carefully optimized for low RAM circumstances.
I am seeing something similar over at Android. Where earlier versions of the Play store app worked without a hitch on my aging tablet, now it seems to crash left and right whenever i want to look at longer lists of search results or similar. And this seems to happen when it tries to load the app icons or similarly asynchronously, meaning that i can enter the search, get a list of results, and then see the app stutter and crash as it tries to load the graphics.
The mandatory (1) software updates (specifically iOS8) have basically made it perform half as well as it did when it was sold, I don't think it's a shining example.
"Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations."
I recall many years ago I would sometimes write comments at places like Slashdot. And I recall pointing out that so long as governments have armies that can find ways to be repressive. I recall being down modded as if I was some kind of irrational troll. At that time, and in those forums, the people who got upvoted were the ones who made the argument that the Internet could never be censored, because the Internet would route around censorship as if censorship was a form of network failure. During that era, a lot of people made some fairly naive libertarian/utopian arguments about the Internet was changing the world. Some people still make these arguments even now. There were some places (I'm thinking of places such as BoingBoing) where the utopian editorial tone was the only tone that was allowed. Places like BoingBoing have gotten much better at documenting the ways that governments are undermining the Internet, but many of these places started off denying that such undermining could ever happen. I am happy that these people finally revised their view of the world, though I wish the dangers had been more widely appreciated at an earlier date.
The reality we face is now much as it has always been: there is no technological solution for repression. The only way to establish a free society is to mobilize and fight for it. That was true 2,500 years ago, when the Plebians were demanding fair treatment from the Roman upper classes, and it remains true today, and it will probably remain true for as long there is a species that you can recognize as homo sapien.
OK there's no automatic technological solution for repression but the advance of tech probably helps overall. If you look at something like the polity data for democracy things seem to have gotten better since 1800 and I doubt human nature is that much different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity_data_series
> They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
We used to have this. Then GMail took over email, Facebook took over most people's communication, reddit replaced usenet and so on. We let the general masses sleepwalk into corporate data silos.
notice how all of those ran over their own protocols and needed their own software. now its all http(s) and HTML/CSS/js inside a web browser. you may say the net not webbed. or maybe the cat that got out with the introduction of the micro/personal computer was stuffed back into the mainframe bag with the introduction of ajax.
Email is still p2p, but it is true that it gets harder to run your own server all the time.
Reddit is mostly publicly accessible, and run like some kind of low-profit community-directed social benefit corporation. But... It is increasingly infiltrated by marketing in subtle and frustrating ways. Maybe this is why it exists.
Facebook, however, is just a nightmare. It gives us one thing we lacked before, which is a centralized identity service, and using that as leverage twists everyone's arm into joining and directing all communication through it. I can use any email server and talk with my friend on gmail. I can browse reddit anonymously. But facebook won't be satisfied until it owns my digital soul.
We need tools. They will have companies behind them. So, we can't throw everything away. But, can we draw the line at the walled garden of Facebook? It is a bridge too far. It is the end of the internet. Please, don't give in. Write your friends. Call your mother. Email your baby photos. Post your videos where you get credit (even revenue!) for them. Remember that ten thousand years of humans went to parties, got laid, and had your ancestors without an event page that required a signup and login.
That's not actually true. Home internet access affordable to non-business users has never included the necessary static IP address or upload bandwidth to run one's own servers, and has often included explicit prohibitions on such in the Terms of Service you sign to get service. Participating as a full peer on the internet has always been for the "business class".
The thing about e-mail, for instance, is that it was and is terrifically flawed. And those flaws have been exacerbated by two things:
1) Hostile use of e-mail has increased at a rate higher than exponential, to the point where spam prevention is an incredible chore, and the things that make it to your spam folder on Gmail isn't the whole of it, particularly if you aren't cautious in how your e-mail address is used.
2) People no longer have just one computer. They have a work computer, a home computer, a smartphone... and they routinely change those devices.
Gmail solves those problems. Gmail takes care of all kinds of spam prevention and other infrastructure tasks. You can access it from almost any computing device you have. And it does so nearly painlessly. You don't have to delete e-mails on your remote server because you're running out of space. You don't have to sync anything. There's no configuration. There's no cost. Can you get most of the way to a solution as nice as Gmail on your own? Yeah. But it's not as low-effort or low-cost, and I think people underestimate the expense, difficulty, or shortfalls of the best non-Gmail options for personal use, especially for people who are not either professionals or hobbyists when it comes to using computers.
The general masses didn't sleepwalk into corporate data silos. They went there because the open Internet is a shitshow. It is filled with incredibly dedicated and hostile people who want to run scams, spread malware, do DoSes and all sorts of intentionally hostile things. It is also filled with a lot of more innocent hostility -- nominally compatible software that in practice has weird corner cases, bad documentation, bugs, and so on and so forth. And decentralization is a real hard problem in software. Look at Aphyr and Jepsen. Look at IRC and its interminable netsplits. What you call "corporate data silos" are things that managed to solve problems people really have. Those solutions, yes, have other harms. But people didn't make bad choices or wrong choices, they made entirely sensible choices based on a different set of wants, resources and priorities than the typical commenter at Hacker News. That doesn't make them dumb or "sleepwalking," and condescending about real people with real needs is not going to solve anyone's problems.
The thing about gmail is not its services as a email server, but that you basically have to use Google's site or apps to access the email.
Yes, there is imap support. But as best i understand it, the implementation is "idiosyncratic" to put it mildly.
Similarly, Google used to run a IM service using XMPP. But then they killed the federation feature (allowing other XMPP services to communicate with Google's users), and then phased the whole service out for Hangouts.
Facebook also used XMPP for their IM service, but has since also disabled it.
Thing is that as long as they were using XMPP, i could have Pidgin sitting in the corner and keep up with friends and family on either service. Now it have to run 2-3 apps (and non of them are available for desktop Linux) to do the same.
While it may not be a sleepwalk, it sure edges close to "bait and switch".
Yes. Technically, we know how to do federated systems. But we don't know how to stop asshole amplification, where one person can ruin it for many others. If someone can create large numbers of anonymous accounts cheaply, the service will be choked with spam.
Facebook's real name policy is one way to stop that. Google's "one account for all of Google" is another, because it takes effort to maintain a convincing fake account. OpenID tied to cell phone numbers might work; the cell phone numbers don't have to be disclosed to the sites using the ID for signon. While you can buy multiple cell phone numbers, they're not free. So a solution to that problem might be possible.
It's hard to monetize federated systems. Note that YC doesn't fund any. A few exist; there's Friendica and Diaspora, and, of course, the remnants of USENET. They seem to have a few thousand users total. It's not a technical problem.
Both democracy and capitalism say that the "general masses" get to decide who wins and who loses, for better or worse. I understand the nature of your lament, but the only solution is various forms of autocracy. Communist governments love telling people what's best for them. Likewise with dictators. If you let the people themselves decide, the overwhelming majority of them will chose whatever is most inexpensive and convenient. Period.
The truly heroic will find ways to make what's "best" also the cheapest and easiest solution. But who wants to undertake that herculean task without being very well compensated for their effort? And there's the rub.
I would also note that "digital dissenter" is not a term that Taylor applies to herself. A(n admittedly cursory) Google search seems to suggest that it was made up by the article's author.
You can now get phones that don't break. Nokia was once the leader in that area. There are now good rugged smartphones.[1] I have a smartphone from Cat (yes, Caterpillar Tractor has a phone brand), and can drop it on cement repeatedly with zero damage, or wash it off with a hose.[2]
Apple has been struggling in this area. Their sapphire screen debacle set them back on the ruggedness front.[3] They've made some progress on water resistance, but they're not at IP67 yet.
I don;t think anyone really wants a rugged iphone. The latest models are like delicate jewels, too thin and wide to be believed. Ruggedizing an iphone would be like ruggedizing a teacup poodle: it wouldn't be a teacup poodle anymore.
A cracked screen is not "planned obsolescence", it's bad procurement. If she wanted a device which wouldn't have that problem, she could easily get a less-dainty one. She could also protect it better.
I recently let a smartphone go all the way to EOL (~5 years, not bad in my opinion). I don't see what these snoots are bragging about.
If they don't want to use a device which is state-of-the-art, and don't want to pay for one which is durable, they'll get one which is old and broken.
Not really sure if people concerned about government / corporate spying are in the same category as those concerned about machines replacing people. I felt like the article jumped around a bit too much. Wanted it to go deeper rather than simply assume that the reader was already familiar with all the ideas present.
Agreed. There's a lot wrong with the article. It touched on mass surveillance, capitalism, government regulation, the gig economy and other issues without really tying them together in any coherent way.
In addition, I wouldn't characterize someone who owns an iPhone and a laptop as a "digital dissenter" or a "techno-skeptic", but the story uses both of these terms to describe Taylor and some of the other subjects of the article. I think these are both poorly chosen terms that smack of Luddism and, unsurprisingly, Taylor & co. are likened to Luddites later in the article. The article itself suggests that an appropriate term for them might be "humanists", but I guess that wasn't as likely to get clicks as "techno-skeptics."
I was also amused by the criticism of Lanier's idea of micropayments for content creators. The objection was that it might encourage people to record clickbait or "hey, y'all, hold my beer and watch THIS!" stunts, as if Youtube isn't already teeming with exactly that sort of content.
It seems to me that the centralized internet has simply grown to be very popular because most people are indifferent to having their information stored in a centralized place.
This has not precluded a decentralized internet from existing. (At least decentralized in the sense that it is not run by X mega tech company or NSA controlled.) You can run your own email server, you can run an irc server, we have tor, you can run a server out of your home and serve web pages or even run a reddit clone to organize like minded people. In a certain sense all of this is more accessible than ever. The problem that these people have is that as the internet grew, it expanded to the wider population of non-technical users who had no need or desire for the aforementioned technologies. They are perfectly fine with Facebook and Google and not knowing or caring how it works because that is good enough for them and censorship will likely never be a problem they will have to face. They don't mind the ads because for the most part they are relevant and the privacy invasion that more technically inclined users perceive has no real affect on their lives.
The internet has not necessarily closed and centralized, it is just that the centralized closed portion of it has grown very popular while the rest has just stayed small and limited in its appeal.
She says she’d like to see more government-supported media platforms — think public radio — and more robust regulations to keep digital powerhouses from becoming monopolies.
Really? That's the solution? Have the organization that is trying to invade your privacy take over more of the communication methods?
It's a weird blind spot a lot of people have. As if a government agency whose budget depends on a perception of ever-bigger threats will be more reluctant to violate people's privacy than Facebook is, or a government agency run by a single political party will report the news more evenhandedly than Fox News does. Large bureaucracies don't magically become trustworthy just because you painted a flag on their side.
> a government agency whose budget depends on a perception of ever-bigger threats will be more reluctant to violate people's privacy than Facebook
What makes you think that a public ISP/whatever would rely on 'ever-bigger threats' for budget?
As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
> As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
That's a poor argument because it's simply your opinion and you're not giving any evidence to show your opinion is more valuable or more correct than anybody else's.
I can claim the Criterion Collection represents the highest-quality media content ever released, and it's just as valid an opinion as yours.
> What makes you think that a public ISP/whatever would rely on 'ever-bigger threats' for budget?
Perhaps I was unclear. Facebook will violate your privacy to sell ads. The government agency will violate your privacy to justify its budget. In both cases your privacy is violated, with the additional point that you can't quit using the government agency and if you get in their grill too much they can have you killed.
> As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
They're very high-quality, and they also generally represent a single minority point of view in their societies. The two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
This is so naive. Organisations are as resilient as the way they were designed. Look at public broadcasting across the world: govts in Europe and other places successfully run critical state media.
Most organizations, especially private ones are trying to invade your privacy. If you think it's only the NSA you are kidding yourself. She thinks corporate surveillance and censorship is a bigger danger than government surveillance. Whether or not you agree with her (I tend to -- you can't vote Zuckerberg out of control of facebook, and he has no responsibility to be accountable or transparent to the citizenry. Facebook is run by orders given from the top, not laws and representatives of the people, it doesn't even pretend to be. Plus, even organizations like NSA have goals which are ostensibly good like 'protect citizens' not simply 'profit') it's a fairly reasonable stance that is not uncommon.
Also the government isn't one organization. It is as wide and varied as the corporate landscape. She may trust NPR which is nominally "the state" (barely) but not NSA or FBI, which is a very reasonable stance to take. The most stringent defenders of privacy I've ever heard of as a class are librarians, who are -- you guessed it -- part of the government. Even agencies themselves are not monoliths; there are many people even at NSA who work in a defensive capacity securing and protecting systems instead of subverting them.
So "More government! That's ludicrous" isn't really nuanced enough.
> Most organizations, especially private ones are trying to invade your privacy. If you think it's only the NSA you are kidding yourself. She thinks corporate surveillance and censorship is a bigger danger than government surveillance. Whether or not you agree with her (I tend to -- you can't vote Zuckerberg out of control of facebook, and he has no responsibility to be accountable or transparent to the citizenry. Facebook is run by orders given from the top, not laws and representatives of the people, it doesn't even pretend to be. Plus, even organizations like NSA have goals which are ostensibly good like 'protect citizens' not simply 'profit') it's a fairly reasonable stance that is not uncommon.
That's backwards. Individuals have more control when working with non-government entities because they can opt-out completely. If I don't want Facebook to invade my privacy, I don't have to use it. Problem solved. There's no opting out of the government and NSA invading my privacy.
No, you can't opt out of being tracked by Facebook. By not using it, you stop seeing what Facebook knows about you, but they keep collecting the information through "like" buttons all over the web and through posts and pictures from your friends. Opting out of the Internet is still not enough to avoid the latter
If you don't want the NSA to invade your privacy, it's easy. Just don't use the internet or email.
That isn't a real solution, just like "opt out of google" or "opt out of facebook" isn't a real solution. When a corporation has a monopoly it's as powerful as a government in that area but with zero accountability or transparency.
The concern here is power. The people in government choosing how to use their power are elected or responsible to someone elected. On the other hand the power structure of a corporation is a dictatorship. Pretending you can theoretically choose to not participate in society and avoid corporate control so their power isn't real power is naive.
Public radio is government supported, not government run. Meaning, most public radio stations get less than 5% of their annual funding from the government. The rest comes from listener donations and pledge drives, not advertisers, which is pretty much the opposite of what you're suggesting. This is also how Wikipedia works, minus the small percentage of government funding. Not sure if say, Facebook, could operate in the same way, mostly due to hardware scaling and liability issues, but it's possible.
> Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
There's a lot of problems in the tech industry, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was a lot of planned obsolescence in hardware, but breaking a phone screen isn't planned obsolescence. That's you breaking a screen. People like to talk about their mother's grandmother's washing machine and how it never broke, but if you dropped it off a cliff it would break.
Also, a couple things I've read on reddit that made me rethink my thoughts on planned obsolescence:
It used to be that hardware engineers had to plan for errors in manufacturing, etc, and not knowing exactly how much stress this part would place on this part, and as such, had to over-engineer their products to make sure they would work. These days, we have CAD tools, and can almost exactly figure out how thick this particular piece can be to work, and exactly how strong that motor needs to be. Products aren't over-engineered anymore, and as such will fail sooner.
Additionally, when your grandmother bought a washing machine, it might have cost a larger % of your income than now. If you scale the price of older machines, they're significantly more expensive than what we have now.
Final note: You never hear about your grandmother's stuff that broke now, did you. You only saw the stuff that worked forever.
As it stands, I'm actually really concerned about the direction modern technology is going, but at the same time, hopeful. It's easier than ever before for a young inventor to create something wonderful and make sure everyone has access to it. With the same power that allows them to get their ideas to everyone else, more malevolent powers can keep an ever-closer eye on everyone, and much easier.
I was thinking more along the lines of: "This cordless drill would be so much more robust and durable if the manufacturer had not ruthlessly wrung every last cent out of the BOM."
See also: the shitty power supplies in almost all consumer electronics.
In spirit, I am with the "digital dissenters." It is a shame that the term for what they are, luddites, has been corrupted, almost from the start...
Luddites are individuals who are against the adoption of technology when it will destroy the connections individuals have with their family, friends, and community. Plenty of Kirkpatrick Sale, E.P. Thompson, etc. about for those who wish to dig deeper.
However, in practical terms, I find the digital dissenter's mistrust to be somewhat misplaced. The technology does not set itself up in a women's restroom to take up-skirt video any more than a gun pulled its own trigger recently in San Bernardino.
The soap box, jury box, and ballot box are all failing, in part because all the mistrust, anger, and energy are not being focused on creating substantial penalties for inappropriate use of the technology.
Remember, it isn't just about planned obsolescence or the Web 2.0 centralization of everything. Read the books. Those are just the _symptoms_. All of these "digital dissenters" are not anti-technology... that is an oversimplification... many of them love tech (look at J-Lan!)... it is the underlying neoliberal political and economic system that _drives_ the current tech industry that they object to—aka. the California Ideology. That is what lies at the foundation of their criticism.
Really surprised Evgeny Morozov isn't also tagged as a "digital dissenter" in this piece. Or Richard Stallman for that matter.
I feel the arguments against old vs new tech or humanness vs automation are missing the point.
A meaningful debate is the choice between supporting technologies that centralize power or those that distribute it.
The notion that decisions are being made for the benefit of "machines" is nonsense. If that appears to be the case, it's likely for the benefit of those who control the machines.
It's strange that free and open source software was not mentioned, since visionaries (albeit flawed) like RMS predicted the power shifts we see today.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI do have trouble not feeing apathetic. I want to cover my laptop camera, but I don't want duct tape on my equipment! (Nor one branded "Rand Paul.")
I know planned obsolescence is maddening (my iPad 1 is as good a paper-weight as anything) but I love crunchy new technology!
I would love a decentralized Internet, but the one we have right now took a long time to get to where it is. Am I really ready to start from scratch? (Probably not, in the end...)
Snowden made this stuff scary for sure, but I'd rather learn to properly encrypt the Internet we have.
Maybe I'm part of the problem?
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQeIzGu6hQ
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
PO can include external factors. Does apple continue to manufacture spare parts? If no, have they released the designs so that others can produce them? If not, then this is a case of PO even if the devices themselves have not been built to fail.
On one corner of the desk that I am currently using, there sits an old aluminum 13.3" Macbook with a replaceable battery. I never replaced the battery because the laptop got dinged up, old, and slow, so the effort and resources that went into making the battery replaceable were wasted. Getting rid of 'serviceability' is often worth it.
You seem to be hung up on Moore's law as well. And while Moore's law has lost some of its teeth in recent years(and tricks like cluster computing and specialized designs are staving off some of its effects), hardware still grows old quickly. (And bitching about your 5 year old $1k hardware is hilarious to those of us who remember paying $5-8k or more for "all the computer you will ever need" only to see it become almost entirely obsolete in less than a year.
But the fact is this: your 5 year old etch-a-sketch only has 256mb ram on which to run its OS and apps. Considering what people expect out of a tablet these days by way of web browsing, multitasking, etc, your iPad 1.0 actually IS obsolete, or quickly will be.
As to open sourcing the design - why in the world would Apple open source the trade secret that literally makes it Apple? The fact that Apple built it and no one else does is literally what makes Apple all of those earnings.
256mb belongs in the 90s, not 2010. This machine came with 1gb and upgraded a couple years ago with a ssd and 4gb of memory. And anyone who travels will tell you that having an oldschool VGA output is very useful. The average conference-hall projector is far older than the average portable. One less adapter is one less thing to loose.
You don't have to "open source" designs. Look at what car companies do. They maintain a supply of spares and they license out designs they don't want to build themselves. That's what people expect from car companies.
Throwing working machines in the trash simply because they are scratched or fail to keep pace with fashion is wasteful vanity.
I am seeing something similar over at Android. Where earlier versions of the Play store app worked without a hitch on my aging tablet, now it seems to crash left and right whenever i want to look at longer lists of search results or similar. And this seems to happen when it tries to load the app icons or similarly asynchronously, meaning that i can enter the search, get a list of results, and then see the app stutter and crash as it tries to load the graphics.
The mandatory (1) software updates (specifically iOS8) have basically made it perform half as well as it did when it was sold, I don't think it's a shining example.
(1) If you want support.
"Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations."
I recall many years ago I would sometimes write comments at places like Slashdot. And I recall pointing out that so long as governments have armies that can find ways to be repressive. I recall being down modded as if I was some kind of irrational troll. At that time, and in those forums, the people who got upvoted were the ones who made the argument that the Internet could never be censored, because the Internet would route around censorship as if censorship was a form of network failure. During that era, a lot of people made some fairly naive libertarian/utopian arguments about the Internet was changing the world. Some people still make these arguments even now. There were some places (I'm thinking of places such as BoingBoing) where the utopian editorial tone was the only tone that was allowed. Places like BoingBoing have gotten much better at documenting the ways that governments are undermining the Internet, but many of these places started off denying that such undermining could ever happen. I am happy that these people finally revised their view of the world, though I wish the dangers had been more widely appreciated at an earlier date.
The reality we face is now much as it has always been: there is no technological solution for repression. The only way to establish a free society is to mobilize and fight for it. That was true 2,500 years ago, when the Plebians were demanding fair treatment from the Roman upper classes, and it remains true today, and it will probably remain true for as long there is a species that you can recognize as homo sapien.
We used to have this. Then GMail took over email, Facebook took over most people's communication, reddit replaced usenet and so on. We let the general masses sleepwalk into corporate data silos.
Reddit is mostly publicly accessible, and run like some kind of low-profit community-directed social benefit corporation. But... It is increasingly infiltrated by marketing in subtle and frustrating ways. Maybe this is why it exists.
Facebook, however, is just a nightmare. It gives us one thing we lacked before, which is a centralized identity service, and using that as leverage twists everyone's arm into joining and directing all communication through it. I can use any email server and talk with my friend on gmail. I can browse reddit anonymously. But facebook won't be satisfied until it owns my digital soul.
We need tools. They will have companies behind them. So, we can't throw everything away. But, can we draw the line at the walled garden of Facebook? It is a bridge too far. It is the end of the internet. Please, don't give in. Write your friends. Call your mother. Email your baby photos. Post your videos where you get credit (even revenue!) for them. Remember that ten thousand years of humans went to parties, got laid, and had your ancestors without an event page that required a signup and login.
1) Hostile use of e-mail has increased at a rate higher than exponential, to the point where spam prevention is an incredible chore, and the things that make it to your spam folder on Gmail isn't the whole of it, particularly if you aren't cautious in how your e-mail address is used. 2) People no longer have just one computer. They have a work computer, a home computer, a smartphone... and they routinely change those devices.
Gmail solves those problems. Gmail takes care of all kinds of spam prevention and other infrastructure tasks. You can access it from almost any computing device you have. And it does so nearly painlessly. You don't have to delete e-mails on your remote server because you're running out of space. You don't have to sync anything. There's no configuration. There's no cost. Can you get most of the way to a solution as nice as Gmail on your own? Yeah. But it's not as low-effort or low-cost, and I think people underestimate the expense, difficulty, or shortfalls of the best non-Gmail options for personal use, especially for people who are not either professionals or hobbyists when it comes to using computers.
The general masses didn't sleepwalk into corporate data silos. They went there because the open Internet is a shitshow. It is filled with incredibly dedicated and hostile people who want to run scams, spread malware, do DoSes and all sorts of intentionally hostile things. It is also filled with a lot of more innocent hostility -- nominally compatible software that in practice has weird corner cases, bad documentation, bugs, and so on and so forth. And decentralization is a real hard problem in software. Look at Aphyr and Jepsen. Look at IRC and its interminable netsplits. What you call "corporate data silos" are things that managed to solve problems people really have. Those solutions, yes, have other harms. But people didn't make bad choices or wrong choices, they made entirely sensible choices based on a different set of wants, resources and priorities than the typical commenter at Hacker News. That doesn't make them dumb or "sleepwalking," and condescending about real people with real needs is not going to solve anyone's problems.
The thing about gmail is not its services as a email server, but that you basically have to use Google's site or apps to access the email.
Yes, there is imap support. But as best i understand it, the implementation is "idiosyncratic" to put it mildly.
Similarly, Google used to run a IM service using XMPP. But then they killed the federation feature (allowing other XMPP services to communicate with Google's users), and then phased the whole service out for Hangouts.
Facebook also used XMPP for their IM service, but has since also disabled it.
Thing is that as long as they were using XMPP, i could have Pidgin sitting in the corner and keep up with friends and family on either service. Now it have to run 2-3 apps (and non of them are available for desktop Linux) to do the same.
While it may not be a sleepwalk, it sure edges close to "bait and switch".
Facebook's real name policy is one way to stop that. Google's "one account for all of Google" is another, because it takes effort to maintain a convincing fake account. OpenID tied to cell phone numbers might work; the cell phone numbers don't have to be disclosed to the sites using the ID for signon. While you can buy multiple cell phone numbers, they're not free. So a solution to that problem might be possible.
It's hard to monetize federated systems. Note that YC doesn't fund any. A few exist; there's Friendica and Diaspora, and, of course, the remnants of USENET. They seem to have a few thousand users total. It's not a technical problem.
The truly heroic will find ways to make what's "best" also the cheapest and easiest solution. But who wants to undertake that herculean task without being very well compensated for their effort? And there's the rub.
I don't upgrade my phone because the one I have is fine. It isn't a political statement, though.
Apple has been struggling in this area. Their sapphire screen debacle set them back on the ruggedness front.[3] They've made some progress on water resistance, but they're not at IP67 yet.
[1] http://mobiloscope.net/en/hardware/smartphones/waterproof-ru... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku-xItv8 [3] http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7250941/the-inside-story-...
I recently let a smartphone go all the way to EOL (~5 years, not bad in my opinion). I don't see what these snoots are bragging about. If they don't want to use a device which is state-of-the-art, and don't want to pay for one which is durable, they'll get one which is old and broken.
They do have options though.
In addition, I wouldn't characterize someone who owns an iPhone and a laptop as a "digital dissenter" or a "techno-skeptic", but the story uses both of these terms to describe Taylor and some of the other subjects of the article. I think these are both poorly chosen terms that smack of Luddism and, unsurprisingly, Taylor & co. are likened to Luddites later in the article. The article itself suggests that an appropriate term for them might be "humanists", but I guess that wasn't as likely to get clicks as "techno-skeptics."
I was also amused by the criticism of Lanier's idea of micropayments for content creators. The objection was that it might encourage people to record clickbait or "hey, y'all, hold my beer and watch THIS!" stunts, as if Youtube isn't already teeming with exactly that sort of content.
This has not precluded a decentralized internet from existing. (At least decentralized in the sense that it is not run by X mega tech company or NSA controlled.) You can run your own email server, you can run an irc server, we have tor, you can run a server out of your home and serve web pages or even run a reddit clone to organize like minded people. In a certain sense all of this is more accessible than ever. The problem that these people have is that as the internet grew, it expanded to the wider population of non-technical users who had no need or desire for the aforementioned technologies. They are perfectly fine with Facebook and Google and not knowing or caring how it works because that is good enough for them and censorship will likely never be a problem they will have to face. They don't mind the ads because for the most part they are relevant and the privacy invasion that more technically inclined users perceive has no real affect on their lives.
The internet has not necessarily closed and centralized, it is just that the centralized closed portion of it has grown very popular while the rest has just stayed small and limited in its appeal.
Really? That's the solution? Have the organization that is trying to invade your privacy take over more of the communication methods?
What makes you think that a public ISP/whatever would rely on 'ever-bigger threats' for budget?
As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
That's a poor argument because it's simply your opinion and you're not giving any evidence to show your opinion is more valuable or more correct than anybody else's.
I can claim the Criterion Collection represents the highest-quality media content ever released, and it's just as valid an opinion as yours.
Perhaps I was unclear. Facebook will violate your privacy to sell ads. The government agency will violate your privacy to justify its budget. In both cases your privacy is violated, with the additional point that you can't quit using the government agency and if you get in their grill too much they can have you killed.
> As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
They're very high-quality, and they also generally represent a single minority point of view in their societies. The two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
Also the government isn't one organization. It is as wide and varied as the corporate landscape. She may trust NPR which is nominally "the state" (barely) but not NSA or FBI, which is a very reasonable stance to take. The most stringent defenders of privacy I've ever heard of as a class are librarians, who are -- you guessed it -- part of the government. Even agencies themselves are not monoliths; there are many people even at NSA who work in a defensive capacity securing and protecting systems instead of subverting them.
So "More government! That's ludicrous" isn't really nuanced enough.
That's backwards. Individuals have more control when working with non-government entities because they can opt-out completely. If I don't want Facebook to invade my privacy, I don't have to use it. Problem solved. There's no opting out of the government and NSA invading my privacy.
I'm not saying it's a great solution, but it's a solution, and it's more options than exist for opting out of government surveillance.
From other people posting your pictures and whereabouts? You have to quit civilization.
Doesn't change the fact that it's easier and legal to opt out of Facebook.
That isn't a real solution, just like "opt out of google" or "opt out of facebook" isn't a real solution. When a corporation has a monopoly it's as powerful as a government in that area but with zero accountability or transparency.
The concern here is power. The people in government choosing how to use their power are elected or responsible to someone elected. On the other hand the power structure of a corporation is a dictatorship. Pretending you can theoretically choose to not participate in society and avoid corporate control so their power isn't real power is naive.
There's a lot of problems in the tech industry, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was a lot of planned obsolescence in hardware, but breaking a phone screen isn't planned obsolescence. That's you breaking a screen. People like to talk about their mother's grandmother's washing machine and how it never broke, but if you dropped it off a cliff it would break.
Also, a couple things I've read on reddit that made me rethink my thoughts on planned obsolescence:
It used to be that hardware engineers had to plan for errors in manufacturing, etc, and not knowing exactly how much stress this part would place on this part, and as such, had to over-engineer their products to make sure they would work. These days, we have CAD tools, and can almost exactly figure out how thick this particular piece can be to work, and exactly how strong that motor needs to be. Products aren't over-engineered anymore, and as such will fail sooner.
Additionally, when your grandmother bought a washing machine, it might have cost a larger % of your income than now. If you scale the price of older machines, they're significantly more expensive than what we have now.
Final note: You never hear about your grandmother's stuff that broke now, did you. You only saw the stuff that worked forever.
As it stands, I'm actually really concerned about the direction modern technology is going, but at the same time, hopeful. It's easier than ever before for a young inventor to create something wonderful and make sure everyone has access to it. With the same power that allows them to get their ideas to everyone else, more malevolent powers can keep an ever-closer eye on everyone, and much easier.
"So much engineering effort has gone in to making this product just functional".
See also: the shitty power supplies in almost all consumer electronics.
Luddites are individuals who are against the adoption of technology when it will destroy the connections individuals have with their family, friends, and community. Plenty of Kirkpatrick Sale, E.P. Thompson, etc. about for those who wish to dig deeper.
However, in practical terms, I find the digital dissenter's mistrust to be somewhat misplaced. The technology does not set itself up in a women's restroom to take up-skirt video any more than a gun pulled its own trigger recently in San Bernardino.
The soap box, jury box, and ballot box are all failing, in part because all the mistrust, anger, and energy are not being focused on creating substantial penalties for inappropriate use of the technology.
Really surprised Evgeny Morozov isn't also tagged as a "digital dissenter" in this piece. Or Richard Stallman for that matter.
A meaningful debate is the choice between supporting technologies that centralize power or those that distribute it.
The notion that decisions are being made for the benefit of "machines" is nonsense. If that appears to be the case, it's likely for the benefit of those who control the machines.
It's strange that free and open source software was not mentioned, since visionaries (albeit flawed) like RMS predicted the power shifts we see today.