The problem is that people want cages. They want cages, especially, for their foes (real or perceived): every time you hear someone say, 'there ought to be a law' what he is really saying is, 'I want armed men to use the threat of deadly violence to herd people who do what I don't like or don't do what I like into cages.'
Less obviously, many (perhaps most) people want cages for themselves. They don't trust themselves to make adult decisions, or simply don't want to be responsible for their choices. There is security to three hots & a cot, just as there is security to the iOS App Store. What's missing is not security but liberty.
And folks don't just want cages for their foes and themselves; they want not to be confronted with it. Just note the downvotes any post about the lack of freedom on iOS will get.
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. While I think it's partly a failure in properly communicating all of the dangers with big tech to the public, I think the bigger reason is that people just don't give a shit. When trying to talk to non-techie co-workers/friends at happy hours, I've mostly gotten either blank stares or nervous laughter as they go back to staring at their iPhones (hell, I get those responses from other developers who should know better as well). As long as people have their Instagram feed, they're kept satisfactorily sedated.
Your second paragraph is really insightful. It's very simple, perfectly describe the behavior of countless people in various situations, and is not a mere criticism of people in general as this kind of behavior is perfectly rational from an incentive perspective. I would like to read more about that.
You are articulating the insight that has been intuitively grasped by leaders, revolutionaries, and despots alike, throughout history.
If you look at it from a systems point of view, the mass of humanity provides the 'inert balast' that allows for continuity and long-term activities. The system design bug here is that, the acquiescence of the masses is obtained via pschological phenomena common to the human being. The implication of that is that there is a system level disconect between "how am I actually doing" vs "how do I think I am doing". The system of collective human management operates at the partially fictional level of "perception" vs factual "reality". It is this psychological content, formed via psychological manipulations (such as religion, ideology, propaganda), that informs the 'views' and 'decisions' of the masses.
We don't have a systemic approach to providing decentralized "information as utility" services for our societies. There are no technical issues. ("Business model" is not a technical problem.) A centralized approach allows for maintenance of power for existing entities (individuals, families, organizations, corporations). The forces behind centralization are powerful and entrenched, and the opposing vision is held by relatively marginal entities. Obviously entrenched power will fight tooth and nail to maintain power. What "people want" is neither here nor there; they'll use whatever toy they are given, because that is what "people" have been doing since day 1.
Unfortunately, I think this author is far more correct than not. Also unfortunately, we can't just create computer companies that do better; there are too many perverse incentives.
I don't think author is correct. One more piece from someone who cannot imagine people being interesting in other things than computers. I don't see car enthusiasts lamenting (maybe they do, I just don't see them) that Joe Average has no idea how to tune a carburetor or change the brake fluid.
Once again some talk about the imagined war on "general purpose computing". You know who is interested in general purpose computing? People doing it. For others computer is just a tool helpful to write an email, retouch some photos, or compose some music. Do we see public WiFi where we have zero access to configuration, as the "war on general purpose networking"? Or do we not care as long as it works (snooping aside).
The phrase "snooping aside" invalidates your whole argument. It's not like using a car will harm Joe Average on average, but because of the snooping carried on by general-purpose computers, using a computer does hurt Joe Average on average.
I think you didn't understand me. I do understand that Joe Average wants to use general-purpose computing to accomplish things. My point is that Joe Average does not understand the hidden costs of using computers that are spying on him, costs that might make him want to find some other way of accomplishing his tasks.
> I don't see car enthusiasts lamenting (maybe they do, I just don't see them) that Joe Average has no idea how to tune a carburetor
I think they do, and you just don't see them.
I think what the author describe has been happening a lot and even more violently in the car industry. I just think the average Joe doesn't have enough incentive to care and will just throw his car and buy a new one if there is an issue.
But for some specific users it has became really apparent. One of the trend in the farming truck industry is to numerically mark all components of the truck "to help farmer identify and repair". Practically, a lot of truck will behave like printers and stop working if they detect a component is defective / not original even if the fault is minor. Thus, for a while, farmers used hackers services to bypass those costly replacements. But as the manufacturing companies are catching up, it's becoming harder and harder. So the net result is that trucks from the 80's have seen their price explode as they are deemed much more reliable and can be fixed without requiring an authorization. (https://jalopnik.com/classic-tractors-from-the-80s-are-becom...)
I think the vendor lock-in trend might have originated in the tech industries but is definitely trending everywhere (computers, phones, cars, coffee machines, printers, video games, can you name more..?).
That's just the first useful link I could find in 5 minutes; which means there's bound to be a lot more if you google around a bit. (try "right to repair" and "eu" in your search terms)
What I find really concerning is that all of this is man-made.
So we have management who wants to maximize profits. I don't really blame them, it's a lot of money involved and a shark tank environment. (I mean I do blame them, but I can see their reasoning).
But then we have engineers who just do as they told in making all this possible, having the craziest ideas, like:
> The Asus EEE PC 900 that I bought had a 4 GB SSD held in place by a screw that was soldered in place. This prevented the SSD from being upgraded.
If that makes them sleep better at night, I wonder...
I guess they do.
I get payed well, I could earn more with my qualifications, but I already earn quite a lot and I have more holiday than any other software person I know in my area. Not sure if more income would make me happier. More wealth, probably, but no paycheck is gonna suddenly make me rich, so that's that.
Life isn't just about "getting rich" and being wolf of wall street. Engineers aren't billionaires or VPs but they're making a real good living most places in the US.
That's true. But if you think about it: if you have the skillset to design a laptop, your possibilities for jobs are much grander than making laptop's less upgrade-able
In the end, it doesn't really matter what an individual engineer thinks. They can make a stink about it, but ultimately someone will do the soldering/add it to the design. Perhaps if the engineers had a union and the union cared about it, that could be different. As it stands, it makes zero difference if an engineer fights about these things. The only person it will affect is himself when he loses his job.
There are users at all levels; some are really fine with the spreadsheet in Google Drive, and really it leaves them with time to take a stroll in the park and talk to friends and relatives. Some users want to put together their own computers and their own operating systems, and they will do too. No point in complaining for what the "masses" don't want to do.
> Some users want to put together their own computers and their own operating systems, and they will do too.
We'll see how feasible/affordable that is in 10 years. I'm afraid that consumer hardware is only going to get more and more locked down in the name of "security".
I'll be the contrarian: Has the author ever heard of Linux?
I'm being glib, and share many of the author's frustrations with the state of things, but really the trends covered in the article have been happening for well over a decade. In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals. Likewise with scientific computing frameworks like R and Python. The author even managed to get a personal website up for all of us to read. The options for personal computing are wide, wide open, even if some markets or products remain closed and proprietary and tough to hack.
Also,
> I suppose one can argue that if we all have nothing but dumb terminals running software from a ROM (which cannot be written to), then no malware can get onto our computers. But, do we want to go back to the dumb terminal days of the 1980's? Is this the "modern" operating system that we want?
The author does give ChromeOS some credit for allowing Linux apps to run, so it sounds like he gets that bit.
But, he's focusing on what is typically available to consumers. And he's right that MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS all are on some path to be more locked down.
> In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals.
That's great if you want a microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi. What about computers with PC-level capabilities, or laptop form factors? What's going to happen when those devices fall under the arbitrary distinction of being "too insecure" for individuals to have full control of?
A couple of years ago, during a public Q&A, I asked Steve Wozniak what he thought about the architecture of control that Apple mandates on their "i-device" hardware. My question was to the effect of "What do you think about how I don't own my iPhone or iPad the way I owned my Apple II?" His answer took the form of the "we have to give up some of our ownership in order to have nice things" trope. When Steve Wozniak, of all people, answered the question that way I knew that the era of individual ownership (and the control that implies) of general purpose computers really was on the way out.
I was a little shocked (and really, really sad to hear one of my childhood heroes answer like that). I recorded the interaction-- albeit via my iPhone in my pocket-- so the audio quality probably isn't very good. I'll look to see if I can dig up the recording. (This was from his October 30, 2017 visit to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I didn't find a recording available online with a quick search...)
If only the desktop (read: personal) computing experience on Linux wasn't so awful[0]. I realize that's a subjective statement, but come on, I've been hearing "Year of the Linux Desktop" rhetoric for 20 years now and it's still a platform[1] so utterly unorganized and chaotic that even a whole lot of people like me, who believe strongly in personal computing and value the ideas of openness, don't want to use it[2].
[0] I can, and have, gone on at length about why I think this and I won't repeat it here.
[1] One of the big problems of course being that Linux Desktop isn't a platform so much as a loose umbrella label describing a bunch of kludges.
[2] I've been using Linux Desktops for 2 decades and until recently I ran Linux on 4 out of 5 of the personal computing devices in my possession. I have written Linux software, contributed to FOSS projects, put together my own distro, and was even president of a LUG for a while. I have tried to give Linux Desktop a chance and it and its community have driven me away time and time again.
I suspect it's a function of your use cases. I've used Linux on the desktop since the late 90s, and I still use it every day. My employer makes me use MacOS for work, and it's a constant source of frustration for me, but Linux is consistently wonderful.
Vague criticism is useless though. My frustration with MacOS is mostly that stuff is either broken or unintuitive. I use Emacs, and after upgrading to Catalina, Emacs could no longer open files on my Downloads folder, even after manually assigning it permissions to read the entire disk. This turns out to be because Emacs has a Ruby script it gets launched through that has distinct permissions from the executable itself, so I have to hand-tune the launch scripts to make reading from disk work correctly.
There's lots of stuff like this. Mouse avoidance mode on Emacs is broken when it is set to 'banish, completely breaking the ability to drag the Emacs window around the desktop. Took me a few weeks to track down.
I want to tile a window to the side, so I have to click and hold on the full screen button, then select a side, at which point MacOS goes into some weird full screen mode and forces me to select some other window for the other sid, which I didn't want. I just wanted to tile a window on one side. If this feature were launched in Linux, I fear the derision would never end. Pop!_OS did it better.
For some reason, MacOS can't remember that I type Dvorak. After I log in, it remembers, but on the log in screen, I have to manually select Dvorak every time so I can type my password. If I've already selected my account, there's no reason it can't do that for me. Linux does, except Elementary OS, which is broken in dozens of other ways as well.
If I touch the play/pause button on my headphones by accident, my entire desktop gets buried beneath iTunes (I guess Apple Music now). I had to remove execute permission to avoid this, but updates seem to revert the behavior from time to time.
And this is just me trying to run Slack, Emacs and a browser. I'm not even doing anything fancy. So when I hear that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, it just doesn't resonate with me. I've used it for decades as my daily driver, and I plan to continue.
Statistics on desktop OS usage reflect OEM preloading, marketing, and momentum of familiarity, not anything inherent to the operating systems or environments.
Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so, with the only notable exceptions being one gamer and one Excel power user.
> Statistics on desktop OS usage reflect OEM preloading, marketing, and momentum of familiarity, not anything inherent to the operating systems or environments.
Yeah, Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying that forever and yet, as I mentioned, even a lot of people like me who both are capable of and have reasons to desire a different OS find Linux Desktop too broken to deal with.
The community chooses the narrative that protects their ego.
> Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so
Anecdotally I know a lot of people who do some kind of work with their computers and are programmers and general nerds who hate Linux Desktops because they are so broken.
You really seem to have a personal vendetta against linux but it has no bearing on the fact that linux runs, it's up to you to set it up. Don't like your distro? Build one. LFS. I'd rather the majority stay on Windows and don't have a fetish for caring about majority/minority. In fact, I'd prefer minimal cli installs that most don't or can't use.
I did, and said so in the first post. Problem is there is only so much you can do with the garbage components that make up "Linux Desktop". I'd pretty much have to re-write everything above the kernel at this point. No coincidence, so did Android!
> I'd rather the majority stay on Windows and don't have a fetish for caring about majority/minority.
Well that's fine. I'm speaking mostly to Linux Desktop evangelists who seem to really want wider Linux adoption, but without actually having to do any of the things that will move the needle towards that goal.
> If only the desktop (read: personal) computing experience on Linux wasn't so awful[0]. I realize that's a subjective statement, but come on, I've been hearing "Year of the Linux Desktop" rhetoric for 20 years now and it's still a platform[1] so utterly unorganized and chaotic that even a whole lot of people like me, who believe strongly in personal computing and value the ideas of openness, don't want to use it[2].
Well, who's going to pay to make it better? Yes, there are for-profit companies behind many Linux distros with paid developers, but they don't have anywhere near the resources Apple or Microsoft does, so it's simply not realistic to expect a Linux distro to be as polished as Windows or iOS.
The Linux world is unorganized and chaotic because it's full of developers who can get what they want out of the OS, while Apple and MS are organized because they are driven by a top-down vision.
Maybe, just maybe, some Linux company gets a large enough contract, maybe from a nation-state or two, and over a decade is able to polish up a product which slowly starts to gobble up a market segment. That's not impossible, but not likely either.
EDIT: also, normally when people cite things, they're citing something someone else said :). If it's all just going to be your opinion, you could just write it as such.
I want to add a personal anecdote to this very interesting article.
Basically as soon as I fully understood that all my voice communications were stored by the NSA, by my ISP (and can be accessed by my countries government without me knowing), and by various other institutions and secret services, I decided to record all my phone calls.
The rationale being that I could not prevent most of the world to listen to me, but at least in the event they would use what I said against me, I had a piece of the evidence and would be able to defend myself.
On a more practical level, everytime I call a big company they have a prerecorded message telling me that the conversation "could" be recorded (they definitely record all of them). And those company (ISPs, insurances, government...) will very often promise thing on the telephone and then not follow through as they know that it is very hard for most people to precisely recall the content of the phone call, even less to prove it.
So, it did put me in a weird spot legally as my country's laws specify that the consent must be explicitly requested to the receiver of the call to be allowed to record. The thing is that it is not illegal to record phone calls without an agreement. But such a recording cannot be shared or released and would not be receivable as an evidence in a court of law.
I was perfectly happy with this situation, as already being able to precisely recall what was said during a call would alleviate a lot of concerns.
Android recently removed (in v.10) the possibility to record phone calls (except to a few of their close friends apps, FB, MS...)
They unilaterally decided to interpret my countries laws as an interdiction to record phone calls. On top of that, they made no official announcements about that, not even a trace in a changelog here or there.
The worst in all that is that obviously, most people didn't understand that it was Google's decisions. So now if you go to a call recorder's app page you will see a mass of people claiming that the app is a scam https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appstar.ca... . They even managed to totally shift the blame on their partners.
Now, the only option I'm left with if I want to be able to record calls again, seems to be to root my phone. Which obviously from a privacy focused perspective seems unacceptable (giving root access to all userland applications!)
So precisely as the article describe, I lost what I consider is a very important feature, I have no say or recourse in that and the issue is not big / mainstream enough to gather any attention.
Rooting your phone does not give root access to all of your apps. Is this why people keep acting like rooting is a security risk?
I'm very tired of this message. Google has root to your phone and you don't. You think that puts you in a better position? (Not "you", the person I'm replying to- the rhetorical "you")
It's true that I might not fully grasp what happens if I root my phone and it's part of the problem.
It seems that the process of rooting my phone already requires me to download an APK's (KingoRoot?) from sketchy websites. And then what this APK's does is not clear either... Reading a bit, it seems that that this software could be considered as malware...
So the process is not really transparent and is kind of scary.
Maybe if you have a different perspective or some resources pointing to open source alternatives?
Depending on your phone, rooting often involves exploiting security flaws because the manufacturers don't want you to have root (reason #1 that makes me want it all the more).
I have an old Pixel 2, which allows you to unlock the bootloader, so I didn't have to break into my own device, which is nice.
I don't know anything about KingoRoot. I use Magisk (https://magisk.me/) which is FLOSS.
When you have root on your phone, an app has to ask for root access. You may deny, grant temporarily (15 minute default IIRC), or grant forever. Very few app should require root. But it's important to me to be able to run whatever I want on my own computer.
I haven't started recording phone calls with companies yet, but when I started thinking about it, I heard "This call may be recorded for quality purposes" as giving me permission to record for quality purposes.
Yes I think it makes sense to consider the caller query to record the call as a tacit authorization for you to record it as well. (At least in my country it's interpreted that way)
When you (eventually) get to speak to a human (assuming you do, eventually) simply say to them, "Hi. I'm very happy to hear that $ORG is recording this conversation for [quality|security] purposes. I, too, am recording this conversation and I trust you're OK with that."
You'll never get challenged on it. You're simply off their script. But you have implicit consent to record the call.
I do this and then record... using pencil and paper... to capture the essence of what's said/promised, who and when. Nobody said that recording has to be a verbatim electronic copy. Agreed that might be useful from time to time, but mostly not essential if you've captured the substantial points.
If it ever gets to a court case, your lawyers can compel $ORG to produce the original voice recording if it seems necessary.
> your lawyers can compel $ORG to produce the original voice recording
Isn't it why they claim that the calls are "randomly" recorded, so that their lawyers would review the call and claim that the specific call you request was not recorded if it is deemed potentially damaging?
(And good luck convincing anyone of anything with your pen and paper)
The approach suggested in the article is to use market forces, i.e. boycott products which move us closer to unwanted futures. This is challenging when the majority of products are headed in one direction, driven by market demand that companies can influence by advertising.
Another approach is to use regulatory power in democratic societies, e.g. to enact legislation for right to repair (https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Intro), or specific DMCA exemptions for owners to modify device firmware (https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/sep/16/dmca-exemptions-2...). These are necessary but insufficient steps to restore choice in functionality and freedom, which are sometimes placed in false opposition via vague threat models.
In practice, what has worked has been competition from smaller vendors. In a world of more complexity, we need more than GPD Pockets and kickstarters to lead the way with pioneering examples that can be copied by bigger companies. Without the creative force of a Steve Jobs, Apple depends on the broader market to experiment. Several iPad Pro features can be credited to MS Surface, including concessions (still poorly implemented) on a local file system. If we end up with a few monopolies, will innovation slow without competitors teaching consumers about alternatives?
There needs to be a commercial arena where engineers in smaller companies have economic incentives to develop prototypes that increase freedom without compromising security, which "appliances" can then copy. FPGAs and RISC-V have some promise for open hardware, but progress is slowed by closed software toolchains. There are no quick fixes, but pockets of general-purpose hardware success can be encouraged by legislation, engineering talent voting with their feet, and yes, commercial support by customers.
> This is challenging when the majority of products are headed in one direction, driven by market demand that companies can influence by advertising.
Exactly. The author says it's large corporations that are driving us there, and yet seems to be naive enough to believe that the very market forces that made those large corporations large and drove technology in this direction can be changed by an extremely insignificant minority. The vast majority of people want tech that's cheap and does what they want, as evidenced by Xiaomi being the biggest smartphone company in India. The only way to turn that around is to have a power equally as big as the companies - i.e. Government.
The problem of the technological cage posed by reliance on cloud services is one of the reasons Urbit is being developed. It's a personal server that operates on a P2P network. You own your own data, and your messages are encrypted. It feels like a cloud service, except you own it completely.
The project has been in the works for over a decade. It works, has an active community, and is making rapid strides in functionality and stability. I'd know, because I use it every day. Here's a good primer on what Urbit is looking to create: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/
Many seem to like to whine about Urbit and claim that it's creating a kind of digital feudalism. Perhaps they think that what we currently have isn't that. I have no interest in engaging with those old and tired arguments, which is why I originally ignored them and looked into it myself. If you also like to think for yourself, let me know and I'll bring you onto the network.
Urbit looks like some strange combination of rent seeking, land grab, and absurdist comedy. I keep waiting for the whole thing to come out as having been a joke.
Urbit's system creates an elite: the galaxy owners. They will, of course, use their positions to seek rent and grab "land" (control over territory, where territory is just planets and the like).
Somebody's got to own the resources, because they come from the physical world. That will be either power users who know enough about ownership, community groups, or commercial groups. Unless you have a fully distributed system with no centralised nodes, that's what you get.
Urbit doesn't seem to tie the ownership to physical scarcity of computing resources, though. They just invented some "land" to seek rents from, or sell to those who would seek rents. I'm all for spending money to bring physical computing resources to the system, including reselling access to those resources to others for profit, but the whole "stars / planets" false scarcity model ruins Urbit for me.
1) "We have to destroy it in order to save it" syndrome. Urbit's central thesis is "the internet is broken because Google and Facebook" but Google and Facebook didn't exploit flaws in the internet itself, just flaws in the incentive structure of our society.
2) Like Mencius Moldbug, Urbit is an intellectual shellgame Yarvin is playing to obfuscate what he's really up to. In Moldbug's case it's the return of kings as legitimate absolute rulers. For Urbit, it's getting people to sign on to being serfs in his digital kingdom.
> After all, who needs anything but four cold, bare walls, a toilet, and a bed to sleep on. You will be happy here, where "we" will decide what you need and what you don't. "We" will feed, clothe, and house you. "We" will provide you with everything "we" feel that you need
It's kind of a bad joke, this idea that these encroachments on the freedom on the internet are going hand-in-hand with 'free stuff from the government' because in most cases in the anglosphere it seems like, with the notable exception of furlough schemes brought in for the pandemic, we're generally seeing the opposite trend: social protections being torn up and we're told to be happy about this.
Our avenues for complaining about it are slowly being captured primarily by large, ultimately unsympathetic corporations who would rather we as individuals be as insecure as possible so as to be maximally dependent on them and their peers for a wage.
The main gripe here is, I think, that many people trade away privacy and flexibility without even understanding what they're doing.
Most people who read HN don't do that, even if they choose platforms that tilt towards those sorts of services and software.
For instance, I'm pretty firmly in the Apple ecosystem, but I could migrate to something else pretty easily IF I wanted to (I don't). I'm not locked in here. My data is stored locally (though I use Dropbox to make it available across multiple devices and platforms). I use proprietary formats very very sparingly. I feel pretty comfortable the "cage door" can't close on me without me changing these choices pretty drastically.
I'm sure there are Android/Windows people here who do the same thing. Sure, Windows does some invasive things, but if you're careful, you can avoid most of it, and preserve your ability to switch to something else without much difficulty. No cage door there, either.
The trick is to avoid getting SO enmeshed with a vendor that you cannot easily leave. This is one reason why companies like AT&T want you to bundle cell service and home Internet and cable and telephone, because it makes it harder to "fire" them when they screw up.
This "trick" is pretty easy, again, for the sort of person who reads this site. It's a lot harder for your uncle Larry who just wants to read ESPN and balance his checkbook and cares not one whit about the privacy implications of Google docs or whatever.
Have you ever actually TRIED leaving Apple's ecosystem? Like doing regular backups and restores of your data, you're confidence level should be equal to your ability to actually follow through.
I feel like this isn't really a question you're asking so much as an attempt to suggest that it isn't easy or possible.
It totally is, and I know it is, because I maintain a parallel working environment on a Dell XPS 15 for a bunch of complicated reasons. All my data is there, too.
I hate that environment, so I don't work there often, but I could if I had to (such as a couple years ago, when my battery failed in my previous Macbook and had to go in for repair -- it was trivial to do my job from the (previous) Dell for a few days).
This is possible because I do the things I outlined above. I use exclusively x-platform tools, like Office, when I use something with an obscure file format. My notes and management tools are exclusively in Orgmode in emacs. Etc.
I want to stop for a second and appreciate how much I like websites like the one on the OP: no javascript; no ads; non-commercial, honest content; light, straightforward design. All in all, just a no-strings-attached personal site. That's what the Web should be all about.
I miss the late 90s' and early 00s' world wide web. Any search would direct you to a bunch of personal sites just like this one; now, you'd be lucky to find something similar among the typical pile of irrelevant commercial sites bordering on being straight scams that any search engine throws at you.
This article is kind of comical, but I get his point. Even though I think it's not really taking into account the whole picture. Consider as a fact that the internet is broken, in regards to free speech. How many bot/fake accounts are created that spam toxic messages and influence culture? People with the most followers or likes getting to the top of the algorithms list so they exploit the algorithm. Most of the people are abusing the idea of "free speech" as anonymous trolls or maybe not even human at all or from the same country. It's a serious problem. I don't think people would say half the things they do on the internet if it were connected to their identity. Something isn't right here...
Even if there's not some kind of secret agenda, the increasing complexity will make it so most people can't use a computer anyway in the horizon. I want to do something about it.
This is somewhat why I collect computers, because one day, you can't buy a general purpose machine anymore.. I just hope when that happens, mine will be top of the line and solid enough to last.
Though, is this not tinfoil hat territory? Won't the fact that _some_ people _want_ general purpose computer, mean that they will always exist? Even if the established manufacturers decide to stop production, won't someone else start a production ?
>they wanted consumers to hate netbooks, so that they would go back to paying for higher-priced laptops.
Manufacturer induced non-flagship fatigue is real. We're never getting a reasonable forever laptop, it must always be lacking in obvious areas that costs very little to correct. You only get that if you over pay for everything at the top of the line -- where dissatisfaction is not allowed.
Best we can do is buy direct from upstart companies with at most one or two thunderclap flagship offerings every tech cycle. Amazon scale advantage only entrenches the endless consumer bait and suffering by trusted brands.
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Less obviously, many (perhaps most) people want cages for themselves. They don't trust themselves to make adult decisions, or simply don't want to be responsible for their choices. There is security to three hots & a cot, just as there is security to the iOS App Store. What's missing is not security but liberty.
And folks don't just want cages for their foes and themselves; they want not to be confronted with it. Just note the downvotes any post about the lack of freedom on iOS will get.
If you look at it from a systems point of view, the mass of humanity provides the 'inert balast' that allows for continuity and long-term activities. The system design bug here is that, the acquiescence of the masses is obtained via pschological phenomena common to the human being. The implication of that is that there is a system level disconect between "how am I actually doing" vs "how do I think I am doing". The system of collective human management operates at the partially fictional level of "perception" vs factual "reality". It is this psychological content, formed via psychological manipulations (such as religion, ideology, propaganda), that informs the 'views' and 'decisions' of the masses.
We don't have a systemic approach to providing decentralized "information as utility" services for our societies. There are no technical issues. ("Business model" is not a technical problem.) A centralized approach allows for maintenance of power for existing entities (individuals, families, organizations, corporations). The forces behind centralization are powerful and entrenched, and the opposing vision is held by relatively marginal entities. Obviously entrenched power will fight tooth and nail to maintain power. What "people want" is neither here nor there; they'll use whatever toy they are given, because that is what "people" have been doing since day 1.
Once again some talk about the imagined war on "general purpose computing". You know who is interested in general purpose computing? People doing it. For others computer is just a tool helpful to write an email, retouch some photos, or compose some music. Do we see public WiFi where we have zero access to configuration, as the "war on general purpose networking"? Or do we not care as long as it works (snooping aside).
It is extremely sad that HN folks have zero empathy.
I think they do, and you just don't see them.
I think what the author describe has been happening a lot and even more violently in the car industry. I just think the average Joe doesn't have enough incentive to care and will just throw his car and buy a new one if there is an issue.
But for some specific users it has became really apparent. One of the trend in the farming truck industry is to numerically mark all components of the truck "to help farmer identify and repair". Practically, a lot of truck will behave like printers and stop working if they detect a component is defective / not original even if the fault is minor. Thus, for a while, farmers used hackers services to bypass those costly replacements. But as the manufacturing companies are catching up, it's becoming harder and harder. So the net result is that trucks from the 80's have seen their price explode as they are deemed much more reliable and can be fixed without requiring an authorization. (https://jalopnik.com/classic-tractors-from-the-80s-are-becom...)
I think the vendor lock-in trend might have originated in the tech industries but is definitely trending everywhere (computers, phones, cars, coffee machines, printers, video games, can you name more..?).
Modern cars also have computers built in, and car companies try to lock them down. This then makes it very hard for 3rd parties to fix at times.
Here's an example of car enthusiasts not just sitting down and lamenting, but successfully pushing for changes in laws:
https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/service-repair/right-to...
That's just the first useful link I could find in 5 minutes; which means there's bound to be a lot more if you google around a bit. (try "right to repair" and "eu" in your search terms)
So we have management who wants to maximize profits. I don't really blame them, it's a lot of money involved and a shark tank environment. (I mean I do blame them, but I can see their reasoning). But then we have engineers who just do as they told in making all this possible, having the craziest ideas, like:
> The Asus EEE PC 900 that I bought had a 4 GB SSD held in place by a screw that was soldered in place. This prevented the SSD from being upgraded.
In the end humanity is its biggest adversary
These engineers are paid A LOT of money.
I guess they do.
I get payed well, I could earn more with my qualifications, but I already earn quite a lot and I have more holiday than any other software person I know in my area. Not sure if more income would make me happier. More wealth, probably, but no paycheck is gonna suddenly make me rich, so that's that.
Life isn't just about "getting rich" and being wolf of wall street. Engineers aren't billionaires or VPs but they're making a real good living most places in the US.
Look at software. Statistically no one spends even 10% of their paid software/content budget on free software/content
We'll see how feasible/affordable that is in 10 years. I'm afraid that consumer hardware is only going to get more and more locked down in the name of "security".
I'm being glib, and share many of the author's frustrations with the state of things, but really the trends covered in the article have been happening for well over a decade. In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals. Likewise with scientific computing frameworks like R and Python. The author even managed to get a personal website up for all of us to read. The options for personal computing are wide, wide open, even if some markets or products remain closed and proprietary and tough to hack.
Also,
> I suppose one can argue that if we all have nothing but dumb terminals running software from a ROM (which cannot be written to), then no malware can get onto our computers. But, do we want to go back to the dumb terminal days of the 1980's? Is this the "modern" operating system that we want?
For certain stuff like online banking, yes.
But, he's focusing on what is typically available to consumers. And he's right that MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS all are on some path to be more locked down.
That's great if you want a microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi. What about computers with PC-level capabilities, or laptop form factors? What's going to happen when those devices fall under the arbitrary distinction of being "too insecure" for individuals to have full control of?
A couple of years ago, during a public Q&A, I asked Steve Wozniak what he thought about the architecture of control that Apple mandates on their "i-device" hardware. My question was to the effect of "What do you think about how I don't own my iPhone or iPad the way I owned my Apple II?" His answer took the form of the "we have to give up some of our ownership in order to have nice things" trope. When Steve Wozniak, of all people, answered the question that way I knew that the era of individual ownership (and the control that implies) of general purpose computers really was on the way out.
Edit: Found it - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lLz56N2PKCmPIGrzt1WT9n4B08P...
My phone was in my breast pocket so the audio quality isn't very good, but I did my best to clean it up.
(I'm happy to have extracted that audio, though. I wanted to get that done since the night I recorded it but this motivated me...)
[0] I can, and have, gone on at length about why I think this and I won't repeat it here.
[1] One of the big problems of course being that Linux Desktop isn't a platform so much as a loose umbrella label describing a bunch of kludges.
[2] I've been using Linux Desktops for 2 decades and until recently I ran Linux on 4 out of 5 of the personal computing devices in my possession. I have written Linux software, contributed to FOSS projects, put together my own distro, and was even president of a LUG for a while. I have tried to give Linux Desktop a chance and it and its community have driven me away time and time again.
Vague criticism is useless though. My frustration with MacOS is mostly that stuff is either broken or unintuitive. I use Emacs, and after upgrading to Catalina, Emacs could no longer open files on my Downloads folder, even after manually assigning it permissions to read the entire disk. This turns out to be because Emacs has a Ruby script it gets launched through that has distinct permissions from the executable itself, so I have to hand-tune the launch scripts to make reading from disk work correctly.
There's lots of stuff like this. Mouse avoidance mode on Emacs is broken when it is set to 'banish, completely breaking the ability to drag the Emacs window around the desktop. Took me a few weeks to track down.
I want to tile a window to the side, so I have to click and hold on the full screen button, then select a side, at which point MacOS goes into some weird full screen mode and forces me to select some other window for the other sid, which I didn't want. I just wanted to tile a window on one side. If this feature were launched in Linux, I fear the derision would never end. Pop!_OS did it better.
For some reason, MacOS can't remember that I type Dvorak. After I log in, it remembers, but on the log in screen, I have to manually select Dvorak every time so I can type my password. If I've already selected my account, there's no reason it can't do that for me. Linux does, except Elementary OS, which is broken in dozens of other ways as well.
If I touch the play/pause button on my headphones by accident, my entire desktop gets buried beneath iTunes (I guess Apple Music now). I had to remove execute permission to avoid this, but updates seem to revert the behavior from time to time.
And this is just me trying to run Slack, Emacs and a browser. I'm not even doing anything fancy. So when I hear that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, it just doesn't resonate with me. I've used it for decades as my daily driver, and I plan to continue.
Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so, with the only notable exceptions being one gamer and one Excel power user.
Yeah, Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying that forever and yet, as I mentioned, even a lot of people like me who both are capable of and have reasons to desire a different OS find Linux Desktop too broken to deal with.
The community chooses the narrative that protects their ego.
> Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so
Anecdotally I know a lot of people who do some kind of work with their computers and are programmers and general nerds who hate Linux Desktops because they are so broken.
I did, and said so in the first post. Problem is there is only so much you can do with the garbage components that make up "Linux Desktop". I'd pretty much have to re-write everything above the kernel at this point. No coincidence, so did Android!
> I'd rather the majority stay on Windows and don't have a fetish for caring about majority/minority.
Well that's fine. I'm speaking mostly to Linux Desktop evangelists who seem to really want wider Linux adoption, but without actually having to do any of the things that will move the needle towards that goal.
Well, who's going to pay to make it better? Yes, there are for-profit companies behind many Linux distros with paid developers, but they don't have anywhere near the resources Apple or Microsoft does, so it's simply not realistic to expect a Linux distro to be as polished as Windows or iOS.
The Linux world is unorganized and chaotic because it's full of developers who can get what they want out of the OS, while Apple and MS are organized because they are driven by a top-down vision.
Maybe, just maybe, some Linux company gets a large enough contract, maybe from a nation-state or two, and over a decade is able to polish up a product which slowly starts to gobble up a market segment. That's not impossible, but not likely either.
EDIT: also, normally when people cite things, they're citing something someone else said :). If it's all just going to be your opinion, you could just write it as such.
Basically as soon as I fully understood that all my voice communications were stored by the NSA, by my ISP (and can be accessed by my countries government without me knowing), and by various other institutions and secret services, I decided to record all my phone calls.
The rationale being that I could not prevent most of the world to listen to me, but at least in the event they would use what I said against me, I had a piece of the evidence and would be able to defend myself.
On a more practical level, everytime I call a big company they have a prerecorded message telling me that the conversation "could" be recorded (they definitely record all of them). And those company (ISPs, insurances, government...) will very often promise thing on the telephone and then not follow through as they know that it is very hard for most people to precisely recall the content of the phone call, even less to prove it.
So, it did put me in a weird spot legally as my country's laws specify that the consent must be explicitly requested to the receiver of the call to be allowed to record. The thing is that it is not illegal to record phone calls without an agreement. But such a recording cannot be shared or released and would not be receivable as an evidence in a court of law.
I was perfectly happy with this situation, as already being able to precisely recall what was said during a call would alleviate a lot of concerns.
Android recently removed (in v.10) the possibility to record phone calls (except to a few of their close friends apps, FB, MS...)
They unilaterally decided to interpret my countries laws as an interdiction to record phone calls. On top of that, they made no official announcements about that, not even a trace in a changelog here or there.
The worst in all that is that obviously, most people didn't understand that it was Google's decisions. So now if you go to a call recorder's app page you will see a mass of people claiming that the app is a scam https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appstar.ca... . They even managed to totally shift the blame on their partners.
Now, the only option I'm left with if I want to be able to record calls again, seems to be to root my phone. Which obviously from a privacy focused perspective seems unacceptable (giving root access to all userland applications!)
So precisely as the article describe, I lost what I consider is a very important feature, I have no say or recourse in that and the issue is not big / mainstream enough to gather any attention.
I'm very tired of this message. Google has root to your phone and you don't. You think that puts you in a better position? (Not "you", the person I'm replying to- the rhetorical "you")
It seems that the process of rooting my phone already requires me to download an APK's (KingoRoot?) from sketchy websites. And then what this APK's does is not clear either... Reading a bit, it seems that that this software could be considered as malware...
So the process is not really transparent and is kind of scary.
Maybe if you have a different perspective or some resources pointing to open source alternatives?
Not at all. It's very straightforward - all you need is Magisk.
For a starter, head to the Magisk github page:
https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk
Go to "installation instruction" and follow the instructions for your device.
Depending on your phone, rooting often involves exploiting security flaws because the manufacturers don't want you to have root (reason #1 that makes me want it all the more).
I have an old Pixel 2, which allows you to unlock the bootloader, so I didn't have to break into my own device, which is nice.
I don't know anything about KingoRoot. I use Magisk (https://magisk.me/) which is FLOSS.
When you have root on your phone, an app has to ask for root access. You may deny, grant temporarily (15 minute default IIRC), or grant forever. Very few app should require root. But it's important to me to be able to run whatever I want on my own computer.
You'll never get challenged on it. You're simply off their script. But you have implicit consent to record the call.
I do this and then record... using pencil and paper... to capture the essence of what's said/promised, who and when. Nobody said that recording has to be a verbatim electronic copy. Agreed that might be useful from time to time, but mostly not essential if you've captured the substantial points.
If it ever gets to a court case, your lawyers can compel $ORG to produce the original voice recording if it seems necessary.
Isn't it why they claim that the calls are "randomly" recorded, so that their lawyers would review the call and claim that the specific call you request was not recorded if it is deemed potentially damaging?
(And good luck convincing anyone of anything with your pen and paper)
Another approach is to use regulatory power in democratic societies, e.g. to enact legislation for right to repair (https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Intro), or specific DMCA exemptions for owners to modify device firmware (https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/sep/16/dmca-exemptions-2...). These are necessary but insufficient steps to restore choice in functionality and freedom, which are sometimes placed in false opposition via vague threat models.
In practice, what has worked has been competition from smaller vendors. In a world of more complexity, we need more than GPD Pockets and kickstarters to lead the way with pioneering examples that can be copied by bigger companies. Without the creative force of a Steve Jobs, Apple depends on the broader market to experiment. Several iPad Pro features can be credited to MS Surface, including concessions (still poorly implemented) on a local file system. If we end up with a few monopolies, will innovation slow without competitors teaching consumers about alternatives?
There needs to be a commercial arena where engineers in smaller companies have economic incentives to develop prototypes that increase freedom without compromising security, which "appliances" can then copy. FPGAs and RISC-V have some promise for open hardware, but progress is slowed by closed software toolchains. There are no quick fixes, but pockets of general-purpose hardware success can be encouraged by legislation, engineering talent voting with their feet, and yes, commercial support by customers.
Exactly. The author says it's large corporations that are driving us there, and yet seems to be naive enough to believe that the very market forces that made those large corporations large and drove technology in this direction can be changed by an extremely insignificant minority. The vast majority of people want tech that's cheap and does what they want, as evidenced by Xiaomi being the biggest smartphone company in India. The only way to turn that around is to have a power equally as big as the companies - i.e. Government.
I feel like I have to mention here System76 and the work they are doing on firmware and the development of an attractive Linux environment.
https://system76.com/
I am not affiliated in any way.
Once upon a time everyone thought IBM was invincible and then Intel and then Microsoft. Then what happened?
To understand the cycle read - The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (of Net Neutrality fame).
The project has been in the works for over a decade. It works, has an active community, and is making rapid strides in functionality and stability. I'd know, because I use it every day. Here's a good primer on what Urbit is looking to create: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/
Many seem to like to whine about Urbit and claim that it's creating a kind of digital feudalism. Perhaps they think that what we currently have isn't that. I have no interest in engaging with those old and tired arguments, which is why I originally ignored them and looked into it myself. If you also like to think for yourself, let me know and I'll bring you onto the network.
2) Like Mencius Moldbug, Urbit is an intellectual shellgame Yarvin is playing to obfuscate what he's really up to. In Moldbug's case it's the return of kings as legitimate absolute rulers. For Urbit, it's getting people to sign on to being serfs in his digital kingdom.
It's kind of a bad joke, this idea that these encroachments on the freedom on the internet are going hand-in-hand with 'free stuff from the government' because in most cases in the anglosphere it seems like, with the notable exception of furlough schemes brought in for the pandemic, we're generally seeing the opposite trend: social protections being torn up and we're told to be happy about this.
Our avenues for complaining about it are slowly being captured primarily by large, ultimately unsympathetic corporations who would rather we as individuals be as insecure as possible so as to be maximally dependent on them and their peers for a wage.
Most people who read HN don't do that, even if they choose platforms that tilt towards those sorts of services and software.
For instance, I'm pretty firmly in the Apple ecosystem, but I could migrate to something else pretty easily IF I wanted to (I don't). I'm not locked in here. My data is stored locally (though I use Dropbox to make it available across multiple devices and platforms). I use proprietary formats very very sparingly. I feel pretty comfortable the "cage door" can't close on me without me changing these choices pretty drastically.
I'm sure there are Android/Windows people here who do the same thing. Sure, Windows does some invasive things, but if you're careful, you can avoid most of it, and preserve your ability to switch to something else without much difficulty. No cage door there, either.
The trick is to avoid getting SO enmeshed with a vendor that you cannot easily leave. This is one reason why companies like AT&T want you to bundle cell service and home Internet and cable and telephone, because it makes it harder to "fire" them when they screw up.
This "trick" is pretty easy, again, for the sort of person who reads this site. It's a lot harder for your uncle Larry who just wants to read ESPN and balance his checkbook and cares not one whit about the privacy implications of Google docs or whatever.
It totally is, and I know it is, because I maintain a parallel working environment on a Dell XPS 15 for a bunch of complicated reasons. All my data is there, too.
I hate that environment, so I don't work there often, but I could if I had to (such as a couple years ago, when my battery failed in my previous Macbook and had to go in for repair -- it was trivial to do my job from the (previous) Dell for a few days).
This is possible because I do the things I outlined above. I use exclusively x-platform tools, like Office, when I use something with an obscure file format. My notes and management tools are exclusively in Orgmode in emacs. Etc.
Also: *your, not you're.
I miss the late 90s' and early 00s' world wide web. Any search would direct you to a bunch of personal sites just like this one; now, you'd be lucky to find something similar among the typical pile of irrelevant commercial sites bordering on being straight scams that any search engine throws at you.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Even if there's not some kind of secret agenda, the increasing complexity will make it so most people can't use a computer anyway in the horizon. I want to do something about it.
Though, is this not tinfoil hat territory? Won't the fact that _some_ people _want_ general purpose computer, mean that they will always exist? Even if the established manufacturers decide to stop production, won't someone else start a production ?
Manufacturer induced non-flagship fatigue is real. We're never getting a reasonable forever laptop, it must always be lacking in obvious areas that costs very little to correct. You only get that if you over pay for everything at the top of the line -- where dissatisfaction is not allowed.
Best we can do is buy direct from upstart companies with at most one or two thunderclap flagship offerings every tech cycle. Amazon scale advantage only entrenches the endless consumer bait and suffering by trusted brands.