I mostly agree with this article and I'd love to share it with my circle, but I can't get past the condescending tone this article uses towards non-technical folks.
> These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom and their money is being stolen by their masters, the lords of technology, who they serve unwittingly with their data and monthly fees. These are the instant messaging and cat video addicts whose only concern is that computers be easy enough for toddlers to use. These are the techno-toddlers who refuse to grow up...
Believe it or not there are plenty of extremely intelligent non-technical users who are aware of these issues. And comparing users who are unaware of these issues to toddlers (while at the same time comparing the cognescenti to rebel fighters, even if tongue in cheek) is incredibly obnoxious.
Google, Facebook, and Apple invest ridiculous sums of money in the interest of making their platforms accessible in just about every way you can imagine (and many more you might not). If you want to have a single hope that your message will be heard, you have to think about accessibility (of your message). In particular, don't make people feel stupid. That is the kiss of death in the business of winning hearts & minds, and it's also the number one reason why I personally avoid most free software (and related) activist circles.
The systemd line is weird too. People who use systemd are probably in agreement with you here, any privacy issues there are a different breed than platforms controlled by large companies.
It would have been far better if the article had expressed this as a tradeoff: it's entirely valid to choose more time and less frustration over digital sovereignty. You can't assume what other people's situations are, or what a smart choice would be in their situation!
if anything it's more damning of toddlers, whom many of the current generation will have the "turn it off and on again" hard reset hard-coded into their early minds, not only surpassing their parents' technical troubleshooting but also their buggy device's first tier support's
Agreed. Statements like "On one side are the lords of technology ... and the unseen ones who control them." don't help, either. It raises an antisemitism caution flag whether the speaker intended to or not.
> Apple has gone in the direction of net appliances
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.
I'd argue that computing has never been more accessible than it is today.
A Raspberry Pi costs less than an HDMI dongle for an iPad these days and there is more free educational material available on the web than ever before.
When I went to high school and started becoming interested in programming, I was using Windows XP on my general-purpose PC back home, as were all my classmates – yet only two out of more than 20 ended up going into tech.
I think articles like this commonly make the mistake of romanticizing the author's personal way of getting into tech and thinking it's the only way possible for others as well.
I used to work in residential construction, and have done pretty much everything from foundations to electrical to roofing. And so generally, if something needs to be done on my house, even relatively major stuff, I do it, or I could if I wanted to. But there is a world of people who have no idea how to do even the most basic things, and there is a whole industry set up to extract money from them.
So maybe not the best analogy but I see it the same way with computers, there has been a bifurcation between consumer tech that is designed to maximally extract money from the lay-public, and tech the way it is used by professionals, experts etc. The consumer world continues to drift away from the professional world, and I agree it's getting worse, but I think that's just a symptom of the tech becoming commercial. Open source has never been more active and widely used, I have more options to run more kinds of os/code on more kinds of hardware than I ever have before. So yeah, businesses have hollowed out the consumer version, same as if you hire a sears roofing crew to come do your roof, you are getting the minimum product for maximum cost. And that's a problem. But it's not necessarily an existential threat to our continuing to have computers we can use the way we want to.
Your analogy doesn't hold. If someone needs a new plug for their dryer, they might want to hire an electrician instead of doing it themselves. But they can hire any electrician.
It doesn't have to be from the company who makes the dryer, whose electrician charges 30% above market and requires you to use that company's electrical panel which in turn requires you to use that company's stove and refrigerator and buy your electricity from their power company and pay your bills with their credit card whose agreement prohibits you from having any competing credit cards.
You missed the fact where you were able to work on houses because construction uses common open standards / which would not be possible with vertically integrated houses that only work with a specific brand of furniture
I have to sound like a fatalist but today's software resembles yesterday's malware. It does not matter if you're running a general purpose computer if you have no control over 'your' applications or even OS (Windows 10).
In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your network and when.
If the goal is to encourage the general public to use general purpose computers, then I suggest the community try to temp some good UX designers to take part in foss projects. I suspect they many UX people are not extremely informed about foss and it would benefit the community a lot to have a reputation for programs with great workflows
I think I have whiplash from the transition from starting by framing big tech companies as the villains, and then proposing the way to fight back is to buy lots of general purpose computers from ... big tech companies.
Sure, support the companies that produce products you think should exist in the world. But that doesn't make you some kind of warrior, it just makes you one type of discriminating consumer. Giving them money is not exactly combat.
I think the "right to repair" movement is an interesting avenue, which has had some meaningful successes which obligate companies to share enough information to allow users to wrest back some control of what they actually own, and interact meaningfully with the guts. What if we pulled lots of stops to lobby for this from multiple angles, and emphasize that if a company stops providing security updates to original software, "repairing" means providing an ability to use new software which isn't abandoned?
The solution is to foster an appreciation of the values of freedom and independence in the population, not only with regards to computing, but about life in general (freedom of speech, freedom of press, economic freedom, etc).
I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US. In the rest of the world, freedom of speech is constantly eroded with laws against "hate speech", because our cultures (latin american here) don't value freedom of spedch. If we could capture the appreciation Americans have for freedom of speech and extrapolate it to all areas of human activity, we would rest assured that our computers would keep being general-purpose.
Freedom of speech all around the world is eroding (some places more than others of course), step by step, we agree on that.
But I disagree that the US is any different, and is certainly not at the top of the ladder. To be clear: I mean freedom in practice, not freedom in legal theory.
"freedom of speech" is to the US as "politeness" is to Canadians: mostly true, but generally a stereotype that is fading with time.
I always thought it was funny in a tragicomic way, that a country that has freedom as one of its top virtues is the same one where you would quickly get sued (if not imprisoned) for acts considered harmless in other countries.
Perhaps the true free citizens of the US are corporations, to the detriment of natural persons.
Maybe this is not obvious until you've lived both in and out of North America for long enough.
> I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US.
I remember talking to a former coworker who had taken (or maybe taught) LL.M. classes at a law school with lawyers from all around the world (who were learning more about U.S. law as a form of continuing education). She said that she initially assumed that the foreign lawyers would be jealous of the U.S. first amendment (because the U.S. had succeeded in winning so much autonomy against the state, or against tyrannies of the majority), which is certainly the way many Americans would have learned to think about it growing up.
However, she found that most of the foreign lawyers were actually disturbed by or skeptical toward the first amendment, because they thought that some aspects of expression and communication were pretty dangerous and that it was an important function of the state to suppress or punish them.
As an American free speech activist, I was also extremely surprised by this!
One thing that's tricky is that there are several different reasons why people might be proud of or aspire to protecting speech, including:
- Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't. Conversely, censorship is a sign of weakness or fear, or an admission or clue that something is being covered up and people aren't being given a chance to investigate or think for themselves.
- Free speech is a human right that shows that you respect people's autonomy and conscience.
- Free speech is a mark of humility that shows that you accept for some purposes the possibility that you might be wrong or confused in ways that seem extremely unlikely or incomprehensible to you.
- Speech (and culture and belief) are areas of life that are not supposed to be regulated or controlled by the state (because they're too personal, they're too far from the things that states are really needed or appropriate for, or because they're used to define or understand the values and goals that people want the state to pursue in the first place).
- Free speech leads to good outcomes in some way (peace, understanding, progress, constructive deliberation, pluralism).
- Free speech prevents bad outcomes in some way (stagnation, totalitarianism, some abuses of power).
- Even though free speech might not always be that great, no state (or other entity) can be trusted to decide on the truth or the boundaries of acceptable discussion for everyone else.
Eh? By your own reckoning the existing defense of freedom of speech doesn't extend to general purpose computing, so why would you focus on increasing that which already exists and has proven to not have a connection?
IMO one of the greatest enemies to success is broadening scope. General purpose computing: it's a good, specific focus. "Freedom in all areas of human activity" means endless conversations about what that means, what to focus on, what to prioritise, blah blah blah.
Yikes. I wonder what happens to those companies if they have the "wrong" answers. Antitrust, make the executives testify, deny regulatory approval of random stuff... so many options.
So true! I wish South America, Europe and Asia (all culturally quite close to the US culture) would get enlightened about free speech, if only to carry on the torch should the woke cancel culture win.
This essay a great example of online culture. So many stock received ideas: the 'shadowy elites' message, the Walter Mitty 'only we few dared to take the red pill' heroism, the conflation of freedom of speech with forcing a private company to host a photo of your asshole at no charge. We even get mentions of TS Eliot (guess Pound is too edgy) and Glenn 'my editor is oppressing me' Greenwald. In short, I did not enjoy it.
Your reading of this article is dramatically different from my own.
- No "shadowy elites", these are big, well-known companies driving market trends is broad daylight.
- Is it controversial to suggest that only a small portion of people are worked up about digital freedom? That seems self-evident to me.
- Nowhere in the article does the author suggest anyone be forced to host anything (let alone butthole photos) -- if anything, he advocates the opposite: that users be empowered to host their own sites!
I agree that general purpose computing is endangered. And that bothers me a lot.
However, if you are going to take a stand for open computing, you are going to have to make sacrifices. You will have to give up a lot of conveniences. As a technologist you will have to give both time and money. Apple and Google are not going to give up their billion dollar industries voluntarily. You will have to stop giving them money. And you will have to stop using their services.
My solution? I built myself a phone out of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Touch Screen and a Logitech Headset. It does SMS/MMS and voice only. I've been using it for over a year now as my daily driver.
I'm going to open source the code. Check out https://github.com/another2020githubuser/thepyphone for more details. Right now there is just a README out there, the real code exists in a private git repo. I'm reviewing the code and stripping out private details so I don't end up doxxing myself :)
If you like the idea, please star the github project. I could use the encouragement. Thanks.
> Apple and Google are not going to give up their billion dollar industries voluntarily. You will have to stop giving them money. And you will have to stop using their services.
If you believe Apple and Google need to give up their cash cows, it's clear that's never going to happen by convincing people to make lifestyle changes. It's like trying to stop global warming by convincing people to stop driving their cars. That plan won't succeed, period.
The only way is to get laws or regulations passed that force these companies to comply. For example, passing a law that says any device with an App Store must allow 3rd party app stores equal access to the OS. I'm not saying I want this law passed, but if you believe Apple and Google's business model needs to be stopped, a law like that is the only way it's going to happen.
>Some may point to the existence of the Raspberry Pi as a counter argument. "Here is a computer built by a small company that is designed for tinkerers," they might argue
LOL. the Pi? its entire SOC is controlled by Microsoft ThreadX. if there were ever a better example of how the war on general purpose computing was won its the Pi. You only ever emulate or virtualize linux on it. the kernel is never aware of the threadx hypervisor and no open alternative exists. the officially supported OS developer just recently back-doored a repo and GPG key onto every one of them during an upgrade.
>Between the two opposing forces are the non-technical masses. These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom...
I actually agree with a the jist of this article, but this kind of attitude is inexpensive, and part of why this point of view has lost.
The open society ideals of the early web were really important. We failed miserably at framing them adequately for public consumption. I don't think it's because "MOPs too stupid." I think we preferred our nerdy, esoteric, hairs splitting glossary of terms to a well framed lexicon that could serve as a basis for public understanding. The best we gave them was net neutrality... and we let the economists explain their own stupid version of it to politicians.
Take all the social media problems atm... Politicians, regardless of their country, ideology or whatnot, almost all have completely stupid ideas in this space.
There was an article on here recently: "protocols not platforms." It's as true about GPCs as it is about social media. Most HN readers can probably guess the content by the title. It's a vocabulary that badly needs to be in the general discourse, and we need to stop sucking at making it into a simple usable vocabulary.
"And even so, Raspbian relies on Systemd, despite the privacy fears of many."
What the actual fuck? I'm no systemd shill but this sentence makes no sense in the context of this essay. How does systemd represent a loss of privacy foisted upon us by Google and Microsoft?
Systemd, which handles DNS configuration, literally defaults to Google's DNS resolvers (giving Google each and every server that your computer tries to contact, and allowing Google to censor or redirect you elsewhere).
This article is a great encapsulation of why I think the whole Epic vs Apple and attempts to force Apple to allow alternative stores are a step in the wrong direction.
They will only make people more dependent on what will still be a controlled platform.
What will also happen is that the government will end up regulating the App stores, since it’s no longer just Apple running them.
This is one step short of the ‘ban on general purpose computing’ mentioned in the article, but a badly written law regulating software distribution could easily mean that it is that too.
I wholeheartedly agree with the calls to action, but I’d add one more: stop going along with companies like Epic and all this clamor about Apple as if they are freedom fighters, and instead call for them to invest in a foundation to pay for community work on a genuinely open mobile Linux.
There are numerous corporations with many billions available to invest, e.g. Microsoft, Epic, Facebook, all of whom claim to want to be free of Apple’s control.
The way to do is is them to pay for a real open platform that none of them own. It seems counterintuitive, but that is the real way to commoditize their complement (as was successfully done on the server) and devalue Apple’s
Proprietary OS, which would be to all of their advantage.
There is no reason such a platform shouldn’t be an excellent vehicle for games, and with first class SPA support no App Store would be needed at all.
If we really want to lobby for regulation, it should be to force boot camp level of openness for the hardware, so that anyone would be free to run an open software platform on a tablet, phone or laptop.
That would help any open platform compete fairly with proprietary ones without needing to regulate OS designs.
Boot camp level access isn't going to provide the documentation necessary to program those machines. It also impedes the pace of vertically integrated innovation that has been happening over the years. If Apple needed a public contract for open operating systems to build on top of, it would either slow down the roadmap, or break the open software regularly. It isn't just a money problem, it's a technical and human coordination problem that can't be solved with money. IMO, Google should have stepped up to build this right, but didn't. They built Android to defend against Apple not to invent a better future path.
If there is something to regulate it is making super easy for consumers to have choice over Apple vs. something else. Regulate the need for easy adoption paths between mobile ecosystems. This creates a fair arena for a free market to fight for consumers without lock in.
Religion hammered into me as a kid that anything you do for good will always be partial subverted by the devil. While I don't agree with that literally, I think the general principle is 100% correct.
I've worked (and around) in many parts of the Internet (and precursors): dial-up BBS's, web hosting, VPNs, etc. It is virtually guaranteed that the better you are at upholding security and privacy the more certain you will (hopefully unintentionally) facilitate some absolutely dastardly shitbaggery. The kind you can honestly loose a little bit of your soul over.
I do think standing up for these kind of freedom of speech principles are important. However, the bottom line is that if the solution doesn't embody a reliable way to address the problems it enables then an external entity will attempt to do it, along with whatever extra agenda it represents.
I note that even the Raspberry Pi is moving towards locked down devices, the RPi4 has an (easily cracked) HMAC blocking booting into the open source firmware and I hear more recent hardware editions have RSA signing support in the bootrom code.
This problem is real and important. My uncle who is a lawyer knew how to use dBase IV in the 80s. Nowadays young people, even university graduates, struggle to use a mouse. Scrolling is the pinnacle of competence it seems.
We need people going back to buying PC. Thanks to corona, they do now. We should focus on those rich-capability apps and software
You’re missing something. You would need to be running the ZeroNet daemon on your own machine (presumably on the same port, if it’s not the default) for that link to work.
I'm so weary of my smartphone choices being determined primarily by what features will be stripped from me. Losing the headphone jack, losing video-out, losing custom ROMs, losing root access, losing notification leds, losing fingerprint readers that can wake the phone, losing 1:1.5 screens and then 16:10 and then 16:9 and then 18:9 and then 19.5:9 screens until the blasted things are so pointlessly tall I can't reach the buttons with my thumb anymore.
The problem is that most people don't seem to want do any computing, general purpose or not. They want 21th century version of telephone and cable tv, computing behind the scenes is incidental and implementation detail.
[+] [-] vector_spaces|5 years ago|reply
> These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom and their money is being stolen by their masters, the lords of technology, who they serve unwittingly with their data and monthly fees. These are the instant messaging and cat video addicts whose only concern is that computers be easy enough for toddlers to use. These are the techno-toddlers who refuse to grow up...
Believe it or not there are plenty of extremely intelligent non-technical users who are aware of these issues. And comparing users who are unaware of these issues to toddlers (while at the same time comparing the cognescenti to rebel fighters, even if tongue in cheek) is incredibly obnoxious.
Google, Facebook, and Apple invest ridiculous sums of money in the interest of making their platforms accessible in just about every way you can imagine (and many more you might not). If you want to have a single hope that your message will be heard, you have to think about accessibility (of your message). In particular, don't make people feel stupid. That is the kiss of death in the business of winning hearts & minds, and it's also the number one reason why I personally avoid most free software (and related) activist circles.
[+] [-] neltnerb|5 years ago|reply
Another full page before it talks even vaguely about what "taking a stand" means to them, and puts them in prose instead of just listing ideas.
Title of the article is "Taking a stand" yet there is no author attributed.
No, I don't disagree with them, but I have to agree with you about it not being the right one to share with less technical people.
[+] [-] inamiyar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron_m04|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 867-5309|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hippira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandmeyer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|5 years ago|reply
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.
[+] [-] lxgr|5 years ago|reply
A Raspberry Pi costs less than an HDMI dongle for an iPad these days and there is more free educational material available on the web than ever before.
When I went to high school and started becoming interested in programming, I was using Windows XP on my general-purpose PC back home, as were all my classmates – yet only two out of more than 20 ended up going into tech.
I think articles like this commonly make the mistake of romanticizing the author's personal way of getting into tech and thinking it's the only way possible for others as well.
[+] [-] iujjkfjdkkdkf|5 years ago|reply
So maybe not the best analogy but I see it the same way with computers, there has been a bifurcation between consumer tech that is designed to maximally extract money from the lay-public, and tech the way it is used by professionals, experts etc. The consumer world continues to drift away from the professional world, and I agree it's getting worse, but I think that's just a symptom of the tech becoming commercial. Open source has never been more active and widely used, I have more options to run more kinds of os/code on more kinds of hardware than I ever have before. So yeah, businesses have hollowed out the consumer version, same as if you hire a sears roofing crew to come do your roof, you are getting the minimum product for maximum cost. And that's a problem. But it's not necessarily an existential threat to our continuing to have computers we can use the way we want to.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
It doesn't have to be from the company who makes the dryer, whose electrician charges 30% above market and requires you to use that company's electrical panel which in turn requires you to use that company's stove and refrigerator and buy your electricity from their power company and pay your bills with their credit card whose agreement prohibits you from having any competing credit cards.
[+] [-] aidenn0|5 years ago|reply
It's entirely possible that there was just a ~25 year blip in which workstation and consumer computing hardware was the same.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] antattack|5 years ago|reply
In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your network and when.
[+] [-] hertzrat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abeppu|5 years ago|reply
Sure, support the companies that produce products you think should exist in the world. But that doesn't make you some kind of warrior, it just makes you one type of discriminating consumer. Giving them money is not exactly combat.
I think the "right to repair" movement is an interesting avenue, which has had some meaningful successes which obligate companies to share enough information to allow users to wrest back some control of what they actually own, and interact meaningfully with the guts. What if we pulled lots of stops to lobby for this from multiple angles, and emphasize that if a company stops providing security updates to original software, "repairing" means providing an ability to use new software which isn't abandoned?
[+] [-] young_unixer|5 years ago|reply
I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US. In the rest of the world, freedom of speech is constantly eroded with laws against "hate speech", because our cultures (latin american here) don't value freedom of spedch. If we could capture the appreciation Americans have for freedom of speech and extrapolate it to all areas of human activity, we would rest assured that our computers would keep being general-purpose.
[+] [-] throwawayaworth|5 years ago|reply
But I disagree that the US is any different, and is certainly not at the top of the ladder. To be clear: I mean freedom in practice, not freedom in legal theory.
"freedom of speech" is to the US as "politeness" is to Canadians: mostly true, but generally a stereotype that is fading with time.
I always thought it was funny in a tragicomic way, that a country that has freedom as one of its top virtues is the same one where you would quickly get sued (if not imprisoned) for acts considered harmless in other countries.
Perhaps the true free citizens of the US are corporations, to the detriment of natural persons.
Maybe this is not obvious until you've lived both in and out of North America for long enough.
[+] [-] schoen|5 years ago|reply
I remember talking to a former coworker who had taken (or maybe taught) LL.M. classes at a law school with lawyers from all around the world (who were learning more about U.S. law as a form of continuing education). She said that she initially assumed that the foreign lawyers would be jealous of the U.S. first amendment (because the U.S. had succeeded in winning so much autonomy against the state, or against tyrannies of the majority), which is certainly the way many Americans would have learned to think about it growing up.
However, she found that most of the foreign lawyers were actually disturbed by or skeptical toward the first amendment, because they thought that some aspects of expression and communication were pretty dangerous and that it was an important function of the state to suppress or punish them.
As an American free speech activist, I was also extremely surprised by this!
One thing that's tricky is that there are several different reasons why people might be proud of or aspire to protecting speech, including:
- Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't. Conversely, censorship is a sign of weakness or fear, or an admission or clue that something is being covered up and people aren't being given a chance to investigate or think for themselves.
- Free speech is a human right that shows that you respect people's autonomy and conscience.
- Free speech is a mark of humility that shows that you accept for some purposes the possibility that you might be wrong or confused in ways that seem extremely unlikely or incomprehensible to you.
- Speech (and culture and belief) are areas of life that are not supposed to be regulated or controlled by the state (because they're too personal, they're too far from the things that states are really needed or appropriate for, or because they're used to define or understand the values and goals that people want the state to pursue in the first place).
- Free speech leads to good outcomes in some way (peace, understanding, progress, constructive deliberation, pluralism).
- Free speech prevents bad outcomes in some way (stagnation, totalitarianism, some abuses of power).
- Even though free speech might not always be that great, no state (or other entity) can be trusted to decide on the truth or the boundaries of acceptable discussion for everyone else.
[+] [-] afavour|5 years ago|reply
IMO one of the greatest enemies to success is broadening scope. General purpose computing: it's a good, specific focus. "Freedom in all areas of human activity" means endless conversations about what that means, what to focus on, what to prioritise, blah blah blah.
[+] [-] eplanit|5 years ago|reply
America is very quickly (and sadly) trending towards this, too.
[+] [-] chmod600|5 years ago|reply
https://eshoo.house.gov/sites/eshoo.house.gov/files/Eshoo-Mc...
Yikes. I wonder what happens to those companies if they have the "wrong" answers. Antitrust, make the executives testify, deny regulatory approval of random stuff... so many options.
[+] [-] BEEdwards|5 years ago|reply
It's just possible that maybe, just maybe some speech isn't compatible with democracy...
[+] [-] 1996|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] centimeter|5 years ago|reply
This is almost entirely heritable, and can only be "fostered" through demographic management.
[+] [-] uniqueid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForHackernews|5 years ago|reply
- No "shadowy elites", these are big, well-known companies driving market trends is broad daylight.
- Is it controversial to suggest that only a small portion of people are worked up about digital freedom? That seems self-evident to me.
- Nowhere in the article does the author suggest anyone be forced to host anything (let alone butthole photos) -- if anything, he advocates the opposite: that users be empowered to host their own sites!
[+] [-] another_comment|5 years ago|reply
However, if you are going to take a stand for open computing, you are going to have to make sacrifices. You will have to give up a lot of conveniences. As a technologist you will have to give both time and money. Apple and Google are not going to give up their billion dollar industries voluntarily. You will have to stop giving them money. And you will have to stop using their services.
My solution? I built myself a phone out of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Touch Screen and a Logitech Headset. It does SMS/MMS and voice only. I've been using it for over a year now as my daily driver.
I'm going to open source the code. Check out https://github.com/another2020githubuser/thepyphone for more details. Right now there is just a README out there, the real code exists in a private git repo. I'm reviewing the code and stripping out private details so I don't end up doxxing myself :)
If you like the idea, please star the github project. I could use the encouragement. Thanks.
[+] [-] spaced-out|5 years ago|reply
If you believe Apple and Google need to give up their cash cows, it's clear that's never going to happen by convincing people to make lifestyle changes. It's like trying to stop global warming by convincing people to stop driving their cars. That plan won't succeed, period.
The only way is to get laws or regulations passed that force these companies to comply. For example, passing a law that says any device with an App Store must allow 3rd party app stores equal access to the OS. I'm not saying I want this law passed, but if you believe Apple and Google's business model needs to be stopped, a law like that is the only way it's going to happen.
[+] [-] nimbius|5 years ago|reply
LOL. the Pi? its entire SOC is controlled by Microsoft ThreadX. if there were ever a better example of how the war on general purpose computing was won its the Pi. You only ever emulate or virtualize linux on it. the kernel is never aware of the threadx hypervisor and no open alternative exists. the officially supported OS developer just recently back-doored a repo and GPG key onto every one of them during an upgrade.
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
I actually agree with a the jist of this article, but this kind of attitude is inexpensive, and part of why this point of view has lost.
The open society ideals of the early web were really important. We failed miserably at framing them adequately for public consumption. I don't think it's because "MOPs too stupid." I think we preferred our nerdy, esoteric, hairs splitting glossary of terms to a well framed lexicon that could serve as a basis for public understanding. The best we gave them was net neutrality... and we let the economists explain their own stupid version of it to politicians.
Take all the social media problems atm... Politicians, regardless of their country, ideology or whatnot, almost all have completely stupid ideas in this space.
There was an article on here recently: "protocols not platforms." It's as true about GPCs as it is about social media. Most HN readers can probably guess the content by the title. It's a vocabulary that badly needs to be in the general discourse, and we need to stop sucking at making it into a simple usable vocabulary.
[+] [-] gautamcgoel|5 years ago|reply
What the actual fuck? I'm no systemd shill but this sentence makes no sense in the context of this essay. How does systemd represent a loss of privacy foisted upon us by Google and Microsoft?
[+] [-] davisr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
They will only make people more dependent on what will still be a controlled platform.
What will also happen is that the government will end up regulating the App stores, since it’s no longer just Apple running them.
This is one step short of the ‘ban on general purpose computing’ mentioned in the article, but a badly written law regulating software distribution could easily mean that it is that too.
I wholeheartedly agree with the calls to action, but I’d add one more: stop going along with companies like Epic and all this clamor about Apple as if they are freedom fighters, and instead call for them to invest in a foundation to pay for community work on a genuinely open mobile Linux.
There are numerous corporations with many billions available to invest, e.g. Microsoft, Epic, Facebook, all of whom claim to want to be free of Apple’s control.
The way to do is is them to pay for a real open platform that none of them own. It seems counterintuitive, but that is the real way to commoditize their complement (as was successfully done on the server) and devalue Apple’s Proprietary OS, which would be to all of their advantage.
There is no reason such a platform shouldn’t be an excellent vehicle for games, and with first class SPA support no App Store would be needed at all.
If we really want to lobby for regulation, it should be to force boot camp level of openness for the hardware, so that anyone would be free to run an open software platform on a tablet, phone or laptop.
That would help any open platform compete fairly with proprietary ones without needing to regulate OS designs.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|5 years ago|reply
If there is something to regulate it is making super easy for consumers to have choice over Apple vs. something else. Regulate the need for easy adoption paths between mobile ecosystems. This creates a fair arena for a free market to fight for consumers without lock in.
[+] [-] alickz|5 years ago|reply
App stores have been on PC for decades at this point and the government isn't regulating them.
I'm not sure this concern is founded.
[+] [-] mr-wendel|5 years ago|reply
I've worked (and around) in many parts of the Internet (and precursors): dial-up BBS's, web hosting, VPNs, etc. It is virtually guaranteed that the better you are at upholding security and privacy the more certain you will (hopefully unintentionally) facilitate some absolutely dastardly shitbaggery. The kind you can honestly loose a little bit of your soul over.
I do think standing up for these kind of freedom of speech principles are important. However, the bottom line is that if the solution doesn't embody a reliable way to address the problems it enables then an external entity will attempt to do it, along with whatever extra agenda it represents.
You can't solve for freedom alone.
[+] [-] pabs3|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware/blob/master/do...
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
We need people going back to buying PC. Thanks to corona, they do now. We should focus on those rich-capability apps and software
[+] [-] afavour|5 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, I laughed out loud at this. What are you talking about?!
[+] [-] evan_|5 years ago|reply
You should ask your uncle (who's a Lawyer by the way) if he was using a mouse to work with dBase IV.
[+] [-] brutusborn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threevox|5 years ago|reply
Am I missing something, or is this guy trying to get people to visit his localhost?
[+] [-] neilalexander|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unicornporn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverhagen|5 years ago|reply
> Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages.
[+] [-] Causality1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|5 years ago|reply