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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Forget about the porn for a minute gang... this is, to me, the key insight in the story:

    VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations. 
    Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens. 
    Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android 
    treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell 
    unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it through official 
    channels and maybe not at all.

And it isn't even just about VR... the point is, we, collectively, are losing control of our use of computing and technology.

Remember the early 80's, when anybody could buy a handful of 8086 processors, a Phoenix or Award BIOS, some cases, etc., and start pumping out IBM compatible PCs? That was pretty amazing, and arguably led to amazing things. How about the way you could take your PC and install ANY operating system on it: DOS, Xenix, Solaris x86, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, BSD Unix, various flavors of Linux, etc. Great opportunity for invention and creation there...

and now? When was the last time you installed a new OS on your smartphone? Your game console? Your VR device? Your smart watch? Etc?

Yeah... thought so.

Look, I'm not saying anything terribly new here, and I don't claim to be. Cory Doctorow said it all better, and before:

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

But we need to take this seriously. I don't want to live in a world where Google, Facebook, IBM, HP, Twitter, Microsoft, EMC, Cisco, Snapchat, etc., decide what content I can consume, what programs I can run, etc. And I doubt most of you do either.

View on HN

Right this moment I'm sitting in an office in the place that represents our hope, a capital of continued progress[0] - Shenzhen, China. Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway. China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here. There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me". And in the ongoing war on general-purpose computing, for better or worse, this seems to be our only recourse.

I'm gonna ask around if they have any Google Glass knockoffs or components handy.

[0] - built on the backs of abused and impoverished people, but that's a topic for another day.

> "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"

This is how Silicon Valley worked, back when the silicon was actually made there. My impression is that Google's obsessive culture of secrecy (necessary because it grew up in an environment where loose lips really did sink ships) is the strongest influence in destroying that culture of information-sharing, although of course NDAs, interface copyright lawsuits, DRM, and software patents have also taken their toll.

California's century-old legal limitations on what rights employees can sign away to employers have also been very helpful.

So it's not surprising that technological development is happening today in a place where employers' ability to own their employees' minds is more limited — the innovation is done by the engineers, after all, not the investors, so shifting the power balance in favor of the investors will damage your region's competitiveness.

I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.

Why Google and not Apple?

Apple was usually pretty bad (though remember, the Apple I and Apple ][ were demonstrated at Homebrew before Apple even existed as a company), but in my experience, Google is a whole different level of omerta. Don't get me wrong, there are great things about both Apple and Google, but I think the secrecy thing is super corrosive.

(I guess I should confess that my objectivity can probably be called into question here: I have lots of friends who work or have worked at Apple, Google, or both, and as far as I know, none who have worked at a company that either of them crushed. Unless you count OLPC.)

Didn't Apple want to force all softwares to be signed by them to run on MacOS at one point?

If they haven't gotten there yet, they will soon.

I don't know that OLPC has been crushed, it had never had a capitalistic mission. The shareholders back home aren't demanding a particular volume is met.

OLPC crushed itself. FLOSS fans were clamouring to develop for it, seeing it as a way to bring emerging minds into the OSS mindset. It created a lot of buzz. Then OLPC jumped into bed with Microsoft, and the FLOSS geeks were driven away, with no similar group of developers to replace them. OLPC made a massive miscalculation, and never regained the buzz they had back then.

Microsoft had nothing to do with OLPC's downfall. It had everything to do with failed project management, and at the highest levels, failed leadership. Expectations (on national levels) were not managed correctly, strange omissions in implementation (such as even rudimentary technical support) crippled uptake, and in the end participating nations had to work with volunteers to get anything done. The volunteer effort continues.

Eventually the organization was mismanaged into oblivion; there is currently some while-label vulture in possession of the commercial brand, and the non-profit arm has progressed rapidly into irrelevance.

As bad as things got (and are), OLPC never shipped a single machine running Windows -- if there are any out there, the participating school program installed it. As for FLOSS fans, mostly they made a lot of noise on blogs without ever having actually been involved with the program. If they had, they would have known that OLPC didn't spend a dime on Microsoft support; MS was allowed to send engineers to develop support within OpenFirmware for loading Windows, should the recipient nation desire it.

Strange, I remember going to linux conferences, of which the OLPC talks were heavily attended; competitions to win one were heavily patronised; colleagues going for the G1G1 program. There was a ton of interest in this low-cost, open-source laptop project. I remember the "for the children" argument for why they were partnering with Microsoft. The FLOSS community was pretty vocal in asking please don't do this, but OLPC ignored them. The buzz died, and the media moved on as a result. It didn't matter that MS never shipped in great numbers[1]; the damage was done.

It was mismanaged, absolutely, and the proposed MS partnership wasn't the only nail in the coffin. But with my own eyes I've seen a lot more interest than "noise on blogs". With that silly move, OLPC lost a pool of enthusiastic, free developers and media buzz. It also caused the OLPC chief of software to resign.

Given that you disparage the FLOSS complaints as just "noise on blogs", it's clear you didn't read the complaints. It had little to do with dimes moving from OLPC to MS. The issue was OLPC letting MS use them as a conduit to train new users in 'the windows way' - that MS was effectively going to co-opt OLPC as a loss-leader program. How far would OLPC go with MS? Why bother developing when they're so intent on providing XP on a clearly underspecced machine for it? And how could a sluggish OS actually be a decision 'for the kids'? How else would OLPC break their previously loud promises? The license fees really had nothing to do with the FLOSS community largely abandoning interest in the project.

[1] You're wrong about Windows never shipping. Windows-only machines never shipped, but dual-boot Windows machines did.

And I remember being personally involved in the OLPC project, which was not driven by linux conferences. The G1G1 program was a massive albatross that generated almost nothing but bad PR. Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft. The project never lacked developers (until it began to run aground due to the mismanagement).

I not only read the complaints, I made many of them myself. I disparaged noise on blogs as noise on blogs; the FLOSS community as a whole is fine but was not a major factor in the development of the project. This was not because they were unwilling; it was because the senior leadership made an executive decision not to engage with that community.

I understand that many people in the world confused OLPC's mission with that of free software. But the cold hard fact is that nobody really ever gave a shit about software licensing; the goal was to get computers to kids, and then try to set up a sustainable pedagogical practice around them. I'm not really interested in the completely tangential issue of whether you think Windows XP is sufficiently performant for this task -- the point is that FLOSS was never the point. It was an era where anyone's use of GNU software was considered to be some kind of philosophical statement on the validity of GNU, sure, but this was never the intention at the executive level. It was gratis software that was easy to customize. The decisions involved were primarily pragmatic. Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.

I remember when the FLOSS community abandoned OLPC. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. But I'd be interested in which countries received Windows loadouts -- I don't recall ever seeing a single support issue regarding it, which makes me think you may be mistaken.

http://blog.laptop.org/2011/09/01/every-xo-runs-linux/

Uruguay. This blog article clearly states that every OLPC runs linux, and also clearly states that some shipped with windows. Not many - they went to pilot programs and they weren't taken up largely because of that non-performance you hand-wave away - but they were shipped.

> Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft.

Getting super-cheap licenses and Microsoft to customise their OS for your hardware is 'partnering with' Microsoft.

> the point is that FLOSS was never the point

I knew this, as did a lot of the FLOSS advocates. The point was that MS was still seen as the Evil Empire at the time. The geeks were interested both in the low-cost laptop and the idea of spreading FLOSS instead of MS's stranglehold. And they were naturally excited about OLPC's strong promises. And when OLPC went back on their promises... as I say above, why bother continuing to work on the machine? What other promises will they break?

While you characterise the FLOSS argument by the more frothy fringe's statements of betrayal, what I saw was more "what's the point?". What's the point of doing work we believe in if they're not going to stick to their statements? Especially for the people who were far more interested in the machine than the kids - the concern that if OLPC switched to MS, hardware might be used that wasn't supported by linux.

> Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.

What a strange argument. You chide me for having a particular opinion, and then state the same thing that I'm arguing. You should be a spin doctor.

By the way, I was a Windows guy then, working in Windows support until 2009. I wasn't a FLOSS advocate, though I am now. Colleagues were into FLOSS, and I went along to conferences to hang out with them. I personally didn't feel betrayed, I just thought it was a stupid thing to do, and I noticed the buzz in both the tech and mainstream media evaporate with the FLOSS movement's disillusionment (which is a better description of the overall feeling than 'betrayal', I think).

However, it appears that we both agree that from the GP's original comment, it wasn't Apple or Google that crushed OLPC - OLPC crushed itself.

I agree that OLPC crushed itself, but I think that had more to do with CIA associations (in the minds of possible client nations, even if not in reality) and with the kind of paternalistic "we know what is good for your children" attitude, combined with the "sign up the whole country or we won't sell you a single machine" avoidable problem with adoptability, and plenty of promising what they could never deliver (promises which, unfortunately, were repeated mouth to mouth throughout the FLOSS community). By the time they sold their users down the river to Microsoft, they were already years late and an enormous disappointment.

So, the $100 laptop is real. It just isn't very FLOSS-friendly or made by OLPC. Instead, the mainstream $100 laptop is an Android tablet or cellphone, or maybe an iPad or iPhone. It's Apple and Google's fault that those machines are so user-hostile and dangerous, but it's not their fault that OLPC failed to provide a user-friendly, safe alternative.

> I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.

Disclaimer: I've only been in China for a week so far, so what I can tell is just what I see (besides what everyone hears in Western media, that is) and it may be biased.

Shenzhen is a city of many contrasts. I work in a relatively modern office building and live in a not-totally-crap hotel. I travel to work via taxis which seem to be staffed by poor people trying to make a living. Forget about Uber here.

When I get out of the hotel, I can turn left and find myself next to KFC, Starbucks and a big shopping mall full of expensive-looking clothes. Everything is plastered with ads like you wouldn't believe. Or I can turn right and find myself on a poor street that is flooded with trash and occupied by tons of people selling absolutely everything - meat, fruits, phones, barber services. Those people look impoverished and from what I can tell, pretty much sit there 24h/day 7 days a week trying to sell something to someone. They are all incredibly friendly, but you can feel the lack of perspective for a better life; it's heartbreaking. There's a family of street food vendors making fried pasta with various meats; a father, a mother and a son. I'm buying food from them pretty much every day. They're extremely proficient at what they do (and they use up scary amounts of propane for that), but you can see that they'll be doing it for the rest of their lives.

There's a big construction zone next to a metro station nearby. They'll probably be building skyscrapers, like a lot of others that are currently in progress. The zone is fenced off with 2m high concrete walls. I managed to take a look through a crack, and what I saw was something akin to a labour camp. Some metal sheds, minimum sanitation, lots of people cramped together. I've been told they're workers from local villages. They looked hungry and impoverished. They don't seem to have any safety equipment.

There's a fucking Starbucks and a KFC and lots of people with smartphones few hundred meters downstreet. And a modern, high-tech metro station on the other side of the wall.

Then there are electronics markets. Tons of fancy stuff. Everything you could imagine. Sold by people cramped together in small spaces that look like they couldn't afford what they're selling. Basically third world selling first-world products.

It's really unnerving that you can have a place that is so amazing and yet so sad at the same time, with nothing but an occasional concrete wall separating the two pictures.

Here in Buenos Aires we have a lot of entrenched poverty too, in slums that are often only tens of meters from rich areas. What I wonder most about is: what is the relationship between the poverty and the prosperity? Are the people in the "labour camp" able to go out and shop for meat, fruits, and barber services? Can they go get another job? Or are they in some kind of debt bondage? Have they been forced out of their homes by the electronics industries, or are they sending money to their parents and grandparents back in the village? Are the street food vendors and desperate taxi drivers better off than they were before the electronics industry came along, or are they finding themselves unable to pay the escalating bribes and taxes, forced off the land their families farmed, and occasionally beat up by police for scaring rich teenagers? What was their life like five or ten years ago, and what do they expect it to be like five or ten years from now? Can they walk to the KFC, or will the police pick them up as if they were Maciej Ceglowski walking around in the wrong neighborhood http://www.idlewords.com/2006/08/i_spy.htm or a black person walking around in a white neighborhood in the US?

Why is there only trash on the poor street? Do people not throw trash on the ground on the rich street, or is there a municipal street sweeping service that takes care of that? If so, why doesn't it clean the poor street? What's up with the lack of safety equipment? I'm happy to live in a country where I can still enjoy fast merry-go-rounds, but safety equipment in construction work is super important for preventing accidental death.

The derivative and the causality are more important than the current state.

I wish I could answer your questions. I keep asking them myself. I want to talk about it with someone local, but it's incredibly hard to find someone speaking English here outside work (and incredibly awkward to ask those questions at work), and my Chinese currently is limited to "hello", "thank you" and "goodbye" (I try to learn some as fast as I can; I only had a week's notice I'll be flying here so there wasn't time to prepare).

My Polish co-worker who is here with me and has been here before tells me of a girl working here who somehow escaped the poor villages far away from the metropolis and ended up working as a software tester. He says that he tried to talk with her about life, but that her English proficiency is limited to the technical matters; she can't express herself in English if asked about non-work topics, probably due to lack of general vocabulary.

I'll be happy to post something if I learn the answers to those questions.

I'm very interested!

I'm also interested to learn more if you come across any answers? Will you post it on your website or something? I feel like I'll miss it if it is posted on HN.

I'm noting down to update both you and 'kragen after I write something up. I might post it on my blog or do a Tell HN; we'll see after I actually have something to write about :). You can also shoot me an e-mail (mine in the profile) so that I know how to notify you directly.

I'm very interested as well! I'll shoot you an email!

Shenzhen is one of the best city in China. From your standard and perspective , other places seems looks like hell .

How weird to think about only knowing English at that level. Even when I learned another language, it was conversational. I hadn't really given it a lot of thought about if you only knew the technical words. I can see how that would be difficult to work with, but it's hard to imagine.

Last time I visited there were two guys with jackhammers taking up half of the concrete stairway to a McDonald's while it was still packed and busy: no safety equipment or barriers. I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years. Shenzhen is great, but the air pollution is a holdup for anyone looking to relocate there (or Hong Kong). Otherwise it's a maker's paradise.

>>There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me".

Andrew "bunnie" Huang coined the term gongkai to explain this concept, as differentiated from the Western-originated idea of open source (kaiyuan)[1]. It was based entirely on his observations of the semi-open hacking culture that is hopefully still flourishing in Shenzhen.[2]

[1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040

[2] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=gongkai

Yes, gongkai was the term I thought about and this is the blog I first learned about it. Thanks!

EDIT: [0] was the post that introduced the term to me.

[0] - http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

"China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here."

haha, I used to live in Dongguan.. Well, actually, Changping Town, Dongguan. It was impossible to get software that wasn't pirated.

When I was a kid you could hardly get any legal software in Poland too, and whatever there was available legally, was priced beyond reach of a simple low-to-middle-class family. Quite honestly, I owe my entire career to software piracy. Now that I work and earn money I buy everything I need legally if it's available, but I still support policies and technologies that give cheap or free access to tools, knowledge and culture to youth. Fortunately the current situation in IT is much better now, thanks to the Internet and companies realizing they can get more paying customers later if they give personal-use licenses for free.

> When I was a kid you could hardly get any legal software in Poland too

True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a "flying fuck" what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa '95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.

Yeah. I was buying games on CDs in a particular market in my city around '97. Also VC++ 6.0 was my first real programming environment; I got it from a friend of my dad, I have no clue where he did find it, but it was what turned me into a programmer. I still have fond memories towards that environment.

Actually, I was on the phone with Microsoft once, applying for internship. I was asked what is my favourite dev software; I answered something along the way of "VS C++ 6.0, because the 200x editions kind of suck", just little more politely. I didn't get the internship eventually, but I want to believe this was for unrelated reasons.

You guys had CDs? I was buying software on floppies by mail order from my friendly neighborhood pirate. My favorite thing about it was that whenever I ordered a program or two, he would include a bunch of other programs and games for free to fill the extra room on the floppies, since the floppies were the expensive part and it didn't cost him any extra. It was like getting a box of chocolates. Ah those were the days.

In late 90s/early 2000s (around 1997-2005) the standard practice was to go to a specific marketplace in the city to get games and software for $6 - $7 (around 25 PLN); this was a standard price for a CD of anything, the content didn't really matter. I was a kid at that time, so I don't remember how it was before. Maybe we had a floppy market as well; someone older would have to chime in.

> Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway.

I'm going to have to disagree here. The vast majority of stuff is designed or thought up elsewhere. Things might get assembled or manufactured in Shenzhen (it is after all, the manufacturing capital of the world) but the innovations aren't coming from China. In fact, China doesn't even rate that high on manufacturing innovation (they rank 41st place). While they may manufacturer more than anyone else, the bulk of their manufacturing is low tech stuff (Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-innovative-countries/). - Scroll down to manufacturing.

That's why I wrote 'built there', not 'designed there'. I meant the factory aspect - but it also means people here have access to those designs as well as tools and expertise to iterate on them, tweak them and repurpose them.

> but it also means people here have access to those designs as well as tools and expertise to iterate on them, tweak them and repurpose them.

I don't see how that's relevant. If they're designed elsewhere, then who is going to be tweaking and re-purposing? The Chinese slave labor? Anyone who matters will be back in their home country, doing the work there. Anyone overseeing manufacturing operations in China literally doesn't matter from a design or innovation standpoint.

Oh this is very relevant. You need to see things that are happening here in Shenzhen. Western companies may bankroll some interesting designs, but they are not innovative wrt. applying technology to life. Not compared to "the Chinese slave labor".

And honestly, who "matters" is a matter of a point of view. Big tech companies try to lock you in to maximize their profits out of devices they sell. Meanwhile in Shenzhen, nobody gives a fuck and you can get any permutation of electronics you can imagine for fraction of the western price, and it's often user-servicable. This is the place where actual innovation happens - selling overpriced gadgets that do 5% of features everyone saw in Star Trek 30 years ago is not innovation. I want to live in the world with more gongkai[0] and less attempts at locking people in unneccessary, wasteful, idiotic cloud platforms.

I want the Western tech giants to lose the war on general-purpose computing.

[0] - Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.

> Meanwhile in Shenzhen, nobody gives a fuck and you can get any permutation of electronics you can imagine for fraction of the western price, and it's often user-servicable.

And this is exactly why China is on the road to nowhere. With a lack of IP protection, blatant IP theft and rampant piracy, nobody (big businesses) will invest the time and money into China. In fact, those that have, have pulled out (see: Microsoft, Google, etc). It's why despite having over a billion people, nobody really seriously considers China a potential client.

And yet, despite having over a billion citizens, their innovation and technological breakthroughs are non-existent. They are simply not a technological innovative country. Nearly every article you find on google will back this up. Just do a quick google search. Again, see the link I included above.

> Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.

I'm sorry, but the data and reality shows otherwise. You're not going to find anyone saying "innovation happens in China". Quite the opposite in fact. The only way they've been keeping up with the rest of the world has been through theft and buying the technology from those who created it.

And that's the problem. Since they're so used to stealing and buying their technology, they don't have a foundation in which to create their own. That's what China hasn't grasped yet -- the process of creating new technology and being innovative (the discovery) is itself just as important as the end result because it's a foundation that allows you to move forward onto the next breakthrough. China doesn't have that. And they're getting left further and further behind.

> "There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"."

Shanzhai?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

I meant gongkai, which is to shanzhai as 'hacker' is to 'cracker'. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138.

Ah right, thanks.

a great example of this is the 'hoverboard', the segway without a handle. These were designed and built by chinese factories and right now are being pumped out by a variety of factories with no clear owner or license holder and nobody cares, they are bought, re-branded and re-sold all over the world and due to the nature of the ownership issue retail price is dropping all the time.

I've seen them last week, didn't get a chance to try out yet though. Looks scary without the handle, but the less rational half of me wants to buy one on the spot.

Unfortunately, it appears that many people, both end users, power users and programmers alike, have made up their minds and want their computers to be appliances instead of tools. In fact, strict regimentation, curation and immutable defaults are in wide demand by consumers of all demographics. Having to manually tune something is considered ever more blasphemous these days.

I think we will end up losing a lot in this process, not least of which the ensuing moral crisis as system software research becomes increasingly dead in favor of having our machines just be whatever black box the vendor has crafted, indeed our very mental model of a computing environment being whatever is presented to us obliquely.

And all of this happening while many beat their chests demanding that programming be made a compulsory subject in public schools. What a sickening irony.

> And all of this happening while many beat their chests demanding that programming be made a compulsory subject in public schools. What a sickening irony.

Indeed. Also note how the typical curriculum offered by proponents is geared towards teaching people to create things that will be ad-supported or will be providing ads.

I wish to know if there's a way to fight back somehow. Maybe not to reverse the trend, but to separate ourselves from it? Let the masses have their appliances if they really like them, but let us keep our tools.

The thing I fear is professionalization of programming, when we become a legitimate engineering discipline and thus will have to work for an expensive license to legally use a turing-complete language, and compilers is something you can go to jail for if they see you trying to run it without credentials.

and compilers is something you can go to jail for if they see you trying to run it without credentials.

I'm a little skeptical this will happen with software, but it is well underway in the case of hardware[1].

[1] https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Save_WiFi

Software is incredibly dangerous. All the malware that spreads exists because a) you have a general-purpose computer to run it on, and b) they have a general-purpose language to write it in. By restricting a) and b) we're ensuring your safety, as well as the safety of our critical infrastructure, baking, etc.

The arguments aren't actually that bad (of course we know that currently the strongest side supporting them is media companies trying to kill general-purpose computing to make unbreakable DRMs, but in principle they sort of have a point...) - it's the cost that is too high.

And all executable code must be signed by the register that licensed you, so the code that runs can be audited back to its creator. However, the Software Engineers Union will offer the developer some legal protection, as well as negotiating the trade wages by scale.

the safety of our critical infrastructure, baking

Well, the baking industry is certainly more productive of human comfort and happiness than certain other industries demanding protection from the laws the rest of us live by -- such as finance.

You should submit that link as a top level story!

Well, there have been similar submissions every few weeks, and there was a pretty long discussion about it 7 weeks ago [1], so it'd probably be a dupe.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679

Senator Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) in 2001 introduced the SSSCA, the bill to take away all the pansy freedom of speech provisions of the DMCA and really lock down computers for the legitimate big business that should control programming. It was Hollings's 35th year as the junior senator from South Carolina and -- as chairman of the Commerce Committee -- he had really decided to crack down.

The SSSCA as introduced would have prohibited, with criminal penalties, the possession without a license of a compiler capable of producing programs that could process, copy, or decrypt data in media files. Every Turing-complete programming language in the country would have required a special federal license to use. Finally, only licensed, bonded, qualified, and tracked professionals taking responsibility for their actions could violate our precious copyrights.

But Hollings wasn't as spry as his senior colleague from South Carolina and retired before he could finish his final good work for the corporations that made him. Even that business so famously unashamed that its own mascot is a rodent would have to settle for waiting a little longer to achieve its aims.

> that business so famously unashamed that its own mascot is a rodent That's a line I'll remember!

It's an old Carl Hiaasen line.

Just like in early 80s I cannot install an OS on my game console, watch or phone. Just like in early 80s I can install an OS on my PC. There had always been open and locked hardware, even in the blessed 80s. And no, I don't mean that smartphones did not exist. There had been mini-computers, mainframes, various embedded systems from calculators to microwave ovens etc etc.

But even locked back then just meant, "locked for the typical user." We're getting to the point where like cars before us, we aren't working on Chevy small blocks anymore.

And now "locked" means something else? There is no absolutely locked hardware that I know. If Apple can update OS on their phones it's not by some magical power that nobody else can possible posses.

Get acquainted with the magic of public key cryptography code signing.

> If Apple can update OS on their phones it's not by some magical power that nobody else can possible posses.

Yeah, it's only signed by cryptographic keys that nobody else is likely to ever possess.

You "only" need to put in a new Boot ROM with your own key ("When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. [...] The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load." https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) AFAICT this ROM is probably deeply integrated into the CPU, so hopefully you have some really precise tools and/or plan to make your own replacement CPU as well.

Ah, I guess the signed bootloader is the 100% protection. Too bad PS3 did not have one, right?

The PS3 does have a crypto key, but it was recovered by hackers because Sony reused nonces in ECDSA signatures: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.crypt/3isJl28Slr...

Apple's probably isn't susceptible, especially with the PS3 failure in recent memory.

Yup. Companies are pushing unlocking the devices into seriously illegal territory. Yes, in principle you can unlock anything - you can always kidnap the CEO and beat him with $4 crowbar until he gives you the key. In practice we would like to be able to do it without harming people.

I am not an Apple user but I cannot help but notice some kind of "jailbreak" business going on there. Could it, perhaps, involve breaching iPhone security in some way that could lead to loading arbitrary code with system privileged and even modyfing the OS itself? It sure looks this way from a cursory googling. It appears Apple had been and still is susceptible to various attacks. As is every other company.

It's never going to be impossible to access these devices (and I suspect Apple deliberately doesn't make it too hard). But every year it gets more expensive, riskier, and requires more specialised knowledge. Modern BluRay keys are already out of reach for a casual home user (speaking as someone who tried to play my own BluRays on Linux). Soon we'll be at the point where you need a cleanroom and an electron microscope to bypass protection.

If you care about hackability, you can buy a completely open hardware development board for under $100 delivered. That's roughly $45 in 1985 US dollars.

Android device makers from China maybe haven't been told about their own inability to pump out clones. Somebody should let them know.

A VM instance from Digital Ocean costs $5/month. Go buy a dozen, and install Xenix on all of them.

All your platforms up to about 1995 have emulators that run on your phone, completely opensource, and gratis.

The devices are locked down, because the cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors.

> Android device makers from China maybe haven't been told about their own inability to pump out clones. Somebody should let them know.

Oh they know about it. They just don't give a fuck. What is the US going to do, sue them?

(Actually, the Chinese government started cracking down on that industry, because it pisses off the West too much and thus "hurts economy".)

As for the rest of your comment, this is the golden age we're having, but we're seeing more and more signs that the big companies - both technology and media ones - are trying to put an end to it. One reason is that "cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors." The other is that it's easier to make money off people if you lock them down behind dumbed down devices and your own propertiary ecosystem. Yet another is that people like media but don't like to pay MAFIAA for it. Surveillance is also a an issue. This all adds up in a way that threatens the future hackability of stuff.

Sure, I'm not saying that there aren't any ways to hack still. And that's especially so in regards to legacy platforms, like the PC. But for newer devices, and for future devices (like, say, VR appliances), it looks like we're taking, or at risk of taking, a big step backwards.

I also acknowledge that if you're willing and able to (find|build|buy) hardware that skates around patent law and the like, then you have more options. And as long as that's a possibility, that's a Good Thing. But I still argue that it's a Bad Thing when major computing platforms become "lock down by default".

OTOH, I don't mean to be all "gloom and doom". Clearly there have been some positive developments over the past few years. The resurgence of the burgeoning DIY/hacker/maker movement, the advent of cheap single-board-computers like Arduino, rPi, BeagleBone, etc., are all good signs. But as they say "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty".

I think the next big thing after VR will be sexbots, as in, per Philip K Dick, "your basic pleasure model." The pieces are almost all on the shelf and coming together.

The hard part of course will be the software, with the motivation of making it an increasingly realistic companion. The Dark Matter series placed an interesting spin on it, where the "entertainment android", in addition to sex, is also specialized for cooking, backrubs, songs, etc.

"in addition to sex, is also specialized for cooking, backrubs, songs, etc." Oh man, that market is a huge dormant monster..

Over my inanimate RealDoll™. Maybe you're right...

Sounds like a great product, but of course, it'll likely offload most of the processing to "the cloud" so the manufacturer can spy on you and sell info on your sexual kinks to the highest bidder.

Not that I'm cynical about tech or anything...

You're not cynical, you're being realistic...

I dunno, I feel like porn is one area where society in general really does care about their privacy. People who don't care about most tracking will still use private browsing to watch porn, and companies go to great lengths to highlight their discreet billing/packaging etc.

One doesn't really exclude the other. What you wrote is true, but people primarily care about not being discovered by people they know, and cloud is a go-to business model for people too lazy to invent something that's sustainable and actually beneficial to the user... Given how hard it is to monetize causal porn browsing, I wouldn't be surprised if some companies started giving in to the temptation...

I don't think so. Google Glass proved that tech, fashion and social cues are all deeply related. I think the same people who wore glass around in public and didn't get why people called them assholes would be the same people who buy sexbots and don't get why people call them perverts. A few dorks with calf-high white socks with birkenstocks would go nuts for them, and most of the rest of the world would look on with a mixture of disdain, amusement and repulsion.

Yes, of course, this is dork territory.

The interesting thing here is that sexbots can come in both genders, which might mitigate the stigma. There are probably a lot more women with vibrators than men with various appliances, yet no one calls a woman a pervert for owning one. If it becomes common for women dorks to own sexbots, then the path might be clear for men dorks.

> I don't think so. Google Glass proved that tech, fashion and social cues are all deeply related.

That's very true.

> I think the same people who wore glass around in public and didn't get why people called them assholes would be the same people who buy sexbots and don't get why people call them perverts. A few dorks with calf-high white socks with birkenstocks would go nuts for them, and most of the rest of the world would look on with a mixture of disdain, amusement and repulsion.

It's interesting how this polarizes people. Because you see, I consider everyone who called Google glass wearer 'glasshole' to be a total dick. I understand the reason for their hate and I think they're stupid and they should get over themselves and their jealousy and fear of technology. It doesn't warrant hostile behaviour to another human being.

What about the Vive and OpenVR?

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr

I generally agree with your sentiment. I think there's an important distinction to add. By and large, people don't fully expect their mobile devices to be general purpose computing machines in the same way that their PCs are. What I expect from my phone, primarily, is convenience and usability.

Of course, at least on android devices, it's not at all uncommon to install custom variants of the OS (CyanogenMod, etc.), so it does happen.

Yes, it does happen, but the device manufacturers (for the most part) don't exactly go out of their way to make it easy. And other than Android forks, there aren't exactly a ton of choices. It's a pretty sad situation in many ways.

Of course, I recognize that most people aren't going to want to install a different OS anyway. And that's OK. Most people didn't install a new OS on their PC's either. But some do, and some want to tinker, create, invent, hack, and innovate. And if we slip into a world where that's not possible, or where it's incredibly difficult, I posit that that is a bad situation for everybody (except, I suppose, Google, Samsung, Apple, etc. stockholders).

>And if we slip into a world where that's not possible, or where it's incredibly difficult…But some do, and some want to tinker, create, invent, hack, and innovate.

I don't know, I think there will always be people who will drift towards areas where they feel/embody this, and where the field is so niche that most people just don't care about what you are doing at that moment in time or it's so far removed from what most people engage with on a daily basis.

Fields where the current "monied" players are all running like chickens with their heads cut off, peddling snake oil (too many times have friends heard about some device and asking me if it can really do xyz, and I just facepalm to myself only to realize that things are just so new and most people have the faintest idea of what is actually possible now and what will be possible in the near future), and things like laws/incentives restricting xyz aren't even talked about because people are still trying to figure out what the hell is going on (at least from my perception working in a research lab on the outer tech world).

And even if it is not bad for Google, Samsung, Apple, et al today, years from now, they'll be where ibm is, peddling their watson equivalents to everybody that will listen fighting off their own obsolescence.

> and now? When was the last time you installed a new OS on your smartphone? Your game console? Your VR device? Your smart watch? Etc?

I get your concern but I don't think the analogy holds up.

For instance, hacking a gaming console in the 80's is pretty much as hard as it is today, except that people who does this share it more efficiently.

Smartphones? You can jailbreak pretty much every platform and in some cases you don't even need to.

The thing that is changing in my opinion, is the easyness of access for locked-in software and digital content. For instance, I could spend an hour chasing an ebook and download it to my kindle. Or I can pay a few bucks to license the ebook in the Amazon Kindle Store in less than a minute.

Depending of the price tag I will be doing the second option most of the time, even if I don't control the copy. Just because I'm lazy ...

>the point is, we, collectively, are losing control of our use of computing and technology.

That assumes that "we collectively" were ever in control.

The reality is that these breakthrough technologies, no matter what the century, took massive amounts of money and time to become adopted and by and large they were built by the bigs in some fashion - either through license deals or direct investment from IBM, US Government etc...

Sure there have been FOSS wins, but if you look at the major technologies, basically since forever they were funded and owned by big corporations.

Before the microcomputer most technologies were totally hackable and often buildable from scratch. Out of the things you had in the 60s, probably only TV could not be built in-house. Radios? Washing machines? Cars? All could be constructed by general population with various levels of effort. But what's more important, all those things were user-servicable, user-modifiable and it was a popular hobby to tinker with stuff.

But is losing control really that bad? Often we don't want control as much as we want to do more stuff. We don't have control about our food, but we are as fat as never before. We don't have control over what happens with our taxes, but still live for most people in the western world is stable, there are roads, public transport, doctors. I don't think people really want to keep control over their computers.

We want things that enable us to do more. Food designed by experts and good taxation financing a stable public service system empowers us to do more. So does control over tools we use. Also keep in mind that the reason we're talking about losign control is because greedy corporations are greedy. It's not a good reason to give up anything.

You have the choice to eat some read meal in a packet full of chemical preservatives and flavourings, or you have the choice to buy fresh ingredients and cook your own. I wish I had more control over where my taxes went. I would far rather they were helping the poor rather than bailing out banks.

Im definitely not the norm, but I have a modded every piece of equipment I own. if it's a black box, I don't buy it. Very vew people are looking to cash in on this niche, though.

So, tell me, how often did you install a new os on your smartphone, game console, VR device smart watch in the early 80s?

We wouldn't have smartphones, game consoles, VR devices or smart watches if big companies in the early 80s were pulling the shit they try to do now.

Yes, this is pretty much exactly the point. The "freedom to tinker" we had in the past has played a big role in enabling the things we have now. If we lose that freedom, we'll be reduced to a world where the only innovation comes from big corporations, or possible from academics who are controlled (via purse strings) by those same big corporations.

Interestingly this battle got started in the 80s around games consoles, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade (does the console maker have the right to total control of the games market for that console?)

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