Techno-skeptics’ objection growing louder
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Apple has been struggling in this area. Their sapphire screen debacle set them back on the ruggedness front.[3] They've made some progress on water resistance, but they're not at IP67 yet.
[1] http://mobiloscope.net/en/hardware/smartphones/waterproof-ru... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku-xItv8 [3] http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7250941/the-inside-story-...
"Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations."
I recall many years ago I would sometimes write comments at places like Slashdot. And I recall pointing out that so long as governments have armies that can find ways to be repressive. I recall being down modded as if I was some kind of irrational troll. At that time, and in those forums, the people who got upvoted were the ones who made the argument that the Internet could never be censored, because the Internet would route around censorship as if censorship was a form of network failure. During that era, a lot of people made some fairly naive libertarian/utopian arguments about the Internet was changing the world. Some people still make these arguments even now. There were some places (I'm thinking of places such as BoingBoing) where the utopian editorial tone was the only tone that was allowed. Places like BoingBoing have gotten much better at documenting the ways that governments are undermining the Internet, but many of these places started off denying that such undermining could ever happen. I am happy that these people finally revised their view of the world, though I wish the dangers had been more widely appreciated at an earlier date.
The reality we face is now much as it has always been: there is no technological solution for repression. The only way to establish a free society is to mobilize and fight for it. That was true 2,500 years ago, when the Plebians were demanding fair treatment from the Roman upper classes, and it remains true today, and it will probably remain true for as long there is a species that you can recognize as homo sapien.
There's a lot of problems in the tech industry, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was a lot of planned obsolescence in hardware, but breaking a phone screen isn't planned obsolescence. That's you breaking a screen. People like to talk about their mother's grandmother's washing machine and how it never broke, but if you dropped it off a cliff it would break.
Also, a couple things I've read on reddit that made me rethink my thoughts on planned obsolescence:
It used to be that hardware engineers had to plan for errors in manufacturing, etc, and not knowing exactly how much stress this part would place on this part, and as such, had to over-engineer their products to make sure they would work. These days, we have CAD tools, and can almost exactly figure out how thick this particular piece can be to work, and exactly how strong that motor needs to be. Products aren't over-engineered anymore, and as such will fail sooner.
Additionally, when your grandmother bought a washing machine, it might have cost a larger % of your income than now. If you scale the price of older machines, they're significantly more expensive than what we have now.
Final note: You never hear about your grandmother's stuff that broke now, did you. You only saw the stuff that worked forever.
As it stands, I'm actually really concerned about the direction modern technology is going, but at the same time, hopeful. It's easier than ever before for a young inventor to create something wonderful and make sure everyone has access to it. With the same power that allows them to get their ideas to everyone else, more malevolent powers can keep an ever-closer eye on everyone, and much easier.
"So much engineering effort has gone in to making this product just functional".
See also: the shitty power supplies in almost all consumer electronics.
We used to have this. Then GMail took over email, Facebook took over most people's communication, reddit replaced usenet and so on. We let the general masses sleepwalk into corporate data silos.
Reddit is mostly publicly accessible, and run like some kind of low-profit community-directed social benefit corporation. But... It is increasingly infiltrated by marketing in subtle and frustrating ways. Maybe this is why it exists.
Facebook, however, is just a nightmare. It gives us one thing we lacked before, which is a centralized identity service, and using that as leverage twists everyone's arm into joining and directing all communication through it. I can use any email server and talk with my friend on gmail. I can browse reddit anonymously. But facebook won't be satisfied until it owns my digital soul.
We need tools. They will have companies behind them. So, we can't throw everything away. But, can we draw the line at the walled garden of Facebook? It is a bridge too far. It is the end of the internet. Please, don't give in. Write your friends. Call your mother. Email your baby photos. Post your videos where you get credit (even revenue!) for them. Remember that ten thousand years of humans went to parties, got laid, and had your ancestors without an event page that required a signup and login.
1) Hostile use of e-mail has increased at a rate higher than exponential, to the point where spam prevention is an incredible chore, and the things that make it to your spam folder on Gmail isn't the whole of it, particularly if you aren't cautious in how your e-mail address is used. 2) People no longer have just one computer. They have a work computer, a home computer, a smartphone... and they routinely change those devices.
Gmail solves those problems. Gmail takes care of all kinds of spam prevention and other infrastructure tasks. You can access it from almost any computing device you have. And it does so nearly painlessly. You don't have to delete e-mails on your remote server because you're running out of space. You don't have to sync anything. There's no configuration. There's no cost. Can you get most of the way to a solution as nice as Gmail on your own? Yeah. But it's not as low-effort or low-cost, and I think people underestimate the expense, difficulty, or shortfalls of the best non-Gmail options for personal use, especially for people who are not either professionals or hobbyists when it comes to using computers.
The general masses didn't sleepwalk into corporate data silos. They went there because the open Internet is a shitshow. It is filled with incredibly dedicated and hostile people who want to run scams, spread malware, do DoSes and all sorts of intentionally hostile things. It is also filled with a lot of more innocent hostility -- nominally compatible software that in practice has weird corner cases, bad documentation, bugs, and so on and so forth. And decentralization is a real hard problem in software. Look at Aphyr and Jepsen. Look at IRC and its interminable netsplits. What you call "corporate data silos" are things that managed to solve problems people really have. Those solutions, yes, have other harms. But people didn't make bad choices or wrong choices, they made entirely sensible choices based on a different set of wants, resources and priorities than the typical commenter at Hacker News. That doesn't make them dumb or "sleepwalking," and condescending about real people with real needs is not going to solve anyone's problems.
The thing about gmail is not its services as a email server, but that you basically have to use Google's site or apps to access the email.
Yes, there is imap support. But as best i understand it, the implementation is "idiosyncratic" to put it mildly.
Similarly, Google used to run a IM service using XMPP. But then they killed the federation feature (allowing other XMPP services to communicate with Google's users), and then phased the whole service out for Hangouts.
Facebook also used XMPP for their IM service, but has since also disabled it.
Thing is that as long as they were using XMPP, i could have Pidgin sitting in the corner and keep up with friends and family on either service. Now it have to run 2-3 apps (and non of them are available for desktop Linux) to do the same.
While it may not be a sleepwalk, it sure edges close to "bait and switch".
Facebook's real name policy is one way to stop that. Google's "one account for all of Google" is another, because it takes effort to maintain a convincing fake account. OpenID tied to cell phone numbers might work; the cell phone numbers don't have to be disclosed to the sites using the ID for signon. While you can buy multiple cell phone numbers, they're not free. So a solution to that problem might be possible.
It's hard to monetize federated systems. Note that YC doesn't fund any. A few exist; there's Friendica and Diaspora, and, of course, the remnants of USENET. They seem to have a few thousand users total. It's not a technical problem.
The truly heroic will find ways to make what's "best" also the cheapest and easiest solution. But who wants to undertake that herculean task without being very well compensated for their effort? And there's the rub.
Really? That's the solution? Have the organization that is trying to invade your privacy take over more of the communication methods?
What makes you think that a public ISP/whatever would rely on 'ever-bigger threats' for budget?
As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
That's a poor argument because it's simply your opinion and you're not giving any evidence to show your opinion is more valuable or more correct than anybody else's.
I can claim the Criterion Collection represents the highest-quality media content ever released, and it's just as valid an opinion as yours.
Perhaps I was unclear. Facebook will violate your privacy to sell ads. The government agency will violate your privacy to justify its budget. In both cases your privacy is violated, with the additional point that you can't quit using the government agency and if you get in their grill too much they can have you killed.
> As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.
They're very high-quality, and they also generally represent a single minority point of view in their societies. The two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
Also the government isn't one organization. It is as wide and varied as the corporate landscape. She may trust NPR which is nominally "the state" (barely) but not NSA or FBI, which is a very reasonable stance to take. The most stringent defenders of privacy I've ever heard of as a class are librarians, who are -- you guessed it -- part of the government. Even agencies themselves are not monoliths; there are many people even at NSA who work in a defensive capacity securing and protecting systems instead of subverting them.
So "More government! That's ludicrous" isn't really nuanced enough.
That's backwards. Individuals have more control when working with non-government entities because they can opt-out completely. If I don't want Facebook to invade my privacy, I don't have to use it. Problem solved. There's no opting out of the government and NSA invading my privacy.
I'm not saying it's a great solution, but it's a solution, and it's more options than exist for opting out of government surveillance.
From other people posting your pictures and whereabouts? You have to quit civilization.
Doesn't change the fact that it's easier and legal to opt out of Facebook.
That isn't a real solution, just like "opt out of google" or "opt out of facebook" isn't a real solution. When a corporation has a monopoly it's as powerful as a government in that area but with zero accountability or transparency.
The concern here is power. The people in government choosing how to use their power are elected or responsible to someone elected. On the other hand the power structure of a corporation is a dictatorship. Pretending you can theoretically choose to not participate in society and avoid corporate control so their power isn't real power is naive.
This has not precluded a decentralized internet from existing. (At least decentralized in the sense that it is not run by X mega tech company or NSA controlled.) You can run your own email server, you can run an irc server, we have tor, you can run a server out of your home and serve web pages or even run a reddit clone to organize like minded people. In a certain sense all of this is more accessible than ever. The problem that these people have is that as the internet grew, it expanded to the wider population of non-technical users who had no need or desire for the aforementioned technologies. They are perfectly fine with Facebook and Google and not knowing or caring how it works because that is good enough for them and censorship will likely never be a problem they will have to face. They don't mind the ads because for the most part they are relevant and the privacy invasion that more technically inclined users perceive has no real affect on their lives.
The internet has not necessarily closed and centralized, it is just that the centralized closed portion of it has grown very popular while the rest has just stayed small and limited in its appeal.
Really surprised Evgeny Morozov isn't also tagged as a "digital dissenter" in this piece. Or Richard Stallman for that matter.
I do have trouble not feeing apathetic. I want to cover my laptop camera, but I don't want duct tape on my equipment! (Nor one branded "Rand Paul.")
I know planned obsolescence is maddening (my iPad 1 is as good a paper-weight as anything) but I love crunchy new technology!
I would love a decentralized Internet, but the one we have right now took a long time to get to where it is. Am I really ready to start from scratch? (Probably not, in the end...)
Snowden made this stuff scary for sure, but I'd rather learn to properly encrypt the Internet we have.
Maybe I'm part of the problem?
PO can include external factors. Does apple continue to manufacture spare parts? If no, have they released the designs so that others can produce them? If not, then this is a case of PO even if the devices themselves have not been built to fail.
On one corner of the desk that I am currently using, there sits an old aluminum 13.3" Macbook with a replaceable battery. I never replaced the battery because the laptop got dinged up, old, and slow, so the effort and resources that went into making the battery replaceable were wasted. Getting rid of 'serviceability' is often worth it.
You seem to be hung up on Moore's law as well. And while Moore's law has lost some of its teeth in recent years(and tricks like cluster computing and specialized designs are staving off some of its effects), hardware still grows old quickly. (And bitching about your 5 year old $1k hardware is hilarious to those of us who remember paying $5-8k or more for "all the computer you will ever need" only to see it become almost entirely obsolete in less than a year.
But the fact is this: your 5 year old etch-a-sketch only has 256mb ram on which to run its OS and apps. Considering what people expect out of a tablet these days by way of web browsing, multitasking, etc, your iPad 1.0 actually IS obsolete, or quickly will be.
As to open sourcing the design - why in the world would Apple open source the trade secret that literally makes it Apple? The fact that Apple built it and no one else does is literally what makes Apple all of those earnings.
256mb belongs in the 90s, not 2010. This machine came with 1gb and upgraded a couple years ago with a ssd and 4gb of memory. And anyone who travels will tell you that having an oldschool VGA output is very useful. The average conference-hall projector is far older than the average portable. One less adapter is one less thing to loose.
You don't have to "open source" designs. Look at what car companies do. They maintain a supply of spares and they license out designs they don't want to build themselves. That's what people expect from car companies.
Throwing working machines in the trash simply because they are scratched or fail to keep pace with fashion is wasteful vanity.
I am seeing something similar over at Android. Where earlier versions of the Play store app worked without a hitch on my aging tablet, now it seems to crash left and right whenever i want to look at longer lists of search results or similar. And this seems to happen when it tries to load the app icons or similarly asynchronously, meaning that i can enter the search, get a list of results, and then see the app stutter and crash as it tries to load the graphics.
The mandatory (1) software updates (specifically iOS8) have basically made it perform half as well as it did when it was sold, I don't think it's a shining example.
(1) If you want support.
I don't upgrade my phone because the one I have is fine. It isn't a political statement, though.
In addition, I wouldn't characterize someone who owns an iPhone and a laptop as a "digital dissenter" or a "techno-skeptic", but the story uses both of these terms to describe Taylor and some of the other subjects of the article. I think these are both poorly chosen terms that smack of Luddism and, unsurprisingly, Taylor & co. are likened to Luddites later in the article. The article itself suggests that an appropriate term for them might be "humanists", but I guess that wasn't as likely to get clicks as "techno-skeptics."
I was also amused by the criticism of Lanier's idea of micropayments for content creators. The objection was that it might encourage people to record clickbait or "hey, y'all, hold my beer and watch THIS!" stunts, as if Youtube isn't already teeming with exactly that sort of content.
Luddites are individuals who are against the adoption of technology when it will destroy the connections individuals have with their family, friends, and community. Plenty of Kirkpatrick Sale, E.P. Thompson, etc. about for those who wish to dig deeper.
However, in practical terms, I find the digital dissenter's mistrust to be somewhat misplaced. The technology does not set itself up in a women's restroom to take up-skirt video any more than a gun pulled its own trigger recently in San Bernardino.
The soap box, jury box, and ballot box are all failing, in part because all the mistrust, anger, and energy are not being focused on creating substantial penalties for inappropriate use of the technology.
A meaningful debate is the choice between supporting technologies that centralize power or those that distribute it.
The notion that decisions are being made for the benefit of "machines" is nonsense. If that appears to be the case, it's likely for the benefit of those who control the machines.
It's strange that free and open source software was not mentioned, since visionaries (albeit flawed) like RMS predicted the power shifts we see today.
I recently let a smartphone go all the way to EOL (~5 years, not bad in my opinion). I don't see what these snoots are bragging about. If they don't want to use a device which is state-of-the-art, and don't want to pay for one which is durable, they'll get one which is old and broken.
They do have options though.