Toward a Technological Cage for the Masses

I want to stop for a second and appreciate how much I like websites like the one on the OP: no javascript; no ads; non-commercial, honest content; light, straightforward design. All in all, just a no-strings-attached personal site. That's what the Web should be all about.

I miss the late 90s' and early 00s' world wide web. Any search would direct you to a bunch of personal sites just like this one; now, you'd be lucky to find something similar among the typical pile of irrelevant commercial sites bordering on being straight scams that any search engine throws at you.

> After all, who needs anything but four cold, bare walls, a toilet, and a bed to sleep on. You will be happy here, where "we" will decide what you need and what you don't. "We" will feed, clothe, and house you. "We" will provide you with everything "we" feel that you need

It's kind of a bad joke, this idea that these encroachments on the freedom on the internet are going hand-in-hand with 'free stuff from the government' because in most cases in the anglosphere it seems like, with the notable exception of furlough schemes brought in for the pandemic, we're generally seeing the opposite trend: social protections being torn up and we're told to be happy about this.

Our avenues for complaining about it are slowly being captured primarily by large, ultimately unsympathetic corporations who would rather we as individuals be as insecure as possible so as to be maximally dependent on them and their peers for a wage.

The approach suggested in the article is to use market forces, i.e. boycott products which move us closer to unwanted futures. This is challenging when the majority of products are headed in one direction, driven by market demand that companies can influence by advertising.

Another approach is to use regulatory power in democratic societies, e.g. to enact legislation for right to repair (https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Intro), or specific DMCA exemptions for owners to modify device firmware (https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/sep/16/dmca-exemptions-2...). These are necessary but insufficient steps to restore choice in functionality and freedom, which are sometimes placed in false opposition via vague threat models.

In practice, what has worked has been competition from smaller vendors. In a world of more complexity, we need more than GPD Pockets and kickstarters to lead the way with pioneering examples that can be copied by bigger companies. Without the creative force of a Steve Jobs, Apple depends on the broader market to experiment. Several iPad Pro features can be credited to MS Surface, including concessions (still poorly implemented) on a local file system. If we end up with a few monopolies, will innovation slow without competitors teaching consumers about alternatives?

There needs to be a commercial arena where engineers in smaller companies have economic incentives to develop prototypes that increase freedom without compromising security, which "appliances" can then copy. FPGAs and RISC-V have some promise for open hardware, but progress is slowed by closed software toolchains. There are no quick fixes, but pockets of general-purpose hardware success can be encouraged by legislation, engineering talent voting with their feet, and yes, commercial support by customers.

I'll be the contrarian: Has the author ever heard of Linux?

I'm being glib, and share many of the author's frustrations with the state of things, but really the trends covered in the article have been happening for well over a decade. In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals. Likewise with scientific computing frameworks like R and Python. The author even managed to get a personal website up for all of us to read. The options for personal computing are wide, wide open, even if some markets or products remain closed and proprietary and tough to hack.

Also,

> I suppose one can argue that if we all have nothing but dumb terminals running software from a ROM (which cannot be written to), then no malware can get onto our computers. But, do we want to go back to the dumb terminal days of the 1980's? Is this the "modern" operating system that we want?

For certain stuff like online banking, yes.

The problem is that people want cages. They want cages, especially, for their foes (real or perceived): every time you hear someone say, 'there ought to be a law' what he is really saying is, 'I want armed men to use the threat of deadly violence to herd people who do what I don't like or don't do what I like into cages.'

Less obviously, many (perhaps most) people want cages for themselves. They don't trust themselves to make adult decisions, or simply don't want to be responsible for their choices. There is security to three hots & a cot, just as there is security to the iOS App Store. What's missing is not security but liberty.

And folks don't just want cages for their foes and themselves; they want not to be confronted with it. Just note the downvotes any post about the lack of freedom on iOS will get.

This article is kind of comical, but I get his point. Even though I think it's not really taking into account the whole picture. Consider as a fact that the internet is broken, in regards to free speech. How many bot/fake accounts are created that spam toxic messages and influence culture? People with the most followers or likes getting to the top of the algorithms list so they exploit the algorithm. Most of the people are abusing the idea of "free speech" as anonymous trolls or maybe not even human at all or from the same country. It's a serious problem. I don't think people would say half the things they do on the internet if it were connected to their identity. Something isn't right here...

What I find really concerning is that all of this is man-made.

So we have management who wants to maximize profits. I don't really blame them, it's a lot of money involved and a shark tank environment. (I mean I do blame them, but I can see their reasoning). But then we have engineers who just do as they told in making all this possible, having the craziest ideas, like:

> The Asus EEE PC 900 that I bought had a 4 GB SSD held in place by a screw that was soldered in place. This prevented the SSD from being upgraded.

In the end humanity is its biggest adversary

The main gripe here is, I think, that many people trade away privacy and flexibility without even understanding what they're doing.

Most people who read HN don't do that, even if they choose platforms that tilt towards those sorts of services and software.

For instance, I'm pretty firmly in the Apple ecosystem, but I could migrate to something else pretty easily IF I wanted to (I don't). I'm not locked in here. My data is stored locally (though I use Dropbox to make it available across multiple devices and platforms). I use proprietary formats very very sparingly. I feel pretty comfortable the "cage door" can't close on me without me changing these choices pretty drastically.

I'm sure there are Android/Windows people here who do the same thing. Sure, Windows does some invasive things, but if you're careful, you can avoid most of it, and preserve your ability to switch to something else without much difficulty. No cage door there, either.

The trick is to avoid getting SO enmeshed with a vendor that you cannot easily leave. This is one reason why companies like AT&T want you to bundle cell service and home Internet and cable and telephone, because it makes it harder to "fire" them when they screw up.

This "trick" is pretty easy, again, for the sort of person who reads this site. It's a lot harder for your uncle Larry who just wants to read ESPN and balance his checkbook and cares not one whit about the privacy implications of Google docs or whatever.

This is somewhat why I collect computers, because one day, you can't buy a general purpose machine anymore.. I just hope when that happens, mine will be top of the line and solid enough to last.

Though, is this not tinfoil hat territory? Won't the fact that _some_ people _want_ general purpose computer, mean that they will always exist? Even if the established manufacturers decide to stop production, won't someone else start a production ?

The problem of the technological cage posed by reliance on cloud services is one of the reasons Urbit is being developed. It's a personal server that operates on a P2P network. You own your own data, and your messages are encrypted. It feels like a cloud service, except you own it completely.

The project has been in the works for over a decade. It works, has an active community, and is making rapid strides in functionality and stability. I'd know, because I use it every day. Here's a good primer on what Urbit is looking to create: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/

Many seem to like to whine about Urbit and claim that it's creating a kind of digital feudalism. Perhaps they think that what we currently have isn't that. I have no interest in engaging with those old and tired arguments, which is why I originally ignored them and looked into it myself. If you also like to think for yourself, let me know and I'll bring you onto the network.

There are users at all levels; some are really fine with the spreadsheet in Google Drive, and really it leaves them with time to take a stroll in the park and talk to friends and relatives. Some users want to put together their own computers and their own operating systems, and they will do too. No point in complaining for what the "masses" don't want to do.

Things got back and forth between open and closed - freedom and convenience. There is no end state.

Once upon a time everyone thought IBM was invincible and then Intel and then Microsoft. Then what happened?

To understand the cycle read - The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (of Net Neutrality fame).

This is the future that RMS has been fighting against this whole time. I think he's always been a bit of a Cassandra.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

I’m not too concerned

Sent from my iPhone

>they wanted consumers to hate netbooks, so that they would go back to paying for higher-priced laptops.

Manufacturer induced non-flagship fatigue is real. We're never getting a reasonable forever laptop, it must always be lacking in obvious areas that costs very little to correct. You only get that if you over pay for everything at the top of the line -- where dissatisfaction is not allowed.

Best we can do is buy direct from upstart companies with at most one or two thunderclap flagship offerings every tech cycle. Amazon scale advantage only entrenches the endless consumer bait and suffering by trusted brands.

Unfortunately, I think this author is far more correct than not. Also unfortunately, we can't just create computer companies that do better; there are too many perverse incentives.

I want to add a personal anecdote to this very interesting article.

Basically as soon as I fully understood that all my voice communications were stored by the NSA, by my ISP (and can be accessed by my countries government without me knowing), and by various other institutions and secret services, I decided to record all my phone calls.

The rationale being that I could not prevent most of the world to listen to me, but at least in the event they would use what I said against me, I had a piece of the evidence and would be able to defend myself.

On a more practical level, everytime I call a big company they have a prerecorded message telling me that the conversation "could" be recorded (they definitely record all of them). And those company (ISPs, insurances, government...) will very often promise thing on the telephone and then not follow through as they know that it is very hard for most people to precisely recall the content of the phone call, even less to prove it.

So, it did put me in a weird spot legally as my country's laws specify that the consent must be explicitly requested to the receiver of the call to be allowed to record. The thing is that it is not illegal to record phone calls without an agreement. But such a recording cannot be shared or released and would not be receivable as an evidence in a court of law.

I was perfectly happy with this situation, as already being able to precisely recall what was said during a call would alleviate a lot of concerns.

Android recently removed (in v.10) the possibility to record phone calls (except to a few of their close friends apps, FB, MS...)

They unilaterally decided to interpret my countries laws as an interdiction to record phone calls. On top of that, they made no official announcements about that, not even a trace in a changelog here or there.

The worst in all that is that obviously, most people didn't understand that it was Google's decisions. So now if you go to a call recorder's app page you will see a mass of people claiming that the app is a scam https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appstar.ca... . They even managed to totally shift the blame on their partners.

Now, the only option I'm left with if I want to be able to record calls again, seems to be to root my phone. Which obviously from a privacy focused perspective seems unacceptable (giving root access to all userland applications!)

So precisely as the article describe, I lost what I consider is a very important feature, I have no say or recourse in that and the issue is not big / mainstream enough to gather any attention.

Check out civboot.org

Even if there's not some kind of secret agenda, the increasing complexity will make it so most people can't use a computer anyway in the horizon. I want to do something about it.