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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It's not you, nor is it your age. We've given up on protecting our freedoms, and our devices aren't really our own anymore.

And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple.

We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked.

The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.

Silos like Facebook rank content that isn't hosted internally lower, so the open web has atrophied.

And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.

I don't hate computers. I hate the grifters and gaslighters that have taken the good parts away and told us our way of thinking is the problem.

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> and our devices aren't really our own anymore.

This is the case with virtually everything these days. Stallman is/was right about this. You only rent the movies on Netflix, the games on Steam, the books on Amazon Kindle, and so forth. Everything could be taken away from you for absurd reasons. Who would have thought that your account could be disabled for reasons that it could get disabled today? It is not going to get better. You cannot even play a single player game offline, without running Steam. Torrents/Warez will never go away thankfully. Screw DRM anyways.

At least with music, you can still generally buy and download: I’m unaware of any legal way to do the same for high-resolution video.

You sure? Up to the platform, but generally it is not the case I think. I mean sure, I paid and downloaded albums from Bandcamp before, but I use YouTube the most for music. I do not use Spotify, or Apple Music. No idea if you can download songs from those platforms. I do use SoundCloud and YouTube. I must use youtube-dl to download music from those two places. SoundCloud gives the uploader the ability to allow the downloading of the uploaded song, but in many cases it is not allowed, so youtube-dl it is. Then you can also find torrents and download your favourite bands' music in FLAC format.

youtube-dl is amazing. It supports a lot of platforms, and you can download entire playlists by just using the URL to the playlist itself.

The iTunes Store still exists and has a decent selection as does Amazon Music MP3 downloads, not to mention a bunch of smaller players like Qobuz that have FLAC and other audiophile formats. If you want to buy legally and download, it’s still possible for like 90% of the artists and genres I care about.

Ah, cheers!

YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Apple Music are all streaming services, not places to buy music. However, you can buy digital music from Amazon, the iTunes Store, Bandcamp, and other places that give you DRM free audio files. I personally think this is a fair trade off because when you pay for a streaming service you are just renting access to their library while if you really want the music for keeps you can simply purchase the music.

This year I actually spent over half an hour searching for a legal way to stream a certain series in my preferred language. Which quickly turned out to be quite a task because some streaming sites don't show non-registered visitors more than a login screen, others don't show any language options or information, and the remaining ones refuse service to my region or don't have the content in their selection, at least at that moment. Trying to find out if the search will be successful feels like trying to solve the halting problem while illegal sources offer DRM-free downloads with a single click on the first link in the search results. The disparity is stunning.

I know GPL 3 gets a lot of flak, but it made sense when I heard him talking once, and he said something like "and then I had to add freedom 0, which gave you the right to RUN your program".

Stallman gets a lot of hate, but time keeps vindicating him. As software gets used more and more in all kind of devices, the FSF freedoms are becoming the modern consumer rights. Without having the source code of your tractor's firmware, you depend on John Deere for support. Free software is required in order to truly own devices.

There still exist game platforms that provide offline downloadable game installs. GOG.com is one example. I know this is but one example but I think it's important people reward this behavior so companies know there is demand for this.

Chiming in to mention https://itch.io

Also Zoom Platform (unrelated to the videoconferencing program, AFAIK they even predate it): https://www.zoom-platform.com/

Its selection is small but it has a few exclusives - Alien Trilogy was released recently-ish there. Also they're the only place where you can find the original Duke Nukem 3D with all of its expansions due to some perpetual contracts they had with 3D Realms before the IP was acquired by Gearbox.

I bought a game on GOG recently. It funnelled me hard into getting their terrible launcher and now requires me to start the launcher to play the game, exactly like steam. I'm sure there is some way of avoiding this but it wasn't obvious at all.

Edit: according to this post on the forum the feature is not maintained or supported (as of 2016).

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt/how_can_i_...

The "downloader" mentioned in that forum was a separate piece of software for managing downloads, like a janky proto-steam. To download the offline installers, you just need to go to the games section of your account on their website, and you can click on a game to download the installation files.

Once you have the gog galaxy installed, though, even the "offline" install files of games will automatically get integrated into it. It's horrible.

It is possible that the game you refer to has some form of Galaxy integration (GOG Galaxy has its own APIs) when installed from the client. It might still work if you uninstall Galaxy however.

But Galaxy is optional, you can download the offline installers directly from the site. I have around 680 games on GOG and all of them are in my external HDD in their offline installers - i never installed Galaxy on my PC.

How do those of us inclined... commit, represent, and impact?

Vote with your wallet.

Only buy, fix and support those who have your ideals.

The only reason I use Kindle vs., say, Kobo, is that with Kindle for PC 1.17 I can use Calibre to strip the DRM so I own the book outright.

Against the ToS? Perhaps. But it's my book, damnit.

It's possible with Kobo too, as I recall.

> We've given up on protecting our freedoms...

Wow, putting it like that makes me realize it's just part of the larger societal trend toward authoritarianism. I guess this is one of those 'Stallman was right' moments.

It is - in fact, it's kind of the main thing Stallman was writing about all these years. It didn't click for me until few years ago; as a young programmer, I was thinking in terms of "good vs. evil", then "idealists vs. pragmatists", which are wrong frames of mind. Once I learned to think in terms of market incentives, Stallman's arguments became somewhat obvious.

RE the wider trend toward authoritarianism, I'm not yet sure I see it clearly, at least outside the privacy space. But I do feel trends towards taking away end-user control and turning everything into a service, which are very much market-driven, though perhaps they also are a subset of authoritarianism.

You are on to something important here:) If you want to know how we are will be "happy by owning nothing" read this "masterpiece" of socialized corporatism https://www.amazon.co.uk/COVID-19-Great-Reset-Klaus-Schwab/d... .

Just the sheer number of people calling for Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc to censor others is remarkable to me.

I came of age during a time when we on the left believed fiercely in personal freedoms, especially freedom of speech. We would blast music that would say things like, "F--k you I won't do what you tell me." [1]

Now the same left I loved can't erupt in protest fast enough when social media aren't censoring idiots. We used to all know that censoring of anybody was wrong, but also that it didn't work. Censoring was what corporations and authoritarian states did to people, and we hated it.

That's just one example of the change people have gone through.

[1] https://genius.com/Rage-against-the-machine-killing-in-the-n...

I see freedom of speech as a right that should be preserved at almost all costs.

And also, step back a bit and look at the state of digitally distributed disinformation. We've elected politicians that look like characters from an absurdist satire, loony conspiracy theories are going mainstream, climate change isn't real, the pandemic is a lie, a significant percentage of the US population thinks the presidental election was completely fraudulent... and so on.

Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society. I'd love to think that if you let people figure things out for themselves they'll eventually manage it. That they'll eventually stop believing wild claims based on no evidence.

But we don't have time to test that theory.

Should the big platforms have the power over the digital public square that they do? Definitely not. But they do have it. Pressuring them to deal with misinformation is something I completely support.

The alternative is tech illiterate legislation because the misinformation problem isn't going to go away on it's own.

"Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society." Misinformation is magnitudes of order less dangerous than restricting free speech. The antidote to bad speech is more (hopefully good) speech, not less speech.

I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.

This is laughable. If propaganda and advertising don't work, then why is everyone so invested in creating it?

This is laughable. If propaganda and advertising don't work, then why is everyone so invested in creating it?

The people creating propaganda are also interested in enforcing censorship if they are in the position to do so.

Propaganda and censorship work far better together than individually for groups that want to brainwash society into certain beliefs.

I guess we all imagined that multi-billion dollar advertising industry then...

I need more context or detail to understand the point you a trying to get at. I really do, because otherwise I am just trying to guess what you mean, or even how it correlates to what I said at all. Without further clarification, it seems to be tangential to me.

Who is "they"? Who apparently represents all global advertising interests, and also represents all who desire to censorship for any reason?

I still don't understand what you are saying. When you say "Who is "they"?". Are you saying Google and other tech giants? They have huge advertising networks. But that is a total guess since what you are saying is still very unclear. It looks like you don't want to be clear about this. I'd really prefer you to just say it, rather than all this cryptic stuff.

But since you go on about advertising, that is a way for groups that want it, is to be able to force people to listen to their message. This robs people of their agency to listen to what they choose to. Censorship also doesn't allow people to listen to what they choose to. This makes advertising and censorship very alike. They both result in a persons loss of freedom to choose what information they get.

Promoting free speech would be efficacious as a tool to stop such people if it had any "staying power" to linger on as a defense-in-depth tool to fight them after they assume power - that it would take a while for them to get rid of it. Unfortunately, I believe it could get shut down almost immediately.

The trick is simply keeping people like that out of power.

They work best when there's no one around to rebut, or no one allowed to.

Misinformation is a problem orders of magnitude more dire than the worst 10% of purveys of lies being forced to leave youtube and facebook and promote their crap on bitchute and gab. The real degree of censorship is minimal and liable to remain such. You don't understand how societies process information in the context of our increasingly balkanized asylum.

Allowing the lunatics to spread their message via effective platforms that are designed to promote your brand of bullshit to the people most likely to be vulnerable to it does NOT stop it from festering it actually maximizes the spread of the cancer. If it spreads fast enough you wont have a society to inform anymore because fascists only believe in free speech when its their speech if they gain enough power they will quickly take yours from you.

> The antidote to bad speech is more (hopefully good) speech, not less speech.

I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good faith" argument would win.

I think our problem is that, as you know, humans are subject to a ton of logical fallacies and 'hack vectors' of rhetoric (see also Shopenhauer's 38 strategems). If we, participating in or viewing an argument, fight to overcome these, we're able to have debates of rhetoric - the "truth" wins out in a debate.

But it's a lot worse than a situation where some number of people didn't learn this in school, or can't be bothered to cut through the logical fallacies. Rather, the problem is that these particular kind of lies have a seductive capacity - they 'feel right', because they operate in the part of human speech and human logic that's driven by our instinct, rather than driven by learned behavior. People aren't neutral, and evenly likely to pick the lies versus the truth - they're overwhelmingly more likely to pick the lies, unless they've both deliberately trained themselves not to, and also personally value objective truth over feeling good. Most people don't - even scientists struggle with this.

Not all lies are seductive like this - but the kind that slot into "tricks of debate" absolutely are. They're the bread and butter of con men.

This is why every formal "forum of debate" - in the sciences or academia et al, has it as just a basic rule that they can just get shown the door immediately if they're caught lying. If you just straight-up-lie on a paper getting submitted to i.e. Nature, it can ruin your career. It's why perjury is a crime - because lies of that type just have far stronger evolutionary fitness compared to truth. It's because the rule-setters in these fields care more about reaching the objective truth than they do about feeling good - and they know how dangerous this is, so they treat it with a scorched earth policy.

---

I believe we've been able to get away with free speech because - thus far - most of our media wasn't censored, so much as it was mandated to be "true". You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was plausibly true - people fudged stuff all the time but it generally couldn't be bald-faced lies. As long as that was enforced, then what you said about "good speech being the antidote to bad speech" could work.

But for a few decades, we've had no such enforcement of truth in lots of our media, especially the internet, and I believe the number of people believing outright falsehoods has gotten an awful lot worse. Dangerously so.

I completely agree with your first section. In fact I couldn't have written it better myself.

That said, you seem to have presupposed that the people doing the censoring are always (or mostly) right. Why? Because they happen to be in power?

Twitter (and I think Facebook) censored the New York Post, even disabling their account, over a major news story that turned out to be true. It went against thev censor's preconceived ideas of how the world is, and they smashed that button as fast as they could.

What makes you think the people doing the censoring are somehow unbiased righteous purveyors of truth, absent their own instinctive biases that mislead then into censoring unfairly? Surely history has shown that to rarely if ever be the case.

I totally agree with your analysis of the problem, but I follow it to a much different conclusion: humans can't be trusted to wield power of speech over others. They are too subject to their own instinctive and emotional reactions to information they don't like.

>I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.

This idea, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it. In fact, surely we're owed some justification for the principle - does exposing widespread misinformation correct the bad effects before it was exposed? Some harm has already been done, and I'm not sure how that is justified by the principle.

I think that principle is lacking in empirical evidence, and theoretical justification for the harms it allows, which seem to be based on a shaky idea of the greater good.

I've never seen any evidence that not censoring is worse than censoring. However there is strong evidence of those who instated censorship creating vast swathes of human destruction.

The most egregious I can think of is the Russian government after the Bolshevik revolution. It had the death penalty for being in possession of certain books. In the end these censorship loving people (for other people, not them) killed tens of millions of people they governed (gulags, deliberate starvation of masses of people for instance), yet it is hardly talked about.

These bad effects of not censoring that people talk about seem so pitiful and small compared to what has happened when people willing to censor other people have got into power. Seriously, people stating things like 'sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it' are promoting things that totalitarian groups are very pleased to have, and despite asking for evidence, they provide no evidence that what they are trying to push is not far worse than what they are purportedly against. Along with the destruction of freedom that censorship brings to all the people that it applies to. Those that promote censorship can not be hypocritical and start with themselves first, but they won't, I'm sure they will scream loudest about how horrible censorship is if some other group got the power to censor what they may want to say.

I don't trust the folks who tag information as "misinformation". I would rather that be left to my research and judgement.

Good luck holding this worldview on places like twitter. I feel like certain kinds of individuals think that they have social momentum on their "side" which brings out their true colors: they don't care. In other words they feel that they are "winning". They are the insufferable authoritarians that polluted the right many years ago in their rigid thinking but they are now a very vocal minority on the left. At least I hope they are a minority but I wonder.

The internet has made outcomes immediate. The internet has also removed the human element of social interaction. I think these two mix in a terrible way. I have no idea what can or should be done about it though.

It's not a right or left thing. The natural human tendency, the base state, is fundamentally tribal in nature and the objective is to win, to beat the other tribes.

The recent push to censor and silence dissent isn't an anomaly: the several hundreds years post enlightenment that gave us the ideas of individual rights and freedoms were the anomaly.

I also do not believe anyone advocating the censoring of others has been themselves censored, or put in a minority position where they were afraid to express dissent. Because if you have that experience, it tends to give one a dim view of censorship.

The natural human tendency, the base state, is fundamentally tribal in nature

[citation needed]

The problem with your statement isn't the claim that tribal behaviours are a natural tendency in humans. Of course they are. The problem is your claim that they are somehow primary. There are many other tendencies of comparable weight, and how strongly they are expressed relative to each other depends very much on the individual.

Not to mention that when it comes to tribal instincts, there's a huge difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be. Their nuclear family? Their town/state/country? Their profession? Participants in their hobby? Their "race"? All of humanity?

> [citation needed]

Pretty much the whole of human history? There's no shortage of examples. To the contrary, it's more difficult to find examples that do not demonstrate tribalism.

> difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be

This is a recent luxury that hasn't existed for more than a century. Other than a few cultures here and there that encouraged blended demographics (usually as a consequence of conquest, think Rome).

Humans aren't THAT tribal - if they were civilization would never grow beyond small kingdoms, yet here we are with nations in the millions (one in the billions).

It's not perfect there but most of the world is currently functioning.

Thankfully that's just Twitter and isn't representative of the wider population.

I think it's not so easy. I think it's first important to remember that the concept of freedom of speech is not an end goal by itself. It was always just a tool for people to be able to point out unfairness/wrong things in society. It was deemed necessary for criticism to be able to done freely for improvements to society to be possible.

Now what we are seeing with social media platforms (and I ould argue it started already earlier with the raise of fox news) at the moment is that we see that there are elements of society who found that facts and truth don't matter and freedom of speech doesn't matter if you have big enough pockets and use the right psychological strategies. Essentially the way society and particulary social media is set up is, that the richest voice gets heard (at least by some people) and the truth of what is being said is not important anymore. In other words the platform are used for controlling us (not by the government, but vested interests) and destroying society, freedom of speech is not helping against this if anything it's a hindrance because it assumes all speech is equal, which it isn't.

I don't have a solution and I would like a way to defend us without destroying freedom of speech, but I don't have a good solution.

Also these platforms have been "censoring" for a long time, nobody was batting an eyelid when Isis accounts and videos were removed. In fact many of the outlets who are now screaming about censorship were shouting that twitter et al. were not doing enough. That tells you a lot about howmuch they care about freedom of speech.

We didn't censor the peddlers of not so much alternative opinions as elaborate hate fueled fantasies in which real people feature as alternative versions of themselves dressed in pedophile drag which are conspiring against the rest of us and if you visit the places where these degenerates congregate they happily talk about how people guilty of imaginary crimes ought to be imprisoned or murdered.

Some of them have taken the cues and actually committed such murders. The problem is there is money and importance to be earned by trivial to construct lies that a functioning marketplace of ideas would trivially discard but it turns out ours really doesn't work so well and freedom without responsibility is a clusterfuck.

We let the liars run wild and ended up with a reality TV star killing hundreds of thousands of people with his incompetence and working hard to start a war that would kill hundreds of thousands more in the last days of his regime. Perhaps visualize every one of those corpses stacked one in a reeking pile and realize that censorship may be the lesser of two evils.

There is far more censoring of much more mainstream opinions than you seem to realize. If it was just the crazies you are talking about I would mostly agree. It's not.

Can you give me an example please?

Yes definitely, I was on mobile earlier otherwise I would have. The New York Post had a major story censored a few weeks ago. I have no love for the NYP (I think they sensationalize news), but they are not some scummy right wing conspiracy machine. I pretty much agree with Glenn Greenwald here: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/facebook-and-twitter-cro...

They also suspended an account of a sitting state senator in Pennsylvania who was holding a hearing on alleged election fraud: https://www.ntd.com/twitter-suspends-account-of-state-senato...

The Hunter Biden laptop story was literally the results of a scummy right wing conspiracy with little supporting evidence laundered though the credentials of a mediocre publication in order to attempt to effect the results of the election so as to assist a Mussolini like figure intent on dismantling democracy as we know it.

There is no valid theory of morality which allows one to simply disregard predicable consequences of ones actions in preference for purely theoretical considerations.

This is why many other publications refused to run with this story because merely presenting "both sides" would not in fact be morally neutral it would have been wrong.

In the same vein Sen. Doug Mastriano was not presenting legitimate concerns about election fraud. There isn't any evidence for such it is literally a smokescreen for a desired takeover of the American government by a hostile minority.

The nypost and Mastriano are traitors in the old and simple constitutional sense of conspirators against the legitimate form of government on which all other freedoms hinge. It isn't that they are attacking Biden he like all leaders will be a transitory feature in our system of government here today and gone tomorrow. What they are attacking is a democratic form of government by polluting the essential contest by which we choose our leaders with lies about candidates and lies about the process in order to undermine the whole thing.

The fact that such actions aren't sufficiently clear cut to rise to prosecutable crimes doesn't mean we ought to forget their betrayal. It is OK if twitter doesn't lend its microphone to Mastriano or the nypost. Let them rent their own website if they prefer. Ntd.com is incidentally a laughable source that nobody ought to credit. For gods sake the story you linked is actually them reporting on a story from the epoch times. For the record the real and complete story is that twitter NEVER suspended the senators government account and says that it suspended the personal account because someone reported it for impersonating the senator and it was reinstated.

Presumably a more reliable source would have included the entire story.

Installing Linux, Mate, Firefox, clearing cookies, learning tricks to use or get around biases, etc. I can make my computer more or less "mine". Mine in the ways that are worth it to me.

But your point is well taken in that the way the computer and the stream of data isn't owned by the average user has a serious impact on society. The way the Youtube algorithm pushes people towards extremism is the most extreme, obvious example.

People with the weakest filters seem like they're the victim of this stuff. But overall, the problem is the situation doesn't teach people to have filters.

Yeah, this computer is more or less mine, in all fairness. My phone, much less so.

> But overall, the problem is the situation doesn't teach people to have filters.

Filtering and ranking (and their visual presentation to the user) are the most prized aspects of Google, Twitter and Facebook for their impact in advertising and activism. Everyone wants attention, attention is money and power. Attention is the value system on the internet.

So of course they don't want to share it, not even with the user. But we want to have a say about content evaluation as well, we have our own values.

Perhaps the best way to neuter Google, FB and Twitter is to spin out the ranking/filtering/presentation part and make many of them. I don't care about the indexer too much, it can stay in one piece. But for ranking and filtering I'd like to select other settings than they allow. Maybe settings proposed by EFF or other NGO's I trust more than a for profit company.

It used to be that we only had the option of a few channels to watch and newspapers to read. You could switch but they would be very restrictive in the choice of content. Internet gave us freedom and a high variety of options, but now ranking and filtering take them back. They want to take choice from us and impose theirs.

I know how to take these steps, too, but it's not possible on cutting edge hardware. You're mostly stuck on slower lower-res stuff that's usually made out of plastic.

All of the really good hardware is cryptographically locked to software that you can't alter.

I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win.

Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.

> I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win.

They are also free to play and usually not in a minor way. Some of the latest Gacha games have a dozen hours of storyline (or more) before starting the infinite grind.

> when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun

People have hated games forever so that isn't much of a barometer. Not commenting on whether P2W is more problematic but people have been listing forever the things that got in the way of their fun.

On that topic, if you're looking for games that don't form such abusive relationship with their players, 'StavrosK is maintaining a list of "no-bullshit games" for both mobile platforms: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/.

Was looking for something like this. Thanks so much!

>We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked.

This situation is entirely the fault of web developers at large tech firms who have been pushing "the web as app publishing platform".

It used to be that you'd install a program and run it locally but of course javascript developers didn't want to learn C++ and here we are.

I definitely prefer native to web apps but I wonder if it is fair to attribute fault to web developers actively pushing web apps when the convenience factors are so overwhelmingly against installing native apps.

>the convenience factors are so overwhelmingly against installing native apps.

Citation needed. I can think of precious few applications that are better in the browser than native.

MS Office and Libre Office are significantly better than the horrid google docs experience.

Not a single web-based text or code editor is worth a damn.

Games are better, more featureful and more performant as native than in the browser.

Web based CAD is a joke.

Almost every major application is inferior as a web app. Gmail on desktop is about the only thing that's better than the native experience, at least that I can think of.

It’s the friction of launching a new application the first time. It requires like four more clicks to run an unsigned executable on Windows, two of which are to bypass a scary “this is probably malware” dialog box.

Get your exe signed?

I dunno, number of clicks seems like a weak argument in favour of web to me.

Start -> type "f-i-r-e" -> click Firefox -> click bookmark in the menubar

That's still 3 clicks. Doublclicking the icon on the desktop maybe but that's 3 as well. Launching a native app would be no different.

> Not a single web-based text or code editor is worth a damn.

codesandbox.io is actually very good for web development. If I didn't have access to a native code editor I would be pretty content with just using codesandbox. I think it uses a modified version of VS Code.

> Citation needed. I can think of precious few applications that are better in the browser than native.

Imagine you’re a small business owner without an IT staff. Do you spend your time dealing with corrupted installations, malware, reinstalling after hardware fails, backup data and then verifying backups, or do you pay someone else a monthly fee to deal with all that and just worry about having an iPad with a working internet connection?

If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.

Of course, the downside is you have ceded some control over to someone else and are now paying them rent and possibly getting locked in, but you have limited resources to allocate, and you decide going to see your kids’ performance is more important.

That's great marketing copy for spyware^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware as a service but my father owns a small business staffed with some of the least tech savvy people I've ever met and I can tell you:

- corrupted installs aren't really a thing any more

- hardware failures happen at about the same rate as hardware goes obsolete. If the hardware fails you're buying a new ipad anyways, and unlike a commodity windows PC the iPad can't be repaired.

- malware is still a threat if you have a spyware solution like O365

- as google demonstrates on a regular basis, you can't trust that you'll have access to your cloud backups. If you have data that you actually need, then you need to back it up yourself. Restoring backups takes maybe a few hours a year. Not an issue.

- an iPad is not a substitute for a desktop workstation

>If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.

Sure until google locks you out of your account for no reason or you realize you're paying insanely high fees per year when your strategy could be to buy a prebuilt system from Dell once or twice a year and copy your backup data from a USB hard drive. For a business of 30 people or so this is perfectly viable.

And here's an example from a hotel:

Instead of having an onsite server running property management system software that has to synchronize inventory with the central reservation system, a web based property management system you can access via a browser has the following benefits for the hotel owner:

1) Don't have to worry about server HDD failures, or any other hardware failures.

2) If power goes out, just browse to the website with a mobile device.

3) Never any inventory issues since there is no synchronization that needs to be done.

4) Revolving door of minimum wage front desk workers who install malware on your Windows computers can't do that anymore if using an iPad or iPad like device, and if they do, it wouldn't result in liability due to theft of people's data. See Marriott/IHG data leaks a few years ago.

5) Lowers labor costs since you don't need someone to troubleshoot technical stuff, other than get a device with an internet connection and a browser.

6) Can move towards a self check in check out system where the guest can basically do it all via an app or the hotel's website, further reducing labor costs.

7) Features can be updated and implemented far more easily when hardware features don't have to be worried about.

Ok if your argument is that CRUD apps are well suited to web over desktop, I'll concede that point.

I stand by my earlier point that few applications are actually superior on web compared to native.

Edit: autocorrect

Exactly. It gives me the shivers every time an Apple fanboy tells me something along the lines of "But Apple is just the best, you don't need to modify it"

But it in a sense is. I am or was using linux, windows, osx, ios, android for prolonged times and yesterday I unpacked and updated my iMac'10 (job reasons) and it still kicks ass. Of course it could be more configurable and less authoritarian, but nobody sold me an alternative that feels better just out of the box. I'm a full time user of windows and android right now, if that helps with "fanboy" part. It's not that configurability lacks smoothness and fell. It just happens that best ui provider/supervisor also happens to be the most walled garden, and competition is far behind. If only a part of efforts that e.g. gnome spends on removing settings went on making gnome better looking than apple... They had a decade and became "apple minus ux/ui".

It isn't the best UI for me. I use Ubuntu and Cinnamon or KDE.

Gnome is shit for sure.

> We've given up on protecting our freedoms, and our devices aren't really our own anymore.

And yet TFA's entire point seemed to apply equally to a self-built machine running any OS (including any Linux) that you could name. So this really seems to have almost nothing to do with Apple or MS.

I do agree with your point, in particular with the last part about the grifters. But I think this was bound to happen, just as it happens in pretty much any domain that is no longer a niche. Companies see a way to make a quick buck and move in.

However, I see this as something of a new development that didn't actually remove what was before. You can still run Linux if you like, just as you could 10-20 years ago. You don't have access to UHD Netflix, but... you never had. They didn't take this away, it was never given in the first place.

Granted, the fact that Apple goes downhill is, I think, a net negative for the computing world. Ditto for the tracking embedded in windows 10.

Regarding Linux, there's the UEFI / SecureBoot situation, but even on "enterprise" HP hardware this can not only be disabled but I can actually load my own keys, so I don't perceive this as a threat for the moment.

The deeper problem, to me, is that all this works because there are enough people who, for some reason, don't care. Maybe they're not educated enough / don't know better, maybe they actually want it, maybe they're not aware. But the fact remains that there are many, many people who buy the iPhone, who use windows 10, who use facebook, who buy echos, etc. So, aside from "doing the right thing", what incentives do these companies have to stop doing what they do?

[] I actually do own an iPhone but I treat it like an appliance. I install next to no apps, so I really don't care about who can install what on it. I do care that my 4 yo phone got the latest major upgrade and it works as well as the day I brought it home.

However, I am pissed that LittleSnitch is unable to filter all traffic on my Big Sur Mac. But I basically no longer use the Mac, so I'm doing something about it.

> And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple.

This hasn't been true for several years. Yes, distributing an app requires a paid membership, but you can build and run your app on your own device just fine.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/running_your...

> We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia.

Tell this to the young kids coming up - I'm in my mid-30's now - and explain that there existed a time when most sites were served over plain-old, unencrypted HTTP. They either won't believe you, will be horrified at the security hole here, or both.

> The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.

In retrospect, it isn't surprising that Google - a company that makes its real money off of ads - went down this road. It stinks, but I don't know if they had any better options to protect this revenue stream in the face of tech that lets people subvert it getting better all the time.

> And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.

In some ways, I do wish that Apple put more effort into the web app side of things, but the key victory of the App Store can't be ignored.

If you make software easier to acquire, install, and remove, people will use more of it. With few exceptions, I would posit that most people who aren't nerds didn't use much software because these guardrails weren't there, and that they might "screw up their phone/computer."

As a result of this progress, that fear has been largely eliminated, even if it means people give up some access to the nuts and bolts of how the software stack works.

I somehow like both Apple and my ten+ years old XFCE installations (until they removed menu configurability in 4.6). It's not appleness of apple itself that is sad, but the fact that everyone jumped that boat of "knowing what's better for you" and then started to push it over the limit of sanity. Commercial effort is understandable, they do private business at least, but even free/open software catched that disease.

> We've given up on protecting our freedoms

Now "we" bloody haven't! You may have, I and others have not and will not. Decades ago people were literally fighting fascism and dying for it, these days whiners can't manage to install linux, VMs or blocklists.

You chose. You can unchoose.

Isn't this really how Capitalism suppose to work. Anything that can be milked for money would be done. Reducing control/choice(freedom) of consumer will always lead to more power for the vendor leading to more potentials for money and so it will be done. An individual consumer was always be in such a power imbalance and now with the trillion or 100s of billions of dollar companies on one side the balance is ultra skewed. You have regulation as a potential recourse but then the political systems are also controlled by money and they themselves love the lack of freedom leading to more political control. And perhaps the most critical is how the social media and media is encouraging an unthinking herd mentality that is making any change in the status quo all the harder.

Spot on.

HN is interesting sometimes. So many on here make a crap ton of money, way more than most other industries, and then go on to complain about FB, MSoft, Apple, Google, etc. But they all want their money and gladly take it, many working for these same companies.

No one wants to make decentralized software because there's no money in that, and no money means no fancy Tesla, or expensive restaurants, or nice condos.

It’ll be awful just like that car dystopia where no one changes their oil, and the recycling is handled in an organized way.

Your way of thinking is the problem. You’re a minority of users and not entitled to mass production of goods that fit your intentions alone.

Reality moved on as physics obliges it to do.

Go buy a Dell and install Linux. Go buy an Rpi. When did MS or Apple ever cater to open source opinions on computing?

Did a golden age end or were you all distracted and simply forgot these companies were awful back then too?

Better juice those stocks gains though!

Why do you feel the need to pick on Apple when:

a) their updates require consent

b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things

c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917

d) generally add functionality

Because most windows/android users would love to jump to apple for their privacy friendly and user-unhostile approach to updates but resent the idea that they would have to give up their app freedom to do so.

So i can either install any app i want into my factory installed spyware ridden forced updating android phone and windows desktop machine, or give up the ability to control what software I can install my machine in order to gain privacy by switching to apple.

We want both damn it.

And in my case I'll begrudgingly take windows and android over apple, but I don't like it.

You can AFAIK install what you want as long as you're willing to pay for a developer cert.

But it's easier to just think of iThings as appliances with lots of cool use cases instead of general computing machines.

I mean, you literally are not even mentioning the option that has exactly what you want defined as it's core values.

Whenever I hear all this lamenting about Apple this, Microsoft that, Google rablerablerable ... we have been told about all of this sine at least 1989! I'm full-time, work and private, on a Free desktop OS since 10 years +. Just put your money and effort into the Free alternative.

I have a rooted and custom rom android phone running an official lineage os release

It still can't make phone calls without cycling airplane mode between calls.

The one before that would crash if I paired a bluetooth device while connected to one already.

Both of them bootloop at the power off battery charge screen, which basically means i couldn't turn my phone on while plugged in, and unless its a fast charger, the act of repeatedly booting up keeping the phone screen on ends up draining power faster then it can charge.

So. Tell me again about these free and open options.

And you will have similar justifications for using Windows instead of Linux, I presume.

It is interesting how it works for some people, and for other people their device literally explodes.

Even veteran Linux users face absurd shortcomings in interoperability. Sleep mode being a trivial example, or using bluetooth headsets at all.

Currently use both a bluetooth headset and a bluetooth speaker with my nvidia optimus laptop.

There are occasional issues, but nothing showstopping for me.

Not my experience with LineageOS. My biggest problems with my phone with LineageOS is that I cannot use a microSD card as more internal disk space, not a problem with LineageOS itself, but a problem with Android 6 and above on my phone. The other problem is LineageOS not having an update for my phone for 2 or 3 years, as mine is an old budget phone from 2014.

On the whole I have been very happy with LineageOS as it has allowed me to continue to use my phone for years longer than I would have with the simply bad manufacturer updates that almost completely filled the internal disk space and stopped updating something like 2015 with Android 5. Less unnecessary expense, less eWaste, thumbs up.

For me, I would definitely go with a phone manufacturer that supports rooting their device and put LineageOS on it if I think I need it. I may not install it, but the option for the future is the main thing.

What are those Android phones with forced updates?

Wasn't the problem originaly that Android phones didn't have any updates?

My LG android phone periodically forces updates and accompanying restarts usually triggering at the least opportune time.

Really? TIL.

However, that's still not something being common among Android phones; if the original poster pointed out specific vendors, that would be OK. But saying that it is a common trait shared by all Androids is incorrect.

> Why do you feel the need to pick on Apple

I, a person with a modest net worth, am picking on trillion dollar Apple? That's so backwards it's funny.

This is a company that erodes computing freedom and ownership. They've co-opted the commons, and they built it all on the back of open source. And I'm picking on them?

Apple fans will say that Apple created billions of dollars of commerce opportunity. But it would have happened anyway without Apple.

We'd be in a better world if we had an open app standard that worked cross-device and consumers had choice in distribution channels.

We don't need to be "protected" by a company or big brother. Especially if such protection is just a cover story for controlling commerce.

Hold on mate... yes... you're picking on them :) I'm not saying you're crushing them with your righteous anger and to please have mercy on them, just that it's a tad odd to single out one particular trillion dollar company that is at least trying to do something in all the areas the original poster was complaining about.

And I do feel that we should focus on the biggest offenders (i.e. Google and Facebook) first, because if there's a precedent the others will get the message quite fast.

> we should focus on the biggest offenders

Apple is the worst of the lot, by far the most culpable, as they're directly attacking the notion of ownership and computing freedom. They're their own government that has somehow snuck under the radar of the DOJ. They behave like the mafia and offer "protection".

Google is next for the harm they've done to the web. I think we can agree how bad they've bloodied it up.

How can you put Facebook ahead of Apple? They're creepy and invasive, but they're not redefining what we can and cannot do, and they're the easiest to remove from our daily lives and industry.

I want to distribute software and I still have to pay the Apple tax and jump through their hoops, and I'm left without a relationship with my customers. On the other side of the coin, as an owner I can't repair my device or run my own software. Facebook has little impact on my life, meanwhile Apple is a gravitational distortion in our industry.

Because I'm looking at real harm, not "what if..." harm. Google & Facebook have implemented the largest mass surveillance apparatus in the history of mankind. Not even in their wildest dreams could the STASI or KGB expect to be able to access the intimate thoughts, pictures and communication of pretty much everyone on the planet.

You complaining about paying 99 bucks per year and comparing it with the above is seriously mind-bending. No wonder our privacy's so fucked...

If you think Apple isn't tracking your every move and handing that information over to the government, then you're choosing your facts to support your favorite company.

Apple is just as evil in tracking and even more evil in taking freedom away.

I didn't say Google was blameless. Google is horrifically evil. You're just mad I'm also implicating Apple.

You love Apple. And you love it enough to overlook the incredible harm they're doing.

Stop loving a company that doesn't give a shit about anything but profit. The feelings and pleasure you derive is just Apple fitting to the gradient slopes of profit maximization within the market they've carved out. It's engineered, and you're falling for it.

Use your device for what it is, and be happy in the capabilities it gives you, but be a good citizen to your fellow persons. Not a company. Don't overlook their grievances. Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive.

Edit: Downvotes from Apple fans making it further in the thread than those that overwhelmingly agree with my parent comments.

Downvotes from those that disagree with "Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive."

Astonishing.

No down vote from me.

This reads like something on /. fifteen years ago. The anti Apple crowd always was louder than the mythical Apple fanboys.

The argument is not “did Apple create a walled garden and rule it like the actual Chinese Communist Party” because yes it did. The question is, are they alone in doing it, or just successful?

I think the latter, you think the former it seems.

I've been carefully observing how privacy was worn down piece by piece for more than 10 years now and you come of as a bit clueless if you're putting Apple in the same bucket as Google. They're not saints, but they're playing in a different league. I don't have time to correct all your misconceptions: read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism if you truly want to understand this topic.

Also don't pretend to know what people feel just because they buy products from a company. It's ridiculous how you're claiming what I love when you don't even know me.

I would put Microsoft before Google, some of us remember the 90's and 00's and even the early 10's and all of the crap they pulled, they may not be pushing the authoritarian envelope now but they pioneered all of these methods apple google and Facebook and others have now perfected.

It took the DOJ hammer to reform Microsoft. It clearly worked. They're not a force for evil, and they're still worth a trillion dollars.

We should do the same to Apple, Google, and the others. It clearly doesn't erode stock value.

Wait, what do you mean? The latest Windows is worse than previous versions with its telemetry, Cortana, updates reverting your preferences and so forth. I do not think Microsoft is reformed at all. I think they are just as bad as the rest of the companies mentioned. Why do you seem to be giving them a free pass or calling them reformed? You seem to behave similarly to the Apple guy you dislike for his views on Apple. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook... I would even include Canonical here (Ubuntu), just take a look at everything they touched, and take a really close look at Snap.

Based on their statements about Microsoft, I think OP's very eager to fix things, but rather clueless about what needs fixing and how to do it :-)

> as an owner I can't repair my device or run my own software

I wish people stopped buying phones with non-removable battery. I sure as hell will not buy a phone if I cannot replace its battery. On the other hand, I think it makes the device thinner, and weighs less, so some people prefers that over being able to replace the battery. Not sure what to do here than to accept their preference.

meh if replacing a battery is a once every two year operation that you can pay a shop $2-40 + $10 of battery cost to do it in 30 minutes depending on the cost of labor where you are, is it really that big of a deal?

Key word is repairability here, not necessarily user swapable. You can go buy chunky construction worker edition if you want all the swapabillity if you want to.

> Apple is the worst of the lot, by far the most culpable, as they're directly attacking the notion of ownership and computing freedom.

How are they worse than Microsoft?

> and they built it all on the back of open source.

That is exactly the point of permissive open source licenses. Freelancers and commercial companies can build stuff on top of it that makes them money and brings real benefits to paying users.

Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.

Free software licenses permit this, too: you can build stuff on top of it that makes you money and brings real benefits to paying users. You just can't restrict their ability to do exactly what you did.

The Linux and *BSD communities wouldn't be where they are today without those contributions, no. But they would be somewhere else. Not as far down the road, but down a different road; who's to say that would've been worse?

> Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.

The open source part doesn't change anything. Windows has so many hooks that 1984 (the book, not the year) is now a reality in 2020 with DLP software watching employees. Apple's walled garden is not there to encourage growth inside the walls but to extract profit from those that flourish inside of it. And linux is so fragmented because everyone has a great new idea which requires a new X where X is a UI, library, window manager, etc.

Interesting that back in 1980's the Apple II line was frankly pretty darn well open. Sure Apple had copyrights on the assembly, but if you looked at the magazines at the time there were lots of articles giving annotated disassembly of Apple's object code. And yet, Apple sold a bunch of computers anyway. Wow. Fucking genius.

Sure Apple is fighting the Good Fight with privacy (and I've yet to see that it's anything different than pure marketing). But I ask why should Apple need to market "privacy first" when they can just open up their software and show us directly? Let's start by open sourcing any telemetry they send back to the mothership. Is that reasonable perhaps?

I don't know why you list the only major internally developed OS as if it is the same as the ones that were transformed from open source offerings.

Sure DOS was akin to open source and formed the basis of Windows way back when but the decades of development have left little left (except what exists to support backwards compatability)

Apple doesn't let you run software Apple hasn't approved on most Apple devices (Phones and Ipads). On the remaining devices Apple doesn't let you run software Apple has blacklisted.

Apple won't approve software that uses non-apple-approved services, like payment providers. Apple won't approve software that dares to inform users of these limitations. Apple won't approve third party browsers. Apple demands payment in order for them to approve software. Etc.

Apple apparently has been silently and without permission or an off switch sending the name of the developer of literally every app you launch to Apple. This is far more invasive than anything I've heard of Google or Microsoft doing - not that I'm a fan of their telemetry either. Microsoft in particular also gives you tools to examine what they're sending in detail: https://www.howtogeek.com/348699/how-to-see-what-data-window...

On Apple devices which allow power user options (the minority of devices), they are still limited. For example Apple was (is?) making their own traffic bypass Little Snitch.

Apple generally seems to remove functionality in the name of "design" and "safety" as far as I can see... I'm not sure how you think they're generally adding functionality.

>Apple doesn't let you run software Apple hasn't approved on most Apple devices (Phones and Ipads). On the remaining devices Apple doesn't let you run software Apple has blacklisted.

It's not like Apple forced you to buy a Mac or an iPhone. If anything you have to go out of your way to get one, because you see some appeal in them - as otherwise they're more expensive, with limited model choice, less bang for the buck, and a minority market share wise compared to most PC/Android stuff.

So, perhaps those buying them know what they're doing? Walled garden (aka "curation") for many is part of the appeal.

By buying an Apple, you're hurting the rest of us.

How is a person’s preference more important than another's?

Who decides?

Don't let the door hit you on your way out...

You're just regurgitating a bunch of stuff without rhyme or reason. It's very tiresome to answer such comments and frankly not worth anybody's time.

iDevices always worked like you're describing. You can get a dev cert and install whatever you like, but these devices are not general computing devices. They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.

You obviously didn't even read my link because there it says exactly how Apple offers a power user option which allows an older version of Little Snitch to capture that traffic.

I have a Windows machine and I've looked at how they behaved with their telemetry from the beginning. They were so secretive and malicious that it beggars belief. An EU government even had to reverse engineer their telemetry communication because they wouldn't say what's in it. You're coming after the dust has settled and draw conclusions from there.

Google... where to even begin. What a complete waste of time this was.

> You can get a dev cert and install whatever you like, but these devices are not general computing devices.

You mean $buy$ a dev cert, yearly.

> They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.

And if you want both, FUCK yourself right ?

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