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Comment by c7DJTLrn | Hacker News Reader

I'm so done. I'm sorry to dump a pointless rant like this on HN but... what the hell is going on these days? Nobody seriously seems to care about legitimate privacy concerns anymore. If I were in a position of power, like being CEO, CTO, or even just an engineer on the team at Apple that implemented this, I'd do EVERYTHING to make sure that my power is in check and that I'm not pushing a fundamentally harmful technology.

I just feel so lost and powerless these days, I don't know how much longer I can go on when every piece of technology I own is working against me - tools designed to serve a ruling class instead of the consumer. I don't like it one bit.

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What is going on is that reality is slapping some techno-utopians in the face and they are shocked, shocked, that governments are more powerful that businesses.

That's not at all what the lefty geeks learned by reading Chomsky or what the righty geeks learned by reading Heinlein.

All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!

Well, that was all very foolish, because they mistook government uninterest in something for the equivalent of government being powerless to control it, and when governments did start taking an interest in something, it turns out that protocols and algorithms are no defense against the realities of political power. It is to the field of politics, and not the field of technology, that one must turn in order to increase collective freedoms. Individual freedom can be increased by obtaining money or making lots of friends, but collective freedom cannot be increased this way, it can only be increased by organizing and influencing government.

Bingo. I wish I could upvote this comment more. All the geeks get distracted by words like “cloud” or “virtual” and forget that all this stuff we depend on has a physical presence at some point in the real world. That physical presence necessitates humans interacting with other humans. Humans interacting with humans falls squarely in the “things governments poke their noses into” bucket. It’s like the early days of Napster when people were all hot for “peer to peer”, as if that tech was some magic that was going to make record labels and governments throw up their hands over copyrights.

Dont worry, ill fix all this by creating a unique javascript framework that will change the world.

Maybe we could make this framework future-proof by using blockchains? Somehow? Maybe it can use blockchains, or it can be stored on a blockchain, or maybe both at the same time. Surely that will help society in some nonspecific, ambiguous manner.

Remember the people who, decades after the invention of the Internet, kept on insisting that it was useless and only for porn addicts?

Remember the people who, after the invention of the phone, insisted that it was a nice trick but probably only useful for a few businessmen with dictation needs?

Yeah, they all had to change their tone at some point, under the shame of having been wrong for so long.

No, we just need another anonymous distributed networking/storage/socialmedia/coffeemaker protocol to save us

(Gestures at the community of people who smugly use the word "fiat" as commensurate with obsolete)

Not sure everyone has gotten the memo yet.

> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!

But that's the underlying problem here. Apple isn't a standardized protocol or a distributed system. It's a monolithic chokepoint.

You can't do this with a PC. Dell and HP don't retain the ability to push software to hardware they don't own after they've already sold it and against the will of the person who does own it.

People pointed out that this would happen. Now it's happening. Qué sorpresa.

Dell ships laptops with tons of Dell software, as well as tons of third-party software. Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs?

Hell, Dell has shipped more than one bug that allowed attackers administrator-level access or worse, I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some kind of asinine feature that not only lets them push new software/drivers/whatever to the machine, but lets attackers do so as well.

> Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs?

If they did that, people would wipe their device and not reinstall the Dell software. Many people do this already as soon as they buy the device.

The internet and its design and associated protocols were designed to work around external forces - a nuclear attack or natural disaster. It was never designed to be government-proof. People who thought that would be the case were being idealistic and naive.

If you want real change in the world, as you said, you have to affect the political world, which is an option available to any citizen or corporation who can spend millions on lobbyists.

There are many of us that DO care! Unfortunately, even though we are many, we are still a small minority among the general population, or probably even among software developers.

Convenience and fashion tend to trump security and principles for most people. (Oftentimes, I'm one of those people as well, though I try not to be. It's exhausting to be an activist 100% of the time. But let's keep at it!)

I'm as surprised as you are that a giant like Apple doesn't just tell them "go ahead, ban iPhones, see how popular they'll become" to someone as powerless as the government of India. It would be a huge free publicity campaign for them in the rest of the world while the public in India would either put pressure on their government or buy iPhones via import websites.

For additional fun, strike a deal with the #2 non government owned carrier in whichever country you do this to. Offer the iPhone at a special rate for a few months. They would kill the government telco while selling record numbers of phones with free publicity. And at the same time scare any other government into not trying this kind of stunt with Apple ever again.

“Powerless” is not how I would refer to the Indian government.

Too political. It would just scare consumers away.

How much fun would that be for customers if India then decided to confiscate every iPhone it encounters within India (maybe excepting tourists, but maybe not)?

I wonder how Apple's shareholders would react if the company threw away a market that was worth $1.8bn in revenue in 2020.

Then there's China; 17% of Apple's global revenue, $43.7bn. I don't think shareholders would much appreciate that.

> the public in India would either put pressure on their government or buy iPhones via import websites

The iPhone had 2.97% market share in India in April 2021, down from a high of 3.54% in June 2020. I don't think the people who wanted to buy iPhones but couldn't would be able toput any significant amount of political pressure on politicians.

Rich people would just import them from somewhere else like they always have before, and everyone else would switch to some available Android phone that had the modifications that the government wanted.

> I don't know how much longer I can go on when every piece of technology I own is working against me - tools designed to serve a ruling class instead of the consumer.

This made me think of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

I'd say the typical remedy that societies have adopted for these sorts of things is legislation, though regulatory capture[1] is an issue that blocks the way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Buy Sony Xperia 10 ii, then buy an official SailfishOS package from shop.jolla.com and flash it over Android 11 - enjoy a polished mobile OS without snitches, which you fully control, a real pocket computer instead of a future pocket policeman.

The feeling is mutual. The devices we own are now being used to actively police us.

The parent comment might have misunderstood what the government asked for. It asked for a feature to "report spam" by end users.

Maybe I did. But what difference does it make? There's plenty of other instances where Apple has reportedly been bullied into action or inaction (being dissuaded from implementing E2EE for iCloud is one example). I've really just reached a breaking point and I'm sorry if logic does not apply.

My only conclusion is that Apple is not arguing in good faith. That CSAM prevention is an excuse.

This makes me very sad.

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