Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Why does everything you dislike need to be illegal? No one is forcing you to buy these things.

How about we just rephrase?

We should stop making it illegal for people to do what they want to things they own.

Not even this. The problem is that hardware manufacturers have what amounts to technological supremacy over the rest of the society. If you buy an iPhone, it's not illegal to jailbreak it in most countries. The problem is that you lack the technology to do so reliably (i.e. change the fuses in the SoC to flip it into a less restricted mode of operation) so you have to resort to vulnerabilities to untether it from Apple's servers which you never wanted in the first place. Android is marginally better because of the officially unlockable bootloader, but there still are various encryption keys within your device that you aren't allowed to see and/or overwrite.

It's not "illegal" to put tape over the led. It's a violation of the terms of services and they could cut you off from their service.

The point I'm making here is that the device becomes useless without said service, even though there's no valid technical reason for this dependency.

I mean it's basically a Bluetooth camera, it's not rocket science. It will be hacked and de-Facebooked in no time.

It would be nice to live in a world where the needs of nerds are more important than those of idiots on Instagram but that's not going to happen.

Luxottica/FB should be free to make a product/service they can charge for and you're free to buy something else (PineGlasses release in 2030?) or hack it.

Isn't that at the core of the "right to repair" debate?

Its related, but not identical. "Right to repair" in the sense that the FTC is talking about now is largely about manufacturers restricting usage of third-party repair services or parts - so think of it more in terms of Facebook/Ray-Ban allowing independent repair shops to swap your cracked camera lens, or an individual who can source the parts being allowed to perform the work themselves without buying a service contract: things which the manufacturer may currently choose to prevent via terms of use, or which they might have required you to buy a service contract to do.

You making a modification to your glasses to hide an LED isn't a repair... at least in the terms the FTC is using at present.

Should it be legal to use hidden cameras to record images of people without their knowledge? Or should it just be legal to deliberately modify small cameras for the sole purpose of doing so, and illegal for manufacturers of small cameras to implement tamper detection?

I mean people have been putting cameras in their cars for more than 10 years. And at some point, with the advancement of neural interface tech, the line between eyes and cameras would start to become blurry.

>Should it be legal to use hidden cameras to record images of people without their knowledge?

Probably not but many of us live in the surveillance states. Businesses and governments already have lots of hidden and visible video cameras everywhere, I don't see why citizens shouldn't be granted the same liberties to invade others privacy instead of having double standards.

No one is forcing me to buy a phone? Yeah sure. Try to live without one in the modern society.

But don't lots of people live without one though?

No, at least not in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

About 48% of the human population owns a smartphone (that doesn't include "feature phones"). 85% of American adults own a smartphone. 97% of Americans own a cellphone.

it's pretty tough now that we do things like pay for parking, provide vaccine status, communicate with daycares all via apps

You can do all those things without apps, if you want.

Lots of people can live without running water, sewer, power, cars, hygiene products, etc. but that doesn't make any of it practical in modern society in the US. There's of course a limit to this as to where the baseline is, but I'd say having a portable phone of some sort and internet access are pretty high up on that list.

Its not so much that it needs to be made "illegal", The problem is that terms of service itself is a legally enforcable idea. Facebook is the one using legal frameworks to overstep into our life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com