But he did not seem to draw any lesson from it.
All this case (and similar others with other companies) demonstrates is that we're lacking in laws and regulation here.
There should be no way that it is legal to just lock a customer like that without paying them all the money invested in virtual "goods". Sure, you want to block me then return all the money I paid for music, apps, etc.
There should be channels in every company where they will precisely tell you what happened and why. If they want to just stop dealing with you - they must pay back.
There's nothing wrong with using a service, what is wrong is that our laws are not up to the task of dealing with those risks.
It's not something most tech people can really (properly) manage either.
I'm sure of this because I've made a career of it and I do it professionally for a large corporation. I know how many engineers it takes to have a 24/7/365 follows-the-sun rotation that doesn't lead to burnout. I've personally seen and solved lots of failure modes that result in mysterious degredation. (Hey did you know there's firmware on the SAS breakout board itself?) I've read many more, with solutions I'd never have come up with, by people cleverer than me.
An individual tech person could theoretically manage to do it, but I'd rather have my team helping me while I help them. I'm only human, and can't always see my own shortcomings.
I can. But I know better than to try and self-host something mission critical for myself or (especially) family. I self-host the same way a car mechanic has a classic car in their yard that they'll aspirationally fix one day.
I once got a nasty call from Comcast's net abuse department because I was gasp running a mail server. It was locked down tight, and only accepting mail from an old email provider.
They didn't care. I was told that if I had SMTP open or they saw SMTP traffic coming in, I'd be permanently banned from being a Comcast customer because I was "running a server."
Internet needs to be declared a utility and internet companies need to concern themselves only with reliably delivery of network packets and to otherwise completely fuck off. My power company, gas company, and water company don't give a fuck what I do with my electricity, gas, or water.
These days the bad actors have automated there exploit attempts to the point that its not even really about asking when you will get hit rather then if you will get hit anymore, its almost instant in most cases.
with so little leeway its just not viable to self host anything that is exposed to the internet, and then if you still have to deal with things like off-site backups if you care at all about your data.
That's not really true, there are offerings on the market that make it a breeze. Take Synology. You get raid with dozens of terabytes, that is self managed and has got instructions on every aspect of usage. It's got Google Photos rip-off for every mobile platform, it's got LDAP, Email, Caldav and Cardav packages with GUI. It's got DNS server with easy to use GUI, it's got packages for NextCloud and it's got something like Dropbox that is made by Synology as well.
You don't need no port forwarding or fancy security, it can connect to Synology's cloud thingy that will route your traffic back home correctly, DDNS on steroids.
So if you really want to self host everything, it is couple grands out of pocket and couple of evenings of clicking around.
I am not affiliated with Synology, just a happy user (although I only use it as raid storage with SMB, NFS and as Docker server).
Also there used to be "Windows Home Server" thingy.
Eg, he doesn't have to make access to all his music so it is contingent on his one credential, which can be revoked at any time by Apple. He can keep local copies of what he has bought, despite the ecosystem tries to make that difficult. Apple Music will delete any local copies it manages when the credential is invalidated.
https://www.guidingtech.com/what-happen-when-you-sign-out-ap...
This smells like "let them eat cake" except in the context of technology. Not everyone is able or even wants to mess with that stuff. There's a vast difference between "Yes, backup my stuff, Apple; Here's my card" and "I know what an IP is"
At $12/year you literally cannot get anything like what Apple offers just in terms of backup — not the equipment, not the man hours required to maintain it. Even if I were able to set it all up, it would cost me a huge amount of money in lost revenue just to maintain it safely.
It feels like "I could build dropbox in 5 minutes" never stopped.
* Maybe we can get to a point where running your own services is easy enough and normalized enough that most people do it.
I'm doubtful, but there's at least some small winds in that direction-- disillusionment with FAANG, peaking of the large tech economy, some renewed interest in privacy.
People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages. Not everyone is capable of playing MP3s on an PM3 player? Since when?
If these new systems that everyone is using is so much more complicated than that that you have to pay a professional service to do it for you, we have royally fucked up somewhere along the way.
Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs.
For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.
Likewise, it's weird that you need professionals to build such services? Anything that is so complicated that it requires professionals to create it has fucked up? In other words, every industry that ever existed is fucked up because they require more than a passing knowledge... professionals shouldn't exist.
You don't need professionals to build such services, no. Especially considering that the services don't really work better than a drive with MP3s on it.
Software is eating the world, I expect defensiveness on this site particularly, having massive back end data centers and frameworks just for people to do what took a 1tb drive 10 years ago is absolutely stupid.
My grandma wouldn’t know what ‘burning’ a CD means, but she sure knows how to use Netflix.
It’s not defensive to explain the overwhelming reality of todays content landscape. I couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between a single 1tb drive and YouTube or Netflix, it’s clearly obvious.
There is nothing ridiculous about contracting companies to do work. We hire professionals to perform all sorts of tasks everyday and purchase products made by them. It’s not lazy to do so, it’s smart. Why do I have to explain the basics of how the world works?
For e.g. Do you grow your own food? Fruit and vegetables all that. It's easy right some soil and seeds with minor maintenance. You don't need professionals to do something so basic. Why cant everyone become an expert at growing their own food? Why do we need farmers, a massive global supply chain and mega stores to do something so simple? The idea that we have this global spanning network just to supply a tomato to someone is stupid and we screwed up?!
We don't have time to be experts at every facet of life, the world doesn't work like that. Believe it or not, managing big stashes of content isn't common knowledge or on everyones priority list.
But on the topic of services like Netflix and YouTube, they're used to manipulate peoples tastes these days, discoverability is broken deliberately to push priority content, and really their only advantage is discoverability, so they've got virtually nothing going for them besides network effects and entrenched market position.
Services can be nice, when they work for a user. The problem is these services are designed to disempower users. We could live in a world where all these services empower users and work perfectly, but we don't, because there's a conflict of interest.
Yes, I do grow my own food actually.
Needs to be very simple so my grandmother can build it, and cheap. No maintenance, set and forget. I assume there will be apps available for all her devices to quickly go through the process or will she need to create them? It needs to be easy to search for content and stream on any device at any time without fail.
She doesn’t care about ‘owning digital movies’ or the exaggerated threat of her accounts being closed. She's is much more likely to accidentally lose her own content managing it herself. She just wants to watch movies, how much will it cost to own all that content? Less the $10/month?
No professionals so let’s keep instructions basic and preferably just using a single blank drive with no content.
It must bother you that people don’t grow their own food? That they can’t manage their shit and need to buy it from a store?
You can BTW buy pre built devices where this is already done from owncloud I believe.
It doesn't bother me that people pay other people to do things, no need to be condescending about it. What bothers me is when people are funneled into paying for services that are more stressful to use than doing things themselves, and then making excuses for the state of affairs for whatever reason (either they're convinced by the marketing, or their salary depends on it all continuing this way).
People by and large use what they see in advertisements and justify the decision after the fact. What is preferred is not always what is superior.
Bandcamp is as easy to use as Spotify. Yet people don't use it as much. Why not? Marketing is why.
Mobile UX is full of deliberate friction points put in to support profitable business models at the expense of utility. The mobile experience is designed to funnel users towards making certain choices. This is beginning to happen in windows as well now. And people just go with it.
Is it condescending? Maybe. But if I was wrong you wouldn't have advertisements on TV, marketing people know what works and businesses aren't in the business of throwing money away for no return. People wouldn't bitch about Facebook and continue to use it, they'd go somewhere else.
As for your reference to ownCloud, there are no pre-builds for raspbian. You have to build the web stack on the pi. This is the most inconvenient option imaginable, but I guess it's the hypnotising marketing stopping Grandma from building a web service.
No, it doesn't. I literally just tested this. The article you linked to is wrong. (The site looks like a content farm, so this is hardly surprising.)
Signing out of an Apple ID will leave any subscription content downloaded from Apple Music present on the device, but unplayable. This is expected -- the user never purchased that music; they only had access to listen to it through their Apple Music subscription. Any other locally stored content belonging to the user remains playable, even if it was downloaded through Apple Music, and the subscription content will become playable if you log back in.
Let's say I have an MP3 file, and I added that to my Apple Music library on my desktop computer. Apple Music will make that file downloadable and playable on my phone, and that downloaded file isn't tied to the subscription in any way -- it's literally the same MP3 file that was uploaded. This functionality is an extension of an older feature which Apple called "iTunes Match".
On the other hand, if I download an arbitrary track from Apple Music which I didn't put there myself, that downloaded file will no longer be playable if I log out or cancel my subscription -- because those files don't belong to the user.
(I ask because I just happened to notice a $25 annual charge for that the other day... and I was like, oh yeah, I've been paying them all these years to host those 5 CDs I bought at live shows in the 1990s that aren't available on any streaming service...)
Update: Like every time this comes to mind, I almost just canceled it, but then I listened to "Track 03" by the band "djiin", purchased at Jasper O'Farrell's pub in Sebastopol, CA in 2002, and I just can't...
good to know, thanks
The long term trend is the exact opposite. People don't want to the manage hardware and all the issues of configuration, backups and troubleshooting faults that come with that, just to watch a movie. They want to palm off that responsibility to an external entity.
Imagine someone told you "you can't manage your own system on a workstation, you're going to terminal into a mainframe, no normal person has the time or resources to manage their own workstation." You'd say it's absurd, because it is.
We are literally talking about doing something as simple as buying a single board computer and a hard drive, putting a pre built system on an SD card and plugging it into an Ethernet cable. It's not surgery.
Then you realize you need to access this setup while away from your home. You add port forwarding.
You run an audit to check if the system is secure enough so script-kiddies with a port scanner are not able to access your 'cloud'.
Then you realize your router is not so reliable. You add a watchdog which will reboot it once the connection becomes unstable.
Then there is a power outage. And if before you could just access all data using 4G on your phone, now you cannot. You add UPS to all critical parts of your home network infrastructure.
...
And it goes on and on. It is doable, but doing it well requires a lot of time, planning and resources. It's hardly feasible not only for a lay person but for 'power users' as well.
The problems you say, connection/power downtime are the biggest ones. And they're frustrating, but not near as frustrating as things you paid for going missing, forever.
My point though is, if we can get workstations out of the box ready, we can get home servers out of the box ready. The software already exists, the hardware already exists. The problem is not that people don't want it, that they're lazy, that the tools don't exist, the problem is that mobile devices are deliberately built to herd people to these services. Once they're hooked they're hooked. They're fundamentally disempowering.
With the modern service oriented way of listening to music and watching TV, you risk losing what you purchased, you're manipulated by algorithms, you're trapped in the net of a service provider. Is that really less stressful than pulling out a CD and putting it in a CD player?
Digital media is better than cassettes. But the service oriented way companies expect us to do it now is not better. We really hit peak digital media with mp3 playing software on our smartphones. Everything since has just made the experience worse.
Yes self-hosting is a PITA. Yes things will go down. Yes it takes time to learn.
But owning the means of your production? Priceless.
We need to stop teaching people to be cyber-peasants, sharecropping a land they'll never own.
I self-host a lot, including a smart home setup that is not reliant on the cloud, but in the end looking back how much time I've sunk into this and how often it's down due to _my_ mistakes I don't really think it was worth it.
We should be encouraging self-hosting for those with the risk-tolerance to do so
What about when that hard drive fails and you lose all of your data? Do you have backups? Do the backups _work_? Do you regularly check the health of the hard drive? What if you want to access the system from outside of your LAN? If it's accessible to the web, are you handling security yourself? How often are you applying patches? Kernel patches? What if you go on vacation and there's a power outage and you can't remotely turn everything back on?
Not self-hosting, as in having their own bare metal server in the basement, but most people can go to a VPS/cloud provider and click a few buttons to get their own instance running whatever software they need.
Not only this, but people have always been self-hosting without having any technical knowledge. For a long time, kids ages 14 or less have been running their own websites, forums, game servers, etc. And today it's a lot easier and cheaper than back then.
The problem is that I wish this wasn't necessary. I really like Google Photos and I haven't found an alternative (free or otherwise) that I like. And I'm also sympathetic to people who don't want to do this, even if they have the technical ability to. It wasn't hard for me to set up NextCloud on a VPS, but it took more than a weekend to get backup scripts working, run the security audit, set up New Relic monitoring, etc.
I think about in the past about how a town might have a local blacksmith or a local doctor that everyone in the community trusts. I wouldn't mind being the ops guy for a local co-op for friends and family and neighbors. But I think in this day and age it doesn't work well since people don't care enough about the problem. I told my wife to stop putting files in our shared Google Drive and to install the Nextcloud app and she said sure, but I don't think most people would care.
This is the specific thing that customers are prevented from doing. If you want Apple's hardware, whose processors are faster than Qualcomm's, you get Apple's App Store. If you want iOS instead of Android, you get Apple's App Store. If you need iMessage, you get Apple's App Store. And no other.
It's not a separate choice. If it was, what it would look like is multiple app stores on iOS, and the choice would be whether to use any other than Apple's. And then tons of people would use the other stores, especially if Apple continued to reject apps people want.
Do you want the one with the wall, or the one with the barbed wire fence with a tunnel under it?
What if I just want to come and go as I please without crawling through the mud?
Consumers are given a false dichotomy - they have as much choice and agency as a child being asked "do you want a 7:45 or 8:00 bedtime? Mommy and daddy will let you pick!"
Like it or not, being signed in everywhere with iCloud is an amazing experience. I know this because I recently tried a second user account on my Mac that wasn't signed in to my iCloud account. It was jarring.
As an Apple user I take it for granted that my watch unlocks my computer. That text copied to the clipboard on any device is immediately, invisibly available on the others. That all of my contacts and messages are just there. That my Safari history and state synchronises.
You can't 'selfhost' this stuff. You may not like Apple -- I'm not trying to convince you -- but the fact is that there are a ton of benefits that their integrated ecosystem delivers that you just can't emulate yourself.
you can,
- kdeconnect can do clipboard & messages sync
- nextcloud (or anything else that does webdav & webcard) does calendar & contact sync
- Firefox (and chrome probably too) can sync browser history and share webpages feom one device to another
i'm not aware of anything that can remotely unlock another device, but that seems like a security risk to me (also quite hard to implement as pam is synchronous :/).
but you certainly don't need a closed ecosystem, building your own out of free components is very much possible.
Some of the stuff you mentioned seems to cover computer to computer, but isn’t relevant to computer to mobile scenarios.
no, the things I listed are how I sync my linux machines with my mobile phone.
I wasn't talking about computer to computer sync, but the methods I listed (maybe except kdeconnect, which is built for computer to phone sync) apply to workstation to laptop sync aswell.