Yes, it's terrible how North Korea has made it so difficult to have root on your own phone.
And I looked down at my phone.
And I made myself sad.
----------------
The difference between you and North Korea is that nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root.
Which means that it is very likely that you volunteered for it. Unless somebody else paid for it, like work. Then that is their problem. I still recommend buying your own phone.
Why did you do that?
Is it because the phone is a particular brand that is fashionable and you want that to reflect on you when you use the phone around other people? Is it because it is cheaper to buy because the phone company subsidizes the phone in order to sell you spyware you can't get rid of and to lock in reliable monthly payments from you?
There are lots of reasons people do this. Maybe it's just ignorance. Maybe they tell themselves they don't have anything to hide. Maybe having control over the things in they own seems like too much work or too intimidating.
Because it is extremely likely you actually had a choice and your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles.
You didn't have to do that. And you don't have to continue to do that. You have a choice. You have the power. You really do.
This is important because you have the chance to financially reward people that want to preserve your freedom or you can financially reward people that take it away.
This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting. It also matters much more.
The DMCA (and to a lesser extent, CFAA) is routinely abused by software & hardware manufacturers to prevent people from taking control of their own devices, and if you do it at a large scale then you will eventually end up with a gun to your head.
Vote with your pocket , there are phones like fairphone [1] which makes right to repair a central part of their design .
Even if people don’t know or care about right to repair a lot of people care about sustainability , you can’t have one sustainable credentials with unrepairable phones like Apple keeps marketing.
Help others in your life make that informed choice .
And they looked from their windows at the angry masses and asked: "What do they want?" - "Well they are unhappy that Disney only streams to certified firmware, that banking apps don't work on rooted systems, and that their devices report to the secret police" - "I don't understand" - "They say their bread is moldy and rotten" - "Then why don't they eat cake?"
Supporting ethical companies is a good thing and you should totally do that. But i doubt the emergence of surveillance capitalism can be solved by that alone. By no means stop advocating for it, it does bring change, but some business and government practices must be regulated. And some existing regulation must be changed to favor humans instead of corporations and government agencies.
Note the thread is not about a "right to repair" but a "right to repair democracy"
We are if we limit ourselves to act only as individual consumers. But if we act as a collective of citizens, we can compel companies to offer the choices we want.
It's easy to blame consumerism and people being dumb when you look at a single market, but there are hundreds of markets and in the other 99 we're the dumb ones.
Actually, my choice was that Apple engineers with teams, budgets, etc. and a mandate to protect my privacy will do a better job initially and certainly a better job with updates, than I would installing a collection of OSS software on a rooted Android phone. I mean, most people, if they care at all, slam umatrix as an add on with the default lists and call it a day. It's the same outsourcing, but to volunteers.
> This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting.
I don't know about you, but I only stopped by physical keyboard having phones when the stopped selling them. You can look at dumb TVs, dumb cars, and a lot of other examples where they just don't make some options anymore. I mean, sure I can buy ethically, and try to, but I don't convince myself my money is the make and break difference. Hell, if you look at my purchase habits, you'll see I frequently am on the losing side.
Also, it's kinda bizarre to claim that the free market is more democratic than voting, since voting is the gold standard of democracy.
> sell your freedom
That’s hyperbolic to the point of killing the discussion.
[1]https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1519282822158110721