The boiling frog of digital freedom

I'm writing this because the software is already there. There are decent alternatives to most things, sometimes multiple. What isn't there is government adoption, and commercial adoption.

`$ freeoffice-textmaker`

Critical System Error: Unable to open X Window display. <:0>

I assume it doesn’t support Wayland. And I don’t support X, I don’t use it and if an app doesn’t work on Wayland, I won’t use it. May be useful for someone else, who doesn’t tolerate Wayland being unsupported.

"Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up" is literally a quote from Steve Jobs.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/01/steve-jobs-knows-bes...

https://www.engadget.com/2007-01-11-jobs-confirms-iphone-is-...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-jobs-the-iphone-and-open...

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/0...

https://www.wired.com/2007/01/why-i-want-a-locked-iphone-2/

Of course this just proves another thing I said, which was "Many people seem to forget".

To give those people, who may not be articulate or knowledgeable enough to explain the intricacies of a problem, the capacity to argue for or against a point when engaged in conversation.

For example, there are people who are against behavioural advertising but they may not be able to cite specific examples of how it’s harmful, or how much, or to whom. Thus they would research those questions and make a post so others in similar situations are able to have informed discussions with those in their lives who don’t think behavioural advertising is a big deal.

1. You're in a tech bubble. For a counter anecdote, the only Macs I encounter are those provided by my US employers in the technology sector. The US is particularly high in Mac market share, California more so, and the bay area may be the one Mac OS majority desktop/laptop share region on the planet.

2. Windows laptops don't get replaced that often. I know it's hard to believe from a tech/heavy user perspective, where it may feel like a 4 year old Windows laptop is so outdated and you need to replace it, especially if it was not one of the models that rival the Mac in price, but for the average user a Windows machine reached the point of being good enough for their uses in the Windows 7 era. This is because their uses (a) are not that strenuous (typing up office documents, posting on social media) and (b) unexciting, so they don't feel the need to upgrade the way they might with their smartphones. Notably, these users are also _not_ going to computing conferences to be spotted by you, or bringing their laptops to coffee shops (they have smartphones for that), etc.

Note that despite that, Windows still has the majority of new sales in the US, steady for the last 3 years at 55% to Mac's 30%, and the decline in the years prior to that were mostly driven by iPads and Chromebooks, not Macs - the big jump in Mac market share in 2019 seems to be iPads being merged into the mac category, as iOS's share in this space disappears at the same time: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272667/market-share-held...

You are living in a bubble. I don't know how large it is, but especially in non-web, non-multimedia offices, Windows is the default. Most serious CAD software is Windows-only, some outliers also support macOS. That old ugly accounting software the company uses only runs on Windows and nobody bats an eye.

The laptops at work all run Windows.

My desktop used to run Linux, but I downgraded when I got a (Windows-only) rift s. Since Facebook foobared that, it'll be Linux again if/when it gets replaced.

Most machines i interact with and know about run Linux, but I also live in a bubble.

Yes, I said so myself that it isn’t discoverable:

> Granted, you have to know that’s a solution and most people don’t

But once you know it it’s quite easy and within reach.

> The original article says the option was hidden from the GUI, not that it’s impossible to do.

I wasn’t replying to the original article; I was replying to a comment, in specific the text I quoted.

As I said in my original comment—I'm not necessarily against these changes in isolation. I think macOS handles the balance reasonably well. However, if you take these changes together, the throughline is clear. We went from "don't worry, Gatekeeper is entirely optional and easy to turn off" when it was first introduced to "don't worry, advanced users who can use the Terminal or know the specific hidden incantation can still bypass Gatekeeper."

The banks don't need your money.

Some banks are phasing out code cards or SMS verification for 2FA, and the only way to get the second factor for logging into the online banking website on your computer, is to use the bank’s app on your phone.

A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible. I meant that the banks deliberately chose not to have the websites utilize desktop/laptop webcams as an alternative to smartphone apps.)

Smartphone bank apps also have "push notifications" to immediately alert you of suspicious activity on your account.

But if one never uses the extra features that smartphones bank apps enable, then yes, desktop bank websites can be seen as perfectly equivalent.

My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.

No message, no nothing, just close the socket.

I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.

It is actually Google's Blink that split off of WebKit, not the other way around.

they have 25% of the mobile browser market share.

And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud. What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.

If a company is going to be gating their API behind some proprietary shovelware anyway, I would rather they write it in a plaintext scripting language (JavaScript) that runs inside a free software virtual machine (Firefox) which lets me intercept and control it.

*Yes, "program". How I hate "apps". Perverse term.

But answering the “it failed”. Not really. It exists and is a choice on most license dropdowns and is a famous one.

People should really default to GPL rather than more permissive licenses and hot take… should also default to closed source. And make open source or non GPL a conscious choice.

The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge over let’s say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it. They are obliged to release their source code to their customers.

That Ballmer called it a cancer is a great accolade.

Close source as a default because it is a one way door publishing the code on the open web. So you are protecting your own interests. You owe the “open source community” nothing and should exploit your IP as much as anyone else, and use GPL to allow people to “fix the printer” if they need to.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/systems

https://ryf.fsf.org/

I don't know what line of work you're in but this seems quite unlikely. GTK and Qt are both LGPL (and GNOME and Plasma are GPL). WebKit's JavaScript engine is LGPL. MySQL is GPL. Blender is GPL. Arduino is AGPL. GCC is GPL. Bash is GPLv3. It's hard for me to believe you use the Linux kernel without touching any of these.

GPL is wildly popular. It's losing ground, yes, and you correctly identify a primary reason why: commercial software companies correctly see it as a threat, and are fighting it in earnest now. It is a threat. It was designed to be a threat. The purpose of the GPL is to create a self-reinforcing free ecosystem that outcompetes the balkanized proprietary hellscape that preceded the free software movement. At this, it succeeded beyond any reasonable imagining.

A lot of the revolutionary spirit has left the free software movement. We are currently in the "good times create weak men" stage of the cycle. People who grew up in the garden of Eden created by the free software movement, who take it for granted that the popular web browsers are open source and Microsoft releases cross-platform IDEs that run on Linux, don't appreciate that the current state of affairs was wrought over decades by the kind of people who spelled it Micro$oft and were willing to tolerate their computers only half working in order to avoid proprietary software of any kind, on principle.

But make no mistake, we are still at war. The big corpos know it, even if they've managed to fling enough bread and circuses to fool some into thinking we're all one big happy family now. Giving up on the GPL is how they win, and we lose.

Once that point is crossed, they will have to compensate and adapt or risk losing their entire business.

What needs to be updated is the the knowledge of the users and of the programmers. But we've been co-opted as an industry for the most part by very large bags of money and a service oriented eco-system is the capitalist response to the free software movement.

Doing an end run around that is hard to enforce (see the various licenses that address this loophole directly) without having the backing of a regulator. I see this as a simple swing of the pendulum, which it has done several times in the past regarding centralization and decentralization of computers: single machines -> single machines with terminals and time sharing -> mini computers with terminals -> microcomputers -> networked micro computers -> networked micro computers using peer-to-peer services -> networked micro computers with access to services -> special purpose computers (terminals!) with access to services. So if we want to do away with these we'd need to focus on the technical implementation of federated services that do not require central services at all. One thing you could advocate for is to restore peer-to-peer capabilities of residential internet but the fear of the hacker card will be played to counter that one. But there is also still pressure to push the pendulum one more step to the right: identified access to the internet and without that no service. This may well happen, I would expect a country like the UK or Australia to be first to implement this.

Also note that there is no actual technical driving force behind the pendulum, it doesn't have to swing at all, it could just as easily get stuck. The important common factor between all of the above was that someone (or lots of someones) made a lot of money by driving the swing.

And yes, we need an ethics framework for the IT industry, but we need liability more than that and I don't think either is going to happen in the next 10 years. Maybe if there is a mass death (> 10K people at once or so, a few 100 doesn't seem to have made a difference so far) on account of a software issue we will finally wake up.

There is this Order of the Engineer [2] that has their own oath akin to the Hippocratic Oath. I went down the software path so I never really looked into it, but my professors were very in favor of it.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer

Just like "don't be evil"? Which was actually enshrined in Google's corporate code of conduct for some time, and could even believed if you squinted the right way...

You are on the right track to influence who is on the ballot for a particular party. Last time in PA the Rs put up the Dr Oz with lukewarm conservative values. The R voters in PA were so underwhelmed that the D with literal brain damage was elected. Also, States with a caucus process give people who show up to caucus enormous influence of which names the party will put on the ballot.

> What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population

We could allow for more representative government in the federal House of Representatives by allowing the House to expand with population, as was written in the Constitution. The census was to count the people to expand the House to track population growth.

Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force.

The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.

From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress.

Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.

Not even close to true.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/43jywd/why-tens-of-thousands...

Agree.

But the best alternative might actually be one where artists (Disney included) can’t “own” their art and where you can’t make money selling copies of digital files.

First let me add some snippets on what the authors of WEI think can be gained from it:

* This is beneficial for anti-fraud measures. Websites commonly use fingerprinting techniques to try to verify that a real human is using a real device[1]

One of the proposed use cases: Detect non-human traffic in advertising to improve user experience and access to web content* [2]

Another snippet :

we could standardize the set of signals that browsers will receive from attesters, and have one of those signals be whether the attester recommends the browser for sites to trust (based on a well-defined acceptance criteria). As new browsers are introduced, they would need to demonstrate to attesters (a relatively small group) that they pass the bar, but they wouldn't need to convince all the websites in the world [2]

This is clearly an attempt at gatekeeping both web client software and the clients themselves.

> What do they gain from it?

I think we can agree that Google is primarily an advertising and search company. One of the threats to Google's revenue as an advertising company is ad-fraud and this 'anti-fraud' measures protect their bottom-line. Another threat is ad-blocking and though they don't explicitly mention it, the WEI "bar" mentioned above can potentially be used to prevent ad-blocking by denying attestation to clients capable of ad-blocking (either directly or by allowing plugins).

Client attestation also prevents bots(both good & bad bots of all types including new search indexing bots) from accessing websites. This has a nice side-effect for Google that it restricts building a new search engine(a competitor) without its blessing. Search is a gateway to Google's advertising.

> And why exactly do you think they'd want to do that?

Like any product that any company introduces, it is to drive adoption? The more websites use it, the more normalized and legitimate WEI becomes. Once it becomes a standard and an integral part of web, it is easier to dictate terms that keep their position entrenched.

We can argue whether ad-blocking or bots are good or not and whether these concerns are all pure speculation or hyperbole. But once the technical capability is there and it is only the ethical/moral belief of corporate executives( and probability of government intervention) that prevent it, I wouldn't trust them to do the right thing especially when money is involved.

[1] - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_...

[2] - https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

Just because there isn't certainty that it would happen like this, doesn't mean there's not a possible future that looks somewhat like this. Nothing that was listed here seems particularly far-fetched to me, I don't think.

This just isn’t true. You don’t have to give Apple another dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.

Activation locks were required by law to deter armed theft.

> A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple’s introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013 as part of iOS 7.

With iOS 8, Apple made its so-called said “kill switch” active by default, in accordance with California regulation, and that should help the rates of theft continue to trend downwards.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...

Universal safety and security is pushed almost ubiquitously. Like it's a holy truth. Trumping all other concerns. And anybody who argues for anything else is just selfish or whatever.

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manua... ("BBC Microcomputer Model B +")

There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with all the components' part numbers that I guess you can replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97) Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering iron.

Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier.

I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.

My Commodore64 had full motherboard schematics in the manual, and I had a 90s tube TV with schematics inside the back of the case.

This change, lack of docs/schematics has happened over a mere 20 years.

Every device/vehicle/system now needs to be connected to the internet and needs you to download an app.

Is that for the consumer? No. That's for the manufacturer.

For milking be reselling your data and/or spying on you and/or charging extra because they can and/or the capability to turn any device into literal trash by not providing updates or bug fixes to a half-baked alpha software that it shipped with.

Blame your government. There could and should be laws against that or at the very least incentives to prevent it.

As someone who found computing in general through the joy of taking broken electronic things apart and trying to fix them, it does sadden me too when I see a black blob over a circuit board but most people are just happy they're cheap and easy to replace and toss em away. Most developers I know today can't understand basic electrical circuits, even though they are the very foundation of everything we do. But like my previous analogy, most would rather just see the magic happen when they install something, write a little bit of code, and see results.

Some of us do value privacy, security, and even the underlying things that make stuff work. We're in the minority. The vast majority of people simply don't even care. I've tried explaining it to my wife, or my mother, that some piece of software might track them, know about them, restrict them, whatever, and the opinion I usually get back is "Oh, it doesn't already do that?" People joke about Facebook ads being something they just talked about all the time and it doesn't even phase them that the reality is very near to that.

People simply don't care enough to make a change in the laws that would prevent things like this.

Today? Everything is cheap, you can fedex something across continents in a matter of a few days. When the TV is broken, fuck it, a new one is a click and a day of waiting time away, free delivery included. Computers? Phones? Just the same.

Building products that last or are repairable just isn't competitive enough any more. Yes, there are niches like Fairphone, Framework and Pine, but that's the point: they are niches for nerds who care and are able and willing to spend the money.

On top of that, technology has gotten ever smaller and smaller. Up until a decade or two ago, most electronics was through-hole stuff that even a complete dunderhead could repair with a soldering iron, a bit of solder and some tweezers. Modern SMT? That needs highly specialized machines and an awful lot of knowledge about stuff like temperature ramps, not to mention passive components being as small as a tiny piece of sand. And if you want to verify signal integrity, some random scope won't cut it either at modern high speed buses.

> Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of these into one chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI

I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.

What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.

So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800 computers, they did release the information. For an extra cost, but it was released.

I believe that decentralized movements need to be named properly. If Stallman named it “Liberating Software” instead of “Free Software”, his movement could have attracted a lot more devotees from the wider open source movement.

Similarly, I believe (my personal viewe) thay if BLM had simply called themselves BLAM (Black Lives Also Matter) their message would have been crystal clear and would have attracted far less controversy and much more support across the political spectrum, avoiding such rejoinders as “All Lives Matter.” In fact it rolls off the tongue better and stronger: BLAM!

When starting a decentralized movement, the naming is crucial as it affects positioning long after it has become bigger than those who began it.

People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific disciplines to publish one’s discoveries openly for everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma departments — there, the intellectual property system has made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93

Newton said, “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He didn’t pay rent to the giants for those shoulders.

Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire book called World After Capital about this very thing, and is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org

Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network, and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without government force:

https://avc.com/category/blockchain/

I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should be thankful to Zuck’s tendencies, which he can exercise in an area that isn’t a core business proposition of facebook. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z’s tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?

> ... you should be thanking [Zuckerberg’s] open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI [would] belong to only a select few ...

You’re right that such sympathies weren’t exactly “killed” (instead “discouraged”) by advisors but pressing this mistake in phrasing is certainly a bit of a straw man argument.

There are obviously some specifics there, like if the camera on my phone has a firmware blob, does that need to be able to have the firmware updated? A lot of little caveats like that make such a law difficult, but I think with hardware access the open source community can flourish on devices like smart TVs, etc.

Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.

Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.

Most people on HN are techbros

Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!

For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.

I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about.

In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.

Similar to the concept in medicine that it's bad for business to cure vs good for business to treat something. From the consumer side, clearly you want cures but markets don't seem to function that way. Treating kidney disease is far less lucrative than providing a cure (if possible). Your only option as a business to find this appealing is to somehow look at the treatment option, roll all expected profit and revenue up, and tuck that into a "cure" option. If altruism in medicine isn't there, I don't know why we'd hope for it in something as artificial as electronics and software. I don't know what the solution is here if we want to continue to pretend markets self regulate in a healthy way for the general population and not for businesses.