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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Dark ages are a-coming. Seriously.

We are going to have an age of digital serfdom. You will use a device provided to you by some "benevolent" corporation. They will own every aspect of that device and you will only be allowed to drive it if you give them money (pay your access fee today!).

They will lock down most other avenues, general computing will be reserved for "corporate" use only, and while there will be a "free web", it will be fairly technical and user hostile, and the vast majority of marketplaces (ex: anything that touches money) will avoid it like the plague.

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None of us individually can fix the problem we're faced with, but I'll tell you what we can do: Be the biggest possible pains in the ass about it, and that's exactly what I intend to do. I'm planning on digging my heels as deep as they go and just causing as much trouble for everyone. Believe me, if my browser gets blocked based on user agent, the owners will hear about it. I will bypass it. (I am bypassing it in many cases.) If you try to push me to a mobile app, I'm either going to find a way to use your website, or I'm taking my business elsewhere at basically any cost necessary. For me, the end of the open web is scorched earth. I intend to gain approximately nothing from this, and I don't care.

Yeah - No joke, I'm right there with you.

I just don't think it will matter. There is too much money on the table, and too much pressure on the "security" front to get most of the people implementing this to just... stop. They have rational reasons for doing the things they're doing, and they're sitting in the "corporate developer" spot, which will still get the goodies like a real server that can run real code.

I'd like to see some real government regulation... my basic stance is - if I own the device, I should get a key to EVERY fucking lock it has, including all the digital ones. Which seems very sane, and completely mirrors the same stance for ownership of things like houses and cars (the owner gets all the keys).

But the government (at least in the US) has lodged the corporate phallus SO far down its fucking throat it's literally choking to death. So I don't expect any miracles.

But you don't really own the device. Since day 1 Apple has been opposed to this on all their hardware, but most especially iOS hardware. You have the right to use it as they provide, or destroy it. Ergo you own the physical device minus all firmware and software. You have no right to inspect, understand or modify the firmware or software in any way. By extension, there is no right to repair.

This highly successful paradigm is now replicated by John Deere, and Tesla. WiFi radios are being locked down.

I remember folks on HN warning of the slippery slope a decade ago, universally shot down. Security!

Sure, and this is why I utterly refuse to buy Apple hardware (note - I'm still forced to use Apple hardware by my place of employment... sort of making my point).

It's also why I've chosen to do things like selfhost my own services, run my own computing hardware (literally sitting in my basement), contribute to and fund open source initiatives, and continue arguing that the government should regulate this behavior.

Because frankly... I agree with you: it's a highly successful paradigm. If left alone and unregulated, companies that don't abuse their customers in this manner will become less and less prevalent.

I call it "the little green man" paradigm: They have a literal enforcer sitting inside your phone who only answers to them. They use that little green man to extort rent from you for services and goods that shouldn't require any sort of ongoing or recurring expense, but will... because rents * * cough * * excuse me, "subscriptions" are just wonderfully profitable.

I'm just not an optimist on this front.

You don't have to gain anything- it's called not sacrificing your principles. Something many here don't understand. If we don't like something we don't have to put up with it but it might take some sacrifice.

> Something many here don't understand.

This is a complete cop out, and a misunderstanding about how this works.

This is a principle that works right up to "Can I feed my kids" and then it doesn't work at all.

Principles are flexible. Some are more flexible than others. You NEED food in a way that you don't need general purpose computing. If you are forced to choose, I know which one people will pick.

They will just put a finger on the scale to make it more and more difficult to choose an open solution. You will start losing things like income, job opportunities, government access, etc.

They don't have to make you switch... they just have to make an environment where you are less fit. Make your life harder at every step, limit your opportunities, and wait for you to go extinct. And... you will.

I'm complaining about the users around here who will not sacrifice the smallest convenience for their stated principles.

Just wait until everyone's favorite benevolent company misses earnings for a quarter or two.

I just don't see how 'general computing' can ever be taken away from those determined to have it. Forget the latest, fastest CPUs for a moment and focus on what general computing really is.

I can build a computer from scratch from existing knowledge I have stored in my head. Computing that I'm in control of really can't really be taken away from me on a basic level.

I don't disagree though, the web itself is becoming a hellscape and I expect it to be completely and totally locked down within my lifetime. I don't think the web most people know is savable anymore.

It's not that you won't be able to have a general purpose computer, it's that nothing that touches valuable services will be accessible to it.

You can run your toy rpi hobby server, but you won't be able to buy goods, check your bank statements, file your taxes, buy your insurance, pay your rent, check your email or message your mom.

Doing any of those things will require getting permission from the gatekeepers of those services, and your device won't get it if you have root.

In the BEST case: the government heavily regulates what those gatekeepers can do. In the worst... they "convenience fee" away absolutely all surplus productivity so a very small group of people holding digital keys gets to be stunningly rich.

> it's that nothing that touches valuable services will be accessible to it. > Doing any of those things will require getting permission from the gatekeepers of those services

I don't see how we aren't already at this point.

I can be locked out of my banking tomorrow for any reason by the bank or government, banking apps won't run on rooted phones or even many browsers, I can be banned from email providers and I can't reasonably host my own as big providers won't accept messages from my server, etc.

That's not even touching on how companies like CloudFlare are effectively already the gatekeepers of traffic to any service you would want to use.

From my perspective the future you're scared of is here already and only getting worse.

Watch what happens when the bottom finally drops out of Intel and the cloud retreats behind their own custom ARM or RISC-V server optimized SoCs. Open hardware sources will dry-up.

There are very few OSS hardware vendors that are in a position to pick up supporting the whole ecosystem enchilada. System76 is the only one that comes to mind. They seem to understand to some degree where the puck is heading.

While 'general computing' can't be taken away, what an individual or small company can support won't be able to compete with the locked down systems, especially if the upstream efforts are spread across multiple open source fronts.

>While 'general computing' can't be taken away, what an individual or small company can support won't be able to compete with the locked down systems, especially if the upstream efforts are spread across multiple open source fronts.

This is a very pessimistic view.

IBM never designed the PC to be future proof. It just happened to pick up.

RISC-V standardization extends to the boot process and the platform, facilitating a standard PC that's cleaner, simpler and better than the current incidental IBM PC derived platform, which has accumulated much baggage since 1981.

The platform standard being open and simple minimizes the effort the software side (esp. the OS) needs to spend on supporting the hardware.

I mean even if you can build a computer from scratch a few self built transistors aren't going to weigh up against advanced microchips.

Unless we have different ideas of what 'from scratch' means.

Our ideas of what it means are the same and I agree, but "general computing" doesn't mean the latest, most up to date hardware. The ability to freely compute on a basic level isn't under any threat.

I guess I'm being kind of pedantic, but I think there's a meaningful difference between being able to freely compute and being able to freely interact with systems run by other parties which is what is actually threatened.

We're in a new Gilded Age, and it's going to have to get worse before it can get better.

The problem is that too many people hate tech... The people who would otherwise want unrestricted general computing now want no tech at all, or they only want tech as a platform to explore ideas, sort of an external neural enhancement, but not as an ubiquitous presence used by everyone for most daily tasks.

FOSS is falling farther and farther behind commercial tech, and people actively don't want feature parity with commercial apps, they want faithfulness to an interesting technical vision, and they want things that stay out of the way and are made of modular pieces, rather than things that do as much as possible and come with their own opinionated workflow you just learn and use.

Funny how your comment reads like my iPhone user experience (minus the "pay your access fee today!")

I personally do not have a problem with these serfdoms, as they meet a real, functional need. It does suck that there aren't as many easy alternatives for smartphones as there are for laptop computing.

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