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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Everything that I purchase that contains a CPU should be within my power to run arbitrary code upon.

Seriously, what site are we even on right now?

The very same site where a significant number of users argue, completely seriously, that game consoles are not general purpose computing devices and, as such, should not be subject to the same rules.

I'd define the "general purposeness" by the public availability of an official SDK. Video game consoles are strange because there's no agreement whether they are appliances or not. Most of them also have unofficial public SDKs. Heck, some people would even say that routers are general purpose computing devices and install a custom OS on theirs.

Apple's SDKs are "public" in the sense that you can go read them, but if you want to ship anything with them on iOS, you need a paid developer account, right? I wouldn't call that public.

Given the context, I’m guessing what you want is to run arbitrary code on an OS that manages the battery, the network, the display, audio in and out, provide a security apparatus... You want all of the benefits of the well-managed, walled garden.

Or did you mean just running ARM Assembly?

> I’m guessing what you want is to run arbitrary code on an OS that manages the battery, the network, the display, audio in and out, provide a security apparatus... You want all of the benefits of the well-managed, walled garden.

...or a sufficently advanced browser :p (and people wonder why MacOS is loaded with lazy Electron ports...)

Distributing software should be free, ignoring the cost of transmitting the information and storing it on the client. Apple's pricing is arbitrary, and their defense of it is unsubstantiated. Forcing the App Store to compete is the only natural step forward for Apple, whether they (or their shareholders) want to admit it or not.

If you're going to make an appeal to identity: what kind of lame hackers need to appeal to a bunch of stuffy suits in Brussels to get homebrew running on a general purpose computer?

A good hacker does not reject any tool at their disposal. The corpos certainly don’t.

So if a company bribes a politician for favorable regulation, you view that as simply "good hacking"?

Social engineering is a form of hacking, and there are grey, white, and black hat forms of hacking. Hacks also vary in terms of skill, and elegance. What you describe sounds very script kiddie.

A good hacker uses every script at their disposal.

Agreed. It’s still hacking- it just might not be good hacking, in more than one sense of the word. So perhaps it depends on the nature of the hacker itself!

So a good hacker is whoever you decide has good nature?

Now you’re getting it!

Glad you aren't making the rules!

On the contrary, I have already made and set the rules for this tangent into semantics. Behold, social hacking in action.

The entitlement is terrible on this site. “I should be free, but they should be coerced”. People can’t even see their own moral foibles.

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