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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I read too much philosophy, but why doesnt anyone see that when Apple lobbies the government they are doing something measurably immoral(If you subscribe to ethical institution).

Neurotransmitters signaling pain happen throughout our human population with these anti-consumer acts.

What I can't understand is: If a single human lobbied the government for a selfish cause, they would be an a-hole. Why is this different?

I'm all for an equal playing field, lets all go Realpolitik, everyone goes amoral. I just find it odd and a bit frustrating that corporations can commit immoral acts but humans cannot. I imagine this causes inequality.

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Knowing both sides of the argument around this topic and apple, it's not hard to understand why apple has a compelling argument and why it still deserves to be heard.

You have to remember that tons of people have near zero tech awareness, and regardless of the laws, will just bring their iPhone to the Apple store if it breaks. The same way people still go to dealers to fix their car, even out of warranty.

This means Apple can say "Hey, give us full control of your phone repairs, and we can kill the theft market for iPhones. You are going to come to us anyway, so might as well let us end iPhone theft too"

So this is why lawmakers still sit down with Apple. And the generous lunches.

(Apple DRM'ing all the internal hardware does effectively make stolen iphones completely worthless, in whole or in parts.)

-For the record, I have personally written my senator before asking him to support right to repair laws.

I wonder what would happen if the law required devices with unpaired parts to be available, but still allowing the sale of devices with paired parts.

If there would be enough unpaired devices in the wild, both types of devices would get stolen (or, worse, robbed, with risk of bodily harm). Thieves would not return the ones that are worthless to them to their owners (why would they take that risk?). So, it would make the protection worthless for those willing to opt-in.

And no, making it somewhat easy to check whether a phone is locked down wouldn’t help. Thieves and robbers won’t spend even a second to do that check while still near the crime scene. It would have to be absolutely obvious (say by having orange and black devices) for thieves to not steal the locked-down ones.

Presumably the unpaired parts would pair after being installed

Apple has had the full control on supply, and it hasn’t killed the theft market, the same way having control on anything you can install on a iGadget has killed the scam industry, so if we need to get a phone stolen, might as well make it repairable, how long since we start classifying apple arguments as pure marketing detached from reality?

> (Apple DRM'ing all the internal hardware does effectively make stolen iphones completely worthless, in whole or in parts.)

This claim, or to be more specific, the claim that this reduces theft, is missing evidence. Are iPhones really being stolen at a substantially lower rate than other brands, correlating with implementation of these locks?

Lots of articles starting 2013 that Activation Lock reduced theft by measurable amounts. I couldn't figure out how to search for articles about drm'ed parts.

Sample size of one, and anecdotal at that, but someone snatched my iPhone out of my hands last July and ran away. I of course reported it stolen to the police and locked it down in FindMy, so in theory I think it's a brick, but I don't think that the fact that it was an iPhone really deterred them from stealing it from me.

They actually tried to extort $300 from me to get it back which I of course would not pay, but maybe there's still a market in that for some people?

How did they try to get $300 from you after your phone was stolen? You probably don't carry that much cash on you, they can't text you, and they have your phone/digital wallet if they wanted to try cracking it.

After I got home, I got my wife to call the phone, and they said they would give it back to me if I gave them $300. We were trying to see if we could figure out a way to get them to reveal themselves but it didn’t pan out.

That sucks. Although I can't really see someone who went to the trouble of stealing the phone honoring an exchange. I bet if you had arranged to do the exchange anywhere other than outside a police station they would have just walked off with your phone and an extra $300.

Yeah, that’s what we figured as well. I had no reason to think that anything positive could come out of giving them $300. Even if they did give me my phone back for $300, I don’t want to reward extorting me.

I doubt they got any money for it, so it’s probably resting at the bottom of the Hudson River now.

It was especially frustrating for me because I was unemployed at the time, and really didn't want to be spending $700 of dollars on a new phone, so for a brief moment I will admit that I did consider paying the $300 if I had a way to guarantee that they'd actually give it back, but it didn't last long.

> So this is why lawmakers still sit down with Apple. And the generous lunches.

I have to say, this sounds trivially false, and I don't think I'm nitpicking.

Lawmakers sit down with Apple because Apple has an enormous amount of money and power.

After some of these lawmakers sit down for lunch with the lobbyist, perhaps they make the assessment that what Apple is asking for is still doable/ethical/practical/etc.

Edit: clarification

...when Apple lobbies the government they are doing something measurably immoral

Would you consider this to be true if the government was on the wrong side of an issue?

Say politicians wanted to pass a law that every internet search query needed to reviewed and approved by a human before search results could be displayed. Would it be "measurably immoral" for Google to lobby against this law?

> Maybe I read too much philosophy…

Or maybe not enough? Several philosophical frameworks are perfectly compatible with Apple doing legal things to benefit themselves and their customers.

Why would you think that replacement part authentication is immoral? Quite in contrary, I’d say it’s an important safety feature for devices that have access to extremely sensitive data. It’s just important that the user has the authorization rights, and not the company.

Did anyone mention parts authentication? Regardless, you seem to have answered the question you raised. Concepts like parts authentication and secure boot are great in theory. The immoral part is their implementation. They're designed to wrestle the post-sale control of devices away from the customer and consolidate it in the hands of the manufacturer. Besides the subversion of the concept of ownership itself, this leads to increased cost of device ownership in many different ways.

Its a bit like PR stunt for the techies here, while giving master keys to whole cloud to NSA behind the doors. And to claim this will never-ever-pinky-promise-happen we shall show it on some highly publicized FBI case.

Maybe there were good intentions in the beginning and path was truly a good one, but not for a nanosecond do I believe they really made it 100%. Phone is simply not a secure device, doesn't matter who manufactures it, period. Neither are all the networks used to connect anywhere.

If all this lowers theft its a good strategy overall, but with terrible misguided marketing.

Actual techies are interested in the inner workings and can see past marketing. The group you're referring to is either the wider public that doesn't have the technical expertise to analyze the claims made, or Apple loyalists who uncritically accept and defend Apple's reasoning.

If this had anything to do with theft, Apple would only blacklist parts which were inside the device at the time of theft, and otherwise provide "pairing" tools for free.

To play the devil's advocate, the US economic system doesn't have a clear notion of what is selfish or not.

One reason why lobbying is allowed in the first place is to let corporations express what is good and bad for them and have their interests in the balance. The assumption is what's good for corporations increases the overall market and benefits society.

Doubting that assumption is probably out of the current overtone window[edited]

You’re starting from the assumption that no one thinks what Apple is doing is wrong or immoral, but that isn’t true. They have been and continue to be criticised to no end, for this very matter and others, including on Hacker News.

Search for Apple and Right to Repair as keywords and see for yourself. Add Louis Rossmann to the mix and you can’t miss it.

Companies are just a trick to make you think they're not made of of people when in fact it's just a mask for decisions made by real fleshy humans. When a company does something immoral it is because a human at the company did something immoral.

Modern capitalism has created a sort of new type of nobility out of corporations, a layer of entities above that of citizens. Just as you say, their actions are not judged by the same standard we'd use for normal people, and they can actually just get away with fines for breaking laws that would land normal people in jail. And actions we'd deep deeply immoral for normal people to engage in are morally acceptable for them.

I would refine your statement slightly, it's modern corporatism, not capitalism.

We hold corporations in too high of regard and have intermingled what should be free and open exchange of money and goods with governmental power, lobbying.

Sure, but names aren't what's important here. It's the logical conclusion to capitalism, even if it's more fitting to call it corporatism.

Either the government is big and the corporations lobbies and gets undue influence over how society and it's laws operates though the government, or the government is small and the corporations get undue influence over how society and it's law operates though sheer unregulated societal power. The group who controls your means of getting food, shelter, medicine, and information will have power over your life, and will bend the rules to their advantage using that power.

Boss: "If you don't like the pay they can find another job"

You: "I found another job"

Boss: "What about loyalty? Are you a job hopper?"

You feel bad for some reason.

The morality we were taught in preschool largely serves the interests of the elite. Things like "if someone does you wrong, don't seek revenge, forgive them" are really helpful messages to have ingrained in society when you are a corporate looter with a name and a address.

This comes across as teenage thoughts masquerading as philosophy. “Neurotransmitters signalling pain…”. What? Massive citation needed. Words mean things. “People get sad about things, yet things happen” is thought-terminating nonsense.

Nobody, not even Tim Cook, considers themselves the Bad Guy. The real world doesn’t work like that. This situation is certainly more nuanced than you’re making it out to be. If you’ve been part of basically any discussion about this topic, you’d see that there are multiple sides. Starting from a position of “my preconceived view is correct and no other view exists” is intellectually dishonest and wilful ignorance.

does anybody not see it? isn't the issue just that we're powerless to stop it?

> Neurotransmitters signaling pain happen throughout our human population

I love this formulation

Personally, I'm just jaded. Corporations have acted this way as long as I can remember. I just accept that corporations act like sociopaths and the people running the large corporations are more interested in buying a new yacht than doing the right thing.

Apple changed in about 1996. When Steve Jobs came back he ended all of that 3rd party business. It was costing his company money. They went from a starting to thrive secondary clone market. To a closed off eco system pretty much overnight. It used to be fairly easy to get info on parts and what to do from Apple. That singular act saved Apple from becoming the next IBM. However, it doomed the rest of us to this weird dynamic of Apple choosing when to help the little guy out or not. Usually it seems to fall on the 'not' side. If Apple had always been this way it would not be as frustrating.

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