Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

They need to crack down on companies that ruin hardware (or will one day ruin hardware) when they shut off their last cloud server.

There's no excuse for an appliance to brick itself or lose functionality just because of the manufacturer's remote action. When I buy a device, I don't want a perpetual, tethered relationship with the manufacturer in order to work the device. I don't want it to ask the manufacturer for permission to run every day. I don't want it to be dependent on the manufacturer to keep it alive. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to log in to the manufacturer's servers. I don't want them to know my IP address or my home address. Leave me alone, I'm just not that into you!

A hardware device should work on day 10,000 just as it worked on day 1. If you as a company can't do that, you should not be able to sell the device (EDIT: OR at least you should be required to prominently mark the devices as "dependent on the manufacturer's servers")

View on HN

Couldn't agree more.

A recent example - you buy a $1600 virtual reality headset (HP G2, specifically). A couple of years later the manufacturer drops support and Microsoft disables WMR capabilities.

This bricks a perfectly functional, expensive, device.

Personally, I feel the "right to repair" should extend to software. Why am I not allowed to revive an old mobile phone with a new OS version? Why am I not allowed to revive an old device by modernizing its hardware driver? Why can I not bring an old video game back to life?

Yes source code is IP - but maybe an expiration system similar to pharmaceuticals should apply where, for instance, a regulator compels a companies to release the sources of their drivers & services when a product or service is no longer officially supported.

The current VR generation was destroyed by the manufacturers themselves with the exception of Valve. Oculus did develop nice devices as well, but you never could get a single replacement part if anything broke. Want to exchange a heavily used controller? Tough luck, maybe you find a used one that is heavily overpriced. Using any other controller isn't possible.

This isn't acceptable, especially not for devices in that price range. I recommend to try it once as it is an experience, but otherwise VR is pretty much dead again. But don't buy Facebook or something similar, they simply don't offer support for their hardware.

Smartphones are a tragedy itself. Security theatre destroyed it. I could have a safer phone that is on a current patch level instead of using the OEM OS. But my digitally incompetent bank doesn't allow me to use a good phone to run a banking app, because it doesn't allow rooting devices.

Even without giving you any source, manufacturers could at least provide binaries and a mechanism to flash it to devices. There is no technical reason to not allow this.

God, I just have to share a little experience that not too long ago happened to me, relating with what you said about oculus and repairability.

So, ol' monkeyfun had a quest 2 controller grip button break. From gentle, ordinary gripping. And on the same day as fixing an unrelated problem in another controller. Tragedy!

Naturally this loser went to fix it. No guides? Oh well, at least she could see 3rd party 3D printed parts online for sale.

Might as well disassemble it to see how broken the part is, to know what to order. Whipped out tools, started disassem-- aaaaaaand it broke.

Not only was there a terribly placed ribbon cable made very difficult to access, not only were tons of parts inconsistently either held in by the lightest friction or intense nearly glued-together forces or strange catches, but the precise intersection of these aspects (and a ribbon cable that was seemingly stuck to the connector on just one pin) meant that when a disassembly step caused the controller to spontaneously fall apart into a few pieces, it was so forceful that it damaged that ribbon cable.

AAAAAAAAAAA!!!! ================

For what it's worth, I anyway discovered that the way the part broke would need me to extract an embedded piece of metal anyway and make some repairs to another piece of plastic, so it was never going to end in success.

But it really made me appreciate just how terribly designed those controllers are for repair. Even the component that broke was... designed to bend a piece of plastic repeatedly from what I could tell, rather than say just having a small metal spring.

So user-hostile.

Regarding rooted android, it is possible to bypass the root checks of most banking apps:

- 1. use MagiskSU for rooting

- 2. add some modules to bypass SafetyNet/PlayIntegrity (https://github.com/chiteroman/PlayIntegrityFix/releases)

- 3. For especially annoying apps add some modules to hide well-known "root apps" from the applist, so these apps don't know they're installed (https://github.com/LSPosed/LSPosed.github.io/releases + https://github.com/Dr-TSNG/Hide-My-Applist/releases) [I only needed it to get Pokemon-Go to work, banking worked without it]

My local banking apps and even google wallet work mostly fine with these workarounds. Though it breaks every few months, which is then usually quickly fixed with a magisk+module update.

“[I only needed it to get Pokemon-Go to work, banking worked without it]”

Yep sounds about right. This world is a parody unto itself.

>But my digitally incompetent bank doesn't allow me to use a good phone to run a banking app, because it doesn't allow rooting devices.

Honestly part of that is the fault of the OS itself. If shouldn't allow apps to tell if the phone is rooted or not. Unless I'm asking the app to do something that requires root, the app shouldn't have any ability to tell that it's on a rooted device.

Agreed. It is part of corporate ambitions to verify devices. We see that with remote attestation too. Again security theatre and a mechanism that doesn't serve the user.

> Smartphones are a tragedy itself. Security theatre destroyed it.

If you're willing to buy a new device, then I recommend getting a Pixel on sale and flashing it with GrapheneOS[0]. No rooting required. Read up on it when you have a chance. Also, if you install the sandboxed Google Play Services layer (which doesn't require any Google account logins and has very limited access to the device) you will be able to run your bank app.

[0] https://grapheneos.org/

While I would agree that overall repair-ability isn't great, you're wrong. Replacement controllers are available without an issue directly from meta:

- https://www.meta.com/us/en/quest/accessories/quest-2-control...

- https://www.meta.com/us/en/quest/accessories/quest-touch-plu...

On the software side they have been pretty great with support IMO, e.g. by adding 120Hz to the Quest 2 quite some time after release and opening up the Oculus GO, after they discontinued it. Maybe not valve-level but definitely much more than I expected from meta, and their hardware was a third of the price of valve's, despite having an actual APU in them!

I don't believe I am wrong. Try to find a controller for the Rift or Rift S.

You may now want to argue that these devices are older. That is true, you mostly need replacement parts for older devices.

And software support? I do remember where Facebook forced me to make an account or the hardware would be unusable.

For me that was the argument to never buy hardware from Facebook again. Sure, it was Oculus at the time and even if technically the Rift and Rift S were solid products, I would thoroughly recommend to not become a private customer of Facebook for now. Maybe things have improved, because they certainly should.

Need some kind of public domain requirements on sunset code/software.

Same as we need copyright maximums in the range of a generation (20 years). Having something come out of copy right 100 years later removes the cultural impact that putting a copyright into the public domain has. Primarily because everyone who was impacted by the original copyright is no longer alive. A prime example is steamboat Willie, aka Micky mouse og, really doesn't have any interest in doing much with it because it is culturally stale/mummified/dried out.

I think this would seriously tank the smartphone business. The reason why I have to buy a new phone every few years is basically sugarcoated planned obsolescence. If the software running my five year old Android phone was public domained, likely the community would keep my phone running for at least five more years.

Not saying that this shouldn't happen, though. Just saying that people suggesting this sort of stuff should realize that the economic consequences for some businesses would be major.

>I think this would seriously tank the smartphone business

Not so sure in reality. There's a lot to dislike about Apple and I won't go into it, but as an example, I like their support policy. They promise 5y and usually it's 7y. They do disable features on older phones via feature flags where the performance would not be up to it (like on-device AI lately), but this rather long support does not seem to impact their sales negatively. Arguably it works for them b/c people know they can resell their phones after 2y and still get a good price as buyers know they will get support. I am one who switched from Android/Sony precisely because of this.

The same could be true for opening older phones as some Android makers do unlocking the boot loader and leave it to enthusiasts to port newer Android versions. Many phones get recycled to something different this way (controller for home automation) and would never reduce sales.

Lack of software updates is definitely a factor why people have to trash a working smartphone but there are two more: software bloat and battery degradation. Newer apps tend to use more and more RAM an CPU so one have to upgrade or use slower and slower apps. Li-Ion batteries have limited life time. Even if you are ready to spend time and money on a battery replacement, spare batteries are available only for still widely used models.

I think most people buy a new smart phone because the battery has aged too much. And changing to a new battery never seems to improve things.

People talk a lot about how phones are built with "planned obsolescence," but different people mean wildly different things when they say that.

On one end of the spectrum are people who insist that the reason phones only last as long as they do is a 100% deliberate decision on the part of smartphone manufacturers to hamstring their own hardware, often going all the way into full conspiracy-theory-level thinking, with timed kill switches and the like. Frankly, I find this line of thought to be bullshit.

On the other end are the people who are talking about smartphone manufacturers using components that are chosen for being small, light, and/or cheap, rather than being durable and user-repairable, purely for reasons of design, practicality, and cost savings.

Personally, I know which side of this I come down on; Hanlon's Razor[0] applies here, as well as the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no actual timed kill switches in hardware or software—nor anything in the same general vein—have ever been proven to exist. And if not even the lowest-grade independent Android phone manufacturers are putting those things in their phones, why on earth would the likes of Samsung, Xiaomi, or Apple feel the need to do so?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

If you apply Hanlon's razor to corporations the only one being stupid is you.

If you blindly assume malice every time it's theoretically possible with corporations, you're going to be left angry, frustrated, and wrong an awful lot of the time. They're really just not competent enough to be doing most of this stuff deliberately.

I agree, but I also give the company the concession of being able to open-source the product when support ends. If they do that, I'm okay with it. As soon as they're done making whatever money they could from the thing and it becomes a burden to their pocketbook, hand the source code and schematics over to the community and let them take the wheel.

Not sure about others, but I am more likely to respect a company that does that and buy future products from them.

Open source would be ideal but I imagine the reality of NDAs and proprietary bits and other lawyer stuff means most companies won't or can't. Which, fine, but if you cut off services for a cloud encumbered device in a way that will effectively brick it, you should at least be required to push a final update that lets it continue with whatever basic functionality is reasonable. None of this "we reserve the right for this thing to stop working arbitrarily when we feel like it" in the ToS, the maker is legally obligated to make it keep working if you ship a product like this.

It's an unrealistic pipedream, but one can hope.

A lot of "impossible" things become possible when required by law. NDAs and business contracts are the way they are because companies can get away with it, not because no other way is possible.

> Why am I not allowed to revive an old mobile phone with a new OS version? Why am I not allowed to revive an old device by modernizing its hardware driver? Why can I not bring an old video game back to life?

Hardware is complicated and there are just not enough people with the deep understanding to fix it. I've got lots of old 'open source' devices that lost traction in their developer community. Nobody ever managed to recreate a usable OS for the old Sharp Zaurus PDA until the device itself was completely obsolete.

New OS versions rely on new hardware functions (or just a higher amount of memory or I/O to be usable) so patching to run on old hardware won't deliver something running well.

Video games are a bit of a special case because there's the media copyright as well. But there are lots of reimplementations of game engines so maybe you can't but others certainly do...

Related to this specific example, WMR headsets are just open enough for linux VR software to work with them - https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/hardware/#xr-devices (of course this is an uphill battle, ...)

Removing 3rd party code from the sources is apparently a monumental task and a major reason why sources for dead software aren't released more often.

This necessarily requires software regulation, too—if your software requires internet connection, functionality should also require internet connections. Why am I making an account with you just to track my periods?

While I do like the idea of requiring vendors to open-source their IP when support for a product ends, I don't think it's practical. For example, the iPhone X is out of the support window for iOS updates, does that mean Apple should be required to open-source the first version it shipped with (11) or the latest version they supported for it (16)?

In either case, these unsupported iOS versions share a lot of code with newer versions, that are still supported, and also with entirely unrelated products like MacOS, iPadOS, etc. So should Apple only be required to open-source only code that's no longer used in any version of their active products? Should they only open-source the drivers and unlock the bootloader so a third party OS can be made to work on it?

Modern software stack for a phone or even less advanced devices contains a fair number of proprietary drivers, which wouldn't be released because the chipset designs they are written for typically outlive the devices they are used in (the chipset gets modified slightly and repurposed for another device). You cannot really get all of the software for the device even if you wanted to.

> Yes source code is IP - but maybe an expiration system similar to pharmaceuticals should apply where, for instance, a regulator compels a companies to release the sources of their drivers & services when a product or service is no longer officially supported.

For the US, an expiration system is built into the constituion: "for a limited time"

It's just that that expiration has been stretched to absurdity where "a limited time" now means a whole second lifetime after the death of the author.

> OR at least you should be required to prominently mark the devices as "dependent on the manufacturer's servers"

Right next to the prominent label about causing cancer in the state of California, presumably.

I feel a notice wouldn't work here because the average consumer wouldn't understand the implications of depending on the manufacturer's servers or what it even means, plus every smart doorbell or whatever would just include it so it's not like it'd affect any consumer's choice

Love it.

This product may be revoked at any time.

This product incurs $30 billion in annual fees.

This product sells your usage data.

Yeah.

The features present at time of purchase may be changed, downgraded, or removed at any time.

With no obligation from the manufacturer to inform you of changes, and even if one exists in law, whaddya tonna do about it? We're doing the take it or leave it approach.

Whenever I come across a thing that contains a "terms of service" or "license agreement", I refuse to read it and make the assumption it says the following things:

> you own nothing

> the company owns everything

> you have no rights

> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have

> just in case you ever get it in your silly little head that you do have any rights whatsoever, you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay

> you cannot do anything the company doesn't like

> the company can do literally anything it wants whether you like it or not

> the company is not responsible for anything ever

> the company makes absolutely no guarantees about anything

> but you agree to indemnify us in all possible circumstances

That, sadly, is an entirely reasonable take on all this.

Yep. Major turn off. I do not buy, unless forced.

Just have no need for the hassles.

Yeah these labeling requirements only work if you operate under the assumption companies will be truthful. But if they're truthful, we wouldn't require labels in the first place, they'd just do them. So it's dead in the water.

And such dependency should only be permitted if there is some essential function the server is providing. Unfortunately, for a lot of devices that's inherently required to get through the firewall--for example, my garage door opener. Since it's not accessible from the internet the app has to communicate with the company server, the same server the opener opened a connection to to listen for commands.

There's also the grey area of remote kill. It should be required to be disclosed up front and the company should be required to put up a deposit with the FTC for a simple you-can-live server. If the company shuts down the FTC's copy is spun up and anything that hasn't been killed continues to operate.

Garage door opener is a perfect example of a device that should NOT require a cloud service in order to operate. Think about how it works. I'm sitting in my house on my LAN, the same LAN that the garage door opener is on. I open the app to close the garage door. It sends a command out to some server on the Internet. Then the garage door, which is presumably polling the server at all times, receives the command to close from the server, and closes.

Why on earth can't I just send the command directly to my garage door opener over my LAN? That should be the simplest mode of operation possible. I only need Internet connectivity if I somehow want to close my garage door from miles away!

>Why on earth can't I just send the command directly to my garage door opener over my LAN?

Because of NAT. Your door opener isn't connected to the internet, it's connected to your router, which uses network address translation to make all your devices share a single internet connection. So your door opener can send outgoing messages no problem, and the NAT router will route those outside, and then route responses to those messages back to the opener, but there's no (easy) way for a device outside your home network to access your opener. Of course, your phone or PC is on your home network, but only when you're at home. Presumably, you also want to be able to control your door opener when you're not at home, and at those times, you have to get through the NAT. Doing that requires the company's server, or something like Tailscale which sets up a virtual private network (VPN) between your opener and selected devices. But even Tailscale requires some type of server on the internet to work, even though the main traffic goes direct.

Basically, what you're asking for could have been a reality if 1) we had IPv6 (or just not IPv4 with its very limited number of unique addresses), and 2) we didn't have to worry about security so we could feel safe putting random crappy IoT devices directly on the internet and not worrying about hackers opening our garage doors or houses so thieves could enter and take stuff.

Over LAN. The thing about my home garage is that it's at my home where my wifi is. NAT and ipv6 doesn't enter the discussion if I'm already on my home wifi.

Right, I addressed that in my prior post.

Because you start with the absurd assumption that remote access is the primary function of a door.

It does not seem unreasonable that a users might want to open the door while they are coming down the street or turning into the driveway, before they are within wifi range. Maybe their home wifi just barely reaches the inside of the garage and doesn't extend past the garage door. Most folks are not exactly wireless network experts.

I agree it would be ideal to use a local network path if possible, but given that remote access is a requirement, I can understand why they just made it the default.

This was solved even before internet or wifi existed.

If I'm at home, yes. But if I'm pulling up to the house I'm not on the WiFi. And the range on the remote is very iffy.

... Doesn't your garage door opener send an RF signal to the receiver on the motor?

Many of them now go through the internet. My friend had me install the app, granted me access to his garage door from another country and revoked it later, all while still in that country.

I'm pretty sure he's had it fail from right outside his house due to mobile network outages more often than he's used it from far away though.

I think the opposite side of this coin is that the company should clearly define the minimum lifetime of the product and it support, including what services they will provide upon its sunset (such as a partial refund and disposal if the product folds before that date). I want to make an informed decision, and like you I would shop for another product beyond this crap we subscribe to.

The Elkjop electrical goods store in Norway supplies an environmental impact statement which often includes the manufacturer's estimate of the lifetime. For instance the Ankarsrum Assistent (successor to the classic Electrolux Assistent) kitchen machine it's 30 years with spare parts available for 12 years.

https://www.elkjop.no/product/hjem-rengjoring-og-kjokkenutst...

Unfortunately for electronic items the lifetime and spares information is usually blank because the manufacturer doesn't supply it.

Off-topic, but I've got an Ankarsrum Assistent (in the US). It's a ridiculously good machine. Much better design IMO than the KitchenAid stand mixer. The rotating bowl means adding ingredients doesn't require stopping the mixer & lifting the head, you can just pour things in.

>including what services they will provide upon its sunset (such as a partial refund and disposal if the product folds before that date)

This might be OK for a huge company like Google, but for many others, what good is it? If the product folds, it's probably because the whole company folded, and when that happens, you're not getting a refund, regardless of what any contract says.

Why people like me buy iphones? Not because they've got the best hardware or have the best camera or the best apps (though they're pretty damn good at those), not because they are open for hackers (they're basically the worst), but because the manufacturer provides de facto support for at least 5 years after release. My kids all have iPhone 8s and they still get security iOS updates.

Did they promise that anywhere? No. Did they kept on their unwritten and unspoken promise? Yes, for years now. Do you have to be Apple to do this? I don't know, would love it if the answer was no, but looks like everyone else treats this as cost and Apple treats it as value added?

I mean that's fine? If you still exist then your obligations remain. Maybe we will have some sort of "digital rights bankruptcy"

Defining minimum support period is already required by law in UK and will also be mandatory in EU as of next year.

This is the same problem as packaging. I think we should have a designated escrow service for the disposal costs of packaging that is taken off the front end, similar to the pension benefit guarantee corporation.

Imagine if there were a product support guarantee corporation which took, say, 4% of the cost of retail electronics sales, in order to guarantee their long term support.

It shouldn't really matter whether a company discontinues their service or not, because the right way to address this trend is through antitrust enforcement against the bundling of device products with software service products. These two things should be distinct product offerings with independent markets, and devices should be straightforwardly configurable as to which specific servers/services to use (with openly documented protocols, of course).

They should not be legally allowed to use the word "buy". They're actually renting out their products.

This is the biggest thing IMHO. Same with games. Buy should mean buy.

Yeah it's especially bad with video games. One of the most dishonest practices I've ever seen. People amass "libraries" and "accounts" worth tens of thousands of dollars and the corporation can just take it all away for any reason at all including no reason. They don't like a little comment you made somewhere, banned, entire account deleted, "your" "property" permanently revoked, and unless some legal miracle happens that forces them to overturn it they won't even reply to you.

They say "buy" but in reality it's a "licensing agreement" nonsense with a zillion lawyery rules nobody cares about or even reads. Judges should take one look at that and throw the whole thing out but they won't because the intellectual property industry is worth trillions of dollars which means they can buy laws that favor them via lobbyists. It feels like the world is unfixably wrong.

>you should be required to prominently mark the devices as "dependent on the manufacturer's servers")

Actually it's "we spy on you and reserve the right to brick your device at any time", which pretty much every EULA already covers ...

That language needs to be in bold print on the consumer package not hidden in a shrinkwrap license inside the box or worse, online somewhere.

Treat it like we do with food allergen labels. A standard location and plain language.

Don't stop at hardware. If the software runs locally but connects to a server for some non-essential or non-functional feature, it should continue working after they shut that server down.

local network isn't enough because these things are usually driven by phone apps and google and apple make periodic API breaking changes and kick everything off the platforms that doesn't constantly update. So even if its not server dependent many IOT things will still become unusable rather quickly.

"dependent on the manufacturer's servers" should also require that it let my install my own certs so I can MITM that connection and see what it's saying to the manufacturer's servers.

Alternatively we could require companies open-source the server hardware if they choose to shut down their for-profit offering.

Another option is to require companies go the Minecraft route where the "server" portion is always free to download and run but you need the paid client to actually connect to the servers to play the game.

So then the new-business model is escrow for ensuring continuity of server-based services ?

Products configured this way are a combination of a "logic bomb" [0] and a "dead man's handle" [1]. Together they form a very nasty combo.

Suicide bombers like release-to-make switches, so if you shoot them they at least complete part of their mission.

Companies that create self-destructing products are thinking like this. They are binding their survival to that of their customers as human shields and saying "we'll take you with us".

It's very disturbing psychology and having laws that allow companies to do it, even by hiding behind supposed technical ignorance, is a problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_bomb

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch

The way it's sold, you buy all those services from the vendor, and need their device to get access. So either the device should be replacable at low or no cost, or you should be able to switch vendor.

> When I buy a device, I don't want a perpetual, tethered relationship with the manufacturer in order to work the device.

Yes, but all the manufacturers want you in that relationship with them, and the technology of "internet" has finally given them that ability.

It's just a reminder that capitalism doesn't produce the best goods for consumers, it only produces the ones that are just not shitty enough that people keep buying them.

No matter how good a product is, the market will inevitably enshittify it to optimally conform to market incentives.

I mean, I fully agree, but how would any jurisdiction even enforce this? If the manufacturer goes out of business, their cloud service will be shut down 90% of the time (exception is if some entity buys the bankrupt company to restructure it). No one has any incentive to keep a service running that makes no money.

And I believe (not totally sure though) that IP is always part of the bankruptcy assets so probably insolvent companies are not even allowed to just open-source their stuff and allow configuration of the backend so users could set up community-servers and keep things running.

Completely different are cases where companies continue to live but lock features behind new paywalls like Happiest Baby with their Snoo bassinet, invent fees to hinder re-sale like Peloton or cripple working hardware like Sonos did.

Those make me unreasonably mad, not just because I already have too many subscriptions for things that improve my QoL but add up, but also because I do care about my CO2 and environmental footprint. I do not want to trash working devices just because they are now 2 years old. Companies should untether them if they think further cloud support is no longer viable and at the very least should support them for 7-10y.

Make it a legal requirement that if they brick the devices they owe the purchaser a refund for the value of any parts of the hardware that are compromised, minus some depreciation schedule. Then they have an incentive to keep running that service even if it's not currently making them any money. If they go out of business, that obligation is the same as any other on the books - assets will be sold off to cover the debts as best as possible, or some other agreement reached. Patching some code so that the system isn't bricked when the server shuts down is almost certainly cheaper than giving everyone their money back.

Force the manufacturer to release their source code for any server-side component of any product. Or API specifications and any HAB keys needed to boot new firmware on the device.

>When I buy a device, I don't want a perpetual, tethered relationship with the manufacturer in order to work the device.

Then don't buy that device. I know this will be unpopular but there is an entitlement here. I want X, X comes with insane restrictions, instead of sticking to my principles I will buy X then complain about the restrictions. I agree it shouldn't happen, but I also don't buy anything that allows that to happen to me.

Many devices can absolutely be built in a way that they do not require a dumb remote server to work, but they're built that way anyways because the manufacturer is rent seeking. It can be damn near impossible to find equivalent devices that don't do that. It is absolutely right to get one and complain about absurd remote links that shouldn't be there in the first place.

If you're financially rewarding them to do it, I honestly don't want to hear you complain about it. Company X is doing exactly what I paid them to do! What a nightmare!

Is it clearly advertised at time of sale that X comes with the insane restrictions? Is there a viable alternative to X without? What are the consequences if you don't make a purchase at all?

There are some necessary conditions to fully consent to an agreement. If someone has a gun to your head and tells you to do something you don't want to do, it is not entitlement to comply but complain instead of "sticking to your principles".

> Then don't buy that device

Except when the device doesn't appear to be, but can be updated in a way that makes it obvious it does. Absolute statements like "all devices should be able to be jailbroken" or "I want things supported forever" or "just dont do x" are misguided. The world is more complicated, even on this issue. Any implemented solution will have holes and the world will be all the better for it. Progress requires things to die off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com