Hacker News Reader

Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism!

At least in capitalism you have the choice to look for a malware-free alternative. 100% USSR, had it survived to the IoT era, would penalize you for not having a state-mandated surveillance device on at all times.

I agree fully with your assessment of USSR but basically any nation state with the power does such things.

Show me a COTS smartphone where the end-user can burn the OTP fuses for his personal public key, so they can have it boot their own custom signed firmware, and control exactly what runs in TrustZone's SW Secure World?

You can flash yourself GrapheneOS with your own keys for the bootloader. Then again "I can't make sure all manufacturers aren't in collusion" when FBI sues Apple and others (and fails) over suspects' phone access is quite different from "every device sold in the country must have government malware", as it is in China.

I can't find a device in the USA that doesn't come with government malware. Is this another instance of the USA accusing China of everything the USA is doing (like with the credit scores)?

You'd have to be a bit more specific of which government malware you found in Android/iOS devices, cause that would be interesting

Android comes with something called Google Play Services, and iOS has a thing called iCloud. You may have heard of them.

I have, I still have not heard how the US government uses these as malware, but I would love to learn something new

For instance, if you use an Apple phone and the government wants to see the pictures you took, they can just get a copy of them from Apple using iCloud.

Yes, using a warrant from a court. If the government wants to break into my house they can also do that with a warrant. Not exactly the same as having a key to my house though, and very far from a malware.

Also to be more specific, In apple ecosystem I can opt for encryption where they can't

In the UK you can't opt for encryption.

You still can install PGP/GPG and encrypt whatever you upload yourself.

Still waiting for anything comparable to what China does.

> Still waiting for anything comparable to what China does.

Social credit scores. The USA inspired China to copy them. But in the USA they aren't called social.

You're free to opt out of icloud/gcloud and the government will have a tough time extracting the pictures from your phone, as multiple lawsuits have shown.

Without my encryption keys, which Apple doesn’t have? Don’t think so.

Please tell me how with Advanced Data Protection on they can access my data. I’d love to hear it.

show me anyone outside of HN or XDA devs that would ever want to do that

> At least in capitalism you have the choice to look for a malware-free alternative.

In the US capitalism, can you find a mobile phone OS that respects owner freedom?

Chinese!

Chinese capitalism!

Communism with Chinese Characteristics

Absolutely, there's no scam outside capitalism!

Outside of capitalism is outer space, so your snarky comment is actually true.

I think he meant the other kind of "outside", not physically. Plenty of bad stories.

Of course, every socialist country is actually capitalism and that's why it fails.

Which country is socialist?

Get the sarcasm, but of course there is scam outside of capitalism. Its just that the capitalistic model almost turns it from an inconvenient bug into a mainline feature.

Not saying there is an absolute perfect alternative, anyone who says that is usually shoveling smoke, but there are flaws with this economic model to be addressed.

Not true at all. I'm from Poland which was occupied by communist for a long time, and I can guarantee you - the amount of scam we had under that rule was orders of magnitude larger than what we have now.

Yeah I did forget about that. When you flatten the pay structure across the board, it makes bribes and scams so much more desirable. But also, communist structure in practices is sort of the total opposite of capitalism at a distance.

It was said that Karl Marx was completely right about Capitalism and completely wrong about Communism. And that is fairly accurate, both have big flaws.

Most times, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

I think it's really far fetched to say capitalism is bad idea. It's great system, it has some problems, but the upside is so big and alternatives are so bad that it's really unfair to call it bad system.

I think that encouraging corporations to destroy our environment (e.g. climate change) as fast as possible to maximise profits is a very good reason to call it a bad system. Yes, some goods and services become much more efficient, but now we're all going to have to pay the price for it.

Like the current never-ending heat wave. It's predicted to go on for months btw and the ocean is 4 Kelvins warmer than it should be.

Yh, the end of civilisation is a good thing after all, so enabling greedy fuckers to accelerate all life on Earth ever more rapidly towards destruction has to be good ...

Civilization is thriving and we are living in the best times (thanks to capitalism).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com