1,139 karma · joined June 9, 2016
So let's forget about the slavery and focus on the 'modernization' of this 'activity' and maybe even celebrate the off chance some slaves scramble to freedom. For 'technical folks' this makes sense.
The US seems to want to run a business for 'consumers', not a country for citizens. Part of this culture has leaked to some countries via the classic neoliberalism playbook of demonizing government services and public infrastructure, defund, create chaos and sing the praise of privatization to transfer resources and business to the private sector. All these experiments have failed miserably to deliver better services, promised efficiency or costs savings. Notice the absence of economic studies and wider dissemination of these failures compared to the ever flowing 'economic studies' demonizing public services and government. No one to fund it.
On the other hand public spends that benefit business like subsidies, bailouts, a wildly excessive military industrial complex do not generate the same ideological fervour. Think tanks, economists and the business press do not talk about inefficiency and size of the public workforce when it comes to the agricultural subsidies regime, bank bailouts, corporate freebies, the massive security state and endless wars and its attendant inefficiencies in the pentagon, NSA, TSA, in this case its 'grin and bear it'. Why does the NSA need to spy on everyone, how much is it spending, how many workers does it employ? How much does the TSA cost? Lament but make no changes. This is not how a democracy works.
This just won't fly for anyone concerned with the ethical issues. The point is not that Huawei should get away with anything but no one should. This not only makes a mockery of concern with surveillance but also exposes globalization and free markets as self serving political tools.
Huawei is a perfect example of how ethical issues are hijacked by vested interests with zero interest in the ethics to encourage an empty culture of jingoistic finger pointing that serve to distract and deny while advancing their own financial interests at the cost of everyone else.
We live in a 'fantastic' world where the same people who have made a billion dollar business model of behavioral targeting and creepily stalking people 24/7 aggressively push things like https claiming to care about user privacy and security.
Where Android can be promoted as 'open' in-spite of abusing all the driving principles of open source. Tech folks cannot be unaware of the massive and ever growing surveillance ecosystem in operation and many are infact actively building it, and pretense of surprise by such articles only serves to affect some kind of fabricated normalcy.
Many here swear by free markets, fair competition and a level playing field and yet do not see the contradiction of letting large companies play regions against each other to extract concessions.
Too many times we just see pro business narratives that rehash arguments by lobbyists, bought economists and the business press to support specific business interests and these one sided narratives are now being challenged.
Ethics is reduced to meaningless posturing if whenever it comes to action people have a litany of excuses on hand. In the case of surveillance whether its government or private its individuals empowering themselves at the cost of others not particularly burdened by the wider social ramifications.
It's a bit tragic that its only when without power that people talk of ethics and even with little power it seems self interest always rules. And discussions become pointless as it becomes impossible to tell how many will do differently.
Now 20 years later the private pools have faded into the background and the public pool is a lake but its inhabitants are disconnected from the past, only vaguely aware of the era of private pools and couldn't care less how the public pool came to exist. Their reality takes for granted this huge public pool's existance on which they can build and sail their boats, so Linus's arguments are unlikely to resonate.
Users will gladly wade into a private pool this time by cloud providers and that suits closed vendors like Arm who maintain tight platform control - billions of phone socs with zero open drivers - just fine. It's like every generation has to make the same mistakes and go through the same cycle of pain or it slips generational memory.
A NUC can be had for about $120 that sips power and has full hardware support for storage, pcie, graphics and is seamlessly compatible with the entire software ecosystem.
ARM is more comfortable with vendors ie soc, routers, nas vendors than supporting an open platform with access to optimized drivers and off the shelf parts. Thus the entire mobile ecosystem is closed and tightly controlled. Even early devboard makers like Odroid have moved to an Intel platform for their latest N1 dev board.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with hardware design will know this cannot be an accident in any way and form. It's there because its designed to be there. The fact that its not documented takes it firmly in the territory of extreme malice and dystopic surveillance unconstrained by any ethical concerns.
The only folks for whom this is not a concern are those unburdened by any sense of societal or ethical concern. They represent those sections of the tech community who have zero compass or qualms and do not see any problem building a toxic dystopic society.
Nobody is interested in the random individual so looking at this the purely personal level is pointless.
It's the ability to do this enmasse, 'collect' and 'collate', analyze and drill down to 'people of interest' and the power it gives the data holders that makes it toxic and ominous.
jQuery remains as useful as ever and the constant sniping here is a dead giveaway of a faddish mindset of not just making one's own choice but trying to force it on others.
Fortunately for those who do not have hours and weeks of time navigating NPM dependency wildlands, jQuery represents a quick and efficient escape. If Vue or React offer better efficiency or simpler use, users will migrate swiftly but given the current state of affairs that seems unlikely, so they can coexist serving different use cases.
The idea that React or Vue can or should replace jQuery is more wishful than real given 90% of jQuery use cases are for websites and ajax calls that would not benefit from the massive overhead of a shadow dom and NPM workflow.
Africa has suffered at the hands of global agendas for centuries now, some of these countries are barely 50-60 years of colonialism and were divided arbitrarily for reasons suited to colonialists. Yet we have narratives that seriously suggest all these invasive actions do not have consequences and these 'made up' countries after centuries of systemic exploitation and plunder will magically emerge developed in mere decades and if they don't its their own fault. That may suit a certain blame shifting worldview but has nothing to do with reality.
Narratives that ignore the kind of effort, century scale timelines, political and religious conflicts, colonialism and context in which we grew and how the current world operates and ignores all that to point to statistics have to go because they are completely lacking depth and connection with reality.
Look at the 'extraction' in pre-colonialism and post colonialism, the methods change but the objective is the same, corrupt the top leadership to benefit yourself and your companies, while 99% of the local country suffers. And if they don't fall in line organize coups, destabilize countries to get new despots who benefit you. This model is replicated efficiently in South America and across Africa and is happening right now. How can you 'develop' and improve the conditions of people across the world when your policies are actively and intentionally sabotaging them?
You don't because that's just cover, conversations about statistics by pinker and his ilk then fall right into place to deflect, deceive and affect fake concern. South Korea and Taiwan have great stats but what those stats don't tell you is South Korea grew under a dictatorship with extreme western political and economic support that grew oligarchic chaebols for political reasons to counter the North and China. Can that context be replicated?
Someone reading an auto site or watching a video, healthcare information, makeup guides or a million other things already provides nearly 99% of an advertisers profiling needs, and geolocation delivers finely grained control of delivery. No tracking and behavioral creepiness needed.
All the tracking betrays a certain unhealthy obsessiveness, a desire for control and second guessing and a false belief that knowing an individuals history, race, religion, sex, health data, political beliefs, purchasing history 'somehow' makes things more efficient. But this looks like pursuing an advertising chimera given it has never and will never be a 'neat' science and human behavior is complex. Why not just take the context and immediate interest, and show some basic respect for your fellow humans.
As usual many are too blinded by greed to realize this simple fact, focused on 'innovation' and profit but once you dehumanize your fellow citizens its the beginning of the end.
The tone of discussion on HN itself on these issues betrays the dehumanization and alienation from the general concerns of privacy, democracy and ethics.
All talk of accessibility and ease for new users often comes off as posturing by some tech folks who then proceed to rubbish any efforts at achieving it and the compromises involved. It fits in nicely with the 'contempt culture' recently covered here.
The growing problem for the technical community and new users is the marketing by other languages, frameworks and those vested in these ecosystems which means using forums like this to belittle, rubbish and exaggerate any perceived fault in everything else. PHP's contemporaries like Python, Ruby, Javascript have their many downsides too but these efforts create false binary narratives. This is not a good basis for technical decisions or informed discussion.
An ISP is local, accountable to its customers and more important subject to local laws that can be enforced. An added benefit is ISPs cannot collect, collate and correlate vast amounts of global user data. This is a huge win for wider society.
Compare that to unaccountable global organizations built on stalking and hoovering up every single piece of user data with zero regulation and subject to and support of their own home governments.
With this already in play 'concern' with localized ISPs cannot be justified without first offering more immediacy and potent solutions to the larger global surveillance problem.
This is an entire organization devoted just to this, and they in turn enable ecosystems of hundreds of thousands all interlinked driven by profit.
Yet on a technical forum which probably has a large proportion of people involved in this intimately as their jobs we do not have informed discussion, instead we pretend as if its not happening, or a one off by a 'misguided program manager', or the motives are 'benign' or unquestioningly accept self serving attempts to 'normalize' this surveillance dystopia.
This is an insult to informed discussion and enables an environment and discussions where blatant bad behavior is consistently overlooked and control of standards that benefit toxic business models are glibly handed over without scrutiny, skepticism or challenge. And then when one day one wakes up in dystopia some will wonder how it happened, this is a culture of delusion.
The regulatory framework was compromised by lobbying and the usual problems like ex PG&E execs in regulatory positions so there was no oversight. This is not a problem of government but corrupt compromised 'business friendly' governance enabled by the twin evils of regulatory capture and corruption which we have seen replicated in all industries.
The idea that without governance these companies would behave themselves is some kind of mythical fantasy completely disconnected from the real world and a long catalogued history of self serving greed driven behavior. No business is under obligation to behave unethically to make money.
At some point technical discussions will have to rise above current naivette and various parroted 'laws' and demonstrate understanding of the real world, corporate and human behavior instead of lamenting after the horse has bolted.
We can agree on the problem and then on the solution, but any proposed solution can't just pass through 'without scrutiny' because a problem exists.
Systemd proponents since the beginning have positioned any criticism as 'motivated', 'greybeards', 'haters' or anti-change which tells you that there is no space for discussion here, only 'acceptance'. Can there be any legitimate criticism of systemd without this kind of politics, hypersensitivity and now posing as victims?
More evidence there is zero moral compass in SV and given enough money people are willing to do whatever away from public view and posture and pretend to care about niceties like ethics in public. And these are educated folks who are not starving and desperate.
Discussions should move from a default human base ethical position to any discussion about ethics is posturing and empty, its only by actions that any sense of ethics can be gleaned.
But people who behave unethically cannot then expect an ethical society or ethical behavior from others. These others too have a right to exchange their values for money and attempt to normalize, redefine or hand wave away their actions.
A little bit of research will show it's far simpler to use and manage than Docker [1], and because it offers a standard OS environment with support for standard networking, daemons, logging, no enforced use of layers or ephemeral storage it doesn't need an app to hang around and manage its networking and other subsystems.
It offers seamless migration of workloads from VMs, is compatible with the ecosystem of apps and orchestration systems without the need for any special daemon handling, network or storage management that comes from a custom environment, thus simplifying container use and management.
All the improvements in containers are happening in the kernel, for instance the long awaited support for cgroup namespaces. Improvements in layers will happen in the overlayfs project with better compatibility for filesystems including possible support for NFS. All this work is happening outside the spotlight while userland runs away with the hype and credit.
The whole community around containers is not about the technology or understanding how to use them efficiently but who is marketing it and how many layers of complexity and buzzwords can be added on top. A bash script to build containers thus becomes 'declarative' and running a copy of a container becomes 'immutable'.
A non standard OS environment, single process environments, the uncontrolled use of layers, ephemeral storage all add dubious layers of complexity to containers for questionable benefit and increase management overhead and fragility at the base of the your stack. Now 5 years later its back to LXC but 'reinvented' by Redhat. So we get another round of hype to reveal the inadequacies that should have been known 5 years ago but throwing no more light on the core issues lest users get wind its just the LXC project in new clothes.
But this is not about users or ads, its about self serving people thinking its ok to stalk people and hoover up data without a care about privacy because of an absence of regulatory constraints and inadequate privacy protection.
The end result is the continuous building and expansion of highly invasive profiles to offer more and more extreme segmentation to advertisers and a toxic business model.
However without closing the gap between the creators and monetizers this model can't sustain itself and the party will eventually crash.
Don't let that price fool you, its sleek and the build quality and performance is up there with expensive ultrabooks.
The kind of structures and thinking you would need to create this challenge fundamental ideas of dissent, free speech and democracy at which point you should stop and question your objectives, but of course if its not in good faith that won't bother you.
If they were genuinely concerned about privacy, security and surveillance they would have a lot to say about the out of control surveillance economy and its participants including their employers, the security model of browsers, mobile operations systems, javascript, systemic user stalking and hoovering up data.
Yet those stories are mainly driven by people outside the tech ecosystem and within there is mostly silence interspersed with vague economic justifications so there is something truly bizarre about https extremism on the grounds of privacy.
If your packages are already signed why do you need a middleman? That is a better trust model for a distributed Internet than a centralized CA that is not accountable to individuals and can be compromised by power. Here people are neck deep in business models stalking people online 24/7 and tracking their location and some are 'concerned' about protecting the list of packages you download?