I mostly agree with this article and I'd love to share it with my circle, but I can't get past the condescending tone this article uses towards non-technical folks.
> These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom and their money is being stolen by their masters, the lords of technology, who they serve unwittingly with their data and monthly fees. These are the instant messaging and cat video addicts whose only concern is that computers be easy enough for toddlers to use. These are the techno-toddlers who refuse to grow up...
Believe it or not there are plenty of extremely intelligent non-technical users who are aware of these issues. And comparing users who are unaware of these issues to toddlers (while at the same time comparing the cognescenti to rebel fighters, even if tongue in cheek) is incredibly obnoxious.
Google, Facebook, and Apple invest ridiculous sums of money in the interest of making their platforms accessible in just about every way you can imagine (and many more you might not). If you want to have a single hope that your message will be heard, you have to think about accessibility (of your message). In particular, don't make people feel stupid. That is the kiss of death in the business of winning hearts & minds, and it's also the number one reason why I personally avoid most free software (and related) activist circles.
The systemd line is weird too. People who use systemd are probably in agreement with you here, any privacy issues there are a different breed than platforms controlled by large companies.
Also the claim that MacOS and iOS run on linux. Even with the correction, it seems odd to know that MacOS is based on Unix, but not know the difference between Linux an Darwin.
It would have been far better if the article had expressed this as a tradeoff: it's entirely valid to choose more time and less frustration over digital sovereignty. You can't assume what other people's situations are, or what a smart choice would be in their situation!
I disagree, it's not valid. People have shown they're fine sacrificing their privacy, their digital rights, their morals in some cases, for the sake of convenience and lower prices.
Taking a stand means at some point saying "It might be your choice but it's wrong." And I know it comes off as preachy and arrogant and better than thou, but if we (arguably the most technically literate people there are) are justifying immoral corporate behaviour in the name of convenience, I have no hope for the future of computing.
if anything it's more damning of toddlers, whom many of the current generation will have the "turn it off and on again" hard reset hard-coded into their early minds, not only surpassing their parents' technical troubleshooting but also their buggy device's first tier support's
Agreed. Statements like "On one side are the lords of technology ... and the unseen ones who control them." don't help, either. It raises an antisemitism caution flag whether the speaker intended to or not.
I wouldn't. For work I end up reading a lot of antisemitic text, and secret control is a major theme. This goes back a long way, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [1] It has stayed solid through the years, as in the claims of secret control of the Federal Reserve. [2] There are notable QAnon elements that parallel classic antisemitic tropes, [3] so it's no surprise that a Q adherent also believes in Jewish space lasers starting forest fires. [4]
In this case, I don't think the author is antisemitic. But when common antisemitic themes come up in a text, you can bet that some readers, me included, will perk up and start looking for other ones.
For me (and, probably, many other people), who doesn't daily work with antisemitic pamphlet, ‶secret control″ evokes more some shady secret service shenanigans (à la Hoover files or MK Ultra) rather than a nebulous international Jewish plot :)
I assume there would still be a side show to keep us distracted from the important things. And if current politics is good at one thing, it’s keeping people distracted with unimportant outrage.
Sure, that's the point of language like that. If somebody comes right out and says "Nice to meet you, let's KILL THE JEWS" then they get rebuked and shunned. So it gets toned down enough that there's plausible deniability. Instead they talk about the Rothschilds and Soros and (((them))). And "unseen ones who control them", of course.
I get that the language doesn't bother you. But there are plenty of people out there who lost family members due to pogroms brought on in part by antisemitic conspiracy theories. I, and presumably you, are not at the same level of risk, which makes it much easier for us to blow it off. But if your point is, "The experience of Jews reading something doesn't matter as long as I don't see a problem with it," that's a pretty weird stance to take.
The very narrative of secret powers controlling the world is historically tightly connected to antisemitism. Sure, there are alternatives like reptiloids, pedophiles, freemasons, etc. but Jews normally arise at some point in these theories.
The people accusing the OP of antisemitism before the thread got rewritten and also, the people accusing back the original accusator.
The exact names are not worth hunting down, it appears to be some overreaction caused by tunnel vision with no malice intended from any side. The important thing to note is that both one should not jump to conclusions based on a short bad behavior, and that just because you are hurt, it does not give you the right to go after innocent people.
I don't believe anybody accused the OP of antisemitism. What I see is, "It raises an antisemitism caution flag whether the speaker intended to or not." That's manifestly not an accusation. Do you see something different?
I don’t agree with this at all. It sounds like bullshit. And bullying.
“whether the speaker intended to or not“, is the really messed up line here. Intent is pretty important. In fact, IIRC it’s the pretty important even when deciding if there’s a violation, legally speaking.
Antisemitism is an ancient thing, so just about everything you could think of has been used as an attack. The point of coded language is plausible deniability. It's impossible to know without a pattern or a mask-off moment. This doesn't seem to represent either.
If you're trying to imply that some language and concepts aren't more common in antisemitic writing, you're definitely wrong. I explain more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245719
No, I'm implying that the post doesn't have enough context to say one way or the other. That said, I do personally avoid language like that for exactly this reason. Avoiding ambiguity is just good writing, and I've had enough "[marginalized group], right?" encounters to not want to give horrible people any notion that I might agree with them.
Actually, I think the post has plenty of context to make clear he's not going for anything antisemitic. Which is why I think it was reasonable to point out specific tropes frequently used in antisemitic writing.
It most likely just refers to venture capitalists or other absurdly wealthy investors, who do indeed exert quiet control, despite not doing any of the actual work.
Not sure why you had to bring Jewish people into the discussion like that. To be honest, I find it quite rude.
> Apple has gone in the direction of net appliances
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.
I find this attitude a bit misguided. There's never been as much availability in open computing as there is today. These are good times. A Raspberry pi running linux is miles and planets above what I could have imagined when I was a kid. And people somehow still pick an appliance explicitly designed to be closed (for a good reason) as an example of something. I don't get it.
There is a universe of difference between "availability" and "acceptability," and to presume that you can just pick open over closed for day-to-day tasks is oversimplifying things greatly.
To perhaps put it somewhat dramatically, the world outside of geekdom increasingly does not consider open computing to be acceptable; It is growing downright hostile.
I use Linux as my main operating system and it consistently gets harder to do over time as I interact with others in work and life; and there is no good technical reason (e.g. proprietary superiority) for this to be the case.
Surprised to see this feeling about Linux? For me it's never been easier to be a Linux user. More hardware works without configuration. I remember spending hours if not days tinkering in in Xorg.conf just to get a video card and monitor working together. A working camera and microphone used to be a pipe dream. There's more software than ever and it works better than ever. We have at least two major web browsers that are well supported. OK LibreOffice still isn't the equal of Word and Excel but it's better than ever, and now there's Google Docs, or other cloud alternatives that all work.
Not at at all what I meant; I 100% agree that for most "solo" activities, Linux is just fine; I'd argue better than the alternatives.
But (except for gaming, thanks Proton!) a lot of the "strongly interconnected" stuff is indifferent or hostile to Linux, especially the more air-quotes "professional" (perhaps I should say "corporate?") it is. I'm in academia, so I'm thinking about a lot of these LMS type tools (many of which are terrible anyway, but sometimes we have to use them.) Also stuff like Adobe, etc.
But there is more Linux support there than ever before too.
When I first started using Linux it wasn't uncommon for websites to demand you use ActiveX for example!
The only place where we're losing ground is in mobiles. There we really see the downside of proprietary monopolies like WhatsApp, etc. being able to decide where and how you can access the service.
We're in agreement here for sure -- my only issue is that the "proprietary monopoly" problem is far far greater than suggesting it's "merely mobiles" (which itself would be enough of an issue) Even if you don't see them now, they spring up FAST.
If you get to work inside your own silo, that's great, I try my damnedest to do the same thing;e.g. I've deliberately not learned Windows 10 precisely so I can really "walk the walk" in terms of showing people around me how bad I think it is.
But e.g. Covid challenges that way of doing things HARD. I work in higher-ed and also have young kids doing remote learning, and I can't just stand my ground when this tool or that tool pops up, either because of my career or because while I don't mind being a slight jerk to people around me about my tech choices, I won't/can't do so to these teachers who are trying their hardest.
That's a really optimistic view. Try to plug in a new nVidia card when you're running Wayland and see what happens. Also, benchmark an AMD GPU and wonder where the performance you're paying for went.
LibreOffice is a big monolithic disaster eating about 10x more RAM and CPU than the Microsoft alternative it's been designed to replace. Seems like nobody likes to compete with a free office to create something better.
If you buy Windows/Mac there is not even a question if the camera and microphone work. Also, games work often without tweaking and you won't be fiddling with settings when plugging in an external screen everytime.
100% agreed. I had a Palm OS PDA back when I was young, and while there was a healthy community of app developers, most of that was shareware, and the OS was pretty closed down. The IDE to develop for it was prohibitively expensive for me as a high school student.
Today, I can run full Linux distributions on both iOS and Android, interface with USB and Bluetooth devices via open APIs on Android, get a Raspberry Pi for less than the price of a full-price video game...
I'm certain that there are high school students out there doing just that and much more that I'm not even aware is possible. Many of them are sharing their progress on YouTube.
There's many things I worry about – the accessibility of computing and hacking is definitely not one of them.
The Raspberry Pi is a terrible example of "open computing". As well as the usual Broadcom close-source binary blob drivers, you also have a proprietary operating system running underneath Linux (ThreadX, now owned by Microsoft).
An interesting development/build environment going forward might be some sort of small form factor computer (i.e. Intel NUC, RPi4) running Ubuntu (possibly even Ubuntu Server on a multicore NUC). And then use a locked down, proprietary, ultra light Mac M1/Windows/Chromebook laptop to connect to the dev machine via SSH over local networking/USB networking - basically simulating the cloud development experience, just locally. It probably has the side benefit of making the transition from local development to production deployment look a lot more similar.
That's what I've heard about UEFI, TPM and Windows Vista too, yet people are happily building their own PCs and merrily running all kinds of software and operating systems on them. Others are buying heavily locked down iDevices [1] and are happy with them too. ´
People that want openness and the freedom to tinker with their own devices will always find a way to do so, moving away from systems that inhibit their efforts (or just breaking them open, getting people interested in reverse engineering, an invaluable skill even as an open source developer). Others that don't care will continue to not care and buy the system that best fits their needs.
I think it's almost an egocentric worldview to demand that everybody use an open system even if they have no desire to make use of that openness whatsoever at best, and see it as a security/complexity risk at worst.
[1] By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux userspace today!
The only problem is that from a political perspective you have given away all of your power for convenience which is not a problem in say a country like the US until someone comes into power who does not like you or the people you associate with. So yes as long as things are going well security is better taken care of, etc. but when things are not going well for you then all your bases belong to them... like imagine China for instance. So if you had the foresight to build you own bases and your political system goes to shit, you still have the right to carry on with your life whereas in other cases you could be sent off to some place you rather not be sent off to and your life destroyed because the political system and/or company does not like you. And such change is swift, damaging, and isolating as the majority will usually fall in line or not have done anything enough to warrant any attention -- i.e. like as in your average Chinese citizen... but a minority will have and then will be persecuted and have their lives destroyed as a result. Say Hong Kong opposition.
I don’t see what a political perspective provides here. It’s not like you don’t have a choice in consumer tech, unless there are strong networking affects play.
So far, but how far... you should ask yourself. Businesses make decision in light of the current reality. So far Microsoft has had to deal with devs using open source stack on Mac due to things like Homebrew, forcing them to incorporate a whole Linux distro into their OS to keep devs there. So as long as you can keep open source going, you can hold the gates. But question is how long... indefinitely? As the market grows there is room but when the market shrinks and has maturity how much room will be left. And general network effects of the cloud are already felt all over the place, like a document produced on a pc hardly ever stays on the PC it ends up on Google Mail, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, etc. There is no privacy and basically at this point is a joke.
But there are strong network effects. The more people who use a platform, the more apps there are and vice versa.
Other people not caring about openness is like littering. Even if it helps you a little (you don't have to trade against any of the things Apple forces you to trade against), it's a huge problem when everybody does it.
Sounds recklessly optimistic. "I don't care if open platforms go from 5% to 0.1% market share - I am confident manufacturers will keep serving me. Also market share is the purest expression of democratic will, questioning that Apple users want to be prevented from running non-Apple-approved software is egocentric. As is worrying about adverse effects of a world where 90%+ of the population have surrendered control of their computers to a handful of giant corporations."
Who cares if those corporations could (can?) kill any software company by blocking their products. Or news company, for that matter:
Unfortunately, the consumer industry trend will be to follow Apple. I see little hope for competitive open computing devices. Ever since the Nokia N900, openness has consistently lost in the market against faster, slicker, more integrated competitors.
Only in those markets where computing is a fungible commodity, i.e. servers, is the flexibility of openness any benefit, and even there it loses some autonomy to black-box "management engines". While these are still the most plausible vehicle for open computing, I only see them as appealing to a niche of amateurs buying cheaper refurbished machines.
Some may tout stuff like the RasPi as a viable alternative. Sure, but with the understanding that the RasPi is a CPU riding along a beefy VideoCodec/GPU, which has taken years of (ongoing) effort to implement open drivers for, and the RasPi4 still remains 2x slower than my 15 year old laptop.
In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
I don't think much is changing when it comes to gaming PCs. They have been extremely modular and I see no trend for them to change. But when it comes to anything of mobile form factors, like laptops, I agree with you. Less and less ability to change and replace parts.
When a graphics card manufacturer is allowed to artificially gimp the hardware you bought, is that really any better? they modify firmware and drivers in order to restrict you from performing certain workloads.
Yes. Much. They're (presumably this is in reference to Nvidia either with the cryptocurrency mining limit or geforce/quadro divide) doing this in order to sell you a more expensive product which has those premium features. Note that in this case premium is literally true; these are features which, if you want them, you need to pay a premium for them. Product prices are set by demand, not by cost. One happy side effect of this is, if you're not trying to destroy the planet by wasting huge amounts of power mining cryptocurrency, gaming graphics cards might get easier to buy.
In other words, if you want something you have to pay for it. Intentionally making products which are segmented is a fundamentally different thing than what is being discussed up-thread.
But then again the gaming PCs are full of malware -- most game launchers can be very easily called that. Not to mention that part of them have been caught to install rootkits, or the more modest ones just don't allow the game to be started if you have Process Explorer running (they claim it's for preventing game cheats -- which doesn't work anyway).
So while I have a gaming PC myself, I have long ago removed anything personally sensitive from it. I can't view it as a platform for open computing by any means.
I agree with you about the software part, but I mostly meant the hardware. What I meant by gaming PCs was that there is a market of modular computers, mainly but not exclusively serving gamers. You can still build your own computer from parts you ordered on the internet. You don't have to put Win 10 with a bunch of games on it. You can install GNU/Linux. I have done precisely that.
Agreed on that. The PC platform allows us to build any specialized computer that we like and that's awesome.
But I am worried. Non-free firmware is everywhere. The Intel Management Engine showed a very dark side of the hardware vendors. How long until a remotely activated censorship or spying is brought to light?
I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.
It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.
> I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.
> It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.
So, buy from vendors that are working toward similar goals, like System76.
Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.
At my work, we used to use gaming PCs as high power compute boxes. We used them fully, and they worked great. And they were as open as a PC can get - they had all open source software, no rootkits, no suspicious files.
Please don't mix the platform and what you do with it. Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.
> Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.
Not necessarily. Freedom has its own equivalent to the Paradox of Tolerance (ie. tolerating the intolerant implicitly gives them the upper hand, leading to a decline in tolerance).
Because of that, there are various limits that are imposed on giving (or trading) your freedoms away, in the interest of maximizing freedom overall. For an extreme example, it is not legal to sell yourself into slavery (or indentured servitude, or most other variations on that theme).
Less dramatically, Fair Dealing / First Sale doctrines make imposing a restriction on reselling goods as a condition of purchase (most prominently applied to the secondhand book market) unenforceable. Various jurisdictions have similarly made non-compete clauses in employment agreements unenforceable. And so on.
Of course, there are plenty of circumstances where free societies have determined that the freedom to give up your freedom is allowed, or even encouraged, but it is hardly universal across the board.
> Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.
It doesn't make sense indeed because I am not saying that. I am saying that most software running on these platforms is proprietary and at least a part of it is malicious. I think we were discussing the merits of the various platforms plus what most usual folk uses them for. If not, then my mistake.
We're quite free to assemble any PC we like and install Linux on it. At least we have that still.
The consumer industry. And I think it is to be expected, and frankly, not a bad thing.
For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.
But Macbook Pros are not supposed to be consumer products! It is called "pro", that should be for a reason. People work on these machines, there are developers, sysadmins, etc... You can almost consider it a dev kit for the entire Apple ecosystem. That's why I am a bit concerned. The "consumer product" trend is starting to overstep its borders.
> I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part.
Sure, but the right comparison is between an engine that you can access and might sometimes require work on your part (or you can hire someone else to do it) and an engine you can't access, and in fact is so locked down that no one not approved by the manufacturer can access it, so when you encounter any problem you have to take it back to the manufacturer, who (it turns out) almost always says the only solution is a total replacement of the engine.
You're forgetting one factor in this slide to locked-down engines: as a customer I prefer an integrated engine with a significant lower chance of failing so I will not have to work on it or pay someone to fix it.
It could be we're straining the whole discussion too far with all these analogies, but in any case, I think that would make sense if it were actually true that you'd never have to work on it. In the real world, my friends seem to be at the Apple store for repairs constantly, and Apple is bricking [1] older hardware when they release software upgrades.
I believe it has become just a marketing term - but the original macbook pros were very much geared towards lots of computing power to get serious business done. It has shifted over time.
> For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.
Ironically your car is a bigger spy device than your phone.
> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
But, as you note, there is a huge benefit for open server and embedded computing, and there may be trickle-up and trickle-down effects to desktop computing.
Moreover, programmable hardware is becoming more price and performance competitive, and open source support software is becoming more functional and usable, so we may be in an interesting era where at least some hardware becomes more "open" and it's viable to run a full stack of open source software, starting with your own custom RISC-V CPU on an FPGA.
>> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
This is a chicken and an egg problem.
Corporations don't have an incentive to create open consumer devices (lock-in,planned obsolescence). Consumers don't have an option of a consumer (not maker/hobbyist) level open computing device (TINA).
Hence the appearance of a non-viable consumer market.
> New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do.
This easily-debunked claim is repeated daily on HN. Obviously, macOS is a less malleable platform than some others. But the introduction of Apple Silicon did not radically change the extent to which the platform is "locked down." You can still boot alternative operating systems, disable system protections, and compile and run your own code (even the kernel!).
Except the device doesn't conform to any standards, and apple hasn't bothered to document any of it. Given they tend to release new devices on a yearly cadence its quite possible that the "hackers" will never catch up. Sure in 4-5 years it might be possible to boot a linux distro on the M1, but by then apple will have the M5, with new GPUs, reworked interrupt, iommu, etc. So its great apple has this speedy device, but its likely that in the couple years it will take to open it up, it will be behind the curve. That is the problem with the rest of the "open" arm ecosystem, you looking at 5 year old SOCs designs. The "good" stuff might as well not exist at all.
And then its there is almost always a perf/power difference between a reverse engineered device and the native drivers.
This again has nothing to do with whether "you only get to do what Apple lets you do."
I'm not arguing the M1 is an open platform (as, say, PINE makes), only that it is not significantly more closed than the Intel-based Mac. Nothing has changed with regard to Apple's lack of documentation. Nothing has changed about the ability of the platform to execute open source code. The pace of hardware releases, and Linux's preparedness to deal with the changes to the hardware, are independent from the openness or non-openness of the platform.
The fact that my router was hacked to run DD-WRT doesn't make it an open hardware platform. The fact that a newer model can't be hacked the same way doesn't make my router "more closed" in retrospect.
I don't know what standards they should conform to but I doubt there is a vendor-agnostic GPU driver that Linux has that works with every non-M1 computer. It wasn't that long ago that Wi-Fi support on Linux all seemed to depend on reverse-engineered Atheros drivers. Hardware support has always been a problem on Linux, regardless of vendor. Day 1 availability of hardware support in Linux is not the indicator of openness.
There is more to reverse engineer on the M1 than there is on a random Intel based mac. Intel has been a reasonably good opensource steward as evidenced by all the .intel.com contributors to the linux kernel, and a goodly amount of documentation. Yes the intel has plenty of closed source firmware/etc but a lot of it exists to provide standardized boot flow/etc.
The M1 has none of that, so a random intel mac's reverse engineering is limited to only the parts Apple changed from what is mostly a set of platform standards that have been built up over decades. The core system IP (interrupts, iommu, virtualization, pci, memory controllers, USB, etc) already have linux drivers. The M1 OTOH isn't even fully compliant with the ARM instruction sets because they apparently have extended even that.
So, yes the hardware may not technically be locked down, but for all intents it might as well be, since Apple could have picked up the ARM system specifications and conformed to them but they didn't. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of SGI's failed attempt to create a new "PC" standard by dumping all the legacy, designing their own chipset/etc and running their own firmware. Yes it was an x86, but it didn't run anything except their blessed version of windows NT (IIRC). It was a dead end, because it turned out it didn't really offer any advantages, over a boring old PC, cost twice as much and removed the ability to run a bunch of software.
The M1 is much the same, it loses out in a lot of ways not only on the software front, but the hardware front as well. If it weren't for its fairly outrageous single threaded perf, which is at least partially enabled by being fully two process generations ahead of intel it wouldn't be noteworthy at all.
Of course you cannot have absolute guarantees about the future but it doesn't mean there's an excuse for so much misinformation about the products on the market today.
Apple's head of software engineering has repeatedly publicly dismissed the idea that macOS will become as locked down as iOS.
In each of the past several years of releases they've expended a great deal of engineering effort to improve macOS security for the average user while giving advanced users control (for instance, they simultaneously developed secure boot on new Macs, and made it possible to boot alternate operating systems).
They continue to release source to several OS components such as the kernel, the cryptographic frameworks, etc.
They've never expended any real effort in developing DRM to prevent Hackintosh users from running the OS.
Criticism of system internals being poorly documented, and complaints against security features obstructing tinkering are valid, but nothing they've done is signaling that they intend to abruptly change course and create a truly locked-down Mac.
How is this question not moving the goal posts? The top comment claims that Apple Silicon is more locked down than previous Mac iterations. It is not. Does that say anything about future hardware? No. But we are in the same boat with the raspberry pi. If broadcom decides to fuck over hackers who want to use alternative is software for newer hardware iterations, they can.
Anything can happen in the future. When purchasing hardware, look at what you can do with the device that is in front of you.
Can you be confident that any future hardware, or linux even, will remain open to tinker with? If you're worried about tech being closed up, that's fine and well. I wholeheartedly agree with you. But future hardware being limited isn't the same as forcing an update on existing owners, locking services to new devices, etc.
We’re talking about hardware here. There’s no guarantee that all future hardware will be able to boot an unsigned Linux kernel that the user compiled themselves.
Tell that to people who were caught by surprise when redhat decided CentOS was no longer viable. Sure you could find alternatives, but it was still a deeply undesirable disruption.
> You can still boot alternative operating systems, disable system protections, and compile and run your own code (even the kernel!).
Except that the hardware is undocumented and complex, so there aren't any alternative operating systems that can actually use it. The people who have it "running" don't actually have working drivers for components required for ordinary usage.
The claim I responded to is that suddenly Apple Silicon-based Macs are more locked down than the Intel-based ones, and that "you only get to do what Apple lets you do." It is false.
Whether or not anyone has gotten other operating systems to run well on these machines is orthogonal to the claim.
I have an Alienware laptop whose trackpad doesn't work on Ubuntu, which sucks, but I don't accuse Dell of plotting to take away my ability to run my own software because of it.
> The claim I responded to is that suddenly Apple Silicon-based Macs are more locked down than the Intel-based ones, and that "you only get to do what Apple lets you do." It is false.
It is true for the reason I stated. You can run other, less locked-down operating systems on Intel systems, as well as older, less-locked down versions of macOS. On Apple Silicon-based Macs you in practice have to use the latest, more locked-down version of macOS.
> On Apple Silicon-based Macs you in practice have to use the latest, more locked-down version of macOS.
Because Apple Silicon computers were not available on the market until 3 months ago. Of course you have to use the "latest, more locked-down version of macOS" considering they have never released any other version of macOS for this platform! It is absurd to expect that they would backport support for an _entirely new architecture_, a monumental engineering effort, to previous versions of macOS.
If you are going to claim that Big Sur is more locked down than the previous release, I'd also like to see citations about that. The most significant change is that the OS-provided files are now on a read-only partition. You can still break the seal and modify it if you want.
Whether or not they prevent you from downgrading to Big Sur from the next release remains to be seen. They do so on iOS, but this has never been the case on macOS, which has the `softwareupdate` command line tool that can download OS installers for past releases, plus Time Machine for rolling back to earlier snapshots.
> It is absurd to expect that they would backport support for an _entirely new architecture_, a monumental engineering effort, to previous versions of macOS.
What they could easily do, however, is to release a new version of macOS which is not more locked down than historical versions.
> If you are going to claim that Big Sur is more locked down than the previous release, I'd also like to see citations about that.
Snow Leopard didn't have Gatekeeper. Things are clearly going in a particular direction.
Also, inconveniences are "more locked down" or else you could argue that nothing is ever locked down because all you have to do is find a security vulnerability and jailbreak the device.
The meta problem is that hackers love to contribute to stuff just for the challenge. They don't have a consolidated philosophy to make things and a mega corporation that put out products that the public buys. You basically need a Linux foundation that competes and fights with Microsoft and Apple but instead you have Google co-opting open source stuff to make a viable competitor and closing things down even further, where pretty much everything happens on their servers. It seems that democracy and openness in that sense always creates value that it can't capture but is instead captured by Capitalists with deep pockets. The value created by open source can't be used to forward the open source or user centric philosophy.
How could it? Well you need the same level of zealotry and fundamentalism that Steve Jobs inspired in Mac users and then deliver products that capture that Zeal. Where you could not pry me away from a Mac for a decade until Windows created WSL 2 so is now bareable as a daily driver. Before that it was a decade of Linux, which was as good and useful as a Mac... just never bundled, marketed, all the quirks worked out, so it could be sold properly. What made Macs replacement for Linux was the community which made tools like Brew which would make it possible to install all the goodies you need for development. It seems all the software still gets developed by open source, and all the value is captured by Capitalists.
As Theil pointed out you need a monopoly, competition distributes which is not good for someone looking to maximize capital. But at the same time necessary for society, for what good is society without distribution. It seems he's basically advocating for working against society and everyone with money is like yes we need more of that.
To some extent this is handled via GPL/AGPL, which gets in the way of companies building a fence around your work and locking you outside. If you use them.
But the general idea that you need a monopoly is wrong. You don't need a monopoly, only scarcity. Monopoly is extreme scarcity but you don't actually need that. Just enough to turn a profit and stay in business.
Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing. They're just not in the consumer products business. Somebody needs to be the Redhat to Apple's Microsoft.
Realistically Google's business model isn't completely useless here, i.e. make free software to sell services to the users. Or make free software to sell hardware to the users. The problem with Google is that they became too much of a publicly-traded conglomerate and then they get bad incentives to betray the community -- having a monopoly actually makes it worse because it enables abusive behavior.
> Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing.
Redhat managed to leverage their monopoly on their own trademarks to prevent anyone unauthorized from offering Redhat-branded support services, coupled with the time-bound monopoly on their own updates (because obviously no one gets those until they actually get distributed) that translates into a short delay for other vendors to incorporate those improvements (and longer if any discussion of whether to include them is warranted).
For most purposes these delays are inconsequential, but plenty of customers are willing to pay for the privilege of getting bugs and critical security fixes distributed and deployed ASAP just so zero-day vulns can't become one- or two-day ones (at best).
It's worth noting that this is more a matter of perception than reality, since by far the biggest factor delaying the eventual deployment of updates including critical security fixes is the customer's own internal processes, but it is hard to get a customer to admit that going from a 15-day to a 14-day delay hardly justifies paying a premium.
You're just using a pedantic definition of monopoly that would cause anybody to have a monopoly on something. It's equivalent to saying that no two pieces of real estate are identical so land ownership is a monopoly, even though in practice land is fungible with other land and owning one piece of land is not what anybody means by a monopoly.
Redhat is clearly not the iOS app store or 1970 AT&T.
Trademarks aren't even property, they're a consumer protection mechanism. You nominally can't even sell them, though the restriction is more in theory than in practice.
I'm not being pedantic. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are all monopolies, and most of their realizable market value is derived from that (more technically, the exclusivity is what enables the conversion of use value to market value).
Trade secrets are an even more extreme case of a monopoly that doesn't even have the expiration dates of patents and copyrights, or the active defense requirement of a trademark.
>New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do.
This is not true. iOS is certainly locked down but you can still build from source on MacOS, and many folks do; far more use tools like Homebrew to skip the build part and still get access to arbitrary tools. And while the Mac App Store exists, there is no requirement that all software be distributed that way.
apple didn't put up huge insurmountable barriers on m1. microsoft's secure boot mandates certain keys be shipped on devices but also requires users be able to add their own keys.
thus far it's been phones where users have no rights to their devices g no access to bootloaders. if you do jailbreak or root, on Android SafetyNet comes & slaps you in the face, disables a bunch of apps. I think apple has some similar restraint?
I think you'll be shocked how much use folks make of these systems, with reverse engineering, even with no support. if the door is left open people do amazing things. the gpu should be working very well. some problems spots may remain. but running a system, watching it tick, carefully, reveals so many secrets. it's only when humanity is locked out, when the process of human discovery & collective advancement are blocked, that our great human potential is squandered, wasted.
What Apple is doing with their hardware trumps anything that Microsoft or Google does with the software, in my opinion. With software at least it's more or less possible to hack it to your liking or replace it with something else. Thankfully I never had the displeasure of owning any of Apple products and hopefully I never will.
I don't understand the vitriol towards Apple. They are selling a closed (eco)system, definitely. But many people have lived through the virus-ridden 90s and early 2000s and want the confidence that comes with pre-approved software. Who over the age of 30 doesn't remember doing tech support on crappy Windows computers for family for years? Is that still needed for those family members with Apple computers? Not in my experience.
I also want the ability to choose and use an open computer - and I can still do so. I have both Apple and non-Apple devices. Apple hasn't destroyed my ability to build a Linux box. Chill.
> Is that still needed for those family members with Apple computers?
Honestly though, it's not nearly as needed on Windows machines either. The common maintenance needed for software issues has strongly decreased as good security features have become more advanced and feasible. One of those advancements is windows realizing "Hey, that unix permission stuff, that seems like an up-and-coming idea" and actually implementing proper ACLs to protect most of the sensitive files on your machine.
I'd argue that computing has never been more accessible than it is today.
A Raspberry Pi costs less than an HDMI dongle for an iPad these days and there is more free educational material available on the web than ever before.
When I went to high school and started becoming interested in programming, I was using Windows XP on my general-purpose PC back home, as were all my classmates – yet only two out of more than 20 ended up going into tech.
I think articles like this commonly make the mistake of romanticizing the author's personal way of getting into tech and thinking it's the only way possible for others as well.
Even the Raspberry pi has a few areas of concern with propriety firmware and closed codecs. It is not a completely open hardware platform, it does run code that no eyes can see.
I don't entirely get the notion that computing has to be 100% open for anybody to learn anything. My pulling-back-the-curtain moment was booting Linux on an Xbox & hand building a VGA adapter. Had never touched Linux or a soldering iron before that. Was it easy, no, but that's literally what made it so engaging & educational.
yes but: the % of computing that people do that can be engaged in, explored, enhanced, modified continues to drop. most computing happens in far far away data centers, happens in invisible far off processes that society can not see or understand or learn about or tinker with. most computing done is now special purpose, and its purpose is alien & it's presence is saturating, utterly surrounding us.
that we have some freedom for low cost on our tiny little free computing reservation does little. there is a full on society, a massive world of computing about, that we get to know nothing of, but if we want to set ourselves free & try things & explore we must utterly renounce the world about us & head off, like the elves of middle earth, cross the seas & leave the world behind.
society is becoming ever more blind to what computing is. thank you cheap single-board-compyters for providing some homesteading experience. but the megalopolises of computing being all effectively alien artifice, impervious to science, too far away to learn about, secured against us: this is a real & genuine horror, something no technical advance has ever corrupted society with before. we have always been free to observe & learn but now we are denied at the firewall. knowledge burns.
> yes but: the % of computing that people do that can be engaged in, explored, enhanced, modified continues to drop.
Yes, the number of closed systems is growing, but so is the number of open ones.
So many commercial projects these days are based on open source software or even open hardware. I'd argue that the total set of complex systems to take apart, study and admire has never been larger than today.
> So many commercial projects these days are based on open source software or even open hardware.
In the 90's & aughts, Linux & open source was obsessed with "free desktop", with becoming a world-class environment for computing.
But today my feeling is that 90%+ of open source development exists to help & equip corporations with better ways of making products & services. The only users the software is concerned with are other developers, businesses, most of whom will leech value & grow without contributing anything at all. But none the less, a couple folks persist, try to bring honor to the world, by being really good at something, by- for whatever usually very foibled reason- caring.
> I'd argue that the total set of complex systems to take apart, study and admire has never been larger than today.
It is cool that folk can go check out android, get in the source, kick the tires. It's colossal, a beast, but it's still cool. Having access to both an SDK & the means to go look beyond is compelling.
Alas I still feel like the software world about us, the software we use, is radically out of reach. We spend enormous time on social networks, chatting, writing, sending media. None of these systems are at all observable, learnable, explorable. It matters that the digital matter about us is invisible, far off, unseeable. Except as the shadow of puppets, projected against a wall, opposite to where we are chained. It matters that society cannot see the mechanisms about us. How the "natural sciences" are supposed to carry on now that we've obstructed ourselves from our reality all about us is a mystery to me; we have only a legacy of engagement, a history of man the tool maker. Now we are man, the tool-made. Software has become the firm prison.
All of this is because none of it adds measurable value to the user over other products, and when it does, it doesn't apply universally. Using Linux on the desktop won't be a better experience than Windows until Proton is at 99% compatibility with all games and Wine runs all windows applications seamlessly, so until then, we're stuck with Windows and the scripts[0] Windows users have built up over the last 20 years. And, until a fully-open-source phone means you can be just as productive (or unproductive) as you can be on an iPhone, consumers are going to pick the better product. Social media is the one breakthrough with Mastodon being a fairly widely-used product, however, most people really don't care about "can I see what my social network is doing" and just want a place like Twitter to grow a following or a place like Parler to spread conspiracy theories.
This is, of course, because FOSS doesn't have money. Apple spends billions on R&D and talent a year, and because of that they continue to make absolutely breathtaking technological leaps that directly increase consumer value (see M1 battery life and performance). FOSS, on the other hand, doesn't have a few hundred full-time developers and thus something like a non-android open source phone operating system becomes a delusional pipe dream. Unless you can really sell privacy and openness to the masses, you're not gonna win when it comes to consumers choosing the best product (and Apple is already hoarding the buyers who value Privacy over configuration/openness).
I think this view is extremely limited, a view only through the filter of what is. It, alas, is reflected in the 90's & aughts focus on the Free Desktop, which too often was an attempt to recreate & compete with the better-funded commercial giants on their own ground.
Open source has different virtues. Interoperability, extensibility, unix small-pieces philosophy are all extremely strong technical advantages that allow us to build together, to intermix & co-create systems in more organic & less top-down monolithic hierarchical ways. They allow more exploration & organic growth. The possibility space is big, & more so, allows diverse fronts of exploration & growth, which beget only more possibilities & creativity.
But the big win, the strongest strength of open source is sociological & cultural. Malleabe software environments - what we lack - blur the line between user and developer. Being unable to peer into things, to see the operations & systems, being forever treated as an end user by the OS, by the application, & so so few of them offering extension points, & usually only at high power-user levels, creates a culture of tool-used, of processed individuals, who lack agency & the potential for agency. We are creating a weak culture, that lacks critical review, critical eye, that has the power to consider the world about them. We can't even begin to imagine the alternatives, what a Free Software world would look like, where there are not such hard lines, such enclosing confinements all around us.
We can not know what value we are missing by not including humans in most processing. It takes an act of faith, in human potential, to know & to seek a more human-inclusive, open form of computing. I for one believe this is critical to insuring mankind's legacy as an intelligent, conscious reasoner of the world can remain intact for generations. Following this path will create different forms & assemblages of software than what we could imagine today.
In terms of the ability to develop a technical understanding of computers and to use computers as a medium for certain types of creative expression, much ground has been lost over the last 25 years.
Mr. Torvalds may never have got Linux off the ground if the state of the world had been such that, as today, a desktop operating system that didn't support WebKit were not useful to anyone.
Even if you don't care about connecting to the internet and rendering modern DOMs, try building a desktop operating system from scratch for the raspberry pi and as soon as you want to interface with a keyboard you'll run into the fact that you have to do it through USB, the protocol for which will cost you months of your life to understand and implement.
This is not to say the USB and the modern web are unequivocally bad things, but they were designed/evolved without any consideration of certain kinds of concerns (both pedagogical and engineering concerns) and the benefits that they provide could probably have been had without imposing these particular costs on the inhabitants of the modern computing ecosystem.
Now, admittedly, most people (and even most people learning about computing) won't want want to build an operating system from scratch. But that's not the point.
The problem is that (my personal, and yours, and society's at large) innovation is stifled by the contingency of a project's survival or success on its ability to provide feature parity and backward compatibility with incumbent juggernauts. No serious compiler author is going to use your code generation framework unless it does everything that LLVM does. Nobody is going to join your social network unless their posts will reach everyone that their posts reach on twitter.
Is it a mistake to romanticize the idea that a person with less than a billion dollars could totally rethink a particular facet of computing and then execute on that vision and not have to give up, in the process, ostracize themselves from the rest of the computing ecosystem?
10-20 years from now, maybe 90% of everyone's interaction with computers will be via speech recognition and AR glasses, using devices and software infrastructure provided by Google, Apple, and Microsoft. These systems may be provided in a very closed way where the usefulness of the devices is dependent on connectivity to the proprietary cloud infrastructure of the megacorps and through which everything you say and everything you see is recorded. Maybe you'll have an idea for a similarly-useful personal computing system that works offline and doesn't invade the user's privacy. Or maybe their invasion of privacy won't be so egregious but you'll have some ideas about how to improve the UX in some way that's outside the range of your Apple device's configurability.
In either case, the sophistication/complexity of both the hardware and the software involved will be such that you'll need a TON of capital in order to make a competing product. There are basically two ways you'll be able to get that capital
1. Crowdfunding and voluntary, gratis, open-sourcy contributions. This requires wide interest in what you're doing from the public at large (and waning public interest in privacy is one of the things that the OP is concerned about).
2. Venture Capital, which means you need a plan to generate return on the investment, which means you either need to plan to sell your system at a high retail price, in which case it won't win any market share from the cheaper established systems from the existing megacorps, or else you need a plan to monetize the data of your users by sucking it all up into your own proprietary cloud.
I don't have enough time remaining in my day to make this rant shorter or more coherent, and I've spent too much time writing it to just leave it unposted. So I'm now going to post it in its current state.
I used to work in residential construction, and have done pretty much everything from foundations to electrical to roofing. And so generally, if something needs to be done on my house, even relatively major stuff, I do it, or I could if I wanted to. But there is a world of people who have no idea how to do even the most basic things, and there is a whole industry set up to extract money from them.
So maybe not the best analogy but I see it the same way with computers, there has been a bifurcation between consumer tech that is designed to maximally extract money from the lay-public, and tech the way it is used by professionals, experts etc. The consumer world continues to drift away from the professional world, and I agree it's getting worse, but I think that's just a symptom of the tech becoming commercial. Open source has never been more active and widely used, I have more options to run more kinds of os/code on more kinds of hardware than I ever have before. So yeah, businesses have hollowed out the consumer version, same as if you hire a sears roofing crew to come do your roof, you are getting the minimum product for maximum cost. And that's a problem. But it's not necessarily an existential threat to our continuing to have computers we can use the way we want to.
Your analogy doesn't hold. If someone needs a new plug for their dryer, they might want to hire an electrician instead of doing it themselves. But they can hire any electrician.
It doesn't have to be from the company who makes the dryer, whose electrician charges 30% above market and requires you to use that company's electrical panel which in turn requires you to use that company's stove and refrigerator and buy your electricity from their power company and pay your bills with their credit card whose agreement prohibits you from having any competing credit cards.
I agree you can find flaws in the analogy, but my main point is that there is a difference between how things are designed for "consumers" vs professionals. The electrician in your example sees the world and their options for fixing electrical problems very differently than the average condo owner.
On the other hand, I was reading yesterday about the Tonal home gym (not picking on it or promoting it, just top of mind), which is a subscription based home gym appliance that you have to pay monthly for, and, pay to have their techs come and install it, and pay them to come re install it you move. So your example is actually getting closer to reality.
> I agree you can find flaws in the analogy, but my main point is that there is a difference between how things are designed for "consumers" vs professionals. The electrician in your example sees the world and their options for fixing electrical problems very differently than the average condo owner.
None of the things are actually designed any differently. You can go to the Home Depot and buy the same plug as the electrician does. The only difference is that you're hiring someone else to do it instead of doing it yourself -- in a competitive non-vertically integrated market using standard modular parts.
> On the other hand, I was reading yesterday about the Tonal home gym (not picking on it or promoting it, just top of mind), which is a subscription based home gym appliance that you have to pay monthly for, and, pay to have their techs come and install it, and pay them to come re install it you move. So your example is actually getting closer to reality.
My example is a horrifying dystopia that people will regret not preventing. The fact that it's infecting other industries will only increase the overall amount of regret.
You missed the fact where you were able to work on houses because construction uses common open standards / which would not be possible with vertically integrated houses that only work with a specific brand of furniture
I have to sound like a fatalist but today's software resembles yesterday's malware. It does not matter if you're running a general purpose computer if you have no control over 'your' applications or even OS (Windows 10).
In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your network and when.
> In addition, new privacy features such as HSTS and DNS over https, ESNI, etc degrade what control you had even further stopping you from even knowing what data gets out of your network and when.
Inspecting these, on a machine you control, is still 100% possible – I do it all the time.
Are you proposing we should go back to plain HTTP and DNS just to make tinkering easier? I'd argue that that would come at the expense of the vast majority of users.
It's much easier to inspect at multiple points, and I know what to expect coming down the pipe.
There are multiple threat models, and having different options helps in different situations.
It's also not realistic for me to try to figure out what's going on inside an SSL or TLS library.
I'm OK with TLS being the default, but I believe in always providing a plaintext option.
TLS also introduces compatibility and accessibility issues. With regards to GPC specifically, requiring TLS cuts off access for a huge population of about 20 years' worth of older devices which work fine otherwise.
There are many, many situations where plaintext ability has allowed me to access my own resource where requiring TLS would have caused it to fail, and I'm certain there are many more which I cannot even anticipate ahead of time.
If the goal is to encourage the general public to use general purpose computers, then I suggest the community try to temp some good UX designers to take part in foss projects. I suspect they many UX people are not extremely informed about foss and it would benefit the community a lot to have a reputation for programs with great workflows
From the 2.0 version on, GNOME based many of their UI changes on research studies of what ordinary computer users want, chasing after the corporate desktop and tablet markets. The result was something that alienated many techies, but failed to see much mass-market adoption.
I don’t think the problem is UI. I think the problem nowadays is that many people are so used to an Android phone (with Google Play Services and all apps sourced through the Play store) or iPhone that they are increasingly forgetting that ordinary computers exist at all.
Your argument reads like a fallacy (over-generalization): "UI/UX modifications were carried out on a single project with terrible results, so all UI/UX changes must be useless on any other project".
Look at it this way (taking a decentralized network as an example): either one of I2P's two most used implementations (Java & C++) would greatly benefit from adding an informative configuration wizard to set speed limits, enabling or disabling features, help set up UPnP or manually forward ports, etcetera. Such a small addition would make wonders for adoption. UX improvements cannot be ruled out, especially not that hastily.
Ironically, setting up UPnP or manually forwarding ports is hard in some countries today because the ISP insists you use their broadband router, and it runs a locked-down firmware where those settings are not available to end users (unless customers upgrade to their more expensive business plan). So, another example where it is the ecosystem that is biased against general-purpose computing – or at least general-purpose networking – and UI tweaks can’t change that.
You are talking about UI though. UI is not UX. The last time I was forced to use a Linux desktop environment for work, the resolution that I needed it to run on was not supported. It took me 10 minutes of googling to find the arcane invocations to perform this simple task. The UI looking really pretty did nothing to improve the situation.
Normal people outside of tech just want their problem solved. They couldn’t care less about some theoretical software freedoms. For them, freedom is being able to accomplish work without fiddling, close their laptop and have a beer. And I think this is fundamentally incompatible with what FOSS advocates are trying to accomplish, which is why we will never see the year of the Linux desktop.
Put another way: computers are just tools. The less fiddling my tools take, the better. I don’t want the freedom to modify my hammer, I just care about how easy it is to drive nails with. Linux desktops are a bag of disjointed wood and metal which in theory can be used to assemble the perfect hammer. Completely free of charge, if your time is worthless or you’re really into building hammers. I want to build a shed quickly though, so I’ll just pay for a readymade decent hammer with manufacturer warranty.
> The last time I was forced to use a Linux desktop environment for work, the resolution that I needed it to run on was not supported. It took me 10 minutes of googling to find the arcane invocations to perform this simple task
What do you do if the resolution you want isn't supported on other platforms?
Is that a rhetorical question? I have never ran into the issue of my native screen resolution not being there on MacOS because the hardware and software are built in tandem. I haven’t used Windows in the past 10 years but I would safely bet that the panel’s native resolution will work out of the box.
It is a rhetorical question, but to illustrate a point.
One way to look at it is that the OS is not good because it didn't support the resolution out of the box. Another way to view it is that all it took was a measly 10 minutes of googling to enable features that the OS doesn't natively include. You're right, the macOS probably would have an easier job at handling your monitor's resolution.
Fair point, I have to admit. And I do appreciate that to some degree, but it’s not what most people want out of a desktop environment since they do not have the technical know-how to do it anyway.
It's the ecosystem. Niche phone OS is not going to dominate the market until they have a competing app store that as good as Android's or iOS's. People uses Adobe will forever bounded by whatever OS Adobe truly supports. People uses MS Office will forever bounded by whatever OS MS Office truly supports.
Nobody really cares about UI. Everybody hates new UI. Once you are settled in the local comfort zone of the app that you use the most, nothing else would replace it unless that app goes out of support.
My laptop and desktop broke around the same time. I had an iPad Pro for work and next thing I knew I was just living in iOS. I did this for a few years before finally pushing back into desktop Linux during COVID lockdowns.
There's a lot of reasons behind why it's so easy to become used to living in the mobile ecosystems but for me it was very much about form factor. It's just so much easier to carry around a slim tablet with amazing battery life and software that "just works" when you live a very on-the-go life.
Projects like PinePhone give me hope that one day we can have general purpose computers in the form factors that made Android and iOS so popular to begin with. Obviously, this is a software and hardware problem, it's just that the world moved on to more and more mobile devices and FOSS stuck to less portable hardware.
This is the big problem. OSS advocates have been pushing software that is both open and completely terrible. It's no surprise that the public doesn't care.
I used to work as a front-end dev. The biggest issue facing good OSS UI is the fact that everyone throws their support behind Qt. Consumer OSS, and especially the Linux Desktop, will not take off until the community make the tough decision to first starve, then excise this God-awful cancer of a framework.
It's one of those technologies that "almost works", like Bluetooth or ring binders. It's not quite broken enough to the point where people can justify breaking compatibility and working on an alternative, but it is a major pain point to anyone who uses it.
Specifically, it introduces and entire class if new build/deploy issues, has a system that you need to actively fight against to get a UI that looks great, state synchronisation that feels like it was designed for UNIX terminals from 1985, and a whole host of corner case bugs and bizarre performance issues.
I actually wish it were more broken so that we could all finally move on to something good.
I think I have whiplash from the transition from starting by framing big tech companies as the villains, and then proposing the way to fight back is to buy lots of general purpose computers from ... big tech companies.
Sure, support the companies that produce products you think should exist in the world. But that doesn't make you some kind of warrior, it just makes you one type of discriminating consumer. Giving them money is not exactly combat.
I think the "right to repair" movement is an interesting avenue, which has had some meaningful successes which obligate companies to share enough information to allow users to wrest back some control of what they actually own, and interact meaningfully with the guts. What if we pulled lots of stops to lobby for this from multiple angles, and emphasize that if a company stops providing security updates to original software, "repairing" means providing an ability to use new software which isn't abandoned?
The solution is to foster an appreciation of the values of freedom and independence in the population, not only with regards to computing, but about life in general (freedom of speech, freedom of press, economic freedom, etc).
I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US. In the rest of the world, freedom of speech is constantly eroded with laws against "hate speech", because our cultures (latin american here) don't value freedom of spedch. If we could capture the appreciation Americans have for freedom of speech and extrapolate it to all areas of human activity, we would rest assured that our computers would keep being general-purpose.
Freedom of speech all around the world is eroding (some places more than others of course), step by step, we agree on that.
But I disagree that the US is any different, and is certainly not at the top of the ladder. To be clear: I mean freedom in practice, not freedom in legal theory.
"freedom of speech" is to the US as "politeness" is to Canadians: mostly true, but generally a stereotype that is fading with time.
I always thought it was funny in a tragicomic way, that a country that has freedom as one of its top virtues is the same one where you would quickly get sued (if not imprisoned) for acts considered harmless in other countries.
Perhaps the true free citizens of the US are corporations, to the detriment of natural persons.
Maybe this is not obvious until you've lived both in and out of North America for long enough.
I have little to add except perhaps that the truly free citizens have the capital to either a) hire good lawyers, or b) scoff any financial expenses and fines because they are the equivalent of pennies to them.
IIRC Jeff was renovating an apartment in NYC and he had his car parked somewhere for days with accumulating fines in the order of 10s of thousands but really, those numbers are 6-7 orders of magnitude smaller than his wealth.
> I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US.
I remember talking to a former coworker who had taken (or maybe taught) LL.M. classes at a law school with lawyers from all around the world (who were learning more about U.S. law as a form of continuing education). She said that she initially assumed that the foreign lawyers would be jealous of the U.S. first amendment (because the U.S. had succeeded in winning so much autonomy against the state, or against tyrannies of the majority), which is certainly the way many Americans would have learned to think about it growing up.
However, she found that most of the foreign lawyers were actually disturbed by or skeptical toward the first amendment, because they thought that some aspects of expression and communication were pretty dangerous and that it was an important function of the state to suppress or punish them.
As an American free speech activist, I was also extremely surprised by this!
One thing that's tricky is that there are several different reasons why people might be proud of or aspire to protecting speech, including:
- Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't. Conversely, censorship is a sign of weakness or fear, or an admission or clue that something is being covered up and people aren't being given a chance to investigate or think for themselves.
- Free speech is a human right that shows that you respect people's autonomy and conscience.
- Free speech is a mark of humility that shows that you accept for some purposes the possibility that you might be wrong or confused in ways that seem extremely unlikely or incomprehensible to you.
- Speech (and culture and belief) are areas of life that are not supposed to be regulated or controlled by the state (because they're too personal, they're too far from the things that states are really needed or appropriate for, or because they're used to define or understand the values and goals that people want the state to pursue in the first place).
- Free speech leads to good outcomes in some way (peace, understanding, progress, constructive deliberation, pluralism).
- Free speech prevents bad outcomes in some way (stagnation, totalitarianism, some abuses of power).
- Even though free speech might not always be that great, no state (or other entity) can be trusted to decide on the truth or the boundaries of acceptable discussion for everyone else.
> Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't.
In the U.S. we heard a lot about this idea during the Cold War and also during earlier days of tensions with China. Something like:
There's a conflict of these civilizations going on. How do you know which is right? Well, presumably the one that's not afraid to let you hear the other one's narrative or opinions. The one where you can buy the other one's newspapers if you want. That one doesn't have anything to hide, while the one where you can only get access to the local government's view of things presumably has a lot to hide and a lot to fear.
(However, I no longer think this distinction has been as clear-cut as we think. During parts of the Cold War, the U.S. government did a lot to reduce Americans' exposure to Soviet media or messages, or to stigmatize or deter in various ways the advocacy of the idea that the Soviet Union was right or that its system was better. Present-day Americans are also pretty concerned about Russians or others telling us things that we might find internally divisive. Some of these concerns are mediated by the idea that propaganda is bad or of no particular value if it is either false or conceals its origins, which might be approximately right, although the U.S. government has not consistently accepted either of those as ethical constraints on its own propaganda activities, and some recent American discourse has also evinced a surprising level of similarity to the Chinese idea that true information, or sincerely expressed ideas, might sometimes be bad for a society just because they are disruptive or divisive for it and not because they constitute lying or misrepresentations.)
(I also noticed that both North Korea and South Korea have laws prohibiting receiving or spreading propaganda from the other Korea. Even though I think it's obvious who has more to fear from the free flow of information across the Korean border, the symmetry in this legislation seems to show a lack of absolute self-confidence on the South Korean government's part...)
Eh? By your own reckoning the existing defense of freedom of speech doesn't extend to general purpose computing, so why would you focus on increasing that which already exists and has proven to not have a connection?
IMO one of the greatest enemies to success is broadening scope. General purpose computing: it's a good, specific focus. "Freedom in all areas of human activity" means endless conversations about what that means, what to focus on, what to prioritise, blah blah blah.
Yikes. I wonder what happens to those companies if they have the "wrong" answers. Antitrust, make the executives testify, deny regulatory approval of random stuff... so many options.
Also, Europe has been torn apart for centuries by religious, ethnic, or nationalistic hatred. The current laws reflect that. And communities that had to endure such hatred in the past will not be easily convinced that free speech is always a good thing.
Few states have ever pretended that speech should be absolutely free. The U.S. draws the line at speech that incites the imminent and likely violation of the law[1]. Canada only guarantees free speech within "reasonable limits"[2]. It's still worth fighting against governments natural desire for control to ensure "reasonable" speech remains as free as possible.
It looks good on paper and then in the real world people go "those guys that look different than you, they're the cause of all your problems and we should kill them/let us set up camps to kill them so you don't have to see it."
That's what history has shown again and again.
If you give free speech to people and groups who's express goal is to take away the power and speech of others they unironically will...
The paradox of tolerance isn't some other world hypothetical it has been demonstrated again and again.
This is the classic choice of liberty vs. security. Each has its pros and cons. Free speech may be abused, but that's the risk of freedom. And, in my mind at least, true freedom of speech is a necessary ingredient of authentic democracy. This is how I see it...
Correct, it doesn't seem like they did; the NYT story was debunked.
> dragged an enemy flag through the senate
The rebel flag isn't an "enemy flag" any more than the Republic of Texas flag. It's a historical curiosity that has some function as a completely detached cultural signifier.
They killed a cop? Wow, I only read NYT's retraction of the story, if there was an update on the retraction then it missed my radar. Can you point me to a link from NYT claiming that rioters killed a cop?
So true! I wish South America, Europe and Asia (all culturally quite close to the US culture) would get enlightened about free speech, if only to carry on the torch should the woke cancel culture win.
This essay a great example of online culture. So many stock received ideas: the 'shadowy elites' message, the Walter Mitty 'only we few dared to take the red pill' heroism, the conflation of freedom of speech with forcing a private company to host a photo of your asshole at no charge. We even get mentions of TS Eliot (guess Pound is too edgy) and Glenn 'my editor is oppressing me' Greenwald. In short, I did not enjoy it.
Your reading of this article is dramatically different from my own.
- No "shadowy elites", these are big, well-known companies driving market trends is broad daylight.
- Is it controversial to suggest that only a small portion of people are worked up about digital freedom? That seems self-evident to me.
- Nowhere in the article does the author suggest anyone be forced to host anything (let alone butthole photos) -- if anything, he advocates the opposite: that users be empowered to host their own sites!
I posted a knee-jerk reaction, but I should have written nothing. The essay didn't warrant the pique. Besides, I did enjoy the lines about sitting down to watch Star Wars.
I agree that general purpose computing is endangered. And that bothers me a lot.
However, if you are going to take a stand for open computing, you are going to have to make sacrifices. You will have to give up a lot of conveniences. As a technologist you will have to give both time and money. Apple and Google are not going to give up their billion dollar industries voluntarily. You will have to stop giving them money. And you will have to stop using their services.
My solution? I built myself a phone out of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Touch Screen and a Logitech Headset. It does SMS/MMS and voice only. I've been using it for over a year now as my daily driver.
I'm going to open source the code. Check out https://github.com/another2020githubuser/thepyphone for more details. Right now there is just a README out there, the real code exists in a private git repo. I'm reviewing the code and stripping out private details so I don't end up doxxing myself :)
If you like the idea, please star the github project. I could use the encouragement. Thanks.
> Apple and Google are not going to give up their billion dollar industries voluntarily. You will have to stop giving them money. And you will have to stop using their services.
If you believe Apple and Google need to give up their cash cows, it's clear that's never going to happen by convincing people to make lifestyle changes. It's like trying to stop global warming by convincing people to stop driving their cars. That plan won't succeed, period.
The only way is to get laws or regulations passed that force these companies to comply. For example, passing a law that says any device with an App Store must allow 3rd party app stores equal access to the OS. I'm not saying I want this law passed, but if you believe Apple and Google's business model needs to be stopped, a law like that is the only way it's going to happen.
>> If you believe Apple and Google need to give up their cash cows, it's clear that's never going to happen by convincing people to make lifestyle changes.
I'm suggesting people will stop giving money to Apple/Google when there is an alternative. And we, as tech folks, are going to have to build that alternative.
>> The only way is to get laws or regulations passed that force these companies to comply.
Google and Apple have billions to lobby Congress, so I'm not confident that will happen any time soon.
I think undermining them from the bottom up with a cheap open source alternative is probably more practical.
>Some may point to the existence of the Raspberry Pi as a counter argument. "Here is a computer built by a small company that is designed for tinkerers," they might argue
LOL. the Pi? its entire SOC is controlled by Microsoft ThreadX. if there were ever a better example of how the war on general purpose computing was won its the Pi. You only ever emulate or virtualize linux on it. the kernel is never aware of the threadx hypervisor and no open alternative exists. the officially supported OS developer just recently back-doored a repo and GPG key onto every one of them during an upgrade.
Oh wow no kidding. Was not aware of that. This article [1] seems to be the primary source for that. Also kind of funny that the ThreadX wikipedia page [2] randomly links to Intel Management Engine.
The person you’ve responded to has confused a bootloader with... virtualization? There are some legitimate concerns about how open the RPi has made certain things, but you haven’t read a sane person’s critique of it above.
Interesting, the VC firmware is ThreadX based, indeed[1]! The number of platforms this runs on is absolutely mind-blowing (from an engineering perspective).
>Between the two opposing forces are the non-technical masses. These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom...
I actually agree with a the jist of this article, but this kind of attitude is inexpensive, and part of why this point of view has lost.
The open society ideals of the early web were really important. We failed miserably at framing them adequately for public consumption. I don't think it's because "MOPs too stupid." I think we preferred our nerdy, esoteric, hairs splitting glossary of terms to a well framed lexicon that could serve as a basis for public understanding. The best we gave them was net neutrality... and we let the economists explain their own stupid version of it to politicians.
Take all the social media problems atm... Politicians, regardless of their country, ideology or whatnot, almost all have completely stupid ideas in this space.
There was an article on here recently: "protocols not platforms." It's as true about GPCs as it is about social media. Most HN readers can probably guess the content by the title. It's a vocabulary that badly needs to be in the general discourse, and we need to stop sucking at making it into a simple usable vocabulary.
"And even so, Raspbian relies on Systemd, despite the privacy fears of many."
What the actual fuck? I'm no systemd shill but this sentence makes no sense in the context of this essay. How does systemd represent a loss of privacy foisted upon us by Google and Microsoft?
Systemd, which handles DNS configuration, literally defaults to Google's DNS resolvers (giving Google each and every server that your computer tries to contact, and allowing Google to censor or redirect you elsewhere).
This article is a great encapsulation of why I think the whole Epic vs Apple and attempts to force Apple to allow alternative stores are a step in the wrong direction.
They will only make people more dependent on what will still be a controlled platform.
What will also happen is that the government will end up regulating the App stores, since it’s no longer just Apple running them.
This is one step short of the ‘ban on general purpose computing’ mentioned in the article, but a badly written law regulating software distribution could easily mean that it is that too.
I wholeheartedly agree with the calls to action, but I’d add one more: stop going along with companies like Epic and all this clamor about Apple as if they are freedom fighters, and instead call for them to invest in a foundation to pay for community work on a genuinely open mobile Linux.
There are numerous corporations with many billions available to invest, e.g. Microsoft, Epic, Facebook, all of whom claim to want to be free of Apple’s control.
The way to do is is them to pay for a real open platform that none of them own. It seems counterintuitive, but that is the real way to commoditize their complement (as was successfully done on the server) and devalue Apple’s
Proprietary OS, which would be to all of their advantage.
There is no reason such a platform shouldn’t be an excellent vehicle for games, and with first class SPA support no App Store would be needed at all.
If we really want to lobby for regulation, it should be to force boot camp level of openness for the hardware, so that anyone would be free to run an open software platform on a tablet, phone or laptop.
That would help any open platform compete fairly with proprietary ones without needing to regulate OS designs.
Boot camp level access isn't going to provide the documentation necessary to program those machines. It also impedes the pace of vertically integrated innovation that has been happening over the years. If Apple needed a public contract for open operating systems to build on top of, it would either slow down the roadmap, or break the open software regularly. It isn't just a money problem, it's a technical and human coordination problem that can't be solved with money. IMO, Google should have stepped up to build this right, but didn't. They built Android to defend against Apple not to invent a better future path.
If there is something to regulate it is making super easy for consumers to have choice over Apple vs. something else. Regulate the need for easy adoption paths between mobile ecosystems. This creates a fair arena for a free market to fight for consumers without lock in.
> If Apple needed a public contract for open operating systems to build on top of, it would either slow down the roadmap, or break the open software regularly
They managed it with Boot Camp itself, so it can be done. Also, forcing alternate app stores would be even more of an impedance in the vertical integration model.
That said I don’t think the forced boot camp is a requirement.
Agreed about Google. Google said ‘open always wins’, and then Android didn’t win because it’s not actually open.
It already is super easy for consumers to have access to “something else” vs Apple. It’s just that the only viable “something else” is Android, which isn’t open. Consumers need an open alternative to choose before they can actually choose it.
> It isn't just a money problem, it's a technical and human coordination problem that can't be solved with money.
Building an open mobile Linux problem is both a human coordination problem and a money problem. Not much different from Ubuntu or Firefox, just with a different goal.
You need a coordinated group of people and they need to be paid to work on it full time.
That can definitely be solved with money, as long as there are people who want to build it.
To start, it would be nice if consumers can choose between Android and iPhone and regulate that. Having the systems in place is a precursor to adding a third open alternative with a chance to be successful.
I meant human coordination problem in the sense that Apple is already working at a lower bound of innovation delivery speed. They by definition have the least effort coordination
with everyone working under perfectly aligned goals, under a single Delaware C Corp. Even with Android not being a fully open system, you are already moving away from the lower bound of coordination which is why Android maintains a 2-3 year roadmap gap with iOS. Money doesn't solve this, it takes _time_ to coordinate humans working for differently entities with their own goals/motives. This is coming from someone who worked on Android, at Google and met regularly with hardware vendors, OEMs, app developers, etc.
Yes agreed there is room for low end disruption. I would also agree that consumers can choose between Apple and Android but the perception I’ve encountered especially on HN is that it isn’t so easy to move which is why people call for regulating Apple.
It actually is pretty easy to move, the issue is that no other company wants to put in the effort to compete with these two platforms which already encompass 99%+ of the smartphone market. Any competitor (that isn't just a fork of Android) is going to have a hard time competing against operating systems which are completely free and raising the billions in up-front funding that would be required to have parity with these OS's. Whether or not having only 2 companies is a problem is one of choice, but the fact is that these companies are a natural duopoly simply due to the market's barriers of entry.
> billions in up-front funding that would be required to have parity with these OS's
I agree it would almost certainly require a billion or so of investment.
However parity isn’t needed from that investment.
It has to be ‘good enough’ (in terms of features) for users, and strong enough that people can build on it.
Android isn’t completely free - because Google controls what you can do with it.
The point about billions is to notice that how little a couple of billion actually is in relation to the revenues of the companies who have an interest in this.
To me, this means we’ve reached a steady state where the duopoly has copied enough from each other to make their own customer base happy. The biggest incentive to switch would be you are fed up with your current platform about something that matters to you.
Yes - I generally agree with that. I wouldn’t say it that way because I think ‘duopoly’ is an overstatement. If a market is ripe for low end disruption, it’s not a duopoly or a monopoly. It just happens not to have had new entrants at this time.
I also think that most people aren’t really fed up with the current two platforms, and certainly adding more app stores isn’t going to change anything.
The only thing that will do that, is a platform (or more likely ecosystem, since I am proposing that it be open) that enables substantive changes to the way mobile devices work, which the current platforms do not.
I mean really, do we think an open general purpose mobile computing platform would enable purposes which are not served by Android or iOS, or not?
Thats the big question. If a new entrant that was a true open general purpose platform were to emerge, it would need to create a problem for existing players. It isn’t enough to have better philosophy/ideals. Consumers of Android/iOS need to feel differently about their current setup. I struggle to see what kinds of uses emerge that are not illicit which can’t be copied by current players. Since you mention low end disruption it would rest on simplicity I suppose. But the whole smartphone itself is built on the idea of being a simple computer. How much simpler can we get?
> If a new entrant that was a true open general purpose platform were to emerge, it would need to create a problem for existing players.
Yes, but only over time. It took years for iOS to cause a problem for the existing players.
> It isn’t enough to have better philosophy/ideals.
Definitely. I’d say that’s why this wasn’t relevant before now.
> Consumers of Android/iOS need to feel differently about their current setup.
Yes - they need to see something they don’t have, or question the value of what they do have.
> I struggle to see what kinds of uses emerge that are not illicit which can’t be copied by current players.
Imagine a gaming phone with some exclusive content in an Epic store, and a truly first/class built out PWA / installable web app story. Those are two things that Apple wouldn’t want to copy.
> Since you mention low end disruption it would rest on simplicity I suppose.
Not necessarily. Yes, generally low end disruption means not overserving. But...
> But the whole smartphone itself is built on the idea of being a simple computer. How much simpler can we get?
It doesn’t mean literally simplifying existing conventions. People are holding onto iPhones for longer and longer - so a 4 year old set of hardware capabilities would be a decent entry point.
Software wise - my guess is that if we really have an open platform, there would be a lot of room for creativity which we don’t see on Android or iOS, particularly in the basic features.
And then there are all kinds of not illicit but not fitting into the Apple model kinds of thing.
E.g.
- Signed apps based on distributed models of reputation.
- Genuinely decentralized messaging and crypto wallets.
- First class, on device programming environments.
- Peer to peer distribution of code.
- Private local backup mechanisms that don’t require trusting a cloud provider
If you think in terms of the an open computer that the end-user really controls, the list opens up quite quickly.
Also, the number of users who are sophisticated continue to increase.
The gaming phone is neat idea and I’ve been actually thinking this is the way Microsoft gets back into phones. Leverage their XBox platform to build a phone meets Nintendo DS like device. Thats what I thought the Surface Duo was going to be. If MS could extend their embrace of PWA (since they don’t have a mobile app ecosystem of their own) this starts to look a lot like the Epic phone idea. However, in either case doesn’t this just create another closed platform to compete with existing ones? Everyone would start with Android forks it seems and want to control an app store.
From your examples I see 3 categories of things:
1. control over operating system feature (cloud vs local backup)
2. API access to platform compilers, linkers, loaders, at runtime (to build programming environments)
3. decentralized distribution (no single fault, p2p, etc)
As a user not a developer, the only one I feel is missing is runtime programmability which would enable all sorts of first class development tools on my ipad or iphone. I wouldnt be limited to xcode, or swift playgrounds. I do feel this is coming soon, it’s just Apple being careful with safety and security. Swift playgrounds is dogfooding these APIs that will eventually open up.
local backup vs cloud is interesting. I thought Apple allows this through a USB cable? At some point I stopped bothering with local backups because it takes up precious local space and I don’t trust my own ability to maintain computer hardware. “The cloud” does this better. To me, cloud backup is just 1 of N operating system features that depend on cloud services. I suppose an open platform could be service-less by default.
EDIT: not trying to say that Apple is the holy grail or anything, just trying to figure out what an open ecosystem would add that changes the calculus for people using iphones. What does decentralized app distribution get us?
> The gaming phone is neat idea and I’ve been actually thinking this is the way Microsoft gets back into phones. Leverage their XBox platform to build a phone meets Nintendo DS like device. Thats what I thought the Surface Duo was going to be. If MS could extend their embrace of PWA (since they don’t have a mobile app ecosystem of their own) this starts to look a lot like the Epic phone idea. However, in either case doesn’t this just create another closed platform to compete with existing ones?
It’s not obvious why it would have to be closed. That may be the case if Android is the starting point, but Epic and the streaming game services would seem to benefit from an open platform.
You could argue that they might be tempted to try to close the platform so as not to leave money on the table, but I think that’s just a mistake. By making the platform open, they can deflate the value of closed platforms, and capture the gains of doing what they already do, but without having to partner with Apple.
I see no reason there shouldn’t be an open platform with multiple stores on it which sell proprietary software. This would be much better than a proprietary platform owned by Apple, grudgingly forced to support alternative stores.
> Everyone would start with Android forks it seems and want to control an app store.
I think that’s a tempting, but bad strategy. I assume this is why we don’t see it done.
> From your examples I see 3 categories of things:
1. control over operating system feature (cloud vs local backup) 2. API access to platform compilers, linkers, loaders, at runtime (to build programming environments) 3. decentralized distribution (no single fault, p2p, etc)
> As a user not a developer, the only one I feel is missing is runtime programmability which would enable all sorts of first class development tools on my ipad or iphone. I wouldnt be limited to xcode, or swift playgrounds. I do feel this is coming soon, it’s just Apple being careful with safety and security. Swift playgrounds is dogfooding these APIs that will eventually open up.
That has been my strong desire as a user too and I’ve argued this exact point. It seems like closing the loop so that code goes iOS -> App Store - iOS, rather than Mac -> App Store -> iOS, with Swift / SwiftUI only apps would be a huge streamlining. I have imported fairly complex complete swift only Apps into playgrounds on even a 5 year old iPad, and it’s surprising how well they work, and how responsive the compiler is.
That said, there are still many other kinds of programming that are not supported in that model.
Much as I like Swift, programming models and languages are in a Renaissance right now, and I’m not going to stop wanting to participate in other language ecosystems even if Apple does this.
Therefore, this is a point of differentiation for an open platform.
> local backup vs cloud is interesting. I thought Apple allows this through a USB cable?
They do. But that’s an early 2000s solution! Who wants to plug in their device to back it up? Also what if you don’t have a desktop machine?
> At some point I stopped bothering with local backups because it takes up precious local space and I don’t trust my own ability to maintain computer hardware.
Very reasonable, and probably a good approach for many people, and frankly what I have done too.
> “The cloud” does this better.
Does it? iCloud backups are not e2e encrypted, and are available to law enforcement and anyone who can hack Apple. I trust Apple more than almost any other company in the space, but they are not infallible, definitely not always going to win in court, and nobody is unhackable.
Obviously a local NAS or independent cloud service is not immune either, but it could certainly be e2e encrypted, or have open source code that could be independently verified etc.
Also, access to the file system and system in general means that all kinds of other interoperability between local devices becomes possible.
I think Apple’s approach is a great turnkey system and I don’t want to see it demolished, but I think many other possibilities do exist.
> To me, cloud backup is just 1 of N operating system features that depend on cloud services.
Agreed - it was just meant as one example.
> I suppose an open platform could be service-less by default.
Yes, or have layers of infrastructure that you aren’t forced to use.
EDIT: not trying to say that Apple is the holy grail or anything, just trying to figure out what an open ecosystem would add that changes the calculus for people using iphones.
> What does decentralized app distribution get us?
It allows us to explore different trust and discovery models, and it frees us from a single point of technological or policy failure.
I delegate a lot of trust to Apple. They are pretty good. I don’t want to have that diluted, but I do want us to be able to develop alternatives.
In many ways you can see this as a classic innovators dilemma situation. Apple is over-serving with an integrated solution, but can’t cover all of the use cases, and so the advantages of a modular solution start to increase.
They managed to stave this off for a long time by optimizing execution, and because the plateau was further away than competition realized, but that doesn’t necessarily work forever.
It also doesn’t mean they will now be destroyed, because execution and lowest common denominator appeal count for a lot. They may continue as the market leader of mass market devices, but in a market where there are more options and they are less dominant.
It is interesting to make a connection between integrated solution and over-serving. To me, integration seems like a defense against feature sprawl and over-serving. Not saying they can't be disrupted, I just don't think it comes from their choice to integrate.
Disruption wouldn't come from Apple not covering all the use cases, but from making a really important use case harder to access than it should be. Amazon's Echo is a classic attack in this regard. If Amazon bets that Siri-like interfaces are important it should build a device that mostly does that, and does it better.
I don't see the smartphone as a whole being disrupted, especially by an open platform, since I still don't see a use case that Apple can't copy. If there was an innovators dilemma based attack it would need to radically simplify the interface. The problem is a multi-touch screen and display make the core value the diveristy of things the phone can do. A product cannot really collapse over some subset.
> App stores have been on PC for decades at this point and the government isn't regulating them.
The government also hasn’t been regulating App stores on mobile until now and yet this is exactly what Epic and others are lobbying for.
Forcing a company to allow App stores is a form of regulation in itself.
In past decades, Apps were not a focus of government interest in the way they now are.
Governments will inevitably take an increasing interest in how software distribution plays a part in fraud, disinformation, cybercrime, and espionage, which decades ago were nascent.
The mobile industry has self-organized around restricted platforms curated stores as a solution to these problems.
App stores are commercial platforms with liability for what they sell. We’re already seeing increasing political pressure on stores from government.
The government can’t force the installation of new app stores without regulating what kind of App stores are allowed.
App stores are just apps, though. I think basic consumer protection laws similar to "right to repair" could be crafted along the lines of "right to sideload" that are designed to let folks install software of their choosing on devices they purchase. No need to regulate app stores specifically.
Religion hammered into me as a kid that anything you do for good will always be partial subverted by the devil. While I don't agree with that literally, I think the general principle is 100% correct.
I've worked (and around) in many parts of the Internet (and precursors): dial-up BBS's, web hosting, VPNs, etc. It is virtually guaranteed that the better you are at upholding security and privacy the more certain you will (hopefully unintentionally) facilitate some absolutely dastardly shitbaggery. The kind you can honestly loose a little bit of your soul over.
I do think standing up for these kind of freedom of speech principles are important. However, the bottom line is that if the solution doesn't embody a reliable way to address the problems it enables then an external entity will attempt to do it, along with whatever extra agenda it represents.
I note that even the Raspberry Pi is moving towards locked down devices, the RPi4 has an (easily cracked) HMAC blocking booting into the open source firmware and I hear more recent hardware editions have RSA signing support in the bootrom code.
This problem is real and important. My uncle who is a lawyer knew how to use dBase IV in the 80s. Nowadays young people, even university graduates, struggle to use a mouse. Scrolling is the pinnacle of competence it seems.
We need people going back to buying PC. Thanks to corona, they do now. We should focus on those rich-capability apps and software
Tell that to the zoomer at work who I had to teach how right click copied and pasted text. When you grow up on iPads and iPhones instead of laptops and desktops, this is what happens. The next generation aren't digital natives. They are coddled from the real experience by the actual digital natives who write their software for them. A true digital native knows how to chop their own wood, imo.
Many people dont know right click. many people never use laptops, or rarely, they own a $1000 phone and a $200 crappy laptop. You struggle if you ve never used it before
But... a mouse has two buttons on it. Surely in the normal process of using it you'll eventually try pressing the second one? Even if you don't know what it does at the start, you try things when you're getting acquainted with something new.
Yes, that's true, with a touch-sensitive surface to distinguish between left and right clicks. That does make them less discoverable than a traditional mouse.
You’re missing something. You would need to be running the ZeroNet daemon on your own machine (presumably on the same port, if it’s not the default) for that link to work.
I'm so weary of my smartphone choices being determined primarily by what features will be stripped from me. Losing the headphone jack, losing video-out, losing custom ROMs, losing root access, losing notification leds, losing fingerprint readers that can wake the phone, losing 1:1.5 screens and then 16:10 and then 16:9 and then 18:9 and then 19.5:9 screens until the blasted things are so pointlessly tall I can't reach the buttons with my thumb anymore.
The problem is that most people don't seem to want do any computing, general purpose or not. They want 21th century version of telephone and cable tv, computing behind the scenes is incidental and implementation detail.
The market has shown us most users don’t want a “general purpose computer”? People explicitly want appliances that do something well, and a company that backs them. Users want what computers enable: to keep in touch with others and do work and play most efficiently.
I remember the 80s and 90s and trying to help friends with weird MS Dos or Windows bugs or Windows driver errors. The general, unopinionated nature of these platforms made it harder for most people to do what they wanted.
I’m not saying for some of us it’s not fun to have general purpose computers. But as a consumer model I’m not sure you could argue it’s ultimately successful. The computer and all its complexities is a “cost center” to the real outcomes most care about.
Does this war exists in the real life?
Is there any evidence that "the lords of technology and their masters" are making any moves against IPFS and general computing?
Because I see the opposite. For example Sony, one of the most proprietary companies, is now releasing source code and bootloader unlocker [0]. Could you imagine this 10 years ago?
I don't see anything about general computing there, am I missing something?
Apple still makes macbooks, and those have documented and well supported methods to disable all protections so that user code can be loaded.
If you are trying to say that iPhone should be a general-purpose computer, then I am going to ask: "why?". There are different devices for different purposes. The phone does not need to be general purpose, and back in the day my Nokia had no software customizeability at all. And if you want a phone which can run arbitrary software, there are plenty of unlockable Android headsets on the market.
It is like saying "Ford is attacking fuel-efficient cars" because they are making F-150 truck.
> I don't see anything about general computing there, am I missing something?
Did you already accept as a fact that phones are not general-purpose computers? But they should be! Here is an example: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
Androids force many restrictions on the user as well, even those with unnlockable bootloader. You can never run mainline Linux on them due to proprietary drivers depending on ancient kernels, which eventually leads to non-updatable electronic garbage. You can not change the operating system unless you have ancient Linux kernel under the hood.
> It is like saying "Ford is attacking fuel-efficient cars" because they are making F-150 truck.
But a general-purpose phone does not prevent you from using your phone and being secure. It only adds unlimited possibilities. Using your parallel, Ford is attacking the industry by creating car+truck, 2 in 1.
> Did you already accept as a fact that phones are not general-purpose computers? But they should be! Here is an example:...
Let me ask again: "why should they be?". There are different devices for different purposes. There is no rule saying that every device must be able to run mainline Linux. We just need enough Linux-running devices around.
Let me use food-based analogy this time: there are good, tasty and healthy restaurants out there. There are also McDonalds restaurants which are not. What I am hearing is equivalent of saying "McDonalds attacks healthy food" because they don't want to sell it. And your motivation? "Look, there are hamburger places which sell healthy food!"
Yes, there are many different food places just like there are many different phone types. There is no reason they should all be the same. Yes, I can agree that some are "healthier" / "more open" then others.
But one place not selling the stuff you like is not an "attack". Apple is not buying open-source phone manufacturers to close them, nor they are suing them out of existence. They have full rights to sell closed-system iPhones just like McDonalds has the full right to sell milkshakes with 110 g sugar per serving.
Why do people need freedom? Most of the time it's not needed until it's too late. Same here. Developers of proprietary software have unjust power over the users and often apply it for their own benefit against the will of users: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor....
> What I am hearing is equivalent of saying "McDonalds attacks healthy food" because they don't want to sell it.
I like your new analogy. You are essentially saying that selling bad food is fine as long as someone else produces good food. But it's not fine at all, it should be discouraged by laws or ethics. People get addicted to junk food and can't stop eating it, getting sick. This is exactly the same that is happening with software: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2016/spring/you-are-what-you-ru....
> But one place not selling the stuff you like is not an "attack".
It is. It makes walled gardens a norm. It does not benefit users in any way, because everything can be achieved with open systems. Instead, it just forces users to obey the company, buy more staff and/or give all personal data. This is exactly what Apple is doing by the way.
> They have full rights to sell closed-system iPhones just like McDonalds has the full right to sell milkshakes with 110 g sugar per serving.
This is very harmful for the health and should be severely restricted, like cigarets. Same about proprietary software.
Unlocking the bootloader on your phone will make the phone fail the security check required for online banking and other apps. Therefore, it is not something that the general public can really take advantage of. It is great that Sony provides unlocking, but it will remain the purview of a small community of nerds like us, and it does nothing to improve accessibility to general computing for the masses.
You can still install 3rd party apps on Android without unlocking the phone - this should be enough for general public open computing, this gives you access to KODI, ZeroNet, I2P etc.., all the stuff that the article talks about.
This is irrelevant. The general public has no interest in "General Purpose Computing". I am a nerd, but while I have an interest in a laptop that is general purpose, I have no interest in a phone that is general purpose. I want it locked down. I also have to keep my mom online, and tend to steer her towards her iPad rather than her iMac, because there's just been less tech support (on my part) required for it.
General Purpose computing and Privacy have little to do with each other. There is more malware installed on General Purpose computers than there are iPhones. Facebook tracks you on your computer just as much as your phone. However, the phone is becoming a place where they can't track you, and there's little Facebook can do about it. Contrast with Sony found installing exploitable root-kits on PCs (to stop you copying CDs IIRC).
> The general public has no interest in "General Purpose Computing".
But they do have an interest in their own well-being, and the well-being of society. I think the author's point is that widespread access to general purpose computing is a good thing for society in general, and that it will be a bad thing if access to general purpose computing disappears.
The problems I see are (painting with a large brush) are that in general:
- the public doesn't realize what a gift general purpose programming languages are, how much power they have to solve problems, and how much fun they can be
- the public doesn't care to give children access to these systems who might otherwise grow up learning and appreciating them
- the public doesn't understand that the ability to read and write code constitutes a literacy of its own and can profoundly impact how one thinks in a positive way
But these problems are close corollaries of other problems with society in general: people don't read good books like they ought, people don't learn musical instruments or other skills as often as they should, and many people are forced to work so hard to pay for basic necessities that spending any time on productive leisure (what luminaries called "improving oneself" in prior centuries) is effectively impossible.
This exactly. I read the essay and said to myself “meh”. Having a phone that I can’t mess up is actually pretty dang nice.
High performance computing is definitely locked down. An M1 Mac is pretty dang nice.
But for general purpose computing you don’t need those fancy graphics. I’ve been thinking of microcontrollers as the equivalent of our 1980s general purpose computers more so than the rpi. The rpi still requires a lot of software. An mcu just works. And we can create a nice little gpu for it with an fpga.
Big corporations aren’t locking you out of this world. They are actually helping you get this awesome stuff for pennies as a consequence of the massive supply chain.
Absolutely. I need a good general purpose computer to program on. But for my phone and family, I 100% want to outsource security and updates to someone competent.
The war on general purpose computing is, as they say, real and spectacular. But this essay doesn't really get to the heart of the matter, which is that customer expectations are changing as computing finds its way into more applications and broader audiences.
General purpose computing happened in the first place by sheer accident -- there wasn't a practical way for the OS vendor to control what was installed on a system. To create such a mechanism would require an enormous investment in trusted boot, code signing, and app sandboxing. Yet the security needs of operating systems, driven by customer expectations, are creating all the elements so that vendor controls becomes as easy as flipping a switch.
That's how we got here, not by some vendor plot. Before, it wasn't possible. Now, it's possible, due merely to OS vendors responding to customer pressure for sandboxing infrastructure.
And customers are really pushing and driving putting this infrastructure in place.
People are complaining that the OS is not able to securely identify between two applications in the same user context. So they filed a bogus CVE, where the content of the CVE is basically "Linux is not an iPhone". It is a OS app sandboxing feature request, masquerading as a bug report to the keyring team.
Read the belated reply from the gnome keyring folks, pleading with people to understand what the linux security model is, and that linux doesn't have the sandboxing capabilities that have been rolled out to other (paid) operating systems:
Yet people don't want to hear it. They are demanding that everything be turned into an iphone (in terms of app sandboxes) but they are also demanding that once the OS vendor has the power to install a chokepoint around all the apps, that they wont set up a little toll booth there as well.
But IMO asking vendors to not exploit that for commercial gain is only going to be safeguarded by regulation, and that regulation will hand over to the government the power to decide what is and is not allowed to run. The moment the technical genie was let out of the bottle and OS vendors had the power to control who was running what, that spells the end of general purpose computing, at least from a "freedom" point of view.
As far as end user devices go, it's a mature industry now. Once a certain level of functionality has been achieved, the devices become more polished but also more locked down. Happened to things like cars, stereos and others before. I bet full self driving cars will be completely sealed and no tinkering or self repair possible. They will be as or less repairable as an iPad.
Developer machines will probably soon be viewed as specialized devices that most normal users will not even know how to use.
This is mostly ok. Most end users don't want or need general computing.
There is a factual inaccuracy in the article: Beaker Browser is not "actually under the control of governments and big corporations". It is an independent open-source project.
I guess that’s what they call “computing” now... Anyway, does my using of a GPC as an HTPC count? (Still, you can take my iPad from my dead, cold hands!)
General Purpose Computing is and ought to be an app on a user friendly internet device. An important app, but one of many.
The fact that the internet device is actually a special-purpose simulator running on general-purpose hardware is an implementation detail. Even most programmers want to do other activities on their devices, like check their email. This should be co-equal with programming; anything you do in your coding environment shouldn't break your ability to get email.
Is general-purpose-computing-as-an-app dying? No: repl.it for kids/consumers is great, there's an explosion of nocode/locode for consumers/businesses; and free tiers of the public clouds are available if you really really want to muck with linux.
> General Purpose Computing is and ought to be an app on a user friendly internet device. An important app, but one of many.
If "a user friendly internet device" here is code for "an internet device that doesn't provide its owner full control over it" then... no, absolutely not.
Having control over your own device isn't just about learning to program. Certainly that's important, but it's not the whole story. The question is: what can you do once you've learned? If your device restricts what you're allowed to do, and you're at the mercy of the platform provider, the power dynamic between the user and the platform is hugely asymmetric.
"Most bloggers get so little traffic on their personal websites that they see no point in continuing them, so they give up. Visit personal blogs and leave comments that let their writers know their efforts are appreciated."
Sounds like a good idea, but in practice, at scale, this is exactly the kind of functionality that doesn't work without a closed platform to take care of things. Who deletes the spam comments?
They have already won it is over. Op's post is 30 years too late. Please press F.
"First it came for my shopping habits, and I did nothing because I didn't care.
Then it came for my location data, and I did nothing because I didn't care.
Then it came for my thoughts, and I did nothing because I didn't care.
Then it came for my juices, and it knew exactly where I kept them."
> And even so, Raspbian relies on Systemd, despite the privacy fears of many.
While I do agree with Systemd bashing in general since it completely breaks with Unix design principles... this is the first time I have seen privacy as an argument?
The author may have the systemd-resolved privacy complaints in mind, where the systemd DNS daemon has Google's DNS servers hardbaked into the source code. It will fallback to Google DNS if the configured server is down.
A few concerned individuals raised their worries in a ticket and were shut down for 'tinfoil hat reasoning' or something like that.
It may be an extreme case, but many Linux users would rather not have any particular provider baked into core system services. Personally I'd rather know my DNS server is down or that I've misconfigured it, much more than I would have my system contact Google without my knowledge.
The page linked says "space-separated list of default DNS servers". From this I would assume that this is just an option one could simply overwrite by using a non-default configuration. That doesn't seem so bad, however I could also be misunderstanding and in order to disable these servers one would need to patch the source code like you imply. Do you have a more specific source that would answer this question?
Edit: from the other comments in this thread it seems like it it is a build time option
It's a hard-coded (as you found, compile time macro) value that resolvd uses when it can't find any configuration. So, one doesn't need to patch the source or recompile resolvd, one just needs to add a configuration file (what most distros do).
That said, it's mind-blowing that systemd needs a DNS resolver to start its boot sequence. It should really be able to run without one, and have this as the default. It should also not try to set the network up before it runs the network setup code, and respect all of the user's network configurations. The entire thing is completely messed up, but this one complaint isn't all that it looks like.
Here is the rationale for using Google as the default for ntp which appears to be a problem with ntppool.org than any supposed favouritism for Google.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/16148
However I was under the impression an OSS project could use *.pool.ntp.org as their default but was preferred that they get a vendor zone.
I mean. It's an open-source software. Those concerned can just use a patched version. Not even patched - this is fixed with a build flag - I'm sure security-oriented distributions have already specified the right one.
As a last resort, you can always block requests to 8.8.8.8 with iptables.
Those concerned may be as much or more concerned about fixing this for the masses as they are about fixing it for themselves, hard to speculate on their motivations.
It's still not a reason to harrass a maintainer who already provided a convenient override to set it to whatever one wants. Maybe Ubuntu distro is a better place to get the "safe" configuration to the masses.
It's a pretty rare phobia to be honest, and I think people who consider 8.8.8.8 a reasonable default are totally justified to. For those who don't agree there are plenty of options, that's how open source is supposed to work.
I would be more interested how much systemd made from selling its users tracking data to Google and if they didn't it would be interesting which idiot passed up a chance to secure a possibly sizeable budget increase by handing Google all that data for free. Mozilla got millions from making Google the default search and you can't tell me Google doesn't value the data it gathers from this, they have a tendency to kill under performing projects.
While it's possible for it to be patched out, the default behaviour of any application with similar scope to systemd should be to respect the users privacy. If every application required the user to "opt-out" of privacy infringing features, it would be a very time consuming and costly activity that only knowledgable users could do.
Regular users are likely to spend most of digital lives on a device fully controlled by Google, I doubt that a couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a significant compromise to their privacy (how do they know that whatever they get from their provider is better by the way?).
My main point here is just that open source maintainers don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot of their time. If people strongly disagree with some design decisions - and it's not a backdoor or something, it's a pretty innocent design decision to rely on a highly available DNS server as a last back up - open source gives them a lot of opportunities to do their own thing.
Unfortunately I don't find your argument to be convincing, the knowledge of such privacy concerns varies significantly amongst regular users. I don't believe they are using such software with full knowledge of their privacy-infringing features. And with every feature that evolves such default behaviour, it risks snowballing into rituals that must be performed in order to "opt-out" and done only by those knowledgeable enough.
> I doubt that a couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a significant compromise to their privacy
It could be, it could be more. I don't think either of us are in a position to say exactly and likely largely depends on whether such default behaviour was changed by package maintainers in the various distributions.
> My main point here is just that open source maintainers don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot of their time.
This is something we both can agree on however I tend to apply this only to those not receiving a salary for doing OSS work. I am of course not endorsing harassment or anything of the sort. People should always choose respectful conversation and debate when discussing these issues.
The author admits in the comments that they have no real basis for accusing systemd of violating privacy.
> I think the problem many see with systemd is that it is a very large block of code that is hard to understand and modify. This makes it possible for unscrupulous organizations to hide things in systemd for spying on users. This also makes it more susceptible to hacking and less secure. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the subject to have a strong opinion about it. I just know that many Linux users strongly oppose it.
In my view it's hard to take the author seriously with claims like this, and in the same paragraph praise for the Raspberry Pi as an open platform (it contains proprietary components).
Edit: More egregiously, the author claims that iOS and macOS are based on Linux.
Assuming your distro hasn't fixed this antifeature, systemd sends your NTP and DNS requests to Google as a fallback if there's no other configuration or DHCP. Previous HN discussion:
It's not the argument anyone else is going to make, but as an example... the last time I checked, ecryptfs had been rendered nonfunctional in Debian Buster because the current revision of systemd had made changes that made ecryptfs nonfunctional. Supposedly they're going to have a solution in systemd that'll be of equivalent functionality, but in the meantime, in debian, you're stuck with the systemd stack and not using software that systemd renders nonfunctional.
So I had to back up, reinstall and encrypt the whole hard drive, including swap space, because that's how debian installers do it...
And that’s all open source software. The benefits claimed by open source activists are overstated and illusory. You didn’t have control of your OSS software stack when it mattered.
Deep down in in systemd-resolved there's hard coded fallback DNS and NTP addresses. They're build-time options with defaults set to Google and CloudFlare. They only see is in catastrophic misconfigurations. They're also completely under the control of the distro which can set whatever defaults it wants.
The anti-systemd brigade has translated this into "OMG LENNART SPIES ON MY DNS!!1!". There's cogent arguments to be made against systemd but the privacy angle is one of the weakest.
I am not sure the authors did a careful study of the computing history.
Computing as a way of human activity has always been evolving in the direction that the core platform technology moves up in the abstraction stack:
* We first invented the abstraction concepts with close tie to physical items. I.e., people are counting their possessions in the literal mass. Or very basic abstract concept: using ropes for numbering. As a form of computing, it can only record limited information, and perform very little computing (addition subtraction).
* Then fully fledged abstract concepts in human languages, which enables human mind as the major computing platform, plus various physical aids (papers, pens, etc.)
* Then there are actual machines that perform certain computation with very limited scope. Mechanical computer etc.
* Till the modern era we started the electronic computing. Then we have a primary device that can take over the computing task with minimal human involvement. Even just inside this era, the progressing has a long history that does not simply reduce to "general computing".
The modern day computing platform is not CPU. It's the web. With CPU you cannot do much useful thing. It's with github, linux, and etc. that one can start quickly perform computing. This platform itself does not lend CPU much credits of being more important than any other components.
> These are the online serfs who are completely unaware and will never become aware that their freedom and their money is being stolen by their masters, the lords of technology, who they serve unwittingly with their data and monthly fees. These are the instant messaging and cat video addicts whose only concern is that computers be easy enough for toddlers to use. These are the techno-toddlers who refuse to grow up...
Believe it or not there are plenty of extremely intelligent non-technical users who are aware of these issues. And comparing users who are unaware of these issues to toddlers (while at the same time comparing the cognescenti to rebel fighters, even if tongue in cheek) is incredibly obnoxious.
Google, Facebook, and Apple invest ridiculous sums of money in the interest of making their platforms accessible in just about every way you can imagine (and many more you might not). If you want to have a single hope that your message will be heard, you have to think about accessibility (of your message). In particular, don't make people feel stupid. That is the kiss of death in the business of winning hearts & minds, and it's also the number one reason why I personally avoid most free software (and related) activist circles.