Richard Stallman was right. We didn't listen!
I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#32Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right. Actually I rea…
that's the fallacy of people shipping bogus crap and you thinking you are at fault. Thanks google, i guess.
Most new features on chrome are not for your security. They disable all referrer control options. Want to only send referrer to the domain you are at now? though lucky, google makes money on cross-domain referrer reporting so they can track conversion from their ads.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#33I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 (jailbroken of course) and an original MBP retina running Mavericks. I don't update them because the risk of updating is higher than the risk of not updating. Right now everything is working, and everything is set up the way I like it. If I don't update, things might break some day, but there is also a greater-than-zero chance that everything will continue to work for quite a while. If I update, those odds drop to zero. Not even a statistical approximation of zero, but actually zero. Updating is just trading one set of risks for a different set of risks. I choose the devil I know.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#34[deleted]
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#35You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464
I can certainly imagine the dashboard becoming real estate for ads.
taxis do that to passengers for some 15years now. and that is only counting the video ads. If you count print you can go back all you want.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#36>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
I agree with you. But..
> "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it".
is an interesting choice of example. The anger at updates only really makes sense for apps that are entirely local to your hardware. As soon as you have an app where part of it runs on a server that you don't control, that logic goes out the window. They can stop your non-updated app from working with no effort, just by making the server API incompatible. As long as you are depending on someone else's server to be up and responding and not changing, you give up your rights to be in control of local updates.
It sucks, but that's the reality of SaaS. I'm a fan of using local apps whenever possible. For instance, Google Docs is just too damn useful not to use sometimes. But I still, majority of the time, will choose to use a local word processor whenever I can get away with it. And when I'm done working on a Google Docs project, I download it in several formats and put it in the drawer.
In the meantime I'd really like to see more take-up of open source, federated hosted solutions based on open document standards and open protocols. But so far the big corporations are winning that game.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#37So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
> So, back to land lines with analog phones?
> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?
Funny you bring up land lines, considering that those essentially began the trend of operator-owned end-user equipment. See for example Model 500 phone:
> As with most telephones of the time in the United States, the 500-series telephones were owned by the local Bell Operating Company and leased on a monthly basis to customers
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#38Richard Stallman was right. We didn't listen!
ITYM 'we didn't care', for broad, market-making values of 'we'
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#39So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?
Many (HTC, Google, ASUS, etc. - NOT Samsung) unlocked android phone can be loaded with a variety of bootloaders and then flashed with the ROM of your choice where you have full root access. Of course without google apps (Google Play Store) your phone isn't all that useful, but you can install google apps ( maybe from a questionable legal/copyright stand point, I don't remember) and have more control over the device.
Not sure if this matches what you mean by fully owned though. Checkout XDA Forums (https://forum.xda-developers.com/) to see what interesting things are out there you can do. There's also LineageOS (https://www.lineageos.org/) formerly CyanogenMod.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#40>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
> I turned off auto-updates on my phone. Even if you turn off auto-updates, some things still auto update silently. A long time ago, I wrote a small utility which listened to the PACKAGE_ADDED and PACKAGE_REMOVED events (I don't know if it's still possible to listen to these events on recent Android versions). IIRC, there were two packages that always updated silently (wihout a notification icon) and automatically, e…
I was wondering why I saw updates for those two appear in my notifications bar from time to time even though I had automatic updates turned off!