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I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

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Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#131

Post by badpun »

lisper wrote: post #33

I 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.…

Aren't you afraid of being hacked? In my case, since I use the phone for 2FA access to bank accounts, I bite the bullet and keep up with the phone upgrade threadmill solely for security purposes.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#132

Post by keevie »

macNchz wrote: post #95
isostatic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adverts are why I use uber in New York rather than yellow cabs.

If you tap three times on the display it puts it in an accessibility mode which has a simplified interface and...no ads!

yeah, but then it starts loudly reading to you....and then at the end of the ride when you want to pay with your credit card the whole interface is weird. Better to just get really good at hitting the off button as soon as it allows you to.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#133

Post by DiNovi »

jimmies wrote: post #7

>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'm not sure how I feel about this; you had the power to not auto update; you exercised it; the company had the power to not allow out of date apps use the service; they exercised it... seems right to me. You put yourself in that situation.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#134

Post by seorphates »

It's an interesting (but mostly depressing) problem. The insistence that "others must be in control of what you own" doesn't really sit well with me, at all. I won't drive a phone without root, for instance. Otherwise the plethora of updates I have sitting around not being updated would do nothing but eat data with garbage updates with naught but a new roll of advertisements and, if you're unlucky, new garbage access requests. Update the os? Yeah, no. Not on your watch, at least.

A firewall, for instance, is a basic necessity. Even the crude android flavors. It includes the ability to lock out your "vendors" selectively and accurately.

My build is, hm, approaching it's fourth year, I think. No auto updates save for select apps. No complaints. No surprises. But I'm special, I don't do "phone for fun" and so have a fairly limited and hardened short list of requirements.

The most annoying thing on android is Google XXANY - by a wide, wide margin. I'll be itching to build a google-go-around on my next handset, for certain.

Save all those apps you like, for sure, I still depend on side-loading quite a few that have since gone by the wayside. At this juncture I have to take absolutely every bit of control that I can get my filthy paws wrapped around.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#135

Post by PascLeRasc »

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I just reactivated my old Android phone yesterday for fun and as soon as I put the sim card in the phone started blowing up with notifications about old voicemails, ones I never saw on my iPhone I had just had it in. There were about a dozen voicemails from the past six months from jobs I had applied to and heard nothing back from, or had a preliminary phone interview with, asking me to call them back to schedule something. I mentioned it to my sister, who moved from Android to iPhone the same time I did, and she did the same thing and found a bunch of voicemails from a college she's recently applied to asking if she can send them some piece of paperwork. It's so frustrating that we didn't know that these voicemails existed.

I think the fundamental problem is that to make these technical products like mobile OS's and email apps you need to be so far into tech that you can't really imagine what it's like to be a casual user. This is why I don't consider software engineering to be on the same tier as other disciplines of engineering. Yes, civil engineers make bridges, but they use them in daily life exactly the same as regular people do - the same goes for electrical engineers and power in the home, and mechanical engineers and vacuums/air conditioners/bicycles. When you make software, you look at all software differently and you lose the perspective of a regular person.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#136

Post by markcerqueira »

DiNovi wrote: post #133
jimmies wrote: post #7

>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'm not sure how I feel about this; you had the power to not auto update; you exercised it; the company had the power to not allow out of date apps use the service; they exercised it... seems right to me. You put yourself in that situation.

This is a recurring theme here where people over-engineer their devices, workflows, and lifestyle. Then they get burned by it and blame everything except that over-engineering.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#137

Post by ddalex »

cryptoz wrote: post #59
metalliqaz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a problem? I mean you're using a Google OS. At this point they are selling you a service, not a program. I have no idea what is in one version vs another, and I don't really care as long as the service keeps working. Now, I do still care of being in control of my own hardware, but I do so on my server. I don't know of a cell phone that delivers what I want without being sold as a service rather than a standal…

This was a major major major problem for me. Those silent Android updates are buggy in huge ways. One of them turned off the barometer until phone restart, throwing my startup into a panic as our core product (live barometer data from millions of contributing phones) went slowly dark for some mysterious unknown and scary reason. The data took weeks to return and that gap is lost forever.

Do you have public data sets? Some live view? I'm interested to see live barometer data across a vast number of sensors.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#138

Post by musage »

suprfnk wrote: post #24
tpaschalis wrote: post #8

I understand that powers have shifted, and the majority of the people prefer "free" email/chat/spreadsheets/storage, when "free" means "welcome to our own special walled corner of the internet, give us your personal data and watch these ads". But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at sca…

> But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale? Apple seems to follow that plan. For your "email/chat/spreadsheets/storage", they have iCloud mail, iMessage, Numbers and iCloud Drive. You pay once, and get software support quite a lot of years later. They don't seem to be selling or g…

That's not another debate, that's the debate, and putting users first isn't something I'd associate Apple with. Did people beg apple to remove the headphone jack, for example? I'd say Apple puts Apple first, consumers second, users somewhere.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#139

Post by jimmies »

DiNovi wrote: post #133
jimmies wrote: post #7

>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'm not sure how I feel about this; you had the power to not auto update; you exercised it; the company had the power to not allow out of date apps use the service; they exercised it... seems right to me. You put yourself in that situation.

Replace "car-hailing app" with "phone that makes calls", "desktop operating system", "game", "TV that decodes images from airwaves", "car", "firmware to read expiration dates in juicero machine", "running shoes", "watch", "water kettle", "firmware that predicts upcoming heart attacks in pacemaker", "app that displays a map".

When do you think it starts becoming ridiculous to demand the rights to not update to the user? Do you think that a juicer that stops working because its firmware hasn't been updated recently, and they just changed their expiration date API, is reasonable? After all, yeah, I'm using their health-friendly juicer as a service, just as I'm using a TV to decode the airwaves as a service.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#140

Post by cryptoz »

ddalex wrote: post #137
cryptoz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a major major major problem for me. Those silent Android updates are buggy in huge ways. One of them turned off the barometer until phone restart, throwing my startup into a panic as our core product (live barometer data from millions of contributing phones) went slowly dark for some mysterious unknown and scary reason. The data took weeks to return and that gap is lost forever.

Do you have public data sets? Some live view? I'm interested to see live barometer data across a vast number of sensors.

We used to, the company is no longer active. It was really neat data. It was open source code, but it's now a few years out of date, and would maybe be a good idea to rewrite, modernize and bring a big barometer network back online.

On the individual scale, the sensor data was noisy, but in a dense environment with lots of sensors, the noise is identifiable and filterable to get solid pressure trends (actual pressure values is considerably harder).

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