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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#161

Post by fsflover »

benlivengood wrote: post #138
grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

What I've seen over the last ~25 years is that general purpose computing is a double-edged sword for normal people. The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware. Android probably comes the closest to a free market for software that gives normal users some measure of control over their own devices. It requires TPM and secure boot so that there's a viable…

F-Droid works fine without malware even for non-technical people (if they managed to instal it).

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#162

Post by the_af »

core-questions wrote: post #84
the_af wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm applauding your post furiously. It warms my heart there are still people like you. Yet, it's disheartening that even in many online forums of so-called hackers, one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. Or who argue against the FSF and the right to tinker. If I had to choose one quote from your post is this one: > The general purpose computer is h…

> one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. What these people don't know is that we already had all of these arguments, 20+ years ago, on Usenet and Slashdot and a ton of mailing lists and it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. The problem…

> The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago.

This is what depresses me. It was won, like you said -- yet there's a new generation of tech-minded people, even here (or on stackoverflow, reddit and many other places), who are not Joe Averages and who don't acknowledge the matter is settled, who disregard the old arguments, and who will argue walled gardens and locked down hardware are good things. Surely you've seen this too. It's really disheartening, and probably part of the wider phenomenon of younger generations unwilling to learn and understand old battles and hard-won rights and lessons.

To be clear: I don't mind people not knowing about the history of computing. Nobody is born knowing. But actively arguing for less freedom, freedom that was once part of hacker culture -- that hurts.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#163

Post by the_af »

Nextgrid wrote: post #156
themacguffinman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & ce…

The free software “industry” and its enthusiasts should realise and accept that IT is a tool and not a lifestyle for many people. This includes me despite being a developer and somewhat of a tech enthusiast - a decade ago I had plenty of time to tinker around with a custom Linux installation, nowadays I just run macOS and call it a day. Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and u…

Functionality is fine and dandy till you get blocked out of the software or get your content deleted, or told you cannot share it with your friends. Then you'll care about freedom.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#164

Post by Guthur »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #159
Guthur wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever. The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high. Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your bes…

Doesn't this assume these same political entities won't be manipulated into giving unfair advantages to educational approaches that benefit the manipulator?

Of course. It's patently obvious that the current education systems pander to interest groups that are not necessarily in the best interests of the recipients of said education.

Educational policy is not exclusively for the benefit of the recipient either intentionally when pandering to teacher unions or unintentionally when said policies set targets that drive the system in the wrong direction per Goodhart's law.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#165

Post by the_af »

benlivengood wrote: post #138
grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

What I've seen over the last ~25 years is that general purpose computing is a double-edged sword for normal people. The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware. Android probably comes the closest to a free market for software that gives normal users some measure of control over their own devices. It requires TPM and secure boot so that there's a viable…

> The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware.

These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. I think the real reason is DRM and control over the platform; malware gets used as the stick in this argument, and is mostly a red herring.

There used to be a time tech-minded people widely considered this kind of control evil. I wonder when the cultural switch happened that people in a site called hackernews started considering it acceptable.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#166

Post by Nextgrid »

the_af wrote: post #163
Nextgrid wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free software “industry” and its enthusiasts should realise and accept that IT is a tool and not a lifestyle for many people. This includes me despite being a developer and somewhat of a tech enthusiast - a decade ago I had plenty of time to tinker around with a custom Linux installation, nowadays I just run macOS and call it a day. Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and u…

Functionality is fine and dandy till you get blocked out of the software or get your content deleted, or told you cannot share it with your friends. Then you'll care about freedom.

In a lot of cases there are no comparable free alternatives to proprietary products, so the comparison is not "perpetual functionality vs time-limited/restricted functionality", it's more like "no functionality at all vs restricted functionality", and in this case, restricted functionality is still the more pragmatic choice.

To expand on my earlier comment, my point was that free software will not succeed until it competes with proprietary software on user experience and functionality, and the only way to compete is to focus their (limited resources) where it matters instead of making yet another distro, desktop environment or init system.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#167

Post by the_af »

Nextgrid wrote: post #166
the_af wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functionality is fine and dandy till you get blocked out of the software or get your content deleted, or told you cannot share it with your friends. Then you'll care about freedom.

In a lot of cases there are no comparable free alternatives to proprietary products, so the comparison is not "perpetual functionality vs time-limited/restricted functionality", it's more like " no functionality at all vs restricted functionality", and in this case, restricted functionality is still the more pragmatic choice. To expand on my earlier comment, my point was that free software will not succeed until it c…

Pragmatism is short sighted though. Don't exchange convenience now, with shackles, for freedom later on.

In any case, not being able to install whatever he wants, or being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM is a very immediate limitation even Joe Average will notice and complain about -- unless we, the people who know better, "train" him to accept this is the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it. And we really, really shouldn't do this.

As for your second point, two thoughts:

- Free software has already succeeded. The tech world we live in couldn't exist without it. If you work with computers, your job likely wouldn't exist without free software -- or if it existed, you wouldn't recognize it or want to work in it.

- There's a lot already said, by better thinkers than you and me, about quality vs freedom. Because free/libre software is a philosophical point of view, quality comes after, not before freedom. This is precisely the kind of thing people like RMS pointed out about the differences between libre and merely "open source" software. Please consider what better thinkers have already said in battles already waged decades ago before rehashing the same arguments.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#168

Post by geofft »

saagarjha wrote: post #132
geofft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They created a new business model for a new type of open source software. It doesn't do anything for all the existing types of open source software. Nobody is going to turn glibc into a blockchain.

That's just a sign of glibc being stuck in the wrong millennium more than anything else. Add a couple functions to create ERC20 tokens and add the EVM as a supported architecture and I'm sure that can change. It's high time to remove those unsafe APIs like strcpy and printf that cause CVEs all the time and refocus effort on things that actually matter.

Hahaha I almost got so mad at this comment :)

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#169

Post by webmaven »

city41 wrote: post #14
heavyset_go wrote: post #7

This is something Stallman[1] and others have talked about for a while now, with this article having been published in 2003[2]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so.

I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar.

I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong.

And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that.

It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism.

I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#170

Post by shadowgovt »

Silhouette wrote: post #88
Qwertious wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security?" Yes. It's the monarchy argument - Apple focuses on security because they own the ecosystem, so they're hurting themselves and there's no-one else left for Apple to blame if they screw it up.

Let me know when everything on iCloud is fully end-to-end encrypted. Until then, Apple are still knowingly compromising security in the interests of other priorities. Maybe those priorities are well-intentioned, helping to make sure their customers don't lose access to precious photos because they lost some important key. Maybe they are driven by more nefarious motives, such as the endless rumours of government inter…

Full end-to-end encryption bumps up against Apple's second goal of user friendliness. If the data they store is encrypted with a key that you and only you own, and you lose that key, they can't help you as a user.

This may be surprising, but a lot of users don't accept that as an answer and find this to be a less valuable business model than one where the trusted vendor has skeleton keys.

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