Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

boingboing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 218 posts

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

#171

Post by webmaven »

jariel wrote: post #126
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

"The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'. MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'. In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'm…

> > "The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying."

> Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.

It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over a sufficiently long term ALL costs eventually become marginal costs[1].

[0] Suffice it to say that most businesses try to leverage or introduce imperfections in the market (aka "sustainable competitive advantage").

[1] Instead of thinking about the "sunk cost" of building a factory, consider the (eventual) marginal cost of building the next one.

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

#172

Post by sabujp »

rgbrenner wrote: post #116
sabujp wrote: post #96

general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the sourc…

There are a lot of other fields where you need to go to university just to use the building blocks of the field. Doctors cant just acquire cadavers and try it out at home. Those industries move much slower, but innovation in our field might be related to how new it is. There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices. So I could imagine…

yea i really don't see that happening, there are too many hackers and tinkerers on earth

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

#173

Post by b0tzzzzzzman »

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…

Did you watch the video? I agree with you mostly, I think we have short-term and long-term discussion which are very different.

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

#174

Post by peter303 »

I saw Cory yesterday at the Denver scifi convention MileHiCon. He is the guest of honor this year. Yes, he was on a couple of panels about digital rights. One panel discussed Amazons predatory policies on self-publishing. If you do it there, Amazon prohibits any manifestation of your work on any other platform.

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

#175

Post by Silhouette »

shadowgovt wrote: post #170
Silhouette wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and maybe that's a reasonable position to take commercially, though I note that Apple does use end-to-end encryption for various specific categories of data on iCloud so the argument about being user-friendly with recovery options is not without its weaknesses.

In any case, iCloud still isn't fully secure, and Apple isn't very honest about that in its marketing. It also doesn't give those users who do value security and privacy more highly the opportunity to use iCloud with real security, while simultaneously making it unnecessarily difficult to transfer data using other, more secure methods.

As one potential alternative for discussion, you could instead construct a system where users had the option of keeping keys entirely under their control, with suitable backup options, or of creating an online emergency recovery system where partial key data was given to Y trusted friends and recovering that data from any X out of those Y would be sufficient to reconstruct the key. Each friend need only know that they are agreeing to be an emergency keyholder for someone, and no-one else other than the original user and the keyholder need know that the relationship even exists.

The UI for a system like that could be extremely simple. Turn on the emergency recovery system. Identify a list of friends you want to trust. They each get asked if they're willing to help, and you either get a list of people who all said yes or prompted to choose more people if anyone declined or couldn't be reached. Once you've got enough, everyone who is a trustee carries around a suitable fragment of the other keys on their own secure device(s) in exactly the same way that their own key is held.

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

#176

Post by jariel »

webmaven wrote: post #171
jariel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'. MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'. In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'm…

> > "The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." > Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over…

I agree with all of that, but the very crude issue here is one of sunk/capital outlays vs. unit costs.

Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing.

Books aren't sold for $25 because of the cost of paper.

I think we are wired to think in such material terms, which is why maybe why we have an instinct towards the notion of 'free' software as being somehow special, when really it's not that much different than many other things.

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

#177

Post by Zak »

linguae wrote: post #111
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…

I largely agree with you, and I share many of the same sentiments. Personal computing is supposed to be about user empowerment; the ability for users to not only communicate with other people and to get work done, but to also automate their tasks through programming. Early personal computing was about achieving this vision, and while it may not have fully attained this vision, companies in the 1980s and 1990s at leas…

Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked sufficient discoverability given my age and available resources at the time.

Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too limited to be used for serious work without external tools, but the potential, had it remained bundled with every Mac and given a few more iterations was huge. It was a big step toward making the personal computer a bicycle for the user's mind as Steve Jobs once described it.

Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality.

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

#178

Post by Nextgrid »

the_af wrote: post #167
Nextgrid wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM

Is it? When it comes to media, it used to be that you would have a collection of music/movies ripped from physical formats or pirated, both of which are time-consuming.

It is indeed a problem that media nowadays can't be easily shared, but is it a complete loss? You could argue that the widespread availability of near "all" media (at least when it comes to music, such as Spotify) for an affordable price makes up for it. Not disagreeing with your point, but the current model also has its upsides, at least for the time being (it is indeed a possibility that once piracy has been extinguished by the low demand thanks to legal offerings being available and affordable, nothing prevents them from raising the prices or altering the terms of the deal to be unacceptable, such as with ads/etc).

> Free software has already succeeded

Free software has succeeded, in the form of libraries and developer tools. The ideology of free software and freedom (not as in beer but the other one)? Far from it, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with.

Free software has succeeded in areas where it benefits the gatekeepers and the purveyors of proprietary and freedom-limiting software or services. It has definitely not succeeded in areas which are against that.

> quality comes after, not before freedom

The problem is that there are a lot of people out there, rightly or wrongly (we don't know their individual circumstances and the reasons behind their choice), do not know nor care about freedom as an ideology. The only way to win them over is not by pushing the ideology, but by delivering results, in the form of free software being better, or at least on par with proprietary offerings. This is where the free software "industry" has failed us and keeps failing us.

> Please consider what better thinkers have already said [...] before rehashing the same arguments.

I am not fully aware of those arguments, I am just talking from my own perspective. I try to do my bit as much as possible, but there are cases where free software just doesn't cut it at the moment, thus I have to fall back on the "lesser evil" proprietary services (as in those whose business model doesn't rely on ads, even if more expensive, for example) and recommend those to people in the same boat. For a lot of software/services, the alternative isn't a slightly worse free software experience, it's outright no experience at all.

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

#179

Post by octoberfranklin »

fsflover wrote: post #160
octoberfranklin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

> Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. No, they aren't: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

That laptop has an Intel Management Engine in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

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

#180

Post by Zak »

the_af wrote: post #165
benlivengood wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems to me attitudes started shifting around the time the iPhone was introduced. I suspect it was a combination of many people perceiving Apple as benevolent, and the iPhone being seen as a toy or accessory rather than what would be a primary device for the average person a decade later. I recall a conversation in which someone responded to some criticism I had with "they built a Playstation for adults, what's the problem with that?".

Of course, that kind of power corrupts regardless of its wielder's benevolence, with there being recent examples of Apple imposing, or being forced to impose censorship on services provided through third-party apps (e.g. Telegram being forced to censor doxxing of Belarusian police), and smartphones play a much more important role in society than game consoles do.

Post reply on HN