161–170 of 228 posts
Where is all the unpaid innovation happening, where are people creating for the joy of creating? 8 bit micro controllers and little SoCs.
Why? Just because they thought it would be cool. (Er, hot.)
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The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how s…
I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them. If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did a…
In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention.
re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.
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I love the fact I don’t have to muck about with my iPhone to get it to work ... I have changes I want to make to my iPhone. Some of them would be as easy as adding a trigger to an SQLite datbase that a stock "app" uses. I'm not "allowed" to. I don't think companies should be legally permitted to take away the rights of an owner to do what they please with their own property. Locked bootloaders, e-fuses, crypto keys b…
This is exactly why Richard Stallman created GNU and the GPL. He might seem like an idealist or even an extremist but he's been warning us about this very thing for decades now.
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> Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Cool? I'm a software engineer and I have no desire to do this. The number of people who care about this feature is vanishingly low. I think it is reasonable to lament losing a particular feature for tinkerers, but it becomes unreasonable to demand that businesses cater to this very small n…
The key here is that it's "badware as defined by Apple and Google" though. Who watches the watchers?? If you're not advocating self reliance and self governance for people, you're not thinking long term. It's historically proven bad advice to willingly give all control to central powers. > ...locked down systems are a somewhat effective way of keeping badware off of devices for the masses. Developers are not the mass…
I don't advocate removing all safety checks from phones, but making somebody jump through 15 hoops to install a non-corporate-approved app is stupid.
Secondly, these companies stop a lot of badware, but they also act as gatekeepers to stop anti-establishmentware that may be for the public benefit at the detriment of the gatekeepers' stranglehold on power.
In other words, these devices are systems of perpetuating the status-quo and safeguarding the profits of the ones making them. This in itself I'm not upset about: of course capital seeks to cement its own power. The real issue I have is how much potential is destroyed as collateral damage.
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This is exactly why Richard Stallman created GNU and the GPL. He might seem like an idealist or even an extremist but he's been warning us about this very thing for decades now.
The Right to Read is coming closer each day. Almost nobody cares. It seems like an increasing number of technical people want that future to happen. It fills me with immeasurable sadness. I am having a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that computers aren't "for" me anymore.
Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…
This is fake insight. Most people I know who are any good at programming had started learning about it by modifying something either on their own computers (pre-2000) or on the web (post 2000). They took things they found interesting or useful and somehow introspected and changed them. Good chunks of skills gained by that were transferable to professional environment. Today, this is not how people get into tech. Ther…
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation#Futamura_pr... )
Anyway, I don't see the problem. I don't see how e.g. better GPUs cannibalize the performance of general-purpose CPUs, and I doubt that the market for general purpose computing isn't already saturated. You can buy CPUs for a couple of bucks (little ones), you have a supercomputer in your pocket (phone), and people only buy fancy chips to play video games.
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Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to…
What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software. I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what t…
Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.
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> 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere In the past I could get any component I might need from a local store in 20 minutes. now I've got 2 weeks to 3 months turnaround on shipping from shenzhen.
In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium. Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.
Well. No. RadioShack is closed. Fry's is closed. If I needed a resistor, I honestly wouldn't know where to go. Probably AliExpress or DigiKey. There's no local stores left.
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In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is someth…
>I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need That sounds very atypical. I live outside a major US metro and I know of one good computer store in the area (Micro Center). I imagine there a few small places that carry electronic components but not sure how many. And it wasn't much different 10 to 20 years a…