191–200 of 668 posts
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It seems like a lot of these problems at the core stem from corporations or the government not being held accountable. How do we fix regulatory capture so these privacy issues are a non sequitur?
I dont think we can ever rely on people holding corporations or the government accountable
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It seems like a lot of these problems at the core stem from corporations or the government not being held accountable. How do we fix regulatory capture so these privacy issues are a non sequitur?
> How do we fix regulatory capture so these privacy issues are a non sequitur? by making the general populous care more about it, and force the electorate's hands.
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I agree with this so much. It would be so convenient if I could just flash Arch Linux or something onto a modern smartphone and be able to use all the applications and settings and data I use on my desktop, but on my mobile phone. Android is markedly better than iOS when it comes to customization, but it's a far cry from a (real) Linux distribution. I've started getting OS-level push notification ads from Google News…
It's not quite a modern smartphone, but it's the best we have at the moment; have you looked into the PinePhone? I have mine running openSUSE Tumbleweed.
> Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy, our computers are increasingly designed to be little more than advertising platforms and vehicles for maximizing the cloud revenues of their true owners Huh? You can buy a very cheap used ThinkPad for <$200 and run GNU/Linux on it. In fact, I don’t see any mention of Linux in this article.
This is a "have my cake and eat it too" rant, it has nothing to do with reality. He wants it to run Excel, he wants to be able to use google/fb/whatever. He just wants to be able to do it in a way that costs nothing or next to nothing and that somehow still gives him "full autonomy and control". Or, more accurately, the ILLUSION of full autonomy and control. Why an illusion? Because no matter how much control he has…
This is a ridiculous premise.
If he exercises that control to limit what the computers are discussing -- which is the subject of the article -- then how does that subvert the premise?
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I agree with this so much. It would be so convenient if I could just flash Arch Linux or something onto a modern smartphone and be able to use all the applications and settings and data I use on my desktop, but on my mobile phone. Android is markedly better than iOS when it comes to customization, but it's a far cry from a (real) Linux distribution. I've started getting OS-level push notification ads from Google News…
It's not quite a modern smartphone, but it's the best we have at the moment; have you looked into the PinePhone? I have mine running openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I have a similar feeling, but with modern smartphones. Owning my computer is still relatively possible. I can build a computer from parts which I can choose, and have a choice in which operating system to install on them. Laptops are slightly more closed, but even on those I can choose the OS myself. Modern smartphones however, seem like walled gardens in which I have no control at all. I cannot choose any of the par…
You will never own your smartphone. That would require you to be the licensed operator for the radio transmission. Instead the radio is licensed to the telco (or related) and the telcos have every regulatory and monetary incentive to prevent users from being able to access or control the radio. The government regulators demand the user not have control and the baseband modem manufacturer(s) demand their licensed inte…
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> Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy. Yeah, that weakens his whole argument. That said, I would like to know what models these are? Because I think it's pretty much universal. I think the answer is linux.
the answer is probably an entirely new computing architecture
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You have (almost?) no way to verify how the transistors inside the computer chips are wired. And even if you design your own chips, you can't really know if the design you specified has been faithfully followed at the fab facility. It's a tough problem.
The question then, really, is how far are you willing to go down the stack of software on hardware, in pursuit of true ideological purity? How can, even the Pinephone manufacturers, be absolutely sure that their design is being implemented in hardware as they specced it, without backdoors? If you have a near infinite amount of money and resources, you can be absolutely certain (the hardware that runs NSA approved typ…
Even if this was achieved, the rabbithole would continue though, because the thing you measure with could now have a backdoor. Remind me of the classic paper about the same problem with software: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...