11–20 of 102 posts
DRM doesn't work and is bad
regulation doesn't work and is bad
the gubmint's jackbooted thugs will force cochlear implants on you to make you patriotic
because the market won't demand free as in stallman computing I've decided to frame it as a human rights issue
I just watched the whole thing. I liked how Cory Doctorow acknowledged that some of these problems he didn't know the answers to but he seemed satisfied just to get the conversation started. Near the beginning he flashed a picture of an iPad as an example of a device that records everything you do and there is nothing you can do about it. I had never thought of that; instead I had viewed the iPad as a nice little dev…
Cory is effectively advocating "technology survivalism", where no company will be your trusted for keeping your computers "safe" and "not lying to you". I think it's rather utopian. As far as I can tell, web-of-trust approaches only work in the software world, the hardware manufacturer ultimately has to be trusted to some level, either de facto by consumer belief or de jure by regulation.
Ultimately, his whole premise about "owner freedom" vs "user freedom" may be fatally flawed. It assumes a) Apple wants to control both owners and users to do what they want, and b) owners must be able to control what happens on devices, and this is a necessary precondition to user freedom. I would argue a) Apple just wants to help users with a better experience and b) it's unlikely owners will ever be technically savvy enough to control things, they will always want to delegate things to some degree -- even technical people do this, looking at the number of devs that use Apple laptops.
Cory also oversimplifies the ownership problem. No device owner actually "owns" the software they install, they license it - even with open source. Apple arguably has been the a great force for "user freedom", by constraining what "owners" (i.e. software developers) can and can't do on Apple devices, thus enabling freedoms to the users themselves -- freedom from malware, bad user experiences such as poor battery life, etc. They enable the end user to work around restrictions on content available on the native device by providing a completely open and high quality web browser to get at anything they want in a sandboxed environment. But they also allow the device owner to restrict user actions in the "open web" with (e.g.) parental controls.
Apple's restrictions have little to do with controlling device owners -- they're about improving the user experience.
Clearly the device owners trust Apple today, but Apple could fairly easily move to a TPM-based "certainty" approach where owners get to pick their App Store, if that's what consumers eventually want, and they lose sales over it. But, for now, the market doesn't seem to be arguing in favour of this kind of nuanced approach.
edit: typos
The issue I have with arguments from folks such as Cory is that they presume too much in favour of openness. Many prefer to be regulated rather than have to make decisions on every little detail, that's arguably the whole Apple appeal in a nutshell vs. Linux, and why it's so productive. (Distros like Ubuntu arguably do this too at a much smaller scale.) Cory is effectively advocating "technology survivalism", where n…
How is it improving my experience when they ban apps that turn the device into a wifi hotspot?
Oh right, they prefer money to letting users have the freedom to choose such a thing.
The issue I have with arguments from folks such as Cory is that they presume too much in favour of openness. Many prefer to be regulated rather than have to make decisions on every little detail, that's arguably the whole Apple appeal in a nutshell vs. Linux, and why it's so productive. (Distros like Ubuntu arguably do this too at a much smaller scale.) Cory is effectively advocating "technology survivalism", where n…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. How is it improving my experience when they ban apps that turn the device into a wifi hotspot? Oh right, they prefer money to letting users have the freedom to choose such a thing.
The issue I have with arguments from folks such as Cory is that they presume too much in favour of openness. Many prefer to be regulated rather than have to make decisions on every little detail, that's arguably the whole Apple appeal in a nutshell vs. Linux, and why it's so productive. (Distros like Ubuntu arguably do this too at a much smaller scale.) Cory is effectively advocating "technology survivalism", where n…
I would think you were making a joke if not for the earnest tone of your post. But, come on, that is a ridiculous statement to make.
We had free as in freedom, free as in beer, and then Steve Jobs came up with free as in "freedom from porn". You appear to buy into that doublespeak redefinition of freedom without irony.
The Soviet Union made a similar to give people freedom -- from class distinction, religious persecution, etc., and it used the same logic. (And was just as true.)
Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)
You may not install apps that don't pay Apple 30% of their revenues. You may not install apps that compete with Apple's favored apps. You may not even keep functionality you've already bought from Apple's store and been using, if Apple realizes after the fact that it conflicts with their lucrative hardware licensing deals (Airfoil Speakers).
I'm not saying there aren't user-experience benefits to be had from a locked-down experience; there are, and Apple obviously knows it.
I'm saying freedom doesn't what you think it means, and I don't think even Frank Luntz could make it mean that.
I just watched the whole thing. I liked how Cory Doctorow acknowledged that some of these problems he didn't know the answers to but he seemed satisfied just to get the conversation started. Near the beginning he flashed a picture of an iPad as an example of a device that records everything you do and there is nothing you can do about it. I had never thought of that; instead I had viewed the iPad as a nice little dev…
The restrictions on WinRT make this entirely clear and unequivocal--Microsoft is asserting complete control over the device you purchased. You can't install a different OS and you can't install any software outside of the App Store.
If anything, they're threatening to be even worse than Apple by conflating the somewhat free Windows on x86 with the entirely locked-down Windows on ARM.
The issue I have with arguments from folks such as Cory is that they presume too much in favour of openness. Many prefer to be regulated rather than have to make decisions on every little detail, that's arguably the whole Apple appeal in a nutshell vs. Linux, and why it's so productive. (Distros like Ubuntu arguably do this too at a much smaller scale.) Cory is effectively advocating "technology survivalism", where n…
> Apple's restrictions have little to do with controlling device owners I would think you were making a joke if not for the earnest tone of your post. But, come on, that is a ridiculous statement to make. We had free as in freedom, free as in beer, and then Steve Jobs came up with free as in "freedom from porn". You appear to buy into that doublespeak redefinition of freedom without irony. The Soviet Union made a sim…
Oh come on, one is a market proposition and the other is a forced choice at the barrel of a gun. Is the "no shirt no shoes no service" sign at the store down the street the second coming of Stalin too?