It's an interesting view of history, but without providing your reasoning for why you think the pendulum is about to swing again I have to assume that it is not.
The Pendulum Swings, Again
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Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#12Those who lived through that period and paid attention are probably well aware of the ridiculous notion that information flows should be controlled in order to protect the children or whatever the fig-leaf of the day is. Ask the Iranian and the Chinese people how they like their firewalls. Let’s make sure it ends up on the side of freedom and democracy, and not on the side of DRM and other forms of control and digita…
The simplest way is through the use of your wallet. Buy "open". E.g. - Need a new desktop? Buy one that doesn't lock down uefi by default, and runs linux compatible hardware - New phone? Buy one with Firefox OS if you can wait that long, or at least go for one with a stock Android install - New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] - New app? Don't use a commercial app store, get…
Even if we do that, it's only 0.000001% of the people doing it. It doesn't even begin to scratch the big threats.
People are so easily bought by them that all our efforts seem so small.
I really think we're not gonna be able to change the swing back to freedom. 10 years from now, we're gonna be 100% controlled by them and, as the author said, the Life-as-a-Service era will start.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#13Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was.
It seems so me that in the 1990s, the future that was widely (outside some truly dystopian sci-fi fringes of the net discourse) regarded as the worst-case scenario was the Internet becoming like radio -- i.e. another peer-to-peer medium turned into a broadcast medium. So it may be worth noting that while the best-case scenario hasn't changed much since then, the worst-case scenario has.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
This being in the context of a binary choice, it shares a basic flaw of any 2-party democracy: if there are more customers voting the wrong way (i.e., "closed"), commercial operators have no incentive to go open. If you know your opinion is not mainstream, why limit your choices of commercial goods this way?
Not sure if I'm following you. Are you saying we shouldn't vote because our only 1 vote is meaningless in the crowd?
Voting is not enough. When you're in the minority, you also need to be loud about it. The hard part is not to be annoying or low-status in the process.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#15It's an interesting view of history, but without providing your reasoning for why you think the pendulum is about to swing again I have to assume that it is not.
I agree. While I can follow the author's reasoning about the history of computing (particularly his assertion that computing was most democratic in the 1980s), he doesn't reveal the sources for his optimism, apart from stating:
If my observations are correct then such a swing is about to happen, and this time we had better get it right.
The interesting part, which is missing, would be a list of such observations.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#16The most interesting fact for this swing is that it's not only software that is changing... As noted in the article: if you wanted a computer in the old days, you put it together yourself. That changed and putting together a new computer yourself is unimaginable (I'm not speaking about assembly of components, but soldering the whole thing). Recently cheap(er) 3D printing, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi put hardware on…
Not at all. Hardware is becoming more and more obscure. 5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Don't confuse the chatterings online about RPi etc with any kind of general movement. The vast majority of computer users now use sealed hardware boxes, and that proportion is increasing.
5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop.
Do you think this is an entirely new development? Wouldn't the statement "5 years ago people could do X with computers, now they can't" in fact hold true for the last, say, 40 years in the history of computing?
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#17The most interesting fact for this swing is that it's not only software that is changing... As noted in the article: if you wanted a computer in the old days, you put it together yourself. That changed and putting together a new computer yourself is unimaginable (I'm not speaking about assembly of components, but soldering the whole thing). Recently cheap(er) 3D printing, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi put hardware on…
Not at all. Hardware is becoming more and more obscure. 5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Don't confuse the chatterings online about RPi etc with any kind of general movement. The vast majority of computer users now use sealed hardware boxes, and that proportion is increasing.
Well, Rpi etc could lead the way. Not as they are of course, but that could improve.
One way I can think of is memristors, which could make FPGA-like hardware ubiquitous. This would push the software/hardware frontier so low that there would be effectively little magic left.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This being in the context of a binary choice, it shares a basic flaw of any 2-party democracy: if there are more customers voting the wrong way (i.e., "closed"), commercial operators have no incentive to go open. If you know your opinion is not mainstream, why limit your choices of commercial goods this way?
Not sure if I'm following you. Are you saying we shouldn't vote because our only 1 vote is meaningless in the crowd?
No, because this is not just voting. It is voting + limiting our choices to things we support ethically. I may prefer the openness of the Android stores to the iOS App Store, but if the latter offers higher quality software for whatever I seek, there seems little point in giving it up merely to make a political point.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#19Those who lived through that period and paid attention are probably well aware of the ridiculous notion that information flows should be controlled in order to protect the children or whatever the fig-leaf of the day is. Ask the Iranian and the Chinese people how they like their firewalls. Let’s make sure it ends up on the side of freedom and democracy, and not on the side of DRM and other forms of control and digita…
The simplest way is through the use of your wallet. Buy "open". E.g. - Need a new desktop? Buy one that doesn't lock down uefi by default, and runs linux compatible hardware - New phone? Buy one with Firefox OS if you can wait that long, or at least go for one with a stock Android install - New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] - New app? Don't use a commercial app store, get…
>>>New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1]
You must have forgotten the raging battle between Doctorow and the eBookstores. He and his publisher didn't want DRM, but the stores did. This is part of the point the writer is making about the pendulum swinging.
Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again
#20If tomorrow the government suggested to licence software businesses so that if a consumer had trouble with a program or a website the responsible party would get in trouble, 99% of the population would vote it up. So much about everyone wanting to keep stuff open.
For the most education means getting a place in the vertical, not being curious. So far as everyone else is limited, 99% won't have a problem with it. iProduct and facebook are the obvious examples.
How do we keep it our way? The only answer I'm having is: by becoming billionaires and putting the money to work for the "open" ignoring any other commercial incentives.