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Your phone is about to stop being yours

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#691

Someone here on HN used the term "cloud terminal" for modern electronic devices, and I think that is a very fitting name for phones and tablets. They are definitely not computers because they do not actually give the user access to general purpose computing in the sense that the users can control exactly what computations the device is going to execute. They are just terminals whose production costs we cover but whic…

> it is only a matter of time before you cannot meaningfully host anything by yourself outside of these clouds because your cloud terminal will refuse to talk to it.

That's well on its way. Try to log into your bank (or countless other sites) using a VPN. They flat out turn you away. If you don't use VPN but use a different computer or connection you get grilled with "prove you're a human". I get that they are doing anti spam and fraud steps, but the logical conclusion of where this ends up is "if we don't recognize you from our mountains of tracking info we've been compiling, we don't want to do business with you".

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GrapheneOS phone is just as open as the Librem 5. They both use proprietary blobs and hardware. Librem just tries to hide that fact. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935853#47943179 GrapheneOS is probably more secure also.

> A GrapheneOS phone is just as open as the Librem 5. No, it's not. Try to run a completely free OS on you hardware (like Replicant) and watch the lack of camera, GPS and more. Related discussion for other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942070

The Librem 5 uses a bottom of the barrel, standard industrial CPU from 2017 with no updates. It is no more open than a Google Pixel or any other mobile device. it lacks proper updates, isolated radios, and any form of hardening. The kill switches are also useless if your device is fully compromised and turned into a spying device, all of your data is already gone. The only thing the switches do as a last resort is block voice recording, which is an improper way of doing it since speakers are essentially just microphones in reverse.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Maybe you're just used to your flavors of jank so you don't see it? Your goal is to get off windows, but I've had only Linux on my home computers for ~10 years and it's been working great the whole time. Literally nothing I can think of to complain about. It's been a few years since I had to use OSX for work, but last I used it, you couldn't maximize windows without a 1+ second animation playing when you cmd+tabbed,…

>Maybe you're just used to your flavors of jank so you don't see it?

That's a throwaway line, everyone is used to their own flavors of jank, even on Linux.

>Your goal is to get off windows, but I've had only Linux on my home computers for ~10 years and it's been working great the whole time, Literally nothing I can think of to complain about.

I think you're trying to read too much into a comment and trying to poke holes...I don't have any Windows, if that wasn't clear. Since we're flexing about experience...I've been doing this since RH 7.2 came in the back of a book 20+ years ago and deploying production Linux services for about the same at a large scale but whatever.

Everything has its flavor of jank, and for most people, Linux is a flavor of jank just barely too far over the horizon still. But, once again, far better than what it ever was 20 years ago, and has the potential to pass Windows at least here soon. But, one of the biggest hurdles especially for adoption is, well, the community, 90% of which think they're one step away from being Linus simply because they installed Arch following a tutorial, and they treat new users the same way for no good reason as they tell the same new users "it's Easy!"

You must be one of the luckier Linux users I guess. I have heard of them, but I've had plenty of convos where once you actually dig into things it's usually not as truthful and playing to the crowd on an internet forum _about Linux_ for confirmation.

>It's been a few years since I had to use OSX for work, but last I used it, you couldn't maximize windows without a 1+ second animation playing when you cmd+tabbed

I use it every day for work, for heavy eng work. Let's be honest, yes there's an animation delay to some degree, but this is trafficking a bit in hyperbole here. GNOME has basically the same behavior for many aspects including switching workspaces by default...which can be turned off in both. The Cinnamon or KDE default experience is better in this regard.

>Docker was also super slow

Only issue I've had with Docker on a Mac with speed is when I'm trying to use some hefty x64 images on ARM macOS (I still have a last model i7 MBA for fun too), which is expected, same with VMs. I've run some pretty gnarly full stack apps, some that included Java backends that needed up to 8gb because reasons, without issue as long as I built an ARM image.

>There's no package manager and the usual recommendation (brew) for a third party one is trash that will update programs you didn't ask it to when you're installing something else.

It behaves roughly the same on macOS as it does on Linux, IME. If I'm not explicit on dnf/apt, I get more updates than just what I wanted too. But maybe I'm missing something. It's how I manage all my tooling on the work env and gives me very few issues save usually for only the occasional connection issue which is always attributed to work VPN nonsense.

>IIRC external monitors are completely unusable from blurry text.

Even on a Mac? The ecosystem is designed for professional graphics use, never had an issue there even back to CRT days heavily using all the Adobe suite versions, and even with non-Apple displays. Every Linux setup I've ever used, including this one is janky with external monitors, let alone dual. Even the "Easiest distro in the world" (Mint) according to most Linux nerds is problematic to say the least in trying to use the screen res/layout settings.

>I used a windows laptop recently for a year or so for work. Absolute jank. Sleep was just broken. Like wouldn't sleep/spin down the fan with the lid closed unless I unplugged it. Often completely frozen requiring hard reboots when opening the lid.

A - agreed, I don't work anywhere which requires Windows, because for all my devtooling, it's all tied into a macOS ecosystem, yes, with homebrew for now. Been that way for almost a decade now. Ideally, one should also do a lot in a build container for 1:1 matching so your CI jobs run the same env/toolset/versions. It's better for real dev work and way more stable in a way that won't require you to become a support headache for the company either.

B - what you are describing is a hardware issue and attributing it to Windows. I had the same issue on a B550 series desktop mobo, went to Linux, same exact behavior. This is not an OS issue.

>Leaving it "sleeping" for an extended period would still heavily drain the battery.

To my mind, non-mac laptops are garbage for battery life, everyone knows this, and yeah if it wasn't sleeping for real it's gonna eat up resources. This is more a hardware issue than anything, not the OS layer. Put Linux on it and I could almost guarantee you would have had similar issues, I've dealt with this like I said w/ the mobo above.

>WSL barely works. For some reason I have to care whether things are in my Windows or Linux home directory. Wrong one and git commands take seconds. I'd get environment mismatches where the terminal in VSCode would fail to run commands that run in a normal CLI, etc. DNS would break inside WSL because it wouldn't propagate config from DHCP. UI is just slow to respond to anything. If you start typing in the start menu search (e.g. "shut down" or "power off"), the menu replaces itself with a different one, and you can't find the power options until you close and reopen the menu.

Man, I have to wonder....was this not using latest/WSL2 and instead using WSL1? Because there _is_ a massive leap between the two. It's not ideal compared to native on Linux or even mac but still works quite well for many use cases. When the WSL2 upgrade came back when I was forced in a past env to use a Windows laptop, myself and 4 other Devs could run our full stack including Kafka locally without much issue on WSL2 other than producing heat on the laptop b/c of how many services we were running. (About 35 .NET Core microservices at the time, along with redis, Kafka, etc.). Yes, the home pathing was a tad annoying.

>If you start typing in the start menu search (e.g. "shut down" or "power off"), the menu replaces itself with a different one, and you can't find the power options until you close and reopen the menu.

Yeah every OS seems to have issues with their search/launcher tooling, but the Start Menu has been shit for a while now. I've had more issues on Windows than anything else re: manu defaults (once tweaked on like W10 it's fine), but then Linux, and then even macOS...before paring down Spotlight to only search certain things, which made it way better.

shrugs

I think this is one of the challenges of building good software, it's why Apple does what they do. Some experiences on one hardware set are somehow perfect, but they're rare, some are the exact opposite. But a lot comes down to what a user is willing to tolerate, too, and while someone might say it was "Easier on Linux" it's usually just that they're willing to tolerate more terminal madness and odd behaviors than others in their daily driver.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#694

From my point of view I don't see anything wrong with knowing a little bit more about the person behind the app I'm trusting to do my personal compute on my personal device. Personally I always think twice when I download apps from company's whose names I don't recognize. Same with PCs... do you really want to run that *.exe you downloaded from that cool site you found? Changes like this will help keep developers hon…

It's the no way to op out from this that is bad.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#695

From my point of view I don't see anything wrong with knowing a little bit more about the person behind the app I'm trusting to do my personal compute on my personal device. Personally I always think twice when I download apps from company's whose names I don't recognize. Same with PCs... do you really want to run that *.exe you downloaded from that cool site you found? Changes like this will help keep developers hon…

This isn't the issue that's at stake here though: The question is:

> Who is making the decision which code is allowed to run on my device?

The status quo is already that can make this decision yourself. There are other people who make different decisions from you.

The proposed change is trying to take this decision away from you and making google the arbiter of which code is allowed to run.

The core of this issue is the opposite of "publishing an app to a global scale ecosystem" - I want to publish an app that is useful for me and a very small circle of people, that is what's being taken away.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#696
post #258

This is the most important part: >> Developers Do not sign up. Don't join the program by signing up for the Android Developer Console and agreeing to their irrevocable Terms and Conditions. Don't verify your identity. Don't play ball. Google's plan only works if developers comply. Don't. Talk other developers and organizations out of signing up. Add the FreeDroidWarn library to your apps to warn users. Run a website?…

This is the part that makes the least sense. It shows a profound lack of empathy. For many devs this is equivalent to saying "Give up your livelihood to show you support this principle, that will likely have little to no effect". This is advice aimed at wealthy hobbyists.

What's worse is that it's not even a principled view. If you really don't trust Google, then you shouldn't rely on Google's software no matter what policies they change or promises they make. The problem is actually far more profound, that citizens are now expected to have a closed smartphone from one of the duopolies which government and corporate entities need to trust, which means they cannot allow it to be entirely your device. This is a tacit policy that must be defeated as a policy matter.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s like saying my car isn’t really a car because I can’t adjust spark timing. What if it only drives along select predetermined monetised routes?

What if my aunt had three wheels? I don’t see the value in hypotheticals like that. If the claim is that a computer is not really a computer unless every user can do any low level operations they want, is it also true that a car is not really a car unless every user can do any low level operations they want?

Manufacturers are taking away right to repair too! I think you picked a bad example. Back in the 60s you absolutely could change every low level component on a car.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#698

Someone here on HN used the term "cloud terminal" for modern electronic devices, and I think that is a very fitting name for phones and tablets. They are definitely not computers because they do not actually give the user access to general purpose computing in the sense that the users can control exactly what computations the device is going to execute. They are just terminals whose production costs we cover but whic…

IDK, not really a fan of redefining computer to make a rhetorical point. It seems counter-productive to tell people the computing device they think as a computer isn’t really a computer. It’s like saying my car isn’t really a car because I can’t adjust spark timing. Someone could make that semantic argument but it’s hard to imagine anyone would care.

Point taken. But I think we can say that smartphones and tablets are definitely not "general-purpose computers" because they are not programmable, at least not freely so.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with Google accounts, it's not hypothetical, it's a risk. People do occasionally get locked out of being an Apple developer for reasons they cannot foresee. > Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 > Apple bans entire dev account, no reason given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601548

It’s still rhetorical sleight of hand. I could have a stroke that leaves me unable to program. Does that mean I am not truly free to program today? Those are risks, but they do not change the on-the-ground reality today, and the claim was that users, today, cannot use these device as general purpose computers.

No it's not. I need permission by a third-party to be able to program a device I supposedly own. I need to give them money, I need to give them my identity, and I need to tie my identity to any distribution of the software I make if other people are to be able to install it.

This is not a rhetorical sleight of hand, this is just saying that I am not truly in control of the device that I have bought.

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