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I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

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Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#121

Post by CodeMage »

therealmarv wrote: post #109
CodeMage wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole car metaphor is a bit unfortunate. Most people who want to drive securely from A to B would be pretty freaked out by a bunch of strangers quietly upgrading their car's brakes in the middle of the night. And they would definitely be pissed off if their car suddenly refused to accelerate beyond 25 mph on a clear, straight, empty stretch of dry road in broad daylight just because the speed limit happens to be…

This argument can be also made positive. Imagine a new update (to be on your example, the new brakes) made the car safer and the saved your life because an accident could be avoided entirely. Otherwise you would be dead. It's not only negative... Btw. when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely ;)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there are no positive consequences of automatic updates. Rather, I was trying to point out the difference in perception of ownership between things like cars and our hardware. Regardless of benefits and drawbacks of automatic updates themselves, I regard that difference in perception as dangerous and damaging.

To illustrate my point in terms of your analogy, if people could get free upgrades for their brakes that make the car safer, I like to think that they would still prefer to be given control over it, because they see it as "my car" and not "my car, but with brakes licensed from someone else". And I also like to think that they would object to arbitrary changes to the insides of their car with vague explanations of how the new insides are better.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#122

Post by dmix »

jimmies wrote: post #27
dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived. I've had my phone die well before the Uber arrived and it wasn't a problem, it showed up at the place I requested. Once the ride is initiated the drivers phone becomes the primary client. It seems quite flexible with devices going offline (as it should, mobile networks are unreliable). > use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't up…

Everything you said about it being dead before the car arrived is true. However, it was not the point. What if the phone died before it could update? What if the driver couldn't see me so they had to call me, or I forgot the license plate? What if I was roaming on expensive data? What if that was a more critical app? All of those things shouldn't be a problem in the first place.

As I said I believe apps should be supported for at least 1-3yrs at a minimum via versioned APIs and careful product planning. Especially for 'critical' apps and massively popular apps like Uber.

But otherwise it's not a massive problem, yet. But one we in the software community should promote as best practice and provide social pressure/ridicule when not done.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#123

Post by zanny »

This is why I go out of my way to only buy phones that are going to be very well supported by LineageOS for a long time.

You can go Google-less on such devices if you want.

The only real limitation is that you cannot do anything about the super-privileged proprietary modem that simultaneously can spy on you at any time that also prevents you from running newer kernels on your hardware because of how evil every Android vendor is with their proprietary bits.

At least there is finally momentum to kill the ME / SP backdoors on desktops. Its going to be much harder to do that on mobile since the only way to use cellular networks is through these proprietary black box modems.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#124

Post by wvenable »

therealmarv wrote: post #26

Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right. Actually I rea…

The problem is that security updates are bundled with feature updates, radical UI changes, and bleeding-edge bugginess. Nobody is arguing that the security benefit isn't there.

Automatically installed Windows patches are fantastic. I hardly even notice them. Sometimes a patch will cause an issue with some software but that's an acceptable trade off.

But then I get Candy Crush, or have to go through the setup again, or have all my display setting reset, get new "notifications", etc. These are not part of those security updates.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#125

Post by derefr »

jimmies wrote: post #7

>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…

It’s not the fault of “apps” here. The thing that is breaking compatibility is the server backend. Native frontends (“apps”) have to be coded defensively (e.g. to not even attempt to work unless you update) only because whatever backend service they talk to has no wire protocol that can go a month without what would be, under semver, a major release.

You’ll notice that apps that target stable protocols—POP3/IMAP mail clients, RSS newsreaders, vCard calendar apps—never force you to update. They don’t need to. The app will keep working as long as the server they are configured to talk to keeps speaking the same protocol (and it will, because public, RFCed protocols evolve really slowly.)

The fault here lies mostly, I think, with backend developers who have spent their entire careers working on web projects—where, if they want to make a breaking change, they can just ask the web frontend developers to make a matching change on the website that conforms it to the new wire-protocol, and at most the only problem users will have is that their webpage might spontaneously refresh itself if it was relying on a websocket connection. You can’t do that when you have a native frontend pointed at your backend service, but these backend engineers just don’t seem to put much weight on the needs of native frontends. It's web-frontend chauvinism, basically. (Either that or it’s their management forcing them to act as if they don’t.)

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#126

Post by wvenable »

acomjean wrote: post #61
jim_dow_jones wrote: post #31

Richard Stallman was right. We didn't listen!

I heard Stallman talk at graduate school in the early part of this century. I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily. Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is…

All the open source software I use on daily basis auto-updates.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#128

Post by smacktoward »

gnode wrote: post #19
ohazi wrote: post #2

You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464

I can certainly imagine the dashboard becoming real estate for ads.

Now you know why Google is so interested in self-driving cars. Driving time is one of the few untapped reservoirs of attention remaining. If the car can do the driving for you, your eyeballs are now free to have ads blasted into them.

Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware

#129

Post by freehunter »

craftyguy wrote: post #69
zer00eyz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly you can pick up a "dumb" phone for $20 - it just makes calls (and might play an MP3). Building one would be fun, but would it be worth it?

> Building one would be fun, but would it be worth it? For one, you'd know exactly what was in it.

At that point you're trusting the chipmakers to not have anything funny in there, and trusting the telco to not be doing anything funny with your location or voice information.
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