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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#121

Post by lapcat »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #105

While I share the author's fear, the timeline they created doesn't really work. 1. Windows 10 S has mostly been a failure. 2. Web Environment Integrity, while horrifying, has not been rolled into Chrome! It's an early proposal. We should work to ensure it goes nowhere. 3. The above greatly pushes out the plausible timeline for events currently listed next to 2024, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2031, and 2032. An aside, I don't f…

Agreed. (Except for the part where you're not actually against of these changes in isolation. I was against all of them.) Notarization is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Mac lockdown. It was just another annoying layer atop the preexisting system of Gatekeeper and Developer ID.

Also missing on the Apple side are crucial dates such as 2007, the introduction of the locked down iPhone, and 2008, the introduction of the crApp Store.

Apple did a bait and switch with iPhone lockdown. Many people seem to forget that it wasn't initially justified in terms of protecting the end user. Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers, i.e., "Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." Which we knew was total B.S. at the time, but that was the initial story. The Orwellian move was later made to change the story, and now it has always been about protecting the end user (from themselves).

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#122

Post by nvm0n2 »

attah_ wrote: post #46
KirillPanov wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banking system does not care. The banks don't need your money.

That same logic says you should not vote either. If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care.

You would be trading one kind of "shit" for a much more real and serious kind of shit - at the new bank, you'd either be more likely to get your account drained in ways that are hard to reverse, or you'd be forced back to using dedicated hardware smartcard readers of the type that were common before mobile apps became widely used (at least were common in Europe).

If your bank account gets drained and you'd made a big song and dance about how you selected that bank specifically because it had less security on its mobile app, well, nobody will have any sympathy for you.

If your bank is equally secure but uses dedicated hardware devices instead of smartcard readers, then all you did is swap one bit of secured hardware for another, making your life less convenient and in return for what?

A bank has to know it's communicating with the real human who owns the account and not a hacker. It's going to achieve that one way or another. You'd be much better off accepting the tech and finding ways to achieve your goals within it, like by setting up a project to maintain whitelists of known good/secure OS builds. You can then make libs that wrap SafetyNet and eliminate the false positives. Even if banks don't start using it anytime soon, other smaller companies might and it's a place to start. Of course the fact that virtually nobody cares about custom operating systems to begin with is the biggest hurdle you'd face, not the tech or business requirements, but that is partly on the OS developers. You can't complain nobody cares about if you're not giving anyone a reason to care.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#123

Post by mpsprd »

paulluuk wrote: post #118
mypastself wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they didn’t previously? I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it. If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or repl…

The only example I can think of is beer bottles. I know it's not related to computer hardware, but I'm just trying to think of examples where you purchase a consumer item and it's still not legally yours. The reason why it remains property of the brewery, is so that they can re-use it when you recycle it. It might be something that's specific for my country, though.

here in Canada with returnable bottles, you actually buy the bottle container with a cover, but if you return it they buy it back from you.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#124

Post by schemathings »

paulluuk wrote: post #118
mypastself wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they didn’t previously? I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it. If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or repl…

The only example I can think of is beer bottles. I know it's not related to computer hardware, but I'm just trying to think of examples where you purchase a consumer item and it's still not legally yours. The reason why it remains property of the brewery, is so that they can re-use it when you recycle it. It might be something that's specific for my country, though.

Germany?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#125

Post by aficionado87 »

perihelions wrote: post #88
mypastself wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ownership rights do the sellers retain now that they didn’t previously? I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it. If you’re talking about manufacturers making their devices more difficult to repair or voiding warranties based on minor modifications, that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want with the item. It just means you can’t force the company to fix or repl…

They don't. I think the commenter was guessing by generalizing from software/subscription service ToS's, which are ubiquitous; plus the fusion of hardware/software in inseparable packages, like the iPhone hardware, which is a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription.

> a brick without an ongoing Apple subscription

This just isn’t true. You don’t have to give Apple another dime to use an iPhone perpetually. Any paid Apple subscriptions are optional for cloud or streaming services.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#126

Post by dalbasal »

I like timelines and other formalisations as of thinking/discussing about digital freedom... and I agree that this is a key freedom battleground in the coming decades (maybe centuries).

Alongside this, I think it's worth keeping in mind gradual changes without discreet dates.

For example, online copyright enforcement/existence has been on a complex, but directional journey over the 20 years. Same for "safety" and other "content policies," both euphemistic and literal. For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre. Years later, walking by a speaker playing music triggers automatic "demonetisation" on youtube. Meanwhile, social media became much more centralised and inoffensive. Nudity, politics and such are strongly discouraged unless explicitly encouraged.

There are landmarks in the China-touching part of this timeline that are critical to understanding where we are. At one point, the great firewall was derided. Violating digital freedom with comprehensive censorship meant opting out the digital revolution.

Google "walked away" from China when they got too insistent about "getting the message" and independently censoring search in line with unwritten, but well understood censorship rules. Google regretted this and their subsequents did not repeat the error. Since then, most major tech companies have learned the lesson. Telsa, Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc.

In June 2021, a bug on Bing accidentally applied a chinese censorship setting worldwide. "Tank Man" no longer existed on Bing. A demonstration of what flipping a switch in local content settings can do.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#127

Post by midasuni »

isametry wrote: post #86
simon1573 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is WebKit based too since a few years back

What does this mean, "WebKit based too"? WebKit is primarily developed by Apple, Safari is the canonical browser that uses it. It is actually Google's Blink that split off of WebKit, not the other way around.

It all came out of Konqueror

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#128

Post by jcelerier »

attah_ wrote: post #112
jasode wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible…

Meanwhile most of the world hasn't used checks in 20+ years. Thank god for that. But for completeness; browsers have been able to use cameras since before smartphones. So of course it can work just the same there. "Suspicious activity" is such a bad strawman argument, i'm not sure how to address it. "Just thought you'd want to know your money is gone, lol." Either you do N+1 factor authentication for real, or you jus…

? Suspicious activity isn't about this. For instance my bank reports me when I get a double debit (e.g. go to a restaurant and get charged twice), when a regular expense increases (e.g. some monthly payment that suddenly goes up)...

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#129

Post by ajb »

attah_ wrote: post #112
jasode wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible…

Meanwhile most of the world hasn't used checks in 20+ years. Thank god for that. But for completeness; browsers have been able to use cameras since before smartphones. So of course it can work just the same there. "Suspicious activity" is such a bad strawman argument, i'm not sure how to address it. "Just thought you'd want to know your money is gone, lol." Either you do N+1 factor authentication for real, or you jus…

The real use for notifications is to sell things or get paid for services in-person without cash. The notification provides certainty that you've been paid, so you can hand over the item/stop hanging around after the service waiting to be paid.

Of course, a bank should be able to send you a text on the service of your choice. But they won't.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#130

Post by raverbashing »

iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote: post #84
perihelions wrote: post #55

The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, w…

> In the before-times, [...] You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought. And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them. They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.

That's a lot of time ago in the before times ;)

I've seen a product like this, yes, but I wasn't the one buying it

(got the schematic for some later products, for a fee)

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