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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#131

Post by nvm0n2 »

dools wrote: post #24
max_ wrote: post #21

We need a new philosophical movement for computer technology. The Stallman movement failed because it was not practical for business applications. At the end of the day, coders & hardware manufacturers need to eat just like accountants, plumbers and doctors. Technology can't rely 100% on altruism. What we need is something close to the Ethical standards of the Stallman movement, but also compatable with business owne…

> The Stallman movement failed Citation needed

It failed, yes. If you want to go wide you could argue that all open source is "the Stallman movement" but given Stallman's noted hostility to other approaches than his own, that seems too much.

The peak of GPLd software was in the late 90s/early 2000s and since then the base of GPLd code has shrivelled. I can't remember the last time I encountered a library or program in my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone GPLd, with the exception of some very old programs like the Linux kernel and a few bits of the userspace (plus Java's weird GPL+exceptions thing). These days almost everything new is Apache licensed or similar. Just browse around GitHub for a while and see what I mean.

Also:

1. The Linux kernel, the last bastion of Stallmanist philosophy, in reality has succeeded by not actually enforcing the GPL thus treating it more like LGPL or Apache2 in practice. GPL violations are rampant and rarely does anything happen. They also very publicly refused to switch to GPL3.

2. The most popular Linux based OS is Android where Google rewrote the entire userspace specifically to avoid the GPL, and then also created their own driver layer, again, to avoid the GPL and the Linux approach to technical "enforcement" (constant API churn).

3. The most popular UNIX based desktop OS is built on FreeBSD despite losing technical features, specifically because Apple refused to countenance anything GPL or FSF connected. The few dependencies they started with (like gcc) were rewritten into new BSD-style licensed codebases like LLVM at vast expense.

In other words the people who actually build operating systems for a living avoid like the plague anything connected to Stallman's vision or strategy.

It seems likely that eventually the Linux kernel would also be replaced, certainly Google attempted this with Zircon, but whilst enforcement is so lax and technical workarounds so numerous there isn't much reason for doing so.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#132

Post by amelius »

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…

There should be a law that says that if you buy something and still don't fully own it, then it is a service, not a product.

Owning something should include that you can cut all ties with the original vendor, and still be able to use the device as advertised.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#133

Post by dTal »

jasode wrote: post #94
attah_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to thei…

>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…

> Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam.

Why not?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#134

Post by attah_ »

layer8 wrote: post #111
sneak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ship has sailed for the web. Many apps don't even bother with making functional webapps any longer; the go to market are mobile apps for the censorship platforms. The web lost. Now it's just a transport layer for mobile app API requests.

Apps shouldn’t be web apps anyway. Local-first apps should be the default, in the context of digital freedom. The only exception being self-hostable web apps.

You misunderstand. The point is that online services now come with apps for no reason. Very few things are so local that what you say applies. Though those few definitely should be!

And as you are already on to, not all web apps are cloud. What can be on-device webpages (e.g. routers) should be.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#135

Post by nvm0n2 »

dalbasal wrote: post #126

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 oth…

> For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre

I listen to remixes all the time. Not sure what you listen to but they're massive in electronic music.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#136

Post by ballenf »

mypastself wrote: post #76
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…

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…

> I’m not familiar with any ToS that permits a company to repossess your PC or parts of it.

I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this. It's probably an unpopular example because people seem to broadly like it, but it does demonstrate the principal that the seller retains full control of the hardware and can "repossess" the device. The original purchaser does not receive a master unlock code.

Even if locking yourself out of your device is "your fault", it doesn't alter the fact that at that point only Apple retains control of the device.

Same with bios locks and management engines on PCs.

The idea that possession = ownership is gone. And we're almost all ok with that especially since it makes us a little safer and more "secure". At least until we can't trust Apple, Intel, etc. anymore.

One could argue that the black market value for your locked phone compared to unlocked phone is a proxy for how much you actually own the phone.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#137

Post by midasuni »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #115
fnord123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't! Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities. >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework…

We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.

Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#138

Post by nvm0n2 »

KirillPanov wrote: post #15
mildmotive wrote: post #6

And it will keep getting worse as long as the majority of the population lack proper core values to oppose it.

I don't think it's a values problem. The technical issues here are complex. Can you explain bootloader locking or remote attestation to your grandmother? Personally I think a better approach is to push the phrase "right to recycle and repurpose" as much as possible. People get that. Everybody personally has seen the unsettling amount of e-waste that passes through their ownership and into a landfill somewhere. Right…

How does it follow though. Bootloader locking and remote attestation don't stop you recycling devices or even repurposing them. They stop you changing the OS stack to an unknown one and then using them for the exact same purposes as before. That's much harder to explain and it boils down to in most cases, people still in love with the idea that one day a hacker/grassroots OS may become popular. Which is fun for developers to imagine but has no relevance to any end users.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#139

Post by dinkleberg »

louthy wrote: post #67
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Stallman movement failed The stuff you read on hn... Seriously, you think it failed? I think it succeeded wildly beyond anything anybody imagined at the time, to the point that very large entities threw everything and the kitchensink at it to try to make it fail. Which exposed them for the criminals they were. We don't need anything that is more compatible with 'business owners' than what we've got. What we nee…

Businesses don't do free. It is not what they exist for: The 'Stallman movement' isn't compatible with the the tech-company, the employed software-engineer, etc. I think what the OP is getting at is that the for-profit tech industry needs something akin to the Hippocratic Oath [1]. As software engineers swearing to a set of 'do no harm' ethical codes could well be a first step to becoming a recognised professional. I…

I think this is one of the areas where software being treated as "not real engineering" caused some trouble. I went to school for electrical engineering and in my senior year they really pushed the idea of engineering ethics [1] and the personal responsibilities we had to whistle-blow.

There is this Order of the Engineer [2] that has their own oath akin to the Hippocratic Oath. I went down the software path so I never really looked into it, but my professors were very in favor of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_ethics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#140

Post by nvm0n2 »

b3orn wrote: post #87

> 2027: Non-WEI compliant websites are marked as "insecure" by Chrome and Safari. Accessing them requires confirmation through a "yes, I accept the risk" dialog box. Did I misunderstand WEI? It's an API a website can use to confirm that a client is "authentic", so shouldn't this rather be "Goodle/Apple/Facebook/... drops support for Non-WEI compliant browsers".

You are correct, the author doesn't understand that which he attacks.
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