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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#151

Post by guy4261 »

ume wrote: post #106
iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I still have the circuit diagram (paper copy) that shipped with my Acorn Atom in, ahem, 1981. Didn’t ask for it! (Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)

Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy things that would last. So naturally, the companies that made them could not sell new products.

Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier.

I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#153

Post by naruhodo »

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.

I remember my father opened up a TV set to fix it in the early 80s. The circuit diagram was affixed to the inside back cover of the set.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#154

Post by kstenerud »

totetsu wrote: post #13
kstenerud wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Which begs the question, what would a good investigation look like here? Why is this important? Who are the actors? How can we know their end goals and strategies? What things have happened in the past that we can predict will be attempted again in the future?

It would look like the familiar investigative journalism, studies, surveys, and actual source materials from the companies involved.

And it's important because without due diligence, you get snake oil, Rush Limbaugh, anti-vaxx, and other such bullshit from some rando's wild ravings that people just latch onto out of laziness and familiarity. Could you imagine if court cases were held by such standards? Or if elections could be overturned simply by a president's unsubstantiated assertions?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#155

Post by passion__desire »

notsurenymore wrote: post #150
iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I had an old IBM luggable at one point that had the BIOS source listed in manual.

Well things are so complex now that if they provide you with source code, it would be so easy to make 0days.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#156

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Consumer PC hardware is the exception though. Android and iOS are more or less exactly that: computers that you may have paid for but that you do not actually own. Ditto Chromebooks.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#157

Post by noduerme »

VPNs will never disappear, they'll just get more expensive. Privacy isn't for the masses, you see. But it'll always be necessary for senators who drop trou in the men's room with their underlings.

In shifts toward totalitarianism, it's normal for slime to rise to the top and to enjoy all the freedoms they stole or killed to deprive from others.

Which, of course, leaves the opportunity for hackers to use the holes that they have to leave in their systems.

Then just give it a generation or so for the dictators and their spawn to fully decay.

2056: Revolution

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#158

Post by jacquesm »

grishka wrote: post #110
iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not only schematics, but what amounts to a complete service manual. You were expected to troubleshoot and fix things yourself back then.

Including nice and handy little drawings of what your scope (if you had access to one) should show you if you put a probe to a particular test point.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#159

Post by jacquesm »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #104
iuhaegpoinqhpoq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My first computer was a BBC B. The schematics were IN the manual!

I have that thing etched into my memory to the point that I probably could still fix a beeb without resorting to looking at the schematic.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#160

Post by ballenf »

EGreg wrote: post #117
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…

Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB). If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software.…

What's the alternative to "I built it, I own it"? Seems like forced open sourcing under threat of government force would be worse than what we have now.

Also Meta these days is open sourcing more ML tools than any other corp, so I'm not sure the claim that "killing ... all open-source tendencies" is supportable.

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