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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#171

Post by passion__desire »

wincy wrote: post #166
passion__desire wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Don’t you think in the long term this would result in better source code and hardened software, similar to what’s happened with the Linux source code? Right now the NSA just has all the 0days instead.

I agree with you, I am just highlighting companies' thinking why they would wanna protect their source code. security by obscurity. Also having a copy of source could also mean the companies might have cut corners. Many leaks of future products are now guessed from source code. Also it is so easy to copy as well by other companies.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#172

Post by MarketingJason »

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 wonder if gaming consoles had a big hand in this? Going back to Atari pong in the early/mid 70's and I don't recall if any of the major players (Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, Sears) included anything close to schematics.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#173

Post by mkoubaa »

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.

True, but at the same time, if your grandma's identity was stolen you'd be more likely to be willing to discard some freedom for the sake of security.

There's a general willingness to trade incremental freedom for security in many arenas but ascending that gradient is a hard sell

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#174

Post by wizzwizz4 »

guy4261 wrote: post #151
ume wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound.

Regulation.

Fun fact: this is still possible! It's a little harder – it'll have to be steadily introduced, in multiple countries at once (so we don't break international trade), starting in the areas where it's cheapest to produce lasting equipment (so enforcement doesn't take out entire sectors), and I don't yet know what the regulations would look like, but if it's possible to make lasting things, it's possible to require manufacturers to make things last.

We need to do this, sooner or later, anyway: we simply don't have the raw resources to continue as we are.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#175

Post by dzogchen »

> 2025: Google removes the ability to install Android apps from outside the Play store, citing security concerns.

Ehm... This will be illegal in the EU very soon. A bit alarmist. Also not very fair to only include anti-piracy and anti-freedom legislation while ignoring milestones such as GDPR.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#176

Post by TehCorwiz »

attah_ wrote: post #19

There is one interesting force acting against that though (or it would probably already have happened). It is the simple fact that most people that are competent enough to actually implement these things also understand the problems with doing so. For the most part anyway. If we could just agree to not do that... well, what are "they" going to do? And of course: we owe it to the web to use Firefox. The Chrome clones…

"My poverty, but not my will, consents." -Apothecary

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#178

Post by wheelerof4te »

max_ wrote: post #95
mordae wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry, but you basically say that we need more altruistic capitalists. Won't happen. > These philosophical ethical standards should also be ingrained into VC culture & corporate culture. Won't happen. Money always wins and exploiting people on the side of selling (or giving for free) them some stuff is always going to bring in more cash than respecting their privacy.

Their are business like Source Hut that are built on the basis that they will not do some of the things people like Github do. And I am glad that they are profitable.

They are profitable up to a point.

Once that point is crossed, they will have to compensate and adapt or risk losing their entire business.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#179

Post by dTal »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #131
dools wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 alon…

> I can't remember the last time I encountered a library or program in my work that was even LGPL licensed, let alone GPLd

I don't know what line of work you're in but this seems quite unlikely. GTK and Qt are both LGPL (and GNOME and Plasma are GPL). WebKit's JavaScript engine is LGPL. MySQL is GPL. Blender is GPL. Arduino is AGPL. GCC is GPL. Bash is GPLv3. It's hard for me to believe you use the Linux kernel without touching any of these.

GPL is wildly popular. It's losing ground, yes, and you correctly identify a primary reason why: commercial software companies correctly see it as a threat, and are fighting it in earnest now. It is a threat. It was designed to be a threat. The purpose of the GPL is to create a self-reinforcing free ecosystem that outcompetes the balkanized proprietary hellscape that preceded the free software movement. At this, it succeeded beyond any reasonable imagining.

A lot of the revolutionary spirit has left the free software movement. We are currently in the "good times create weak men" stage of the cycle. People who grew up in the garden of Eden created by the free software movement, who take it for granted that the popular web browsers are open source and Microsoft releases cross-platform IDEs that run on Linux, don't appreciate that the current state of affairs was wrought over decades by the kind of people who spelled it Micro$oft and were willing to tolerate their computers only half working in order to avoid proprietary software of any kind, on principle.

But make no mistake, we are still at war. The big corpos know it, even if they've managed to fling enough bread and circuses to fool some into thinking we're all one big happy family now. Giving up on the GPL is how they win, and we lose.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#180

Post by midasuni »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #122
attah_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You use the word “forced” like it’s a problem? I hated it when my bank got rid of a nice secure card reader (which required my physical card and pin).

If my phone breaks or is stolen, I can’t actually buy a replacement phone now, as that requires spending money, which requires 2FA which requires my phone.

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