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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#231

Post by carapace »

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.…

Thank you, for this comment and for the work you've done, all this time.

- - - -

THe thing that gets me is that people seem pretty much content with things. E.g. they'll complain about Amazon and then in the next breath admit that they still shop there. Etc.

Some of it is complacency. (A friend of mine, an academic, was talking about "the pain" of switching from Twitter to Mastodon. I had to stop him. You just click some buttons? You don't even have to get out of your chair.)

A lot of it seems to be apathy.

And then there's contentment with ignorance.

People say that this is just "human nature" but I feel that's a cop out.

- - - -

FWIW I think of Capitalism as a kind of economic API. It's very useful, but you have to run it within certain resource limits and policies. (E.g. don't "eat the rich", just tax them at the rate that we did fifty years ago, eh?)

Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth, we won history. We just haven't really noticed yet.

We have to stop fighting each other and take care of each other.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#232

Post by Zetobal »

Vinnl wrote: post #228
Zetobal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call to action? The author did nothing to encourage engagement on the topics only on his article. No information about how you could get active yourself or how you could approach the topic politically just FUD.

They were calling attention to the problem, not proposing a solution. But calling out a problem is a call to action for people to try to come up with a (or multiple) solution. Just because there isn't certainty that it would happen like this, doesn't mean there's not a possible future that looks somewhat like this. Nothing that was listed here seems particularly far-fetched to me, I don't think.

Think about your last two sentences in regards to the discussion we are having.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#233

Post by RobotToaster »

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 bought a vintage printer (juki 6100) to tinker with recently, I was pretty shocked how the manual included circuit and timing diagrams, and gave instructions on how to construct adapter cables for various machines.

Also the "driver" installation for IBM PC is just instructions on how to manually patch wordstar to work with it.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#234

Post by api »

MarketingJason wrote: post #172
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 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.

It was mostly the mobile revolution. Consoles were always considered something separate from computers. It was phones that normalized not only locked down OSes but surveillance as a normal thing.

I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.

What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#235

Post by ben_w »

switch007 wrote: post #199
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…

This made me think of schools. Do kids even own their school work done on Chromebooks / Apple Tablets / online learning platforms? Have their parents assigned the rights to the IP? I wonder how much kids feel ownership of their work done electronically

I remember, aged 10 or so, my fellow schoolkids thought we should get paid for going to school because it was "work".

Around this point, same school but not necessarily the same year, someone else in the class thought I'd ripped off their idea in the classroom and that this was a copyright violation.

Now?

Now I understand that the work done at school is not a product, it's at most an extended pre-interview test much like a code challenge (not that literal code challenges were really possible when I was 10, given a decent C compiler would've cost something like 2 week's pre-tax income).

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#236

Post by cachvico »

lapcat wrote: post #121
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 introductio…

> Rather, it was justified in terms of protecting the cell phone carriers

I don't remember that at all. I do remember Jobs resisting the app store because he wanted everything to be a web app though (despite resisting the move to responsive web design).

Can you provide a source for your claim?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#237

Post by [deleted] »

goku12 wrote: post #196
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…

General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will be gone soon. The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs that doesn't do anything more than just display the video signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs out there take too long to start and they almost always phone home to their overlords. The really…

[deleted]

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#238

Post by safety1st »

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…

All I can say is that in the modern era you have to lead by example. Run Linux and Firefox. Use the services from the tech giants as little as possible, you won't be able to eliminate them, but you can minimize the amount of money and attention you give them.

Tell other people.

Contribute. If you work long hours, give a little money to FOSS. If you have spare time, spend a bit of it contributing, doesn't need to be a lot.

The timeline in the link is not set. The tech world has been disrupted many times, if it hadn't been, we'd all be on IBM mainframes and typewriters or something. There is no fate but what we make. Very few people are aware enough to show up on this website and read this thread, so it's on you to do something. If you're reading this you are the resistance.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#239

Post by djbusby »

jasode wrote: post #143
attah_ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Meanwhile most of the world hasn't used checks in 20+ years. True, but the key word you used is "most" . E.g. My home insurance refunds an annual dividend back to me and their method to pay me is paper check . Not an electronic direct deposit, nor a VISA giftcard, nor even a "credit" that can be applied as a discount off year's premium. It's a paper check. >So of course it _can_ work just the same there. Sure but th…

The paper check scanner from Chase also (last I looked) cost a few bucks and needs an app on the Windows PC to process the data. That hardware is only useful when you process 100s of checks (eg: grocery store).
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