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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#311

Post by baq »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #262
GeekyBear wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would call iCloud locking an embodiment of this. Activation locks were required by law to deter armed theft. > A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple’s introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013 as part of iOS 7. W…

It's ironic that property rights have been eroded in the name of protecting property.

It isn’t ironic, it’s precisely how it’s supposed to work.

Laws take freedom (as in do whatever you want) from people and give it to other people so the total expected gains are bigger than without the law, pretending that dishonest lawmakers don’t exist (false obviously). Also, all laws are bets on their outcomes and sometimes they go south.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#312

Post by amelius »

bboygravity wrote: post #217
0xEF wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest in repairing tube radios from the 30's & 40's. One of the first things I realized was how generally easy it was to find schematics of popular brands and models. Some were even pasted right inside the radio shell! I also hack and repair modern stuff, and it is so common to open up a product just to end up staring at an epoxy blob. User manuals hold no mention…

It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed. Every device/vehicle/system now needs to be connected to the internet and needs you to download an app. Is that for the consumer? No. That's for the manufacturer. For milking be reselling your data and/or spying on you and/or charging extra because they can and/or the capability to turn any device into literal trash by not providing updates or bug fixes to a half-baked…

> It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed.

And greed starts to become an issue when managers think they need a raise.

But to be fair, if you're not an engineer is there much else you can take pride in other than driving up profits by whatever means?

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#313

Post by MichaelZuo »

b112 wrote: post #215
MichaelZuo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say they are intentionally spiteful, just that modern electronics are complex enough, especially highly integrated stuff like smartphones, that the OEM's suppliers would be unhappy if detailed schematics were released. Since they would not be willing to guarantee on the record that they are correct, nor would they want stuff impinging on actual trade secrets to be revealed.

Trade secrets are not secret once in the wild, and are immediately invalidated as a result. Schematics for things sold, are never trade secrets.

This is false, there are thousands of examples of products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering that they are effectively considered such, even by industry experts.

e.g. Apple's fixed glass trackpads

Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#314

Post by nologic01 »

Why isnt the frog jumping out of boiling water?

For that to happen you need just two things: 1) somewhere to land where it is not boiling and 2) a trigger.

Today there is nowhere to land where it is not boiling. So triggers do nothing but further desensitise the frog.

People have tried with FOSS in its various strands but its not working.

You cant built a platform for society to land while ignoring how that society works. Principally the money it uses to keep count and the organizational patterns it uses to mobilize resources.

There is nothing predetermimed about the architecture of digital society and it certainly not axiomatic that it must be a dystopia.

Excessive focus on personal freedoms misses the fact that society is not organized around individuals, but rather around coalitions, clans, corporations, collectives etc.

An alternative digital philosophy or platform needs to educate and entice these bigger 'frogs' to act in their own best interest. The rest will be history.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#315

Post by nforgerit »

Takes a lot these days to keep this timeline from popping up in one's head and follow some conspiracy theories about total governmental control through perverted usage of language and weird (incompetent?) regulations on things digital (speaking as a German here, pointing at EU regulations).

I mean, the only thing we (as "the informed people") can do about it, is to keep open and working alternatives for "the masses" to step in on an instant when things are going south with commercial or governmental controlled products.

An example that comes up is Mastodon. It's weird, not necessarily bug-free and has a steep learning curve, compared with commercial alternatives. Still, it manages to attract those people that you want to talk with and every time I'm skimming through the timeline, I'm seeing something remarkable.

We do already (Fairphone, Firefox, etc.) but should work more on keeping up the good tradition of providing free alternatives. When we're too powerful, we'll be getting criminalized but that would just add some more fun to it.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#316

Post by MichaelZuo »

jodrellblank wrote: post #290
washadjeffmad wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't less true for any other appliance that's ever existed, largely because of the availability of the schematics. People have a right to know what they're buying. Companies are testing legal and cultural boundaries, silently changing functionality and usability by altering software or access to required services after sale. It's not "too complex", it'd just be a hassle if people knew.

> " It's not "too complex" " A valve radio had ~50 discrete components[1]. The first semiconductors had triple that number of components in a square millimeter in 1971[2], a modern CPU is in the tens or hundreds of millions of transistors per square millimetre. That's more components than the Encyclopedia Britannica had words in 29 volumes[3]. How are you going to 'know what you're buying' if you don't know anything…

Yes the practical aspect of schematics logistics would prevent this even if everything else was in an ideal world.

Even a fairly old ARM based CPU such as in the Pi 4, has billions of transistors. And miles of wiring.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#317

Post by Vinnl »

Zetobal wrote: post #232
Vinnl wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Done. So they're calling out things that could happen, driving the point home by placing them in a timeline. That makes the issue top of mind again for people, potentially spurring them into action - even if just by e.g. making it one of people's considerations in their next election.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#318

Post by baq »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #284
drewcoo wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the before times there were phones owned by AT&T attached to landlines in every home and business. Attaching your own phone and repairing the phone company's were not allowed. This seems a lot like the same business model you're saying didn't exist before. In fact, AT&T was more draconian. People can pay off their cell phones today. The old wall-tethered units had a monthly rental fee in perpituity.

Also, you didnt use to own your mobile phone number. In the US, at least, it literally took an act of Congress for customers to be allowed to port their numbers between wireless providers.

Nobody would willingly give up their moat.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#319

Post by 20after4 »

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.…

Reddit used to be open source:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update... 2. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#320

Post by b112 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #313
b112 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade secrets are not secret once in the wild, and are immediately invalidated as a result. Schematics for things sold, are never trade secrets.

This is false, there are thousands of examples of products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering that they are effectively considered such, even by industry experts. e.g. Apple's fixed glass trackpads Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

This is false, there are thousands of examples of products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering that they are effectively considered such, even by industry experts.

That's not how trade secrets work. If you give me a device, and I figure out how that part of it goes together, the trade secret dies. There is no protection except an attempt at secrecy, and once someone is retail sold hardware, they may do anything they choose with it, thus the idea of trying to maintain a secret, when it is in someone else's hands, is silly.

Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation.

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