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The boiling frog of digital freedom

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Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#411

Post by landemva »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #96
attah_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.

The thing is, we will. And do. I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'. my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has…

> vote in primaries too because that shapes so much.

You are on the right track to influence who is on the ballot for a particular party. Last time in PA the Rs put up the Dr Oz with lukewarm conservative values. The R voters in PA were so underwhelmed that the D with literal brain damage was elected. Also, States with a caucus process give people who show up to caucus enormous influence of which names the party will put on the ballot.

> What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population

We could allow for more representative government in the federal House of Representatives by allowing the House to expand with population, as was written in the Constitution. The census was to count the people to expand the House to track population growth.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#412

Post by bombolo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #400
bombolo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bank's webserver recently decided to drop connections when a firefox user agent is received. No message, no nothing, just close the socket.

If you're in the US, write to the FTC and complain that this is discriminatory toward the disabled who may need special user agent accessibility features unavailable in Chrome.

Unfortunately not in USA. I have no idea what the rules are here.

But this bank routinely violates EU directives so I'm sure if there's a rule they don't care about it.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#413

Post by verisimi »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #404
brightlancer wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I believe in actual government No, you believe in _utopian_ government, which is not actual government. Actual government is what we have right now, in reality. > I call this real government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

Oh for heavens sake. There are 192 different governments (at least) on this globe and they lie along a spectrum. what we have now (I kinda assume USA) is up and to the right on this spectrum (ie some definition of good, free, whatever is up and right). my utopian government is further up and right but anyone living in any of those 192 places will benefit from their government going more up and right, freer, better, m…

> Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies

We don't live in democracies. At best we live in a 'representative democracy'. These are not the same thing, at all.

Representative democracy is where (if we vote) we choose 1 person every 5 years to represent tens or hundreds of thousands of people, for thousands of votes. If the person you vote for does get in, but doesn't do what he said in their campaign, there is no negative outcome for them. The worst is that they will receive less votes next time, but even that unlikely to be based on their voting record, but on whether more people prefer blue or red this time.

But all that is itself moot, imo. I think we live in a not very covert fascist (corporate and state) regime - voting is simply a pressure release valve, when both red and blue are merely wings of the same bird.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#414

Post by MichaelZuo »

b112 wrote: post #382
MichaelZuo wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What on earth are you even talking about? This: > Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation. Some types of copyright requires approval via some organized entity in many jurisdictions, that is easily discoverable via a quick Google search by any passing reader. The prior comment appears like a deflection from…

Michael, my simple point was that copyright, like trade secrets, requires no validation in some jurisdictions by default. For some reason you view this as a distraction, instead, it was merely illustrative. In terms of validation, I have no idea why you think one cannot invalidate someone claiming to have a trade secret. You can literally invalidate anything, someone is trying to assert as valid. A bottle blonde coul…

Well if you want to avoid getting into the weeds, since it appears you have a peculiar idea of validity that does not reflect the legal or logical usage, then by all means.

Anyways I agree this is a tangent from the main comment chain, if that's what your implying. I included the last paragraph for that reason:

> And in any case there are many real world products which so far have not been reverse engineered to a sufficient degree to recreate, such as the fixed glass trackpad previously mentioned. If you can prove otherwise then I would welcome a link.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#415

Post by Jenda_ »

Daril wrote: post #328

There is hope: - 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few. - It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we h…

Thank you for most of the points, it's easy to miss the good parts of development of the recent years.

I don't however agree with this one: "It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a viable alternative to Android in the near future." I think many essential apps (such as banking, or "less essential" such as for bike- and car-sharing) will start requiring device attestation as soon as even low-end Android phones start shipping with hardware TPM.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#416

Post by Jenda_ »

grishka wrote: post #102

One factor this ignores is that there already exist tens of billions of general-purpose computing devices capable of running arbitrary code. They aren't going to magically disappear. They've already been made and they can't be unmade. Given enough nuisance, people would just stop upgrading. We've already seen this with Windows itself — I know people who are still, in 2023, using Windows 7 daily for the simple reason…

I'm not afraid of not having the hardware for running my Linux desktop, doing my developer work, reading Wikipedia and HN. But imagine banks ("security"), chat apps ("spam"), youtube and maybe even common websites (to enforce no adblockers) requiring a remotely attested smartphone and WEI.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#417

Post by steelframe »

anonym29 wrote: post #251
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. My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.

Ditto. I must have spent 10 full minutes clicking all through my bank's website before I finally realized their phone app provided the only possible way I could make a Zelle transfer.

My HOA started mandating Zelle as the only way they will accept payments. So now it appears that I have no choice but to use a device that supports my bank's app if I want to avoid getting a lien put on my house.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#418

Post by tbrownaw »

TuringNYC wrote: post #372
Macha wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big Windows 10 S problems is back in Windows 11, though. 1. You buy a device with Windows 11 2. The out of box experience demands you add a Microsoft account to proceed past it. There are workarounds for this, but mostly they are getting shut down. 3. You can't even get into the UEFI to install another OS without signing up to a MS account, because the UEFI is accessed via an OS level advanced startup opti…

>> One of the big Windows 10 S problems is back in Windows 11, though. >> 1. You buy a device with Windows 11 I realize i'm techy an have techy friends, but I dont know anyone who has purchased a Windows machine in a decade. No one in my household, none of my friends, no office i've been at since 2017. The only interaction I have with windows is an old laptop used for MS Visio, which immediately dual-boots to Ubuntu…

My laptop (Lenovo X1 yoga) is less than a decade old, it came with Windows.

The laptops at work all run Windows.

My desktop used to run Linux, but I downgraded when I got a (Windows-only) rift s. Since Facebook foobared that, it'll be Linux again if/when it gets replaced.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#419

Post by sanderjd »

amelius wrote: post #388
sanderjd wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean ... the market has spoken on this. It just isn't something that enough people value enough for it to have a positive return on investment. Like pretty much everyone else here, I think that sucks, but I also struggle to begrudge the preferences of people who just don't care about this. So the question is just, is this a market failure in the sense that the market outcome is undesirable to society such that ther…

If companies released just the hardware without the services, then we could have open source jumping in to provide those services, and things would be cheaper. Unless of course you want to argue that without financial incentive nobody would ever do such a thing, and open source is a fairy tale that can't really exist ...

There is a reason that open source thrives in the niche of tooling for other software developers, and ... thrives less outside that niche. The target audience for software development tooling ascribes huge value to being able to read and modify the source of the tools we use. And for good reason, it's not just a principled stand; open source directly helps us do our jobs better.

But outside that niche, nobody really values this capability, and it's not a mystery why not. What good does open source do an accountant? Any given work-a-day accountant is never going to read or modify the source of their software. They just have no interest in that. They may have a computer enthusiast friend who has made a compelling case to them for why this stuff matters, so they may agree in theory, but they aren't going to do extra work or pay extra for this. It just isn't a direct enough impact for them.

Re: The boiling frog of digital freedom

#420

Post by tbrownaw »

steelframe wrote: post #417
anonym29 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.

Ditto. I must have spent 10 full minutes clicking all through my bank's website before I finally realized their phone app provided the only possible way I could make a Zelle transfer. My HOA started mandating Zelle as the only way they will accept payments. So now it appears that I have no choice but to use a device that supports my bank's app if I want to avoid getting a lien put on my house.

Does it not count as a debt, that they have to accept cash ("legal tender for all debts public and private") for?

Or there should be the option of opening another account, at a less tyrannical institution, to use for those payments.

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