Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

Never claimed to be innovative, but sadly all these cool features are nowhere to be found in modern languages. And for some reason, they never appeared in a fast(ish) language, even though I'm sure the JVM is very well equipped to handle this kind of dynamism.

There must be a law forcing them to open all specs, such that enthusiasts would be able to use the device. It should be criminal to force the planned obsolescence and create e-waste like this.

I do think that they are right about many things, although I have my own ideas about how to improve them (and I do not agree with all of the ways they (Ink & Switch) are doing with it).

In UNIX systems you can use pipes between programs (if the programs support that; many modern programs don't support it very well), although there are still problems with that too. (I also disagree with the idea that text (especially Unicode text, although the objections apply even without a specific character set) would be the universal format.)

My idea of a computer design and operating system design is intended to do things which will avoid the problems mentioned there (although this does not avoid needing actually good programming, and such things as FOSS etc still have benefits), as well as having other benefits.

Some of the features of my design are: CAQL (Command, Automation, and Query Language), UTLV (Universal Type/Length/Value), and proxy capabilities. (There are more (e.g. multiple locking and transactions), but these will be relevant for this discussion.)

Like OpenDoc and OLE, you can include other kind of things inside of any UTLV file, by the use of the UTLV "Extension" type. The contents of the extension would usually itself be UTLV as well, allowing the parts to be manipulated like others are, although even if the contents isn't UTLV (e.g. for raster images), you would have functions to convert them and to deal with them anyways, so it will still work anyways.

With those things in combination with the accessibility (one of the principles is that accessibility features are for everyone, not only for the people with disabilities; among other things this means that it does not use a separate "accessibility" menu) and m17n and other features, you can also do such things as affect colours, fonts, etc, without much difficulty. (They might not seem related at first, but they are related.)

I had also recently seen https://malleable.systems/mission/ which seems to be related (you might want to read this document even if you are not interested in my own comments). One part says, "If I want to grab a UI control from one application, some processing logic from another, and run it all against a data source from somewhere else again, it should be possible to do so.", and with CAQL and UTLV and proxy capabilities, this can be done easily, because the UI controls are callable objects (which can be used with CAQL) like any other one, the data source can use UTLV (which can be queried and altered by CAQL), and the interaction between them can use proxy capabilities.

A common failure mode I’ve seen: since Windows 8/8.1 iirc, so-called “Microsoft accounts” are used to login to the OS, as opposed to local user accounts, which were the status quo for personal computers, and are managed locally by the OS on behalf of Administrator users. Many legacy Windows users had and have no idea what the difference is or why it matters, but part of the Microsoft Account setup flow in Windows OOBE involves setting up 2FA for the new Microsoft Account, and I think it will let you use email or SMS, and maybe even a phone call to get the 2FA code. I think you are given the option to complete the 2FA at a later time, in case the code is delayed, but I forget for sure.

I can’t count how many people I helped to regain access to their computer login because of losing access to the method used to receive 2FA codes for Microsoft accounts, which is necessary to login if you have forgotten your password. The Microsoft account user setup won’t let you make a password-free login unless you use a local account, and short easily guessable passwords don’t meet their online account security requirements. Most people probably don’t want a Microsoft account if it has this failure mode, but people don't know the trade offs at the time of user account setup, and Microsoft uses that ignorance as leverage to get people signed into everything so that you will have have opted-in to all of this. It’s such an own-goal by Microsoft and it makes me feel for users who have no idea how any of this works. It’s a hard problem to solve, I’m sure, but it shouldn’t be like this.

The people who are most disadvantaged by the high tech highly secure thrust of modern tech are those who have the least skills with technology. Low skill users are also most at risk for scams and malware and other kinds of tactics, so I don’t mean to say that having no password is good. Having no password is a bad solution to the problem of computers being hard to use for many people, and they don’t know what they don’t know, so anything that they haven’t seen before is a cause for concern or alarm to their mind. Since most people have forgotten that they even have a Microsoft account by the time they have trouble logging in to their computer using one, they click around until they get to the account recovery, and then usually get their account locked because they can’t solve the security challenges that they never faced before or anticipated when doing the initial setup perhaps years prior.

Yeah I got to AppleScript during its dying days.